Bitcoin Dominance at 60 Percent. Is Altseason Dead?

Bitcoin dominance, the percentage of total crypto market cap that belongs to BTC, is sitting around 57%. It was 39% in November 2021. It's been grinding higher for over two years.

And altcoin holders are losing their minds.

In every previous cycle, the pattern was reliable. Bitcoin leads. Bitcoin consolidates. Money rotates into alts. Altseason begins. Smaller coins do 10x, 50x, sometimes 100x. Everybody posts Lamborghini screenshots. Then it all crashes.

This cycle feels different. And I think it might actually be different.

The Numbers Tell a Grim Story

Let's look at how alts have performed against BTC, not against USD.

ETH/BTC is at levels not seen since 2020. Ethereum, the second-largest cryptocurrency, has been steadily losing value relative to Bitcoin for two years. ETH is down about 80% against BTC from its cycle high.

SOL had a strong 2024 run but has given back most of its gains. It's sitting around $83. Most L1 tokens are down 70-90% from their all-time highs in BTC terms. Not USD. BTC.

The altcoin graveyard is growing. Tokens that were Top 50 two years ago have vanished. The total number of active cryptocurrencies on CoinGecko is nearly 19,000. Most of them are functionally dead, trading a few hundred dollars per day.

Meanwhile, Bitcoin just keeps accumulating value. $68,000. Market cap over $1.35 trillion. It's pulled away from the pack in a way that feels structural, not temporary.

Why Bitcoin Is Winning

ETF money only buys Bitcoin. This is the elephant in the room. Spot Bitcoin ETFs pull in billions. There's no spot Solana ETF. No spot Avalanche ETF. The biggest new source of demand in crypto's history is exclusively Bitcoin. That creates a persistent bid under BTC that altcoins simply don't have.

Institutional allocators buy Bitcoin, not altcoins. When a pension fund allocates to crypto, they buy BTC. When a corporate treasury follows the MicroStrategy playbook, they buy BTC. When a sovereign wealth fund diversifies, they buy BTC. Institutions don't care about your L1 play.

The "digital gold" narrative is winning. Bitcoin as a store of value is a simple, compelling story. "The world computer" (Ethereum) or "fastest L1" (Solana) are much harder sells to people who don't understand smart contracts. Bitcoin's narrative is accessible to normal humans. Altcoin narratives require a computer science degree.

Regulatory clarity favors BTC. Bitcoin is clearly a commodity in the eyes of US regulators. Most altcoins exist in a gray area. The SEC has sued exchanges for listing tokens it considers securities. That regulatory uncertainty makes institutions even more likely to stick with Bitcoin.

The Case for Altseason (It's Weaker Than You Think)

The altseason bulls point to historical patterns. "Dominance went up before 2017's altseason too." "It'll rotate eventually." "All it takes is one catalyst."

Sure. But the structural conditions that enabled previous altseasons have changed.

In 2017, the ICO boom created a new class of token that didn't exist before. Massive retail inflows chased 100x returns. The total crypto market cap went from $20 billion to $800 billion. Most of that went into alts.

In 2021, DeFi summer and the NFT mania pulled money into Ethereum and Solana ecosystems. Yield farming offered astronomical returns. Everybody was a genius.

What's the catalyst this time? Memecoins had their moment in 2024 and have already crashed. DeFi yields are back to normal levels. NFTs are dead. AI tokens had a brief mania but most are down 80%+.

The money that's entering crypto now is coming through ETFs and institutional channels. Those channels only connect to Bitcoin. There's no mechanism for that capital to rotate into altcoins.

A Different Kind of Cycle

I think what we're witnessing is a permanent structural shift. Not the death of altcoins, but the death of the "everything pumps" altseason.

In previous cycles, a rising tide lifted all boats. If BTC went up 5x, random altcoins went up 50x. That happened because the market was small, retail-dominated, and driven by speculation.

This market is bigger, more institutional, and more rational. Capital still flows to altcoins, but it's selective. It goes to projects with real usage, real revenue, and real product-market fit. Aave with $33 billion in TVL. Uniswap doing billions in daily volume. Lido with $34 billion staked. These protocols earn money. They don't need altseason to justify their existence.

What's dying is the long tail. The thousands of tokens with no product, no revenue, no users, and no reason to exist beyond speculative mania. Those tokens needed altseason. Without it, they're zero.

What This Means for Portfolio Construction

If you're sitting heavy in altcoins waiting for rotation, you need to seriously reassess.

Reduce the long tail. If you hold more than 10 different altcoins, you almost certainly own some that are going to zero. Be honest about which ones have real usage and which ones are hope tokens.

Increase BTC allocation. The structural advantages are clear. ETF flows, institutional demand, regulatory clarity. If you're underweight BTC relative to your alt bag, you're fighting the trend.

Be selective with alts. The alts that will perform well in this cycle are the ones with revenue, usage metrics, and institutional interest. Think Ethereum ecosystem protocols with real TVL, not random L1 ghost chains.

Accept that alts might not rotate this cycle. Hope is not a strategy. If your investment thesis requires altseason to work, and the conditions for altseason don't exist, your thesis is broken.

My Take

Altseason as we knew it is probably dead. The broad-based, everything-pumps rotation that happened in 2017 and 2021 required specific conditions (retail mania, easy leverage, novel use cases) that don't exist today.

What we might get instead is a "selective alt recovery" where a handful of high-quality protocols outperform while the vast majority continue bleeding against BTC. That's not altseason. That's just normal market functioning where good assets outperform bad ones.

BTC dominance at 57% might go higher before it goes lower. And even when it does mean-revert, the beneficiaries will be a small number of legitimate projects, not the 19,000 tokens currently listed on CoinGecko.

The age of "buy anything and make money" is over. And honestly, that's probably a good thing for the space.