Beyond Bitcoin, IDTraders quotes four other crypto pairs against USDT: Ether, BNB, Solana and XRP. They are lumped together as "altcoins", which suggests they are variations on a theme. They are not. Each is a different kind of thing, and each trades differently for that reason.
ETH — Ethereum
What it is: the network on which most decentralised applications, stablecoins and tokens are built. Where Bitcoin is a ledger, Ethereum is a computer that anyone can run programs on. Ether (ETH) is the fuel — every transaction on the network pays a fee in it.
How it trades: the second-largest crypto by value and the closest to Bitcoin in behaviour, with a correlation to BTC usually above 0.8. It tends to move a little more than Bitcoin in both directions. Its own drivers are network activity (more use, more fee demand), upgrades to the protocol, and the fortunes of the applications built on it.
BNB
What it is: the token of the BNB Smart Chain, the network behind the BEP-20 rail your deposits may travel on. It was created by the exchange Binance, and it is used to pay fees on that network and to get discounts on the exchange.
How it trades: partly with the crypto market and partly with the exchange itself. Regulatory news about the exchange moves BNB in a way it does not move ETH or SOL. It has historically been less volatile than Solana and slightly more than Ether. A master who holds BNB is taking a view on one company's ecosystem in a way that does not apply to the others.
SOL — Solana
What it is: a rival to Ethereum built for speed and low cost, processing thousands of transactions a second for fractions of a cent. It has become the home of much of the fast-moving, speculative end of crypto — small tokens, trading apps, games.
How it trades: the most volatile of the four by a distance. It fell more than 95% from its 2021 high after an exchange collapse it was associated with, then rose more than twentyfold from that low. Daily ranges of 5–8% are ordinary. When crypto is rising, SOL usually rises fastest; when it falls, SOL falls hardest. Masters who trade it are either very disciplined or very lucky, and the drawdown figure tells you which.
XRP
What it is: a token built for fast, cheap cross-border payments, associated with a company that markets it to banks. It is the oldest of the four and the one with the most distinct story.
How it trades: for years it moved on a single regulatory case in the United States, rising and falling on court filings rather than on the crypto market. Since that case resolved it has traded more in line with the sector, but it retains a large retail following that produces sharp, news-driven spikes. It is the least correlated of the four with Bitcoin, which makes it either a diversifier or an unpredictable one depending on your view.
Side by side
| ETH | BNB | SOL | XRP | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| What it does | Runs applications | Exchange network token | Fast, cheap applications | Payments |
| Typical daily range | 3–4% | 2–4% | 5–8% | 3–6% |
| Correlation with BTC | High | Medium–high | High in trends, erratic otherwise | Medium–low |
| Own driver | Network use, upgrades | Exchange news | Speculative flows, outages | Regulation, retail |
Liquidity, in order
The four pairs also differ in how much can be traded without moving the price. Ether is deep — second only to Bitcoin. BNB and XRP are a step down; SOL, despite its size, has the thinnest order book of the four relative to its volatility, which is part of why its moves are so sharp. In practice this shows up in the spread and in how stops fill: a stop in ETH/USDT fills close to its level even on a busy day; a stop in SOL/USDT during a cascade can fill several percent away. Masters who trade SOL with the same stop discipline they use for ETH will show it in the loss column.
The "altcoin season" pattern
Crypto bull markets tend to run in a sequence: Bitcoin rises first; then Ether; then the larger alternatives like SOL and XRP; then everything smaller. Traders call the later stage "altcoin season", and it is the point at which the four pairs above can rise 20–50% in a week. It is also, historically, the last stage before a peak. When SOL and XRP are outperforming Bitcoin by a wide margin, the market is late in its cycle — a useful thing to know when reading a crypto master's recent returns.
For a copier
A master who trades all four is not diversified in any meaningful way; in a crypto sell-off they fall together. The value of the four pairs is in the master's ability to pick the one that leads in each phase — which, when it works, shows as returns that beat a simple Bitcoin holding, and when it fails, shows as a drawdown that is worse. Look at whether the master's SOL trades are sized smaller than their ETH trades. If they are not, the master has not adjusted for the difference in volatility, and the account will eventually pay for it.
ETH runs programs, BNB runs an exchange's chain, SOL runs fast and wild, XRP runs on regulation. "Altcoins" is a word; these are four different bets.
This article is education, not investment advice. Trading and copy trading in leveraged instruments carry a high risk of losing the funds you allocate. Read the Risk Disclosure.