Bitcoin’s share of the cryptocurrency market hit an 11-week high on Thursday, market data shows.

Data from CoinMarketCap reveals that bitcoin’s dominance rate reached 55.38 percent on Dec. 6, which is its highest level recorded since Sept. 20. At press time, that figure is hovering around 55.1 percent. 

The dominance rate is a metric used to measure the percent market share of a particular asset in cryptocurrency market. What the development suggests is that traders may be shifting funds from alternative cryptocurrencies into the world's largest coin by market capitalization – or at the very least, demand for bitcoin is outpacing other networks.

Bitcoin has always maintained the largest share of the cryptocurrency market, even when its dominance rate hit an all time low of 32 percent on Jan. 13 of this year.

At the time, the alternative cryptocurrency market (or the crypto market excluding bitcoin) had seen its total capitalization increased nearly 24,000 percent over the course of the prior year, which ate away a considerable amount of bitcoin's overall market share.

Since then, the alternative cryptocurrency market has depreciated more than 90 percent in terms of total capitalization from its record high of $550 billion.

Bitcoin's price has struggled to retain its value, too, haven fallen over 80 percent since its all-time high was recorded in December 2017. Yet it's still clearly the preferred cryptocurrency even in a risk-off market, where mitigating risk is a top priority – a claim shored up by its rising dominance rate. 

Disclosure: The author holds BTC, AST, REQ, OMG, FUEL, 1st and AMP at the time of writing.

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