Why Has Alt Season Not Happened Yet?

hey everyone and thanks for jumping back into the cryptoverse today we're going to talk about why alt season has been so elusive this Market cycle if you guys like the content make sure you subscribe to the channel give the video a thumbs up and also check out the sale on intothe cryptoverse premium at intothe cryptoverse decom you've probably heard a lot of influencers and and just about everyone call for alt season at some point over the last last three to three and a half years but as we've been talking about essentially all of those calls

for All Season were categorically wrong if you remember back in 2022 a lot of people called for it during the bare Market in 2023 a lot of people called for it and in 2024 but instead of getting any form of alt season what we have actually seen happen is Bitcoin Domin continue to go higher now if you're new to crypto it's probably worthwhile to at least attempt to Define what alt season even is for some people there are times in the market cycle where it might have felt like alt season but for anyone who's been

in crypto for a long time alt season is when Bitcoin dominance collapses and ALT USD pairs go up that is alt season and you can pretty clearly see two alt seasons on this chart the Bitcoin dominance chart you had one right there in 2017 and one in 2021 so that is what alt season looks like this is not what alt season looks like in 2019 for instance Bitcoin dominance basically just went up really from 2018 through the end of 2020 I will change this to a separate color but that is not what all season looks

like just like this has not been all season so I want to talk about why all season has remained so Elusive and why the people that keep calling for it have continued to be wrong one of the reasons people talk about all season is because a lot of people really want to make money quickly right but for several years in the cryptoverse often times the best strategy is just to stick with Bitcoin and get nice and steady gains now for a for a traditional investor who invests in the stock market to get a 6X move

and say 2 years would be incredible in crypto Bitcoin is up about 6X from the bottom but a lot of people would argue that's not enough but the reason why it's so important is because if you can identify if you're not in alt season then you're better off with Bitcoin and preserving the satos evaluation of your portfolio so if you train your mind to think in terms of set Satoshi instead of US Dollars then you'll likely be a lot more successful in the cryptoverse so instead of buying altcoins when alt season when you think All

Season's going to actually begin instead of buying it with US dollars if you just bought it with Bitcoin instead that's how you can really make the most of it and then the goal is to ultimately increase the you know the amount of STS that you own so why have all of these calls for alt season been so wrong like what what did people get wrong this cycle and and what can we look for this year to see if it's ever actually going to change this cycle well one of the things back in 2022 that made

a lot of people think that alt season was going to occur and even 2023 and 2024 was that so many new coins were being created and so one of the arguments that people gave was that since since so many coins are being created that there there's no way Bitcoin dominance can go up because it's competing with more and more coins but the counter the the simple counter argument right and this was the counterargument I gave back then and obviously it's going to be appear a lot more obvious to people today is just because you increase

the number of coins doesn't mean you increase the amount of money that's going to go into the altcoin market right you still have the same amount of money sort of sosing around in the altcoin market whether you have 10 coins or 20,000 or a million it doesn't really matter it just means that that liquidity gets spread thinner and thinner right so by the way this chart it it can be somewhat abstract for a lot of people and so a better way to think about it is to look at at all Bitcoin pairs for instance like

the eth Bitcoin chart and even that can be abstract to people like what does it mean by 027 right like what does that even mean but if you look at the inverse of this stuff so the Bitcoin eth valuation you can see that in 2021 and 2022 one Bitcoin would have gotten you around 11 eth today it gets you around 36 and at this Wick right here it got you around 42 which is actually the same level at Wick 2 right there in November of 2017 so that is why it's so important to to do

denominate your portfolio in SATs because now each bit coin is worth 36 eth as opposed to 12 three times more eth for each Bitcoin which is a lot and it's also sort of an acknowledgment of of just saying you know what no one really knows where the USD valuation Bitcoin is going to go but it's a lot easier to predict when these types of moves are going to occur now what what what were we able to look at back in 2021 to allow us to understand that this was the most likely scenario well as I've

