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While this categorization provides a snapshot of the diverse technologies and applications within the cryptocurrency market, it's important to recognize the fluidity within these categories. For instance, platforms originally designed for specific purposes, such as Solana's high-performance blockchain for dApps, have expanded their utility to support DeFi applications and services, demonstrating a fluidity that transcends traditional categorization. Similarly, Chainlink, while a Web3 token providing oracle services, has become integral to the functioning of DeFi protocols. This overlap highlights the dynamic nature of cryptocurrencies, necessitating a flexible and nuanced approach to understanding this ever evolving market.

This heatmap shows how the top cryptocurrencies move in relation to each other. Red squares mean the tokens are strongly correlated (moving together), while blue indicates a negative correlation (moving in opposite directions). As you can see, the crypto market is highly interconnected, with most tokens showing a strong positive correlation, often influenced by the performance of Bitcoin.
Understanding these high correlations is crucial for crypto investors. While diversification is more challenging in a tightly linked market, identifying less correlated assets can still help manage risk. As Ray Dalio highlights in his book Principles, combining even partially uncorrelated assets is key to building a more resilient portfolio.
To create this chart, weekly price changes are calculated for each token, and the Pearson correlation is computed for every pair. The heatmap is then organized using hierarchical clustering to group the most similar tokens together, making market patterns easier to see.

The Minimum Spanning Tree (MST) simplifies the correlation matrix by showing only the strongest connections between tokens. If two tokens are linked, they have a strong positive correlation and tend to move in tandem. This helps identify clusters of related assets and is useful for portfolio diversification.
The tree is constructed by converting the correlations into distances and then finding the set of connections that links all tokens with the minimum total distance. As noted by Marti, Gautier, et al. (2017), the optimal Markowitz portfolio is often found at the tree's outskirts, and the tree tends to shrink during a financial crisis.
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