When Bitcoin is on a bull run, the rest of the market follows.

When the price of Bitcoin drops, well…unfortunately, so does the rest of the market.

However, there are entire market sectors that are defying this trend.

Not all Cryptos Follow Bitcoin’s Lead

It’s a long-held belief that the market (unfortunately) follows Bitcoin’s lead. Bitcoin is still the single largest cryptocurrency in the world (with a market dominance of 41.8%) and when the price of Bitcoin shifts, the rest of the market shifts with Bitcoin.

Over the last few weeks, we have watched the price of Bitcoin fall from its all-time high and as a result, so has the rest of the market — Except for a few outliers.

We will be looking at these cryptocurrency sectors which have defied the downward trend and are performing exceptionally well in an otherwise down market.

Top 5 Sectors in a Down Market

At the time of writing, this listing was pulled from CoinGecko, the top 5 cryptocurrency sectors (category) ranked by returns over the last 7 days.

1st — Play to Earn

If you have been around the crypto space for any period of time, it shouldn’t come as surprise this category is at the top of the list. P2E by a large margin is at the top of the list, with over 100% gains in just the last week, more than twice the gains by the next category.

At the top of the Play to Earn category is Realm (+336%), Deapcoin (+263%) and AnrKey X (+237%), over the last week. Of course, there were P2E projects which didn’t so as well, but as a category as a whole, it was up 119% over the last week — Impressive.

2nd — Metaverse

The metaverse is growing at an incredible rate. According to a recent report by one of the largest crypto investment firms Grayscale, the number of metaverse users has increased by 10x between the start of 2020 and June 2021. They believe this will become a $1 trillion industry within the next few years.

The results from this list help to collaborate this as the Metaverse category is booming with projects like The SandBox (+119%), UFO Gaming (+113%) and Spheroid Universe (+100%) up over the last week.

3rd — Gaming

Gaming comes in at a close third place at 41% gains over the last week. While it's true most all play-to-earn projects are games, not all games are P2E.

While the gaming returns weren’t as strong as in the P2E or Metaverse category, some of the best performing projects in this category included Crabada (+233%), Gala (+208%) and Tower (+121%) over the last week.

4th — DaoMaker Ecosystem

The DaoMaker ecosystem is a retail venture investing and funding framework and platform to help new projects and startups launch successfully.

The best performing projects in this category include My Neighbor Alice (+89%), Infinity Pad (+43%) and Fear (+25%).

5th — Non-Fungible Tokens (NFT)

For the last year, NFT’s have been all the rage, so it’s not a surprise to see NFTs on this list. NFT is short for Non-Fungible Token, typically digital art that is unique and identifiable on the blockchain.

The best performing projects in this category include COCOS BCX (+568%), Realm (+316), DeapCoin (+257%) over the last week.

Notable Mention

This article would not be complete without mention to the many ecosystems which are also positioned to perform very well in the near future, such as the
Avalanche Ecosystem, xDAI Ecosystem, Polygon Ecosystem, DaoMaker Ecosystem and of course the Binance Smart Chain Ecosystem.

This is only a Snapshot

While I do think this listing is very revealing, it’s only a snapshot of the market at a specific point in time. For a much better analysis of which sectors are performing well, we would need to track this list over a period of time to get a more complete picture and trending.

Nevertheless, I do think this snapshot is very revealing of what we can expect in the near future and indicative of which sectors will likely dominate the cryptocurrency scene in the upcoming months and years.

Conclusion

While Bitcoin and the majority of the market are down over the last few weeks, a few market sectors are doing extremely well.

Granted, this was only a snapshot of the market at a specific time, I believe this snapshot is a decent representation of the market as a whole — Not surprisingly Play-to-Earn, Metaverse and gaming projects made the top three.

While it is unfortunate the price of Bitcoin does to a large degree determine the movement of the majority of the market, there are many sectors whose growth is so strong as to defy this market pressure and these are likely the areas where you will want to be focusing your attention.