mentioned a few times what allowed for it was just the understanding of tighter monetary policy and knowing that last cycle we did not see e Bitcoin bottom or the inverse of that top right we didn't see the Bitcoin e valuation top until the FED ended quantitative tightening right and so you can see that the fed's been doing the same exact thing this cycle and and throughout this process just like last cycle eth has lost value to Bitcoin now the same could be said about a lot of altcoins right you could say the same thing about

a lot of a lot of the altcoins and in fact if you look at a basket of alt right total 3 minus USD divided by Bitcoin you can see that in fact they have put in new lows this week and my arguments is always been that they will likely eventually go to the range low before there's really a great hope of any All Season being able to occur you could also look at others Bitcoin and see that it has just dropped since 2022 began and so there's a lot of people that sort of call this

the meme coin super cycle and they and they try to get you pumped up for All Season by saying these meme coins are going to outperform but at the end of the day they just keep on bleeding to bitcoin and now you know we're three years after this top over here and others Bitcoin has put in a new low once again others is everything outside of the top 10 at least what trading view tracks divided by the Bitcoin market cap and it just continues to go lower so why is all this well I think a

lot of it has to do with quantitative tightening and I think quantitative tightening has a lot to do with the fact you know the continuation of quantitative tightening has to do with this chart of all Bitcoin Pairs and recog izing that there was not a pivot by the FED last cycle until all Bitcoin pairs reached the range range low now I know you're probably thinking you're probably thinking well Ben hold on a second it's not like Po is looking at the off Bitcoin chart and be like all right well I can't pivot yet but I

think one of the use cases of crypto is maybe it gives you insight into liquidity conditions and the overall economy and until you see them down here you could argue that that weakness might just not show up in the data for then the FED to be willing to Pivot right so the reason that you might not yet have the reason why you haven't had all season in my opinion is because quantitative tightening never ended but the reason quantitative tightening never ended is because the DG have never really they haven't given up this cycle as quickly

as they did last cycle right last cycle they gave up by 2019 right I I mean and I was one I mean I didn't really I guess it depends on what you mean by give up right I mean I was buying altcoins in late 2018 and thinking I was a genius buying them throughout all you know throughout this period right there and looking back on it a year or two later and just being like yeah I probably should just bought Bitcoin instead and I would have made more money and so this cycle I wanted to

make sure I didn't fall into that trap so instead of buying alt coins I just stuck mostly with Bitcoin um and so I think the real reason you haven't seen alt season again is because there was never an end of quantitative tightening and there was never an end of quantitative tightening because the consumer has held on for a lot longer this cycle than they did last cycle if you look at last cycle the amount of time it took for all Bitcoin pairs to reach the range lows from the peak was about 87 weeks but this

cycle it's taken a lot longer from the Peak right we're we're now at at 178 weeks or so so this is why this this bull market feels so different than what a lot of you probably experienced in 2020 and in 2021 a lot of people joined crypto in 2020 and 2021 and during that period most assets were going up against Bitcoin rather than down right they were generally turning up um and then there was a period there was a there was a very brief period where they went down and then they just continued to go

up for a while so that is what people remember that is why this cycle feels so different because all Bitcoin pairs have continued to go lower now one of the things you can look at is something that we call the Social risk the social risk is made up of five different risk metrics one on YouTube subscribers to crypto YouTube channels YouTube view or crypto or YouTube views to crypto YouTube channels the same ones and then followers to various analysts exchanges and layer ones on Twitter or X and you can look at all of them and

and kind of just see where they are right now and that's what they look like individually you can show all of them as well and see that they more or less EB and flow together but you can also average them out to get a single risk metric and it looks like that now in order to get alt season you need retail to durably come back back and not just where we sit here and we we say oh they're back but really it's just the same old people pretending like someone's back one of the things you'll

