ICP against BTC, ETH and SOL across shared cycles

A comparison across assets with different histories has a survivorship problem built into it. The assets that exist today are the ones that survived to be compared; the ones that did not are absent from the table. That is not a criticism of any particular asset, but it does mean the four series are not a random sample of what a new token experiences.

The second problem is that the periods differ in character. Bitcoin's early record covers a period when the asset class was small and thinly traded; the later records cover a period when it was larger and more institutionally connected. Comparing an asset's early years with another's later years compares two different market environments as much as two assets.

The third is that the shared window is short. The period in which all four assets traded simultaneously begins in May 2021 and covers a single contraction and the recovery that followed. Any statement about how the four behave "across cycles" is really a statement about how they behaved in one.

This site's design-intent comparison makes the structural version of this point, and the Bitcoin vs ICP architecture page covers the two-asset case in detail.

The useful reading is structural rather than numerical. The four records differ in length, in the market conditions they cover, and in the supply mechanisms behind them. Those differences are documented and checkable, and they are what a reader should take from the comparison.

The reading to avoid is a ranking. A table of four assets invites the question of which performed best, and the honest answer is that the question is not well posed when the periods differ. A return computed from a listing date is a return from a price-discovery period, and comparing it with a return computed from a mature market is comparing two different measurements.

Where a calculation would genuinely help — working through a specific window for a specific asset — this site links out rather than computing on the reader's behalf. The ICP price history against Bitcoin's cycle phases page takes the two-asset version of this framing and states the same limitation.

The four series are venue-aggregated daily closes, so intraday extremes are not captured and the aggregation method affects all four.

The listing dates are the dates each asset began trading on public venues, which is not the same as the date its network launched. A network can operate before its token trades, and the pre-trading period is not represented in any price series.

The comparison is of price records only. It says nothing about network usage, security, or the design intent behind each network, which are covered on the architecture pages this cluster links to.

Finally, no return, correlation or capitalisation figure is asserted anywhere on this page. The coverage of each record is described because it is a documented property of the data; the numbers themselves belong to the source.