Alt Season? Over 100 Crypto Assets Outperform Bitcoin in Q1 Surge

The first quarter of 2019 was a breath of fresh air for the cryptocurrency market, having recorded its first quarterly increase in overall network valuations since the fourth quarter of 2017.

With Q1 of 2019 now in the history books, let's dive into some of the more notable individual performances by way of breaking down their respective asset size classes and market sectors.

Bitcoin SV's 26 percent loss and NEM's 13 percent loss was enough to establish them as the worst performers in the large and medium cap segments, respectively, while the worst performer of the broader market was the small-cap crypto Grin, which lost 70 percent of its value since its main-net launch on January 15.

Another way to segment the cryptocurrency market is by sector, which describes the key parts of the crypto-economy.

Messari provides a number of different market sector classifications, the Q1 average and median performance of which are shown in the table below, and were calculated by taking the performance of the top 5 coins by market cap in each sector into account.

In all, the top five cryptocurrencies by market cap in each sector averaged no worse than a 20 percent price increase.

The last time CoinDesk conducted the same analysis on March 13, just four of the top 20 cryptocurrencies had both of its BTC and USD pairs trading above the 200 day moving average as signs of life in the market were just beginning to re-emerge.

Still lagging behind with neither trading pair above the MA are the first and third largest cryptocurrencies in the world by market cap, bitcoin and XRP, as well as six others.

Q1 was an impressive stretch for the cryptocurrency market, which has seemingly renewed optimism among some of its market participants.

Longer term outlook on the market leader bitcoin by asking what price it will trade closest to on the date of its next supply production halving event in May of 2020.