The crypto world is starting to look like just bitcoin again

Looks like 2025 is shaping up to be a big year for crypto... or at least for one particular coin.

Bitcoin briefly flew past $123,000 on Monday morning, the first day of the House’s “Crypto Week,” which (despite some disappointments) saw landmark legislation to regulate stablecoins passed by Congress, helping to boost the value of the entire crypto market beyond the $4 trillion mark on Friday. Through the week, the world’s biggest cryptocurrency did cool off a little, with a handful of meme coins and altcoins starting to steal the show.

However, zooming out beyond the recent altcoin gains reveals that the crypto landscape is still very much dominated by bitcoin, which takes up a whopping 63% of the total crypto market’s value.

Can’t stop, won’t stop 

The last time bitcoin enjoyed a similar level of dominance was from 2018 to 2020 following the collapse of the Initial Coin Offering boom in 2017 that made investors abandon many altcoin projects. Companies like Tesla and PayPal had also just started to accept bitcoin as a form of payment, lending an increasing sense of legitimacy to the asset.

Just as new demand stemmed from bitcoin’s growing image as a safe haven, supply was also being squeezed by many long-term investors HODLing (translation: holding) on to their coins, expecting gains after a “halving” event in mid-2020.

But a lot has changed since then, and more commentators are looking away from retail bitcoin traders to explain BTC’s latest surge.

Stable(r) coin

As bitcoin’s price fluctuates less wildly and it begins to look a little more like big name securities such as the Magnificent 7, institutional investors have piled in. Bitcoin treasury companies like Michael Saylor’s Strategy, for instance, now hold $73 billion worth of bitcoin, while spot bitcoin ETFs have brought in some $50 billion since 2024, per Deutsche Bank analysis. 

All told, institutions now control nearly one-third of all bitcoin in circulation.

Indeed, as fund managers move toward risky assets more broadly, with investors’ three-month risk appetite at its highest levels since since 2001, bitcoin appears to be hitting a bit of a sweet spot for today’s risk-on institutions — a high-beta asset that is nevertheless still perceived as a safe haven.

Main character energy

The rising tide is not lifting all boats in the crypto world, however. A Coinbase-EY Parthenon survey of institutional investors reveals that this new institutional demand is only really filtering through to bitcoin and ethereum, with an overwhelming majority of the surveyed interviewees’ firms holding the two biggest cryptocurrencies (97% and 86%, respectively). Even when they are interested in other currencies, more than half of respondents held only one or two coins in addition to BTC and ETH.

Ethereum, which took advantage of some institutional attention from record spot ETF inflows and companies experimenting with an ethereum-based treasury to rise more than 20% in the last five days, might need even more — the asset is still about 25% below its all-time high from 2021.

Magic internet institutional money

Around 2010, when 10,000 BTC were used to buy two pizzas, the cryptocurrency was mostly seen as an alternate means of investment for critics of the centralized financial system, which was dominated by banks, traditional currencies, and huge corporations.

Now, 15 years and a lifetime’s worth of bitcoin gains later, it seems like the institutions could be starting to shape the crypto’s dominance more than the original HODLers.