Why is bitcoin dominance climbing in this bull market?

[timerland]

This bull market I expected Bitcoin dominance to rise.

Why?

Because during this bull market Bitcoin will be added to the portfolio's of many more classical investors including institutional investors who manage trillions in assets.

I think this is it.

The fact that institutional investors are playing a role contributing to this bull market, at least partially, means that whatever they are interested in will likely gain more traction than others.

And since BTC is the most stable, best store of value, and has proven itself over the long run, they're unlikely to be investing in anything other than BTC on a large scale, especially when initial offerings can pose significant regulatory issues.

They most likely would have conducted risk analysis that would show the majority of the rest of the crypto market is quite risky, which we know as well.

[Stedsm]

I think that a lot of people had expected BTC dominance to go down as we saw the bull market unfold, because in the 2017 bull market we saw a huge dip in this index from 80+% pre-bull market to the sub-40%'s.

Do you really expect that to happen again when there's a lot on the table? Who would want to see alts killing this BTC "dominance" when most of them really have no value?

So, why is this trending in the opposite direction now? It pretty much went from 35% to 62% within a year and a half. Historical data and intuition would tell us that as euphoria enters the market, more people will toss their money away towards "penny-tokens".

Nah, this time these kids have got a new toy to play with, and that's leveraged trading. When they can easily make x times while trading on BTC in which they actually believe, why would they put their money back into alts?
2017 was a gift for alts (even shitcoins rose badly more than 10-50x and some did 100x too) and such alts don't deserve those price tags they've had during those "good days". This time, it's the King Bitcoin that would only let the best ones survive after it stabilizes somewhere but I see null possibilities for alts to rise till then. Even awesome projects like NPXS, ZRX, ZIL, NEO, NANO, WAN, etc. are suffering from the ultimate destructive havoc created by BTC for them.

Could it be attributed to institutional investors, the better fundamentals underlying BTC and the network, or a more mature market? Or is it something else?

I don't think it's just institutional investors alone, but an inclusion of every single Bitcoiner who became mature enough to understand the markets and act accordingly.
To me, fundamentals don't work here but technicals as to my knowledge, this isn't forex and we need to buy the rumors, sell the news .

[logfiles]

Perhaps people have come to realize what the real coin is in crypto space.
in 2017,lots of people spent money in altcoins and ICOs thinking that btc price was too high but it went on upto 20K, this time round, they don't wanna miss the rise to 20k atleast 

[BrewMaster]

Perhaps people have come to realize what the real coin is in crypto space.
in 2017,lots of people spent money in altcoins and ICOs thinking that btc price was too high but it went on upto 20K, this time round, they don't wanna miss the rise to 20k atleast 

but this is not the first time the "dominance" change happens. practically every time in the past that bitcoin started reversing out of its bubble burst bear market, its so called dominance grew because people saw the bitcoin rise and dumped altcoins immediately.

the only difference now is that because of the 2017 large number of shitcoins and ICOs that percentage changed a lot more compared to the past so it became noticeable. otherwise the trend is exactly the same.

[BitHodler]

Perhaps people have come to realize what the real coin is in crypto space.
in 2017,lots of people spent money in altcoins and ICOs thinking that btc price was too high but it went on upto 20K, this time round, they don't wanna miss the rise to 20k atleast 

Coins with or without fundamentals, it doesn't really matter for rookies, especially if their unit bias makes them avoid Bitcoin to invest in a basket of low value shitcoins, which a lot people still do to this day. Greed and ignorance will always be present.

Traders don't care about the coin they trade either as long as there is some degree of liquidity to have their positions filled relatively quickly. All they basically need is a chart and volatility, what coin in crypto doesn't have that?

I think we're still at least a few years away from investors actually paying attention to the fundamentals, but then again, fundamentals are very subjective. What you consider good fundamentals might be poor fundamentals to me.