Trading Majors vs. Altcoins: Ethereum DEX Trader Profitability, 2020-2026

Ethereum on-chain traders are having their worst year on record in terms of trading performance. The overall median win rate across active DEX traders fell to 26.29% in the twelve months to August 2026, down 25.91 percentage points from 52.20% the year before — a 49.63% relative decline. Since 2020, when the median win rate stood at 80.65%, the figure has fallen by 54.36 percentage points, a 67.40% relative drop, the lowest point in our seven-year dataset.

In this study, we tracked the top 500 tokens by market capitalization as of August 2026 on CoinGecko. We further excluded non-Ethereum tokens and stablecoins, leaving us 200 remaining tokens (CoinGecko's top 500 ranking already excludes rehypothecated tokens). These 200 tokens are broken into two mutually-exclusive trader cohorts: Majors-Only (wallets that traded exclusively the top 10 tokens that year) and Altcoins (Any) – wallets that traded any token ranked 11-200 that year. Note that wallets who trade both altcoins and majors are considered under the Altcoin (Any) cohort. This is because altcoin traders typically also trade majors.

Is It Better To Trade Altcoins or Majors?

In terms of win rates, the data shows a relatively even split. Majors traders posted a higher median win rate in 3 of the 7 years studied (2020, 2025, 2026), while Altcoin traders were ahead in the other 4 (2021, 2022, 2023, 2024) — including a narrow 2022 edge (38.61% vs. 38.39%).

The more revealing pattern shows up in PnL: Altcoin traders' median PnL moved in the same direction as Majors traders' in every single year studied (a 0.975 correlation), but consistently amplified — in 6 of the 7 years, Altcoin's median PnL was roughly 3-6.6x the size of Majors', whether positive or negative. When Majors traders made money, Altcoin traders tended to make several times more; when Majors traders lost money, Altcoin traders lost several times more too.

Overall, no single cohort dominates consistently on win rate — but on PnL, the story is less about who wins and more about how much each cohort's fortunes are magnified by the same underlying trend.

Median Wallet PnL by Year: Majors vs. Altcoins

Ethereum Altcoin Traders Cohort Size

Altcoin traders are a shrinking share of the market, but showed some signs of recovery since 2024. Altcoin traders made up 15.82% of the trader population at their peak in 2021, falling to a low of 7.22% in 2024 — a 54.36% relative decline — before recovering to 10.82% by 2026, still 23.15% below the 2020 starting point of 14.08%.

This shift did not track overall market growth in a simple way. 2024 was the single busiest year in our dataset by trader count — the combined population (Majors + Altcoins) peaked at 874,013 wallets, the same year overall win rates also hit their post-2020 high of 65.43% (see Chart 1) — yet it's also the exact year Altcoin share bottomed out. In other words, at the moment the market was performing best and attracting the most traders overall, altcoins were capturing the smallest slice of that activity.

Total trader population on Ethereum fell 3.96% in 2025 and a further 25.14% in 2026 to 628,326. Meanwhile, Altcoin share climbed, rising even as the total population shrank suggests Altcoin wallets held up somewhat better than Majors wallets during the recent contraction, rather than altcoin trading genuinely attracting new participants.

Methodology

This analysis covers Ethereum decentralized exchange (DEX) trading activity across all major protocols indexed in Dune Analytics' unified dex_evm.trades table (Uniswap, Curve, SushiSwap, Balancer, and others). You may find our dashboard and dune queries here.

Trader population: An active trader is defined as any Ethereum wallet with between 10 and 2,000 DEX trades within a given study year. This range filters out one-off/dust wallets on the low end and automated bots/routers on the high end (some wallets recorded millions of trades per year, clearly non-human activity). Each year's eligible-wallet population is computed independently. Known contract/router addresses (per Dune's labels.owner_addresses table, where coverage exists) are excluded; label coverage on Dune is incomplete, so this is a best-effort filter rather than a guarantee.

Token groups: Tokens are drawn from CoinGecko's top 500 coins by market cap (as of 2026), with stablecoins excluded, filtered to the ~200 tokens with a genuine Ethereum ERC-20 contract (native assets on other chains, such as SOL, XRP, or ADA, do not trade on Ethereum DEXs and are correctly excluded). BTC and ETH are manually mapped to their canonical WBTC and WETH contract addresses, since neither exists natively on Ethereum. These ~200 tokens are then re-ranked among themselves (not by original global rank) into two mutually-exclusive trader cohorts: Majors-Only and Altcoins (Any). A wallet is classified as Majors-Only only if it traded exclusively top-10 tokens in that study year; a wallet is classified as Altcoins (Any) if it traded any token ranked 11-200 that year, regardless of whether it also traded majors — in which case its entire trading activity for that year (both majors and altcoin legs) is counted toward the Altcoins (Any) cohort's statistics, not split between groups.

Important limitation: this token list reflects 2026 market-cap rankings, applied retroactively to 2020-2026. A token that did not exist in an earlier year (or was not yet prominent) simply shows zero or reduced activity in that year, by construction rather than as a data gap. This means the study measures "how today's most significant Ethereum-tradeable tokens have performed for their traders through recent history," rather than a true point-in-time ranking for each year.

PnL calculation: For each wallet and token, cost basis is calculated using a weighted-average method (not FIFO): a wallet's cost basis for a token is the running average price of everything it has bought so far within that year. Realized PnL on a sell = sale proceeds minus (quantity sold × average cost basis at that point). A sell only counts if the wallet made a prior buy of that same token in the same year; sells with no in-year buy history are excluded rather than treated as breakeven or loss. Wallets need at least 3 matched sells within a given group/year to be included in that group's statistics.

Win rate: Calculated at the wallet level using the same weighted-average cost basis, not FIFO. A sale is scored as a "win" if the sale proceeds exceed the sold quantity multiplied by the wallet's average cost basis at that point in time. A sell only counts toward win rate if the wallet has a matching buy of that same token earlier in the same year; sells with no prior in-year purchase are excluded rather than counted as either a win or a loss. Win rate is the percentage of a wallet's qualifying sells that were profitable, and each group's reported win rate (median or average) is calculated across all wallets with at least 3 qualifying sells in that group for that year.

Data-quality guard: a small number of sells were excluded (~0.07% in testing) where the sold quantity exceeded 1,000x the wallet's cumulative bought quantity for that token — this targets a specific failure mode found during development, where rebasing tokens, decimals metadata errors, and certain scam contracts produced quantity mismatches between a wallet's buy and sell legs, resulting in nonsensical implied per-token costs.

Other notes: gas costs are not netted into PnL figures. Study years run from August 11 of the labeled year to August 11 of the following year (e.g., "2026" covers August 11, 2025 through August 11, 2026).

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Related reading: Pump.fun Traders are Making a Comeback

This study is for illustrative and informational purposes only, and is not financial advice.

Year-over-Year Summary: ETH DEX Trader Win Rate & PnL, Majors + Altcoins Combined

Trader Cohort Size and Altcoin Trader Share