Altcoins: what history says about returns, crashes and survival

"Altcoin" means any crypto asset other than Bitcoin. The name covers everything from Ether, the second-largest crypto asset, to millions of tokens that traded for a few days and disappeared. Every bull market brings a new list of altcoins that rose far faster than Bitcoin, and every bear market thins that list out.

This guide looks at the record rather than the stories: how many of the leading altcoins of 2018 and 2021 are still near the top, what they lost in the two big crypto bear markets, how many tokens fail, and how closely the survivors now move with Bitcoin.

The top 10 of 2018: three are still there

On 1 January 2018, near the peak of the first big altcoin boom, the ten largest crypto assets by market value were Bitcoin, XRP, Ether, Bitcoin Cash, Cardano, Litecoin, IOTA, NEM, Stellar and Dash. On 30 October 2026, only three of them were still in the top 10 of non-stablecoin assets: Bitcoin, Ether and XRP.

Sources: CoinMarketCap historical snapshots for 1 Jan 2018 and 3 Jan 2021; Forbes Advisor top-10 list of 30 Oct 2026, which leaves out stablecoins, wrapped and staking tokens and meme coins.

Of the 2021 top 10, five were still in the top 10 in October 2026 (counting Tether, a stablecoin). The pattern is the same in both cohorts: Bitcoin and Ether stayed, a few others held on, and the rest slid down the rankings while new names took their place. Number 20 on the 2018 list, BitConnect, shut down its lending platform on 16 January 2018 after being accused of running a Ponzi scheme.

The returns show the same thing. K33 Research calculated what a buyer of the top 10 of 7 January 2018 would have had by May 2023: about −53 % with equal amounts in each coin, and about +6 % weighted by market value. Only Bitcoin (about +63 %) and Ether ended above their January 2018 price. The S&P 500 returned about +51 % over the same period.

What altcoins lost in the bear markets

Crypto has had two full bear markets since altcoins became a mass market. In both, the large altcoins fell further than Bitcoin.

Sources: CoinDesk and NBC News (2018 falls); Messari data via Cointelegraph (coins that peaked in 2018); Bloomberg via Fortune and Motley Fool (2022 falls); CoinDesk (Terra). Peak-to-low falls on intraday or daily prices, as reported.

Two findings from these numbers matter for anyone holding altcoins. First, recovery was not the norm: in January 2021, three years after the peak, 83 % of the assets that had peaked in January 2018 were still at least 90 % below their high. Second, a fall of 90 % or more needs a gain of 900 % or more just to get back to even; the drawdown recovery calculator shows the arithmetic for any fall.

Terra is the extreme case. Its stablecoin UST, worth about $18 billion, lost its link to the dollar between 7 and 9 May 2022. LUNA, the token that was meant to hold UST's value, fell from a market value of more than $40 billion to about $500 million within 24 hours.

Most tokens fail

The two tables above describe the largest, most established altcoins. Below them, the failure rate is far higher. CoinGecko counted about 25 million tokens listed on its decentralised-exchange tracker since mid-2021. About 13.4 million of them, 53 %, had stopped trading by the end of 2025, and 11.6 million of those failures came in 2025 alone. Most were short-lived meme and launchpad tokens rather than coins listed on large exchanges, but the number shows how cheap it has become to create a token, and how little most of them were worth.

Bitcoin's share of the market

Bitcoin dominance is Bitcoin's share of the total value of all crypto assets. It falls in altcoin booms and rises when they fade. Its low came in January 2018, at 36.7 % on TradingView's measure. In late October 2026 it was about 58–60 %, depending on the provider (57.7 % on CoinGecko, 59.8 % in the Forbes list). Providers count different sets of coins, so dominance figures should always name their source.

Concentration at the top is high. Bitcoin and Ether together made up about 70 % of the crypto market in October 2026, and the ten largest non-stablecoin assets about 83 %.

The survivors move with Bitcoin

For the altcoins that did survive, our own data show a clear trend: they have become more and more closely tied to Bitcoin.

Their swings are also larger. From August 2020 to September 2026, Ether was about 1.4 times and Solana about twice as volatile as Bitcoin. In practice, a basket of large altcoins has behaved like Bitcoin with more volatility, not like a separate source of return. The full comparison, with every fall of more than 50 %, is in our guide Bitcoin vs Ethereum vs Solana.

What research says about crypto returns

Academic work on crypto returns is young, but two findings recur. Liu and Tsyvinski (2021, *Review of Financial Studies*) found that crypto returns are driven by factors specific to crypto markets, such as network adoption, momentum and investor attention, rather than by the stock market or production costs. Liu, Tsyvinski and Wu (2022, *Journal of Finance*) showed that three factors, the crypto market as a whole, coin size and momentum, explain most of the differences in returns between coins. Both point the same way as the data above: the market-wide crypto move explains much of what any one coin does.

Stablecoins are not altcoins in the usual sense

Stablecoins are tokens designed to hold a fixed value, usually one US dollar. Most are backed by cash and short-term Treasury bills; Terra's UST was an exception, backed only by a mechanism linked to LUNA. In October 2026, stablecoins were worth about $300 billion, roughly 11 % of the crypto market. In the US, the GENIUS Act, signed on 18 July 2025, requires 1:1 backing with cash and short-term government assets; in the EU, the stablecoin rules of the MiCA regulation have applied since 30 June 2024. Stablecoins are built not to rise in value, so they belong in a different category from the altcoins discussed here.

The short answer

On the record since 2018, altcoins as a group did worse than Bitcoin, and most did far worse. Three of the top 10 of January 2018 were still in the top 10 in October 2026. In the two bear markets the large altcoins fell between about 80 % and 97 %, and most of the 2018 leaders had not recovered three years later. More than half of all tokens tracked since 2021 have stopped trading. The survivors have become closely tied to Bitcoin, with larger swings. None of this says what any single coin will do; it describes the odds the past record has offered.

The live figures for Bitcoin, Ether and Solana, with their worst falls and trend-following results, are in the free Research Terminal.

Frequently asked questions

Hamann, H. (2026). Altcoins: what history says about returns, crashes and survival. InvestWealth.com. https://www.investwealth.com/learn/guides/altcoins

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