I’m not really understanding your analogy. Yes, oil trade globally is settled in dollars, and there are gold markets…but FOREX pairs also include other underlying pairs (XAU/ERO, XAG/JPY) and we can analyze these markets for insight to whats happening these economies. Your view is heavily BTC centric, id argue you might be a bitcoin maximalist.
The only real economic activity i see happening with ZEC is speculation and paying employees. Maybe someone can correct me, but i think the ECC is selling ZEC for USD to pay employees as most of them operate in the US. Knowing this, i think that the USD pairing is important. The force (aka my tin-foil hat) tells me there must be some sort of managed USD market activity because of the institutional interest involved with zcash,
Yes, perhaps this is just a paradigm we are in. There was a time where AOL, Netscape, and Yahoo dominated the internet(and market share) in the early 90s. The market largely is stupid. Even though i personally dont like him, you cant ignore legendary investors like Warren Buffet calling BTC “rat poison”. I dont think the market knows any better but to follow BTC. The legacy crypto market was built on BTC pairs.
Firms involved in crypto are largely yeild chasing and they’re in the business of dealing with crypto volatility. BTC dominates the market because it came first. I’m not sure if this is sustainable or relevant to analyze the entire cryptosphere. The dollar is king, almost every person on planet earth is affected by its existence. We are all hoping/rooting for the return of people money (aka non government money) and dollars are spent on research and development to create our dreams of private, democratic money.