notice is that in the 2017 alt season and the 2021 All Season social risk was durably going up you see that it was durably going up it was putting in higher lows and it was going higher but so far this cycle we haven't really seen that right every time that social risk has gone above 04 it then just goes back down now last cycle there was a couple of times where it popped above 04 and then eventually it just continued to go and that's ultimately what led into alt season but in order to get that

you need a a rally by Bitcoin that's longer than just you know a really brief period of time because it's that longer rally by Bitcoin that truly brings retail back now I think the reason you haven't had that type of rally you know these rallies over here have been a lot more tame compared to what we saw over here in 2021 and what we saw at the tail end of 2017 I think that a lot of it has to do with macro conditions like inflation and and not really just inflation but it's more the reaction

function of the FED due to the inflation and that's caused them to go you know to to much more restrictive monetary policy than they did in Prior Cycles so really you know to see kind of confirmation of what could eventually be an ALT season you would want to see social risk put in higher highs right and and actually go above point4 and stay above it if you if you just view some of these metrics like views to crypto YouTube channels this is what it looks like and in 2021 at the top you know we were

essentially these crypto channels collectively we're averaging around 4 million views per day but this cycle we haven't we've only seen spikes to two million views a day right so this is not the same as 2021 it's no it's nowhere near as euphoric as 2021 the market conditions are a lot different you know how earlier I was talking about why it feels like why this cycle feels different even though you can't quite put your finger on it right like and what I mean by that is if you look at at a cycle Roi of Bitcoin from

say the market cycle bottom back in late 2022 if you look at it you could argue that bitcoin's kind of doing what it always does right I mean it's it's actually tracking the 2016 2017 cycle pretty closely so far and it's been generally going up like the 2019 cycle as well and and even had some similarities with the 2019 cycle as at one point the 2019 2020 cycle got ahead of schedule and then it faded into the prior cycle Roi just like this cycle kind of got ahead of the 2019 cycle and then faded until

it got back in line so if Bitcoin is doing the same thing that it always does why does the cycle feel so different to everyone well the answer again is due to the continuation of quantitative tightening by the Federal Reserve and if you look actually at at the advanced decline index for the top 100 cryptocurrencies I would encourage you to pause the video here and read the description and the usage but essentially what it gives you an idea of is is the asset class trending higher as a whole like are there more assets going up

than down or are there more assets going down than up so when there's more assets going down than up it means that there's and if the market cap if total market cap is going up there's a Divergence what that means is that you only have a few cryptocurrencies that are responsible for total market cap going higher primarily Bitcoin and then a few of the altcoins but a lot of the cryptocurrencies are not really contributing to Total market cap going higher in fact a lot of them are contributing to it being lower right and you think

about it Bitcoin is at new all-time highs this cycle but even the number two cryptocurrency eth has not and a a lot of cryptocurrencies if you think about it as you go down the list a lot of them most of them have not hit new all-time highs and so this this part of the cycle last cycle lasted a lot shorter this cycle it's lasted a lot longer and let me show you what I mean so in in the last cycle when the FED began quantitative tightening you can see that it led into a bare Market

for alt Bitcoin Pairs and then alt Bitcoin pairs bottomed when quantitative tightening ended right it's pretty clear you can pretty clearly see that now the advanced decline index started going down right started going down and you can see here like all Bitcoin pairs started dropping in 2018 the ADI started going down a lot here in 2018 right it was up at these highs for a while and then it started going down it did not bottom until after quantitative tightening ended quantitative tightening ended in September 2019 the ADI Advanced decline index at the top 100 cryptocurrencies

bottomed just about one quarter later in December right so you just had October November December three months later the advanced decline index bottomed so when a lot of people joined crypto after the pandemic crash in March of 2020 the advanced decline index for the top 100 cryptocurrencies was already going back up so back then it felt like alt season because most alts were going up and the asset class as a whole was going up as everything basically in the asset class was also going up right so it was a more inclusive bull market where most

