A much-watched indicator has turned to “altcoin season,” for the opposite reason the label suggests. Glassnode’s Altcoin Cycle Signal, which reads above 50 when alternative coins, or alts, outperform bitcoin, has risen to 86. Alts are not rising. Bitcoin is just falling faster than they are.
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The signal tracks relative performance, so alts can lead either by rising or by falling less. This is the second case. After nearly two years of decline, alts have run out of sellers and stabilized, while bitcoin has fallen hard and is sliding back towards $63,600 a share. CoinDesk data. Bitcoin, as Glassnode puts it, “still does most of the work.”
A real altcoin season has capital rotating to smaller tokens as they climb. This is the hollow version where the reading becomes bullish for alts because bitcoin is selling off which is bearish for the market as a whole. Relative strength is not a convention.
Until alts start rising on their own rather than holding while bitcoin falls, the signal says more about bitcoin weakness than demand for anything else.
