While bitcoin (BTC) slid only modestly, other major cryptocurrencies tumbled over the past few days, sparking doubt of the durability of the so-called altcoin season.
XRP (XRP), dogecoin (DOGE) and Solana’s SOL (SOL) declined the most among the top 10 cryptos on Friday, slipping around 5% each over the past 24 hours, CoinDesk data shows. From the Wednesday highs, XRP and DOGE plunged around 18%, while SOL was down 12% over the same stretch. The CoinDesk 80 Index, consisting of mid-cap tokens outside of the CoinDesk 20, lost 10% from the weekly peak.
Meanwhile, BTC was changing hands around $116,000, a bit more than 3% lower from its mid-week peak of $120,000. Ethereum’s ether (ETH) was 4% below its weekly high, supported by steady accumulation by crypto treasury strategy firms.
When altcoin season?
The sharp sell-off of the past few days came after weeks heavy capital rotation into smaller tokens, fueling talks of a full-blown altcoin season. That period, sometimes dubbed alt season, occurs when riskier, smaller tokens outperform bitcoin, the leading crypto, for a sustained period.
CoinGlass’ Alcoin Season Index, which measures the altcoin market’s outperformance versus BTC on a scale of 0 to 100, cooled off to 41 on Friday from Monday’s 59, the strongest reading since the late January speculative frenzy around President Trump’s inauguration.
Still, the total altcoin market (except stablecoins) saw a rapid appreciation, nearly doubling in value since April, David Duong, head of research at Coinbase, said in a Friday report.
For this week’s pullback, traders taking on excessive leverage on altcoin bets were to blame, the report pointed out.
The Altcoin Open-Interest Dominance metric, which compares the amount of dollars tied up in altcoin derivatives contracts to bitcoin’s, soared to 1.6, a level that has preceded previous market shake-outs, the report noted. A decrease in the ratio would suggest a healthy leverage reset for the altcoin market, otherwise more shakeouts are expected, Duong wrote.
For an extended altcoin season, investors should keep an eye on the Bitcoin Dominance, which measures BTC’s share of the total crypto market capitalization. The metric has broken below the 200-day moving average for the first time since a brief period in January 2025, the report noted.
“A sustained move under the 200-DMA could validate the ‘alt season’ narrative and have historically preceded multi-week stretches of altcoin outperformance (like in 2021),” Duong wrote.
However, traders might be better off waiting for more consecutive sessions closing below the level before piling into altcoin bets for a more “prudent positioning,” he added.