everything in the top 100 was going up together a lot of people say the cycle feels different but they can't put their finger on why it's because there hasn't really been any form of an ALT season and the reason for that again is because quantitative tightening never actually ended and so we are still in this phase of the cycle as crazy as that sounds right as crazy as that sounds because that that part that phase of the cycle last Market cycle ended in the preh having year so if that had been the same for this

cycle it would have been as if it had ended in 2023 and then things would have changed but quantitative tightening never ended therefore the advanced decline index has continued to drop and I I saw someone describe it like this the other day and I thought it was a fitting A fitting way to think about the market it's almost like a a zombie bull market where and I've talked I actually talked about this in 2022 where I said you could get a Bitcoin only rally and it's lasted far longer than I thought it was going to

and it doesn't mean that nothing goes up obviously many assets are off their lows but I think at this point in the cycle you probably know what I mean right it's it's like the only way that other assets go up is if Bitcoin goes up and it lifts those assets higher like it it it you know brings them Kicking and Screaming even though they don't really want to go but they'll go up if Bitcoin goes up but then the minute Bitcoin drops right the minute Bitcoin even thinks about sneezing the altcoin market collapses right and

so the cycle feels different because quantitative tightening never ended but this is exactly what happened last cycle it's just that this phase of the cycle was a lot shorter a lot shorter last cycle right last cycle it lasted about a year and a half to two years this cycle it's been lasting already more than 3 years and arguably it's just a 4year cycle so what it means is that whenever we do see a pivot from quantitative tightening to quantitative easing that fa that that phase of the cycle could be a lot shorter this Market cycle

because we just won't have as much time so going back to this idea about all Bitcoin Pairs and and it's one of these things i' I've I've talked about a lot and and I've sort of second guessed myself uh internally at times but I mean I've always come out and said that all Bitcoin pairs the most likely outcome is for them to go to the range low especially until quantitative tightening ends it's one of those things where like it's easy to sort of make fun of the view of all Bitcoin pairs going to the range

lows especially considering it hasn't happened yet but also this view has been directionally correct especially since all Bitcoin pairs have put in new lows this week um it's one of those things where like and I've talked about this a lot especially as it relates to eth Bitcoin in order to really get the alt season that people want they have the altcoin market has to go where those people don't want it to go that's kind of like the Dilemma you know as long as all Bitcoin pairs just kind of keep holding this trend line and they

don't go down here then what reason is there to go back up here and I think that is the Dilemma right in order to get the all season that you want you have to feel the pain first you have to see all Bitcoin p and I not have to right I'm just sort of speaking my own opinion I could be wrong I have expressed one one potential outcome is a Fed pivot to soon where you get an ALT Bitcoin rally before it goes down here but if that happens it would likely resolve to a a

macro lower high where it wouldn't it wouldn't go back up here right the way way you go back up there is to First go down here I've seen individual altcoins that don't go back to the range low in a cycle but then the returns for those altcoins end up being muted in the bull market because they never truly got rinsed out in the bear for the for the off Bitcoin pairs so again it's kind of like it was kind of like what I was talking about with ethereum USD right the only way for eth Bitcoin

to really durably go up is to feel the pain on ethusd right so the only way for the alt season that people want to occur is for all Bitcoin pairs to go where they said they would never go because until they go there you could argue the FED doesn't really have a compelling reason to end quantitative tightening if the Market's doing well you know if real GDP is humming along at 2 to 3% if layoffs remain low initial claims remain low what what reason is there because if they pivot too soon they run the risk

of inflation coming back now I don't really think that's the most likely outcome in the short term if I'm being honest um but I think that it hopefully that answers the question for a lot of people as to why this cycle feels different and why there hasn't actually been an all season right and I know some people are like well you know my altcoin is up 10x well I have good news for you I wasn't talking about your altcoin right I was talking about everyone else's the other thing to remember is that I'm I'm sort

