I understand that since altcoins are paired with BTC for trading, the price is based off bitcoin's.
However, even if an altcoin is doing well, it can tank (in terms of sats) when bitcoin's price corrects.
Will we ever see a market that isn't so heavily dependent on bitcoin? Is this possible for the future?
I think that is what not allowed for the crypto currencies because they are literally decentralised and very manipulative. If we do not make any trades in the bitcoin but makes loads of transactions in the altcoins then they can get affected in sever ways and thus can get pumped or dumped depending upon the situation. So its like altcoins are neither too dependent on the bitcoin and sometime they are so much dependent that their graph moves in similar manner as with the bitcoin. This is what happened in todays trades also, when bitcoin started jumping upwards it actually drove the market of altcoins upwards too.