Every Non-Stablecoin in Crypto’s Top 20 Rose in the April 20 UTC Snapshot

A broad end-of-day advance

Every non-stablecoin ranked in CoinMarketCap’s top 20 ended the provider’s April 20, 2024 UTC snapshot with a positive 24-hour change. The result records an unusually broad weekend advance across major digital assets, rather than a bitcoin-only move.

CoinMarketCap’s historical-listings methodology defines daily snapshots as market data from the end of each UTC day. Its separate timing documentation places that boundary at 23:59 UTC. The April 20 table therefore represents an aggregated observation near the end of the UTC calendar day, not a closing auction shared by cryptocurrency exchanges.

Bitcoin was quoted at $64,994.44, up 1.80% over CoinMarketCap’s stated rolling 24-hour window. Ether stood at $3,157.63, up 3.21%, while BNB gained 2.90% to $570.96 and Solana advanced 5.92% to $151.13.

The breadth extended beyond those four assets. XRP rose 5.06%, Dogecoin 4.20%, Toncoin 2.32% and Cardano 7.92%. Shiba Inu posted the largest increase among the group at 14.87%, followed by NEAR Protocol at 11.40%, Internet Computer at 10.47% and Avalanche at 10.31%.

Measuring breadth without overstating it

Coinburn classified Tether and USDC as stablecoins and excluded them from the directional breadth calculation. Both were also inside CoinMarketCap’s top 20: Tether was quoted at $1.0004 with a 0.02% decline, while USDC was quoted at $1.0001 with no reported 24-hour change.

The remaining 18 assets all gained. Their reported increases ranged from TRON’s 1.07% to Shiba Inu’s 14.87%. Sorting those 18 percentage changes produces a median gain of approximately 6.54%, a Coinburn calculation based on the average of the ninth and tenth observations, 5.92% and 7.15%.

That calculation measures cross-sectional breadth within one provider’s end-of-day top 20. It is not a return for a tradeable index. The membership was determined at the snapshot time, the assets had sharply different market capitalizations, and the calculation gives bitcoin the same weight as much smaller tokens. It also excludes thousands of assets outside the first 20 positions.

Bitcoin remained the market’s anchor

Bitcoin’s reported market capitalization was approximately $1.280 trillion, compared with $379.14 billion for ether and $67.53 billion for Solana. The breadth result therefore did not mean capital was distributed evenly or that smaller assets had displaced bitcoin’s market role.

It did show that the April 20 price response was wider than the modest 1.80% bitcoin increase. Major non-bitcoin assets generally recorded larger percentage gains, including Cardano, Polkadot, Bitcoin Cash, Chainlink, Polygon, Internet Computer, NEAR Protocol and Litecoin.

No public price table can identify why each holder traded. The coincidence with Bitcoin’s fourth subsidy halving does not prove that the protocol event caused the advance. Weekend liquidity, positioning, derivatives activity and unrelated asset-specific demand could also have affected prices.

Limits of the dated record

CoinMarketCap aggregates quotes and reported volumes from multiple trading venues. Venue selection, liquidity screening, circulating-supply estimates and conversion methodology can change reported prices and market capitalizations. The April 20 table listed $23.10 billion in bitcoin volume and $9.92 billion in ether volume over 24 hours, but aggregate volume may include economically overlapping activity and should not be treated as audited cash turnover.

A research brief dated April 22, 2024 subsequently characterized bitcoin’s post-halving price action as mostly range-bound and quoted bitcoin near $64,940 and ether near $3,147 at 02:00 UTC. That later observation is consistent with a broad April 20 rebound that did not immediately become a sustained bitcoin breakout. It does not establish what happened after April 22 or convert the April 20 snapshot into evidence of a lasting trend.