Honestly, I think everyone here already gets this, but just to recap: during the last bull run, we saw that play out. Most altcoins didn’t just shoot up all at once within a year, it actually dragged out over three years from 2023 to 2025. The older coins eventually saw some gains, and then the privacy coins like Monero, ZEC, and Dash followed suit. Plus, Bitcoin’s market cap didn’t drop like everyone was expecting.
Recently, a crypto exec mentioned that the next altseason won’t be anything like what we’ve had before, and I’m totally on board with that.
Sure, some coins will still skyrocket like 5, 10, even 25 times but it's gonna be a slow burn with only a handful making big moves at a time, while a lot will probably let us down.
Honestly i agree with this perspective it was in my mind from the last year when peoples were saying that Altseason is coming . If we look at the past cycles the idea of a sudden market wide altseason doesnot really hold up. The move was gradual and extended over a couple of years with capital rotating from Bitcoin into major altcoins and only later into older and more niche coins like Monero Zcash and Dash. Even Bitcoin dominance didnot collapse the way many expected which already hinted at a structural shift.
Another important difference now is the sheer number of altcoins in the market. In previous cycles there were far fewer projects competing for attention and capital. Today we have millions of tokens including many low quality or speculative ones which significantly dilutes overall liquidity. When that liquidity is spread across such a large number of assets it becomes much harder for the entire altcoin market to move together in a strong and sustained way.
Given the current market environment with stronger institutional influence and more selective liquidity it makes sense that the next altseason wont mirror the past. Instead of a broad rally we are more likely to see sector based moves where only fundamentally strong or narrative driven projects outperform at different phases.
That's what happens if 1 cake is shared with more than 100 children, I can agree with the opinion that the experts said. The current crypto market atmosphere is no longer exactly the same as it was in the past, with too many tokens, small MCs spread across new projects & greater concentration on Bitcoin (BTC).
Honestly, this is good news for the crypto community in general, as people are starting to become aware of how & in which projects they should invest, no longer think of the crypto market as Las Vegas.
I think there is probably a couple of other reasons for the poor performance of altcoins than the sheer number of tokens.
First, the "next Bitcoin" story which propelled altcoins like Solana in the past is dead now. Most investors know that while some altcoins have some technical "advantages" with respect to Bitcoin like "increased transaction speed" they come with tradeoffs like centralization. It is thus more difficult that people believe it if some "coin founder" tries to convince them to invest in a coin which will be "better than Bitcoin". Terra/Luna is a notorious case, the fanbois of that coin were raging about their superiority and were bitterly disappointed.
In addition, every year there are less new tokens or coins that make it into the top 20 or top 10. The first ranks are almost unchanged, and "boring" stablecoins perform "better" in them (with higher market cap) than sophisticated smart contract platforms. And even worse: Only very few coins reached a new ATH in this cycle. Not even ETH was able to do that.
And then obviously there's the scams, and the crappy tokenomics of most tokens and coins, with a big part of the initial supply premined to the founders.
Most investors have come to understand that altcoins are just hypes and nothing more. Bitcoin has shown that it's a good store of value overtime and that has attracted a lot of investors making them to ignore these altcoins. The problem is that we have too many altcoins/shitcoins with limited shitcoin lovers because altcoins have shown their real colors that they will become valueless in the long run.
So, I agree with the OP that only a few altcoins will be able to pump with bitcoin in the future because people don't want to gamble with their money since majority of altcoins are empty promises.
That seems to be the case, after a few days of green, the market is red again. We keep getting the same situation, short term rallies, then it falls back again. I was expecting it last year, but it didnt happen, so I thought maybe in 2026, but it doesnt seem likely as well. It seems we might need to wait for the next halving to have another altcoin season. Right now, I dont see any reason that could drive much hype. Even if there is, I dont think it would be enough to reach a new ATH for the top altcoins or even half.
I have been reading about this 'clean up' of the Altcoins Market for a REALLY long time here. It has been a long time coming thing and completely expected. Look at how many Altcoins there are out there and over 99 percent of them are pretty much clones of each other with zero extra utility. Not to mention that most of them are even Scams waiting for the perfect moment.
I do not think the Altcoin season is now 'dead', they may be going through a really long winter but I doubt stupidity is all gone now. They will come back when it is time for another stupid trend to launch and then they will die out again. We have had such 'winters' before, people have just way too many expectations now. If you look at Altcoins such as Doge Coin before it became the toy of Elon Musk, it did pretty interesting rounds of pumps and dumps but it was never like what we saw since Musk took the control handle of Doge Coin.
Just wait for another trend, it will happen again as long as people fall for it one more time. And they will, they always fell for any trend no matter how stupid it was.
Altseason is no longer the same as before. We might expect to see large movements, as expected, in altcoins but because liquidity distribution is now quite random, it's quite difficult to detect. This includes movements in altcoins, making them appear insignificant and harder to detect as a clear altseason wave.
It is true that there are many altcoins, but with the increase in number, the disadvantages have increased. Apart from Bitcoin, all altcoins suffer from many problems such as centralization, blockchain shutdown, the possibility of coin burning, infinite supply, low usage, or lack of onchain activity. there is no real alternative that can replace Bitcoin, and it is natural for investment to be distributed among many altcoins, which leads to a gradual decrease in their price (and here I am not talking about a pump dump scam).
