The Real Reason Altseason Never Came

I spent the last month buried in a decade of altcoin data. And I'm not talking about charts on Twitter, I'm talking about raw data. I pulled the real top 100 list from the last three cycles, 2015, 2018, and 2022. I ran over 11 years of daily price data, over 30,000 data points, and I tracked every single altcoin that's ever outperformed Bitcoin. And I did all of it to answer one question. What happened to that alt season that we were promised? And I found the answer in the data. And if you're currently holding bags of altcoins or you're planning to buy altcoins during the bear market bottom, please watch this video first before you make another move. On October 6, 2025, Bitcoin hits $126,272. A brand new all-time high, and that's the moment when alt season has always fired off in every other cycle. Bitcoin tops and everything moons. However, something very strange happened this time around. Only four of the top 25 altcoins even made a new all-time high during this bull market. It was the first cycle in crypto history where the altcoins did not follow Bitcoin. Alt season never showed up. So, to find the answer to this and to understand exactly what was happening, I went through all the data. I ran three different studies that I'll be sharing with you guys in this video. Study one is the $100 experiment. Simple enough, put $100 in the top 100 altcoins and see what happens. Study two is the correlation test. How correlated are altcoins to Bitcoin? And study three, the autopsy, the thing that actually killed the season with data. And then at the end of this, I'm going to show you guys exactly what I will be doing with my own money during the bottom of this bear market. So, let's begin with study one, the $100 experiment. And the experiment is very simple. What if you bought every top 100 altcoin at the exact bear market bottom and sold at the exact bull market top? Very straightforward experiment, no survivorship bias, dead coins included. I grabbed all the data from CoinMarketCap using the the historical snapshots from the bear market bottom years and the bull market top years. Then I just kind of played it forward and saw what happened with each [music] one of those coins from the bottom of the bear market to the top of the peak. Now, this is the most generous possible version of the trade because we're getting the perfect bottom and the perfect top. So, perfect timing both ways. Any coins that vanish from the top 100, I'm just counting them as total losses >> [music] >> because I'm not trying to find every single coin. Usually, if it fell out of the top 100 is because it either went to zero or it just didn't go up. So, just to keep the rules simple for this data and for this experiment, if it was no longer in the top 100 coins by the top of the bull run, then I counted that as a total loss. So, here are the results for 2015, right? Buying the 2015 bottom, selling at the 2017 top. You would have ended up putting in $9,500 in total, 95 different coins, $100 each. The other five were like uh Tether and things like that, so that's why there's 95, not 100 coins. And these are the results. $9,500 would have become $2.25 million. all that money, the $9,500, into Bitcoin itself, it would have been $865,000. Either way, still very good return, right? But it was nothing nowhere near the return that you got from the altcoin market. Altcoins outperformed Bitcoin by a lot during these times. This was also the ICO mania days, right? The market was going crazy with ICOs. During this time, 56 of the 95 altcoins in the top 100 did a 10X, and 28 of them went to zero or just vanished off the top 100, so we're going to count those as complete losses. Then the remaining 11 were just somewhere in the middle, somewhere in between. During this time, there was also a lot of jackpots hitting, right? So, DGB would have turned your $100 into $318,000 during that time. However, even in the golden era of altcoins, most altcoins still underperformed Bitcoin. So, only 29 out of the top 100 at the time actually outperformed Bitcoin. 38 of them lost to it, and then 28 went to zero or just fell off the top 100. So, now fast forward to the second cycle, buying at the 2018 bottom and riding it up to the 2021 top, we would have put in $9,300 in the top 100 altcoins. If we would have put the same money into Bitcoin, we would have made $187,000. But, the altcoins just outperformed it once again, but this time it was a lot closer. You can see 203K to 187K. So, basically, things were starting to even out. A pattern was starting to show. The cracks were starting to form. So, 2022, cycle number three, we're doing the same thing. Except this time, something happens and the experiment breaks. On November of 2022, FTX went bankrupt. Bitcoin cratered to about $15,500. we put the money into 88 different altcoins at the time. If we rode that to the top of 2025, this is what it would have looked like when talking about altcoins versus Bitcoin. Only five altcoins in the top 100 actually outperformed Bitcoin. Bitcoin outperformed everything else. And the biggest winner from the 2022 bottom to the 2025 top in the top 100 was Solana, which would have turned your $100 investment into $2,000. This looks way different than it did back at the 2017 top. This is a completely different world that we're living in right now. During this time, the top coin returned $318,000 on a $100 investment. Now, during the last bull run, that same $100 would have returned $2,000 on Solana, on the best-performing altcoin in the top 100 during this last cycle. So, in 2015, altcoins outperformed Bitcoin. 