Measurement 1 · The cycle comparison
How often does an altcoin really beat Bitcoin?
Not against the dollar, but against Bitcoin. The question is not “did the price go up”, but: what percentage of the assets traded at the time were ahead of Bitcoin at the end of a window?
Six windows, the same picture six times
The bar shows what percentage of the measured assets were ahead of Bitcoin at the end of the window. On the right: how many that was, and what Bitcoin itself did in the same window. The scale goes up to forty percent.
WindowShare ahead of Bitcoinshare
ahead of Bitcoin · Bitcoin itself
2020/2134.3%12 of 35 · Bitcoin 5.72 times
2021/2231.4%11 of 35 · Bitcoin 0.58 times
2022/2314.3%5 of 35 · Bitcoin 1.28 times
2023/242.9%1 of 35 · Bitcoin 2.20 times
2024/2514.3%5 of 35 · Bitcoin 1.73 times
2025/26 *28.6%10 of 35 · Bitcoin 0.69 times
2020 → 202614.3%5 of 35 · Bitcoin 6.59 times
* The closing figure for the 2025/26 window is a live reading from September 2, 2026, not a daily close.
The overall row, and it is the most important one
August 1, 2020 to September 2, 2026: Bitcoin ended at 6.59 times its starting value. Of 35 measurable assets, 5 beat Bitcoin — 14.3 percent.
Against Bitcoin, the median ended at 0.073 times its starting value — it lost about 93 percent against Bitcoin.
What these figures do not show
35 assets were measured, all of which survived the 2020/21 cycle. Anything that has disappeared since is on no list that can be retrieved today.
All shares are therefore upper bounds. The true rates are below them, not above.
And nobody wins reliably twice
Not a single asset won in more than four of the six windows. BNB leads with four, followed by ETH and TRX with three each.
Seven assets won in no window at all: NEO, XEM, SNT, ZRX, SNX, DGB and EOS.
What is documented: the counter-test from 2022 to 2025
We took the 36 assets we had already measured for the 2020/21 cycle – winners and losers of that round. Twelve of them were ahead of Bitcoin back then. We measured what became of them in the window from November 21, 2022 to October 6, 2025.
Cohort
33
assets from the 2020/21 measurement that were also measurable in the cycle up to 2025
of them ahead
1XRP – and XRP had been behind Bitcoin in 2020/21
Rate
3.0%against 33 percent in the cycle before
Median altcoin
−85.6%against Bitcoin in the same window
The reservation belongs with it: the cohort consists only of survivors. Anything that has disappeared since drops out of the calculation — so the true rate is below 3.0 percent, not above.
See the complete counter-test →
Why we measure against Bitcoin and not against the dollar
In a bull market everything is green against the dollar at once — including what fell behind Bitcoin. Only the gap to Bitcoin shows whether a coin had demand of its own. That is why on this site every color and every figure is measured against Bitcoin.
How to read a rate
A rate of ten percent means: of a hundred altcoins in this window, ten ended up ahead of Bitcoin and ninety behind. It says nothing about which asset was ahead, and nothing at all about which one will be ahead next time.
What this site is not
No investment advice, no price forecast, no buy or sell recommendation. Past measurements say nothing about future prices.
Sources of the figures on this page: RECALCULATION Six-window cycle measurement, September 2, 2026 (German title: NACHRECHNUNG Sechs-Fenster-Zyklusmessung 02.09.2026) and RESEARCH REPORT Price drivers, September 1, 2026 (German title: FORSCHUNGSBERICHT Preistreiber 01.09.2026) — stage 2, stage 2b and the cycle counter-test, folder 07 Forschungsfragen. The document is an internal working file and is therefore not linked here; it is not publicly available.