If you’ve been paying any frequent attention to charts and not just prices, you can easily identify that most alternative coins have been fluctuating almost exactly like Bitcoin. Bitcoin goes up, they go up, Bitcoin goes down, they go down. However, many people don’t actually know why this happens, however, the answer is actually pretty simple.

If you’ve used an exchange like Binance you probably already understood why this phenomenon happens. You see, currently, many smaller coins can only be bought through another crypto coin pair, by which I mean, you can’t buy them with Euros or US Dollars, you have to trade in a crypto coin in order to obtain another coin.

Most smaller coins can only be bought by trading Bitcoin in exchange for the specific coin you want to buy. This is the reason the market is currently heavily tied to Bitcoin.

The step towards an “independent” price fluctuation for each coin relies on the freeness of exchange pairs. Most coins can only be bought through Bitcoin, but, in the future, when more trading pairs are added and you can buy any other coin by using another coin, then the different cryptocurrencies will each distinguish themselves in their own prices.

Ethereum is already the second largest trading pair out there, allowing you to buy several coins by trading this in, but it’s still in no way compared to the number of coins you can buy using Bitcoin.

All we can do is request more trading pairs and hope the exchanges add them.