Altcoins have been waiting since 2021. CryptoQuant: data confirms that altseason will not return – Bitcoin.pl

If you’ve been waiting for several years for bitcoin capital to finally flow to alts, I have news for you that may be hard to swallow. Ki Young Ju, head of CryptoQuant, one of the most respected on-chain analytics platforms, released data on Saturday that suggests this era may have come to an end.

Rotation that has stopped rotating

Throughout the past decade, crypto has followed a predictable pattern. Bitcoin was the first to grow, early investors took profits and transferred them to Ethereum, and then to smaller and smaller projects. A few weeks after the BTC rally, the altseason began – a time when absolutely everything increased, often several times.

Ju says outright that this pattern has “virtually disappeared.” The volume of altcoins paired with BTC, a measure of how much capital is actually flowing from Bitcoin towards the rest of the market, has fallen to levels not seen since 2021. Sales of altcoins on spot exchanges have reached a five-year high. Instead of rotating, capital stands still or simply leaves the market.

What the numbers say

The Altcoin Season Index, an indicator measuring on a scale of 0-100 how much altcoins outperform Bitcoin in terms of results, is today 49. To confirm a full altseason, a reading above 75 is required. However, this is an altseason on paper, because in practice, a marginal number of projects grows. Bitcoin, meanwhile, maintains its dominance at around 58% throughout June.

This is also visible in the structure of the market itself. In 2021, approximately 106 crypto projects had a market valuation of more than $1 billion. Today, there are about 50 such projects left. The new money went into bitcoin, not altcoins.

Why ETFs changed the rules of the game

Over the years, rotation has worked as new investors entered through Bitcoin as the “main gateway” and then looked for something with the potential for higher returns. This mechanism broke for two reasons.

First, Bitcoin ETFs absorb new institutional capital and hold it in BTC. The managing fund does not sell half of the purchased bitcoins to buy dogs, cats or other alts. Second, corporate treasuries of companies like Strategy hold bitcoin as a reserve asset, not as a starting point for altcoin speculation. New money from traditional finance goes into bitcoin and stays there.

The effect: instead of a wave that lifts all boats, we have capital concentrated at the top. Bitcoin absorbs, alts wait.

What does this mean for you?

Ju is not saying that no altcoin will ever grow. He says that the era of “I buy everything because if BTC grows, I will make money anyway” is over. His list of noteworthy projects is short: DeFi protocols generating real income, real asset tokens (RWA, e.g. tokenized bonds or real estate) and stablecoins embedded in broader financial ecosystems. The remaining 99.9% are, in his opinion, items to be rejected.

Let’s add to this a gigantic change in the form of portals such as pump.fun, which enabled the creation of thousands of meaningless coins every day. In the previous cycle, people didn’t have that much choice, so it was much easier to hit something that was growing (in fact, it was difficult not to hit it). Today it is more like gambling, because one in several thousand alts grows. The rest are scraping the bottom from which they will never rise.

I believe this analysis is worth taking seriously. Not because CryptoQuant is infallible, but because it describes a structural change that is visible in hard data. If your strategy was “I’ll wait for the altseason”, today it’s worth reviewing it to see if you’re waiting for something that may simply not come in its former form.