- Bitcoin price continues to show weakness, which has trickled bearish sentiments into major altcoins like Ethereum, Solana, ADA, and DOGE.
- Analyst suggests that the next altcoin season is still looming due to Bitcoin and Ethereum underperformance.
Bitcoin (BTC) resumed today’s trade in red, with the price falling back to around $91,000. Analysts noted that the Bitcoin weakness has failed to ignite the next altcoin season, where alternative cryptocurrencies like Ethereum (ETH) show bullish performance.
Bitcoin Dominance Plunge, But Altcoins Still Bleeding
According to MarketCap data, the Bitcoin price has declined by 15.4% this month. This was accompanied by a drop in its dominance rate.
As we discussed earlier, Bitcoin dominance measures the percentage of the BTC market capitalization relative to the entire crypto market’s cap.
High dominance means BTC is dominating, while a drop suggests money is flowing to alternative cryptocurrencies. Usually, a dominance drop excites traders because it implies investors are selling BTC to buy altcoins, kickstarting the “alt season.”
Altcoin Season is a market phase where top cryptocurrencies like ETH, Solana (SOL), and Dogecoin (DOGE) rally higher than BTC. It is often driven by speculation, FOMO, and rotating capital from BTC.
However, analysts have pushed back that the recent drop in Bitcoin dominance is not a bullish rotation to altcoin. According to them, it is part of a reset, meaning a market-wide cooldown after over-leveraged trading.
For emphasis, altcoins like Cardano (ADA), DOGE, and Solana have dropped more than BTC over the past 30 days. While BTC declined by 15.4%, ADA plunged by 26.9%, and Solana decreased by 27%. These declines showed that the altcoins are not yet attracting capital.
Furthermore, most altcoins/BTC pairs are weak. For instance, the ETH/BTC only dipped slightly, meaning ETH is not surging ahead.
However, the XRP/BTC is holding strong. Still, it hints at selective resilience in specific assets rather than a broad altcoin surge.
Analyst Says We are Not Yet in an Alt Season
Market analyst and Head of Markets at Hex Trust, Rohit Apte, frames the BTC drawdown as a continuation of deleveraging. Apte says an altcoin season has not yet arrived, as most altcoins have underperformed both Bitcoin and Ethereum on a relative basis.
Apte explained that for an alt season to start, Bitcoin and ETH need to stabilize and consolidate.
Meanwhile, traders are reducing exposure without aggressively rotating into altcoins, meaning they amplify market moves. This paints caution as the market trend, with no panic-selling, and no bold bets either.
Furthermore, there are no signs of speculative fever within blockchain building on the Ethereum network. Base, the Coinbase layer-2 blockchain solution, stands out as the current hotspot. The layer-2 blockchain now processes about 19 million daily transactions.
Other chains like Optimism, Arbitrum, Polygon, and Celo are steady, processing millions of transactions without congestion. True alt seasons usually feature network overloads, high fees, and explosive activity across multiple chains.