of talking about generalities right I'm collectively the altcoin market is bleeding against Bitcoin there's always a few that are counter to that Trend but again as I've said for years you would have to cherry-pick the few to say the trend you know to sort of go against the trend rather than the other way around right there's more dropping against Bitcoin than going up against Bitcoin just like when you look at the Advan decline index there's more Assets in the top 100 going down than up and the way that this brutal downtrend ends is for a

pivot by the FED but the way the FED pivots is to feel the pain first so to get the alt season you want I think all Bitcoin pairs have to go where people don't want them to go now they did get pretty close admittedly um they did finally go to 33 so we have made progress right it's not like we're not making progress um but even from that level you're still about 20 to 25% off the lows now I would argue that viewing altcoins as oscillators at best is correct and it's the optimistic way to

view the market where they basically just range between 0.25 and one they Bott them out around the time that the altcoin market cap collectively reaches parody with or 25% of bitcoin's market cap and they top out when they reach approximately parity with Bitcoin where the altcoin market cap collectively is equivalent to bitcoin's market cap I say they're oscillators at best not worst meaning I I would assume that the best case scenario is that they bought them here that's best case because the other way to look at it is the pessimistic view which a lot of

people aren't going to want to hear but I'm going to show it anyways for completeness leave no stone unturned here because technically you know we we've seen lower highs and lower lows in the altcoin market right you had a high and a lower high and a low and a lower low so because of that right and you can actually see right now that if you sort of draw this parallel Channel out right now all Bitcoin pairs the they've been kind of holding support right at that Center trend line you see that like that's where they

basically have spent a lot of their time just like they spent a lot of their time around that level right there before eventually fading and dropping all the way down to the bottom of that of that channel um so I would say they're oscillators at best because that's the optimistic view that you don't look at them as bleeders but instead oscillators but there's a chance they go below 0 25 I'm just simply arguing that until they go to 0.25 the chances that you really get an ALT season are really Slim that doesn't mean that all

USD pairs can't go up they will likely go up if Bitcoin goes up but if if the altcoin market going up requires Bitcoin to go up first then why not just hold Bitcoin right why hold the thing that requires something else to go up to go up itself and I think that's kind of been the argument for the last few years and that's why we spent so many years talking about Bitcoin dominance and preserving the Satoshi valuation of of your portfolio so I think it's a really interesting way to think about the market the other

thing to think about when it comes to you know something like the uh like the social risk right if you go look at at the social risk again um the other thing to think about is that in order to really make Bitcoin dominance go down you need to see retail come back and one of the ways to visualize that is to go over to the workbench that we have on the website again we are we still have the sale going on make sure you guys check it out uh links in the description below but if

you look at the social risk that we just showed and then you plot on here you plot Bitcoin dominance without stable coins you will notice that as social risk is low Bitcoin dominance goes up right as the social RIS is either going down or staying at a low level Bitcoin dominance goes up but whenever the social risk starts to go up that's when Bitcoin dominance crashes right because that's when all the retail investors come in and and they buy all these altcoins up and then they end up having to hold the bag for the next

several years until they get another alt season and and a lot of these people end up weighing the altcoin market down during times like this because a lot of them become bag holders and they watch Bitcoin go up and they're like oh well now my altcoin is going to do the same it doesn't it goes to a lower high and then they end up capitulating and that's why those alts you know have a you know a bigger burden to to Bear than than bitco coin so I think that is why alt season has not occurred

and if you want confirmation for that there's actually an altcoin season index and there's only been two times since 2021 ended well I guess I I mean there there's a couple of Wicks right here but there haven't really been that many times where you've seen all Bitcoin or the this indicator go into all season where altcoins are really outperforming Bitcoin the only time we saw it happen What briefly was back in late or in December of 2024 right here but it's not what you're looking for right because it was only for a few days what

