Bitcoin Outperforms Altcoins: Should You Ditch Them Altogether?

Altcoins have gained notoriety for delivering astronomical returns to early investors, but also for leaving them broke. However, only a tiny fraction of altcoins manage to outperform Bitcoin in the long run.

A study by CoinGecko found that millions of cryptocurrencies launched since 2021 are already extinct, with 11.6 million projects failing in 2025 alone. Many of these were pump-and-dump scams.

Even if an investor picked a handful of altcoins to compare alongside Bitcoin, the result would be similar: Bitcoin up, and the rest underwater. In one example, a casual investor who split $5,000 evenly across a basket containing Bitcoin (BTC), Litecoin, Polkadot, Cardano, and Avalanche in June 2021 found that only Bitcoin provided a positive return.

Bitcoin is currently up 72% in this period, while the other altcoins have lost anywhere from 40 to over 94%. Even dollar-cost averaging, which works best when the underlying asset has a high probability of compounding over time, skews the odds in favor of Bitcoin due to its capped supply, halving-driven supply reduction, and degree of institutional adoption.

For most investors, it seems that buying altcoins is a losing proposition. The best approach may be to simply buy and hold Bitcoin.