Altcoins: Ten of the Largest, Measured Against Bitcoin Over One, Three and Five Years
Altcoins are all cryptocurrencies other than bitcoin, from large networks such as Ethereum to tokens launched last week. The word means alternative coin, and it covers more than 21,000 assets tracked by CoinGecko, which together were worth less than bitcoin alone on 25 Sep 2026.
The word altcoin groups thousands of very different things under one label, defined only by not being bitcoin. That makes the category hard to reason about as a whole. So this page takes a fixed, stated basket of the ten largest altcoins by market value on 25 Sep 2026 and measures each one against bitcoin: price change over one, three and five years, distance from its record, how closely it moved with bitcoin and how much it swung.
How it works
An altcoin is any crypto asset that is not bitcoin. Some are the native currency of their own network, such as ether on Ethereum or SOL on Solana. Some are tokens issued on another network. Some are copies of bitcoin’s code with changed settings.
Stablecoins are altcoins by that definition, but they behave nothing like the rest. A stablecoin is built to hold a fixed dollar value, so most market data sites and most discussions treat it separately. This page does the same.
How big the category is
The shares of the market, from CoinGecko at 03:57 UTC on 26 Sep 2026 (the evening of 25 Sep in US time): total crypto market value $2.89 trillion, of which bitcoin was 58.3%, stablecoins 10.7% and every other coin together 31.0%. Ether alone was 11.3%. CoinGecko listed 21,590 coins. The figures are in a CSV of the market shares.
Bitcoin’s share is often called dominance. When it rises, bitcoin has outgrown the rest; when it falls, other coins have. It is a snapshot, and it moves every day.
What sets altcoins apart from bitcoin
Supply rules differ coin by coin. Bitcoin’s issuance is fixed in its code. An altcoin’s supply may be capped, uncapped, set by a foundation, or changed by a vote of its holders, and each one has to be read separately.
Most move with bitcoin. The data below shows that most large altcoins rose and fell on the same days as bitcoin over the past year. That limits how much holding several of them spreads risk.
Size falls away quickly. The tenth-largest altcoin in this basket, Cardano, had a market value of $9.6 billion on CoinGecko on 25 Sep 2026, against bitcoin’s $1,686.1 billion. Below the top few dozen, trading thins out further, and so does the data.
A worked example
Take a hypothetical $1,000 put into bitcoin and $1,000 split equally across the ten altcoins below, on 24 Sep 2021, and held for five years to 24 Sep 2026, using the daily closes on those two dates.
- Bitcoin rose 97.5%, so its $1,000 became $1,975.
- Each altcoin got $100. Their five-year changes were -8.1%, 121.9%, 62.9%, -14.1%, 275.1%, 1,296.8%, -54.1%, -46.1%, 139.3% and -89.2%. Adding up the ten results gives $2,684, a gain of 168.4% and well ahead of bitcoin’s $1,975.
- Take out Zcash, the one that rose 1,296.8%, and the other nine $100 stakes came to $1,287: a gain of 43.1% on $900, against bitcoin’s 97.5%.
One coin carried the whole basket. Without it, the altcoin half of the example trailed bitcoin by a wide margin. That is the pattern to understand before comparing an altcoin basket with bitcoin: the total can be set by a single outlier while the typical coin lags.
The original data
The basket: the ten largest coins by market value after bitcoin on CoinGecko on 25 Sep 2026, skipping three stablecoins (Tether, USD Coin and USDS), one tokenized-asset product with no Yahoo price history (Figure Heloc) and two coins with under five years of Yahoo daily data (Hyperliquid and WhiteBIT Coin). That leaves Ethereum, BNB, XRP, Solana, TRON, Zcash, Dogecoin, Chainlink, Monero and Cardano. Prices are Yahoo Finance daily closes; the last complete day was 24 Sep 2026.
Against bitcoin, one, three and five years to 24 Sep 2026. Bitcoin changed -25.5%, 220.9% and 97.5%. Over one year, 4 of the ten did better (BNB, TRON, Zcash and Monero), and the median altcoin changed -37.1%. Over three years, 5 did better (BNB, Solana, TRON, Zcash and Monero), and the median was 236.5%, slightly ahead of bitcoin. Over five years, 4 did better (BNB, TRON, Zcash and Monero), with a median of 27.4%. Coin by coin, in the order listed above, the one-year changes were -35.3%, -23.8%, -47.6%, -44.7%, 0.5%, 2,529.6%, -60.3%, -38.9%, 92.7% and -69.5%, and the three-year changes were 69.2%, 269.6%, 203.3%, 503.0%, 302.0%, 5,814.1%, 57.1%, 76.4%, 290.9% and 0.9%.
Distance from the record. On 24 Sep 2026 bitcoin closed 32.4% below its record daily close of 6 Oct 2025. The ten altcoins sat 44.4% (Ethereum), 40.7% (BNB), 56.9% (XRP), 55.3% (Solana), 20.2% (TRON), 5.1% (Zcash), 86.0% (Dogecoin), 74.7% (Chainlink), 20.9% (Monero) and 91.6% (Cardano) below theirs. Five were at less than half their record. Dogecoin’s and Chainlink’s records date from May 2021 and Cardano’s from September 2021, so those three have spent five years without a new high. Of the eleven coins, bitcoin itself was the fourth closest to its record, behind Zcash, TRON and Monero.
Moving together. Over the 365 days to 24 Sep 2026, seven of the ten had a daily-return correlation with bitcoin of 0.75 or more, led by Ethereum at 0.91. The three that moved more independently were TRON (0.45), Zcash (0.44) and Monero (0.49). Nine of the ten were more volatile than bitcoin, whose annualized volatility was 46%; the exception was TRON at 24%, and the highest was Zcash at 156%. Every figure is in a CSV of the ten altcoins against bitcoin.
How the topic shows up on YouTube. Of the 24,971 videos in this site’s search study, 12 have “altcoin” in the title, from 10 channels, at a median of 8,615 views; 2 passed 20,000. Five of the 12 lean on all-capitals words such as MASSIVE and AMAZING, a run of exclamation marks, or a promised multiple such as 10x-50x. The numbers above are the plainer version of what those titles promise.
When it fails
When the basket is picked from today’s winners. This one was chosen by size on 25 Sep 2026, so every coin in it survived. Coins that were large five years ago and have since shrunk out of the top ranks are missing by construction, which flatters the altcoin results rather than hurting them.
When an average hides the spread. The five-year results ran from -89.2% to 1,296.8%. The worked example shows how one coin can decide a basket’s result.
When altcoins are treated as diversification away from bitcoin. Seven of ten moved with it most days. On the days bitcoin falls hard, most of the basket falls with it.
When a record is expected to come back. Three of the ten have not closed above their 2021 highs in five years. A past high is a data point, not a level the price owes anyone.
When it is traded with leverage. Higher volatility means a given crypto liquidation distance is reached sooner than on bitcoin.
Related
Bitcoin is the asset every altcoin is measured against, and Ethereum is the largest altcoin by far. XRP and Solana each have their own page, and survivorship bias explains why a list of today’s largest coins makes the category look better than it was. The crypto page covers the asset class as a whole.
I treat any altcoin as a smaller, more volatile relative of bitcoin unless the numbers show otherwise, and I size it that way. Most of the ones I measured moved with bitcoin on the way down, so they added risk more often than they spread it.
— Michael Whitman
This page is educational, not financial advice. Test every idea on your own charts before risking money.