2018, it was almost the same thing. And then in 2022, you can see that Bitcoin outperformed altcoins, and it honestly wasn't even close. And from what I'm seeing right now, it looks like this pattern could potentially continue. So, back in 2015 and 2018, the idea was that you would buy altcoins because they were high risk, but also a higher reward. Right now, the way that the altcoin market and altcoin landscape is, that's no longer the case. Now, it's a high risk for a lower reward. So, that makes zero sense. There's no point in [music] putting your money in altcoins if the landscape continues in the direction that it's been heading and in the direction that we saw from 2022 to 2025. Because now the odds that an altcoin is actually going to outperform Bitcoin we saw in 2022 it was 6% and I think during this next cycle it might be even lower than this. You can even see it in the median returns. A $100 lottery ticket, right? Invested in an altcoin. Altcoins are lotteries. In 2015 the median return was 1638, 2018 737, and 2022 just 224. And you can see the same exact thing in the best $100 ticket, the best performing altcoin during each of these years. So when you're putting money into the market this year, you got to think to yourself do you want to take those 6% odds of being right that you're going to beat Bitcoin by putting that money into altcoins versus just keeping it simple and boring and putting that money into Bitcoin. So now the next study that we're going to do is what is an altcoin actually? Because we need to go a bit deeper on what altcoins actually are and how they move compared to how Bitcoin moves. How correlated are they actually? And when you're putting your money in a bunch of different altcoins, are you actually diversified or is it all just kind of the same bet? So what I found in the data is that on a day-to-day basis only 38% of an altcoin's movement is based on Bitcoin's movement. So on most of the days the altcoins kind of look like they move on their own. Whether it's news, pumps, narratives, whatever it is, on a day-to-day basis, data shows that altcoins do move on their own more often than just kind of following Bitcoin. However, that's only in a calm market. When Bitcoin crashes, every single altcoin runs to Bitcoin and [music] correlates with Bitcoin. So, check this out. I did the experiment on the top 11 altcoins. Ethereum is by far the most correlated altcoin to Bitcoin. Even on calm days, its correlation is 0.82 out of a one. And during a crash, it goes up to 0.89. Cardano, during calm markets, is at 0.7. In a crash, it goes up to 0.84. BNB, 0.68, in a crash goes up to 0.84. And so on. You can see this going all the way down that during a calm market, they're less correlated. However, whenever Bitcoin crashes, everything crashes [music] with it. So, if we zoom out and look at the crashes, look at any time >> [music] >> that we've had crashes in the market, and then look at the altcoins correlation to Bitcoin, you can see [music] how that correlation moves up. During the COVID crash, almost perfect correlation, 0.97. During the May 2021 crash, 0.87 correlation. During the Luna FTX crash, that whole 2022 bear market, 0.9 correlation. And right now, during this recent crash, this recent bear market, we're at a 0.9 correlation. And not only that, but they fall harder than Bitcoin. >> [music] >> So, Bitcoin right now is down about 48% during this bear market. However, the average altcoin is down 70% right now. The only one doing better than Bitcoin is TRX, which is really random. but look at everything else. Ethereum's down 60%, Solana's down 70%, AVAX is down 88%, and DOT is down 92%. So, what this study shows is that doesn't matter how many altcoins you hold, it's all just one leveraged bet on Bitcoin. You're going to have more downside in every single crash, and as we showed in study one, you no longer have the extra upside that altcoins used to present to you. Now, correlation alone isn't what affected altcoins like this because Bitcoin went up, right? And hit new all-time highs, and the majority of altcoins did not. So, that still has to be something else. There still needs to be another reason why this has been happening, why altcoins [music] have been slowing down, why they're no longer moving up the way that they used to. Now, if you're thinking that you're just going to get the same altcoins that were the winners from 2022 to 2025, then I have some bad news for you. It's not that easy because winners [music] never repeat. I tracked every single coin that ever outperformed Bitcoin from the bottom to the top in a cycle, and then I tracked what happened to them throughout the next cycle. So, the 29 altcoins that outperformed Bitcoin from 2015 to 2017, by the next bottom in 2018, 20 of those had fallen out of the top 100 entirely. Out of all the survivors, exactly one outperformed uh Bitcoin throughout that next cycle, which was Doge. And then I did the same experiment with the 2018 [music] altcoins from the top 100 that outperformed Bitcoin through 2021. There were 15 winners at time. And then I repeated the experiment from okay, those same coins, the winners from [music] what if we just bought all the winners that outperformed Bitcoin from 