Most altcoins don't even need to exist. If bearish market is really coming all these altcoins will go to zero, getting delisted, and go to zero.
I am currently holding several altcoins that was locked due to vesting for about 6 month and all of them lost 90% of its value. How crazy that is. Altcoin is truly dead except few.
Okay, so the "expert" is "Andrei Grachev, managing partner of DWF labs". Have you guys ever heard of the guy or even the company? Of course not, they are a nobody and he is a nobody in a nobody place. This is why I hate these type of news, because it's making it sound like some big name in the business made this claim.
It's not CZ coming up and saying something, even in that case we have seen him be wrong multiple times but at least he is a big name in the industry and could be considered expert at least. These are the news that we are getting from people who are literally nobody that we should not care about. This "expert" title has been given to so many people who are not even remotely experts in this space at all.
I don't see where he's tagged an expert, what's there in this thread is executive, which he is, I do get your point of view, but most of the people crypto users listen to are nowhere close to understanding how the ecosystem works, that is why most crypto users are expected to learn about the economics behind the technology, so as to be well grounded on which decision to take, rather than digesting whatever information uploaded by any influencer or shiller.
Actually I heard DWF lab a lot in my days researching a potentially underrated gem in some VC funding website. It's pretty known investor and market maker.
There were controversies surrounding them but basically its among the most used market maker in the market besides Wintermute.
Agree with your statement here since Bitcoin had proven track record and I think safe to agree that this is already foundation of decentralization. But maybe we should not generalized all altcoins then call them all as a failure. But for other like those shitcoins which mint lots or infinite supply. I think there's nothing to expect with them since eventually their project will die later on, I take those project as money cash grab by its dev.
For now its hard to point out which coin out there can replace Bitcoin, since even they say ETH have great possibilities the uncapped supply might give it a problem in future.
Also for other projects out there usually what we can see are the pumps and dump, which I think not good to deal with if we are looking for serious coin to invest for long term.
It's not only that, i am not taking Cointelegraph seriously as they seem to have a low bar when it comes to quality needed for their articles.
They are also referring to "worse than the post-FTX market crash" statement, which had dishonest narrative. Why not pick ATH at the time as comparison point, when they are comparing current crash to past ath? It's like these people wouldn't have followed the market at all.
In theory, i would accept a theory that cycle lengths could become shorter for a while when investors try to beat each other, cycles being very predictable and all.
I don't want to unpack whole article, but quoting Matt Hougan saying something like "institutional investors are not going to focus on hyped trends in the future" is weird (i am paraphrasing). As that would imply they would have done this before, and if they have, why would they change their tactic now exactly? Especially when we don't even know what the next narrative is going to be.
I'm happy to see that someone finally have the boldness to admit that the concept of altcoin season is no longer applicable now and belong to the past. This is not surprising because the market cannot continue to be following a predictable pattern but have to adjust to conform to the increased number of interest groups that are participating in the market. Besides, people have come to understand that most of the altcoins are shitcoins that are not worth holding, hence they chose to put most of their money in Bitcoin that is safer and more reliable.
I think we have more people with big expectations that think they are going to make that money from Altcoins but it turn out that all of them are big disappointment as they didn't see what they expected and because of that, most of them rush down to meme coins only to lose everything and now such people are going to try make that money in the next bull run, if we happen to have more people again, the numbers of people looking for quick money will double again with small money in the market.
The team of this Altcoins need to also do better, they make alot of fake promises and in the end they gave their self much allocations than they give to community. In the end, only them make money on the launch of the coin and they take their money out by selling some portion of the coin while the rest of the people are left with bags that never pump again. Until the concept of this altcoins are change we may never experience good bull run again.
The market is not the same like before where almost all altcoins pump together. Now it looks more like money just moves quickly from one coin to another. One coin pumps, then it drop and another one starts. So if you are not careful, you can easily miss it or get caught at the wrong time. It just pure selective pump, looks like someone somewhere is just having fun with any coin that fuels their mood. Obviously, there will still be profits, but not everyone will win. Only a few coins will do well at a time and many others will disappoint.
Altcoins have become so cheap compared to their peak prices. As you said, it seems possible for them to multiply 10x or 20x during a rally, but most altcoins won't be able to achieve that anymore; many will be left out of the rally and will eventually disappear and be forgotten. They created so many coins compared to previous years that it takes time for these coins to disappear, and we are currently experiencing that period, which is normal.
Altseason is really dead the cycle is gone I mean back then people called altseason because there is a time when almost all altcoins made new ATH no matter the coin had a use case or not. But today only a few altcoin that made new ATH I just knew altcoin is BNB and TRX that beat the previous ATH.
Even ETH itself the queen of crypto still cant made new ATH, the dino Coin like Chainlink, Cardano or Litecoin cant back to previous ATH. One of the problem in my opinion is to many altcoin right now so the liqudity is divided by lot and memecoin in my opinion poisoning crypto. I had a friend that buy crypto because an AD from instgram that some guy buy memecoin made x1000 buy lambo, in reality my friend buy memecoin and ending losing all his money and called all crypto is scam.