Most altcoins are created to benefit from the gains made by Bitcoin or another well-established cryptocurrency such as Ethereum.

Ethereum itself was made to be a development platform, while Bitcoin itself was just meant to be a payment system. As a development platform, Ethereum made possible the creation of a large number of other altcoins, tokens, and other services such as DeFi. Ethereum is at a point now where it no longer depends on the Bitcoin price for its own price performance.

For an altcoin to be less dependent on the Bitcoin price for its own price performance, it needs to offer use cases which solve problems that exist with other altcoins or with Bitcoin itself. The more utility an altcoin has, the greater the chance its price can go up even if the Bitcoin price goes down. It takes time to reach that stagge, but to reach that stage the altcoin has to be useful.