2018 to 2021 [music] bottom again in 2022 bottom, rolled them up to the 2025 top and zero of them beat Bitcoin. Not one. Ethereum did a 4x while Bitcoin did a 7.6x. So, combined, the repeat rate is about 2%. Exactly one out of 44 winners repeated. And the only winner was Doge. Which, by the way, if you're thinking you're going to just buy Doge now, um it didn't repeat from 2022 to 2025. So, if you thought that maybe that was a cheat code, the data says it's not. So, what's the real reason that alt coins are dying? Why did we not have an alt season in this last cycle? What happened? [music] And I think I found the answer. So, exhibit A, from 2022 to 2025, we went from 440,000 alt coins to 20 million alt coins. Look at how alt coins have been increasing over time. This has been the main issue. This has been the main killer of alt season and of alt coins. And if we continue in this direction, we might never have another alt season again. Exhibit B is that the money didn't [music] grow with the coins. The money pool for alt coins in 2021 was $1.7 trillion. The money pool for altcoins in 2025 was $1.77 trillion. So, it in 4 years it went up 4%. And then, look at the contrast in the number of coins. From 440,000 altcoins to 20 million altcoins, that went up over 50x. Altseason used to be money concentrating. Now, it can only dilute. In 2017, new money flooded into a few hundred coins, so everything mooned at once. In 2026, the same wave has to spread across 20 million different altcoins. So, it is physically impossible at this rate for us to ever have another altseason again. Meanwhile, all the money went into Bitcoin. During the 2021 altseason, Bitcoin's dominance over the market was at 38% during that time. During this cycle, Bitcoin's dominance stayed right around that 60 to 62% area. So, altseason didn't die because of the bear market. It died because of the supply. The money available per coin was $3.9 million in 2021, and today that number is down to $88,000. A 98% collapse. So, here's what I'm actually doing about it and how I'm personally going to be playing it this year. Rule one, Bitcoin is a position. 83 out of 88 altcoins lost to Bitcoin last cycle, including Ethereum. Rule two is that if you're going to be buying any altcoins, treat it as a lottery ticket and size it like one. Because the winners last cycle came from everywhere, from rank 7 to 88. So, there is So, I can't say just by the top five or the top 10, the top 20, top 25 because those weren't the ones that beat uh Bitcoin and outperformed Bitcoin. It was just random coins. So, the data shows that overall, picking which one is going to actually outperform Bitcoin this time around is just going to be pure luck. And what the data clearly shows us is that a big altcoin allocation as your upside engine does not work. It's no longer high risk, high reward. It's high risk and lower reward at this point. Rule three is staged buying, boring on purpose. Nobody knows the exact bottom price. Nobody knows the exact bottom timing. The only thing that my data tells me is a buying window. And during that window is where I'll be deploying the majority of my cash and [music] spread it over time, not just one lump sum on day one because, again, we don't know exactly which day it's going to bottom, and we don't know exactly at which price. Remember that the experiment assumed perfect timing for buying the bottom and selling the top, and the altcoins still lost. >> [music] >> Now, here's what would prove me wrong and what could change things. And it all comes down to Bitcoin dominance. Right now, Bitcoin dominance sits around 59%. In order for altcoins to really moon again and hit that alt season trigger again, it would have to drop likely below 50% dominance. [music] In 2017, Bitcoin's dominance was down at 35% and during 2021 alt season, Bitcoin's dominance was down around 40%. So, we need that dominance to drop down below 50% to get the potential opportunity for alts to see alt season. During 2022 to 2025, the >> [music] >> throughout the entire cycle, Bitcoin's dominance never broke below 50. So, if that were to happen, then this all changes, right? That means that the data is changing, the landscape is changing, and then at that point, I'll consider moving more of my portfolio into altcoins. But, if we don't see that happening, then you know, that's just not something that I'm going to be willing to do. So, my plan for this [snorts] bear market bottom is going to be to honestly position for what actually works and for what the pattern and what the data is showing me. That means I will have the majority of my funds in Bitcoin [music] because the odds of you picking the right coins to outperform Bitcoin are probably going to be in the single digits, just like this pattern has been showing us. Now, everything you saw here, I put all of this information, this entire study, all of the data into a PDF, and I will send it to you guys completely for free. Just comment alt season in the comments and I'll send it over to you. Now, here's the real question that this video leaves you with. If Bitcoin is the trade, when do you buy it? Because a bottom isn't a feeling, it's a date range, and I spent 3 months trying to prove that the 4-year cycle is fake to find it. Four tests couldn't kill it. What survived gives you the exact window this bottom should land in. The video's on your screen right now. Go watch it. I'll see you guys there.