Correlation between Bitcoin and other cryptoassets

This post was originally published on April 18, 2019, and sent to Messari Pro subscribers.

Crypto folks have discussed the correlation between alts and bitcoin (or more recently, between ‘shitcoins’ and ‘majors’) for years now:

As this most recent bear market wore on, many people were looking for a decoupling of Bitcoin and other “strong” assets from the long-tail of cryptoassets that don’t appear to have much of a future. Vinny recently summed up this view nicely last week:

But is he right? First things first - what’s the correlation actually look like right now? Using the correlation tool from our friends at CoinMetrics, we see that a basket of 25 coins from mostly the top 100 are indeed still extremely correlated with BTC and ETH, though somewhat less than they were 6-10 months ago: