Altseason: how to spot the start and profit from it

Altseason isn't magic and it isn't word-of-mouth about "the next 100x." It's capital rotation inside the crypto market that can be measured in numbers: bitcoin dominance, the altseason index, altcoin trading volumes. When these numbers line up in a certain combination, a phase begins where altcoins as a group outperform bitcoin's returns over 90 days.

I've traded crypto through several cycles now, and every time I hear the same question from beginners. "When will altseason start?" The answer is boring. Watch BTC dominance and the index, not telegram channels shouting "buy now or it'll be too late."

In this article we'll break down what altseason actually looks like in the numbers, how to read the altseason index and bitcoin dominance, what happened in the 2017 and 2021 cycles, and which strategies work when entering altcoins at different stages of capital rotation. We'll also cover why the current 2024-2026 cycle is breaking the usual pattern and what that means for anyone waiting for a textbook altseason.

What altseason is

Altseason is a period in the crypto market when most altcoins grow faster than bitcoin over a rolling 90-day window. Formally, altseason is considered to have started when 75% of the top-100 coins by market cap outperform BTC in returns over the last three months. As long as the share of such coins stays below 25%, the market is in "bitcoin season."

The term took hold back in the 2017 cycle, when after BTC's explosive run money flowed en masse into Ethereum and dozens of ICO projects. Since then, "altseason" has come to describe any phase where speculative capital moves out of bitcoin and into riskier, more volatile assets.

Definition: when altcoins outperform BTC

The key word here is "outperform," not "rise." Altcoins can gain in dollar terms even during bitcoin dominance, just slower than BTC itself. Say bitcoin is up 20% for the month and Ethereum is up 12% — technically ETH gained too, but in the ETH/BTC pair it lost ground. That's not altseason; it's the opposite situation, "bitcoin season" against a backdrop of overall market growth.

Real altseason shows up in pairs against bitcoin, not against the dollar. Traders who watch only dollar charts often miss the turning point, because the market as a whole is rising and it creates the illusion that "everyone is making money." In reality, money at that moment can be flowing out of alts and into BTC — it's just less visible on a rising market.

Here's an example. In August 2025 BTC climbed from roughly $58,000 to $64,000, while part of the top-20 altcoins over that same period posted dollar-pair returns close to zero or even negative. Nominally the price didn't drop dramatically, but in BTC terms these coins lost 8-10%. That's a classic sign of a phase where the market is rising while altseason keeps getting pushed back.

Checking this yourself is simple. Open your favorite altcoin's chart against BTC, not against the dollar. If that chart is falling or flat for months, you're not in altseason — you're in a regular bull market with bitcoin dominance. Many traders confuse the two states because both come with green candles on dollar charts, and the difference only becomes visible once you switch the quote to the BTC pair.

Why altseason happens

The capital rotation mechanics usually play out like this. Bitcoin rises first, drawing media attention and fresh capital into crypto as a whole. BTC dominance increases at this stage, because new money first flows into the most liquid, most institutionally understood asset.

Next comes what traders call "rotating into alts." Bitcoin holders who've locked in profit look for higher returns and shift part of their capital into Ethereum and top altcoins. That's the first wave of rotation. Interest in DeFi and new narratives grows, and retail investors pile in after seeing big alts pumping in the news and wanting a piece of it.

The second wave moves down into the mid-tier, the top-50 to top-100 by market cap. This is where real FOMO kicks in. Volumes multiply, social media fills up with 10x predictions, and exchanges list new pairs with a frenzied first day of trading. The final, third wave hits low-liquidity shitcoins and meme coins, where money arrives last and exits first when the reversal comes.

Why does it play out in this exact order? It comes down to liquidity and risk perception. Large capital — funds, whales, institutions — physically can't deploy big size into a low-liquidity token without sharp slippage, so that money moves Ethereum and the top-10 first. Retail capital arrives later and is often less cautious, which is why retail drives the mid- and lower-tier of the market in the final stage of the cycle.

There's also a structural trigger. Some altseasons coincide with a weakening dollar, Fed rate cuts, or a broader flow of liquidity into risk assets in general — growth stocks, crypto, tech. For more on how macroeconomics affects the crypto market, see the article on macroeconomics and the crypto market.

The altseason index: how to spot the start

Trying to call the start of altseason by eye, on the feeling that "everything's flying," is a reliable way to buy the top. You need specific metrics. There are two, and they work together: the altseason index and bitcoin dominance.

Altseason Index: what it shows

The Altcoin Season Index, built by CoinMarketCap, compares the returns of the top-100 coins (excluding stablecoins and wrapped tokens like WBTC) against bitcoin's returns over a rolling 90-day window. The index runs from 0 to 100.

The logic is simple. If 75 or more of those 100 coins outperformed BTC over the last three months, the index reads above 75 and the market is officially in altseason. If 25 or fewer of them did, the index drops below 25, and that's "bitcoin season." Anything between 25 and 75 counts as a neutral zone, where the market hasn't committed to a rotation direction yet.

An important nuance: the index is a lagging indicator. It looks at the past 90 days, it doesn't predict the future. So a sharp jump from 40 to 75 in a week almost always means altseason is already in full swing, not just getting started. You can't catch the very beginning of the move off the index alone — you need it combined with BTC dominance and volume data.

There's another point that often gets overlooked. The index is calculated across the top-100 coins, meaning large, established projects carry the same weight in the count as relatively new tokens near the bottom of the list. That makes the index resistant to manipulation on individual small-cap coins, but it also masks localized altseasons in narrow sectors — say, when only the AI narrative or only Solana tokens are running while the rest of the market stands still. Such narrow rallies can slip past the index unnoticed, which is why it's worth pairing with sector-level analysis.

Take October 2025 as an example. The altseason index climbed above 75 and held there for about three days, then, amid a sharp market correction (total crypto market cap dropped from roughly $4 trillion to $3.74 trillion), it crashed from 63 to 36 in literally a week — a drawdown of around 43%. That shows just how fast the index can reverse during a market panic.

BTC dominance: the main indicator

Bitcoin dominance, ticker BTC.D, is BTC's share of the total crypto market cap. The formula is simple: bitcoin's market cap divided by the total market cap, times 100%. If BTC.D reads 56%, it means that out of every dollar currently invested in crypto, about 56 cents sits in bitcoin, and the rest is spread across Ethereum, stablecoins, and thousands of other tokens.

This is arguably the most readable indicator of capital rotation across the entire market. When dominance rises, money is concentrating in bitcoin as the most liquid and "safest" asset in crypto. When dominance falls while total market cap is growing, it almost always signals money moving into altcoins.

Traders treat the 50% mark as the key psychological level. As long as BTC dominance sits above 50%, bitcoin physically controls the larger share of market capital, and it's premature to call a full-blown altseason even if individual altcoins are rocketing. Only a sustained break below 50%, confirmed on weekly timeframes, signals a genuine, broad rotation into alts — rather than isolated spikes in a handful of tokens.

For a deeper breakdown of how to read the dominance chart and what drives it, see the article on bitcoin dominance.

One nuance worth flagging separately: the total market cap used to calculate dominance includes stablecoins. Their combined market cap in 2026 exceeds $300 billion, and it can rise or fall on its own, independent of any actual rotation between BTC and alts. If USDT or USDC issuance spikes sharply, BTC dominance nominally drops, even though that can just be a technical effect rather than a sign of real altseason. That's why experienced traders sometimes look at BTC dominance excluding stablecoins — it gives a cleaner picture of how capital is split among "risk" assets.

Here's a table breaking down how to interpret different combinations of BTC price and dominance.

Where to track the altseason index

The altseason index is available in real time on CoinMarketCap, under the Altcoin Season Index section, with a chart covering 7, 30, and 90 days. Blockchain Center is an alternative, calculating the index with a similar method and useful for cross-checking against CoinMarketCap.

The easiest way to track BTC dominance is through the BTC.D ticker on TradingView, which lets you apply the same technical analysis tools you'd use on a regular price chart — levels, trend lines, RSI divergences. CoinGecko also gives a breakdown of market cap by BTC, ETH, stablecoins, and the rest of the altcoin market, which is useful when you need to figure out whether a drop in dominance reflects a real rotation into alts or is simply explained by growing stablecoin issuance.

I typically keep both charts, BTC.D and the altseason index, in separate terminal windows and cross-check them against volume on specific altcoins before making an entry decision. A single indicator without context can mislead you.

There's another layer of checking that a lot of people skip. Macro indicators like dominance and the altseason index show the overall market picture, but they don't answer the question of whether there's actual demand for the specific coin you want to buy. That's where analyzing the order book and the tape for that instrument comes in. If the order book on an altcoin shows a density level of large limit buy orders just below the current price, and the tape regularly shows aggressive buys at volumes noticeably above average, that points to real demand — not just overall market sentiment from the index. The macro signal tells you "where to look"; breaking down the specific instrument through the order book and tape answers "whether it's worth entering right now."

Historical altseasons

To understand what a real altseason looks like, rather than just the anticipation of one, it's useful to look at hard numbers from past cycles. There have essentially been two truly major ones.

2017: the ICO boom

The first global altseason kicked off in 2017 on the ICO wave. Bitcoin dominance collapsed from roughly 96% at the start of the year to 36-38% by January 2018 — a drop of nearly 60 percentage points in a single year, a scale of rotation the crypto market hasn't seen since.

Ethereum and the ERC-20 token standard drove it, letting virtually any project launch its own coin and raise money via ICO in a week. Ethereum climbed from around $8 in early 2017 to a peak above $1,400 in January 2018. Ripple (XRP) went even further, running from $0.006 to a peak of $3.84 — a gain in the hundreds of times over a single year.

Dozens of altcoins posted returns of 10x to 100x during that cycle. That's when the "buy anything with an ICO, sell it higher later" culture took hold — a culture that ended with most of those projects collapsing in 2018, when the bubble popped and BTC dominance climbed back to 70% by mid-2019.

A telling feature of that cycle: most 2017 ICO projects had no working product, only a whitepaper and promises. Tokens were sold at the idea stage, and capital flowed not into a business but into an expectation of future exchange-price gains. When the market turned in early 2018, it became clear that the vast majority of these projects physically couldn't deliver on what they'd promised, and their tokens lost 90-99% of peak value over the following two years.

2021: DeFi + meme coins

The second major altseason ran through 2020-2021 and played out differently. The driver wasn't an ICO frenzy but DeFi summer in 2020 — yield farming, liquidity pools, staking — followed by the NFT boom and meme coins in 2021.

BTC dominance fell from around 70% in January to 38-40% by December 2021. Ethereum, Solana, Cardano, and dozens of DeFi tokens posted multiplied gains. What set this cycle apart was that the rotation came in waves: DeFi tokens first in spring 2021, then a pause and correction over the summer, then a second wave in autumn as NFTs and meme coins like SHIB entered the picture, gaining several thousand percent within months.

Unlike 2017, some of the 2021 projects already had a real working product — DeFi protocols with billions of dollars in locked liquidity, exchanges with genuine trading volume, infrastructure solutions. That didn't save the market from a sharp correction in 2022, when the collapse of several major players — including the algorithmic stablecoin Terra/LUNA and the FTX exchange — wrecked confidence across the whole sector and pushed BTC dominance back up to around 50%.

What all altseasons have in common

Both cycles share the same sequence. Bitcoin and total market cap rise first, then money rotates into large-cap alts (Ethereum above all), then into the mid-tier, and finally, at the peak of euphoria, into low-liquidity and meme tokens. The classic rotation pattern is: BTC → large-cap alts → mid-tier → shitcoins and meme coins.

There's also a common sign that the cycle is ending. A sharp jump in trading volume on low-liquidity coins and a wave of new exchange listings usually precedes a reversal. When people who are far from the market start talking about crypto, and social media fills up with new "100x" calls every day, that's usually a sign of a late-cycle stage, not the beginning of one.

It's worth saying plainly: the 2024-2026 cycle hasn't followed the classic pattern so far. The inflow of institutional capital through spot bitcoin ETFs, launched in January 2024, created a structurally different mechanism for money movement. ETF buyers get exposure specifically to BTC through a regulated instrument and physically don't shift that money directly into altcoins the way retail holders did in 2017 and 2021. Because of this, BTC dominance in 2025-2026 has held structurally higher than in past cycles, reaching 63-65% compared with 38-41% at the peaks of previous altseasons. As of early July 2026, dominance is fluctuating around 54-58%, and the altseason index sits around 45-50, meaning the market is formally in a neutral zone, closer to "bitcoin season" — though individual sectors (the Solana ecosystem, real-yield tokens) periodically show localized strength against BTC. Over the first week of July, BTC dominance already dipped from 58.1% to around 54%, while the share of altcoins outside BTC, ETH, and stablecoins rose from 19.4% to 24.7% — something part of the analyst community reads as an early, though not yet confirmed, rotation phase.

That doesn't mean a classic altseason won't happen at all in this cycle. It more likely means the triggers this time may differ from past years: not just retail capital inflows and social media hype, but also altcoin-ETF regulatory decisions, Fed rate changes, or demand for bitcoin itself becoming saturated through existing ETF products. In this environment, a trader is better served tracking the numbers than trying to predict an exact turning point based on analogies to 2017 or 2021.

Trading strategies for altseason

Altseason offers a chance to earn more than sitting in BTC spot, but it's also a period of maximum risk of blowing up your deposit on sharp pullbacks. Let's break down timing, coin selection, and the main mistake beginners make.

Timing entries by dominance

Based on historical data, the best moment to build alt positions isn't when the altseason index is already above 75 — it's the phase when BTC dominance is just starting to steadily decline from a local peak, while the altseason index is climbing from low levels (roughly from 25-35 up to 45-55).

In my experience, entering at this stage gives the best risk-to-reward ratio, because alt prices haven't been heated up by hype yet, while liquidity is already starting to come in. Entering when the index is already above 75 and everyone's talking about altseason in the news usually means you're buying closer to the middle or even the end of the cycle, not the start.

A practical benchmark: watch for BTC dominance breaking below its moving average (say, the MA50 on the weekly BTC.D chart) combined with rising total altcoin trading volume. When both conditions hit at the same time, that's a more reliable signal than the index level alone.

There's also a more conservative approach I use myself with part of my deposit. Instead of trying to catch the exact moment dominance turns, you can ladder in: building the position in pieces as BTC.D falls 2-3 percentage points from its local peak, rather than deploying the full amount at once. That reduces the risk of mistiming the entry while still keeping you in the game if the reversal turns out to be real.

Which altcoins rise first

The order of capital rotation is predictable, and knowing that order helps you decide where to enter at each stage.

First wave: Ethereum and the top-10 coins by market cap. These are the most liquid assets, where institutional and large retail capital can enter without slippage issues. Historically, this group of coins is the first to start outperforming BTC in pair terms, even before the altseason index on CoinMarketCap has noticeably moved.

Rotation then moves down into the top-50, often sector leaders — DeFi protocols, L2 solutions, infrastructure tokens. Returns at this stage tend to be higher than the top-10, but risk climbs noticeably too.

Closer to the peak of the cycle, money reaches the top-100 to top-300, low-liquidity tokens, and meme coins. Returns here can be the highest in the moment, but the drawdowns on the reversal are the sharpest too — often minus 50-70% within a few days.

Reference list by group:

• Top-10 (ETH, SOL, BNB, XRP, and similar): lower volatility relative to the rest of the alt market, first into the rotation
• DeFi and L2 tokens: medium volatility, dependent on the season's narrative
• Gaming tokens and metaverse projects: heavily narrative-dependent, can skip a cycle entirely if the narrative isn't in favor
• Meme coins: extreme volatility, work almost exclusively in the late stage of a cycle
• New listings: a speculative segment, needs extra caution due to low liquidity in the first weeks of trading

We covered a selection of specific coins and their characteristics in the article on the best cryptocurrencies to trade.

How to avoid buying the top

The main mistake most beginners make is entering an altcoin once every crypto outlet has already written about it and the price has multiplied within a week. By that point, early buyers are already taking profit, and you're effectively buying their exit.

Signs that a coin or sector is overheated and close to a local top:

• A sharp spike in social media mentions over a short period
• Trading volume up 5-10x within a few days with no fundamental news behind it
• Funding rate on perpetual futures shifting to an abnormally high positive, meaning the market is overloaded with longs
• The order book and tape showing dominant aggressive buying at new highs with no pullbacks, which often precedes a sharp sell-off of positions by market makers

I've checked this pattern against several meme coins in 2024-2025: a sharp vertical rise over 2-3 days followed by a 40-60% pullback within a week plays out in most cases that lacked sustained volume before the hype spike. A sensible tactic here is to lock in at least part of the position on a multiplied gain rather than waiting for "just a bit more upside."

Risk management when trading high-volatility alts is covered in detail in the article on crypto market volatility, and the basic principles of building income from the market are in the piece on how to make money in crypto.

Risk management inside altseason

Even in the middle of a full-blown altseason, some trades will lose money, and that's normal. The problem isn't the occasional bad entry — it's the lack of a system that caps losses on a single position and keeps euphoria from turning into an overheated portfolio with no exit plan.

A few practical rules that reduce the risk of blowing up your deposit specifically during altseason, as opposed to a regular market:

• Cap the share of any single coin in your alt portfolio. Even if a project looks rock-solid, 5-10% of capital on one position is a reasonable ceiling for a retail trader without insider information
• Take partial profit on every multiplied gain rather than waiting for a single "perfect" exit at the exact top
• Keep part of your capital in stables or BTC as a hedge against a sharp reversal in dominance, rather than putting 100% of your deposit into alts
• Don't scale up leverage on futures in proportion to rising market euphoria — usually it works exactly the opposite way, and risk should be cut as the market gets more overheated

The person who blows up a deposit during altseason usually isn't the one who picked the wrong coin — it's the one who went all-in on a single leveraged position at peak hype with no stop set. Picking the right project might account for 30% of a trade's success; risk management covers the other 70%.

When altseason ends: warning signs

Altseason doesn't end all at once — there's usually a set of reversal signs that show up before prices start falling broadly.

The first sign: BTC dominance stops falling and starts turning back up while the altseason index holds steady or even keeps rising. That divergence usually means large capital has already started taking profit in alts and rotating back into BTC or stables while retail is still buying.

The second sign: the altseason index stays above 75 for more than two to three weeks straight. Historically, such extended stretches rarely go on long without a correction. The market physically can't keep expanding speculative capital indefinitely without fresh money coming in from outside, and once that inflow slows, profit-taking begins.

The third sign: a sharp widening of the spread between the top gainers and the rest of the market. If 5-10 coins are posting extreme returns while the rest of the alt market stagnates, that's often a sign of a narrow, unhealthy rally that isn't backed by broad capital inflow and is prone to a sharp reversal.

The fourth sign is purely technical. Funding rates on altcoin futures climbing to abnormally high levels combined with record open interest almost always precedes a sharp move. That kind of overheating usually releases either through a sharp short squeeze upward followed by a crash, or through a cascade of long liquidations, where one large downward candle triggers a chain reaction of leveraged position closures.

The practical takeaway is simple: the louder the market talks about altseason, the closer, most likely, its end is. A quiet phase of rising alt dominance with low media noise is usually safer to enter than a loud phase full of headlines and "financial freedom" videos everywhere you look.

It's also worth mentioning volume behavior across spot and derivatives. If an altcoin's price rise comes with falling spot volume while futures open interest keeps growing, that points to the move being held up mostly by leverage and speculation rather than real demand. Statistically, such rallies more often end in a sharp, deep pullback than moves backed by solid spot volume.

FAQ

• What is altseason in simple terms?

  Altseason is a period when altcoins grow faster than bitcoin and outperform it in returns. Capital flows out of BTC into altcoins, bitcoin dominance falls, and the altseason index climbs above 75.

• How do you spot the start of altseason?

  Watch two indicators at once: the altseason index and bitcoin dominance. If the index holds above 75 and BTC dominance breaks below the 50% level, that's a strong signal that altseason has started. A one-off spike in a single indicator without confirmation from the other usually means a false signal.

• How long does altseason last?

  Historically, altseason has lasted anywhere from a few weeks to 10-11 months. The 2017-2018 cycle stretched over roughly 310 days, while the 2021 phases came in waves of 1-3 months with corrections in between.

• Which altcoins rise first during altseason?

  Ethereum and other top-10 coins by market cap usually lead. Rotation then moves into the mid-tier, the top-50 to top-100, and only closer to the end of the cycle does money reach low-liquidity shitcoins and meme coins.

• Where can you track the altseason index online?

  The main platforms are CoinMarketCap, under the Altcoin Season Index section, and Blockchain Center. Bitcoin dominance is easy to track through the BTC.D ticker on TradingView, and CoinGecko and CoinMarketCap both provide a market cap breakdown by asset class.

• Can you make money during altseason without trading experience?

  Technically yes, but the risk of losing your deposit chasing hype is higher than the odds of catching the top. Without understanding capital rotation and without risk management, a beginner most often buys at peak euphoria and sells into the panic once the market has already turned.

• Why isn't a classic altseason happening in 2024-2026?

  The main reason is the inflow of institutional capital through spot bitcoin ETFs, launched in January 2024. That money buys BTC directly and doesn't rotate into altcoins the way it used to, which is why bitcoin dominance has held structurally higher than in the 2017 and 2021 cycles, even as individual market sectors periodically show localized strength.

Tracking BTC dominance, the altseason index, and real volume on specific altcoins in the moment is a lot more manageable in a single workspace than across a dozen open tabs. In Secret Terminal you can keep the BTC.D chart, order book, and tape for the alts you're watching on one screen with window syncing (Linking), and the trade journal helps you check whether your capital-rotation entry strategy is actually delivering results — or just feels that way in hindsight.