you're looking for is where it spends weeks there like in 2017 and and and weeks to months there like it did in 2021 right that's what you're looking for that hasn't happened the closest that we've come to it was in 2022 but that was in a bare market and that was actually just before there was another capitulation by Bitcoin which ultimately look took the total market cap lower so when you look at a chart like this because the the only one that looks remotely like it could be considered All Season was actually still during a

bare market so it was Bitcoin it was altcoins were outperforming Bitcoin but the market still really wasn't doing that great um overall just all Bitcoin pairs were going up because we haven't really seen a sustained period like that in the market since 2021 I think you can pretty Clearly say that there hasn't really been an ALT season and hopefully I just did a okay job of explaining why there hasn't been an all season is because quanti tightening never ended because the economy was holding up okay and because of that all Bitcoin pairs never went to

the range lows justifying a Fed pivot to get what you want all Bitcoin pairs I think have to go where people don't want them to go now there's one counterargument that I I I I I I want to at least mention um when you look at a chart like this you know it's easy to to just say well they have to go to the range lows right they have to go to 025 now the counterargument to that is that I'm only subtracting out usdt um first of all if we just look at all Bitcoin pairs

without subtracting out any stable coins they're actually you know a lot higher right and and actually they're they're right around the level that they broke down from in 2019 that then led into a Fed pivot right so I don't know maybe we're entering into that right now right this maybe that's what's about to happen um I'm not really sure but it is worth keeping an eye on you could also look at total two divided by Bitcoin which includes eth and you can see this chart has been moving down pretty quickly right I mean it it

just moved down to the level that it was capitulating to in July 2019 remember back then that was two months away from a Fed pivot from quantita tightening to quantitative easing it was only two months away um so but the counter points right the counter point is that if you look at total 3 minus usct divided by Bitcoin it could be easy to say that these need to go to the range lows which is kind of my base case but you could also include you know other stable coins in here as well right like we

could actually add in here um usdc as well and if you include usdc the range low is still basically 0.25 but in this case they've already gone down to3 right so in this case from that low it would only be about a 16% drop in order to get to the range low so again it all goes back to this idea that to get what people want they have to feel the pain first of all Bitcoin pairs going to the range low again that view could be wrong but we've been following that view for the last

three years and it has proven itself to be correct time and time again right with all Bitcoin perers putting in new lows this week it's been at least directionally correct for the last three years it it could come to pass that all Bitcoin pairs don't go to the range lows but regardless that narrative that has helped us preserve the satosi valuation of our portfolio was based on quantitative tightening and based on this idea that altcoins are oscillators at best and based on the idea that you don't really get all season until after all Bitcoin pairs

go to the range um so those are my views on the market and hopefully that at least is is at least some explanation uh for people as to why alt season has not occurred some of this might be new to you uh if you just follow other channels that call for alt season every couple of months um and it's really hard because I know a lot of people call for it and everyone loves them and they're like well you know Ben doesn't know what he's talking about because you know I want my altcoin to go

up but remember a lot of them are just trying to Hype you up and and a lot of times they're they're actually getting paid to promote meme coins right and so it's in their interest to try to get people to believe it's all season but it's important to remain objective and to say you know what there's there's two things there's what we want to happen and what we think will happen right I would love for alt season to occur because if I truly thought was about to occur then it's pretty easy they make a lot

of money during allseason because everything just goes up for you know four to five weeks and several hundred% right who doesn't want that that would be great there's what we want to happen and then there's what we think will happen right it's like um back in 2022 you know I mean I was a huge Bull on eth bitcoin from 2019 until so basically the first video on my channel was right here and it was about eth Bitcoin and I was very bullish on it and I turned bearish on it right there I missed the top

but I turned bearish on it right here okay did I want to turn bearish on it absolutely not you know it was fun being bullish on E Bitcoin it was fun you know witnessing all season for so long um there was what I wanted to happen which is the continuation of that Trend but there was also what I thought was going to happen which was you know going back over here and and seeing that the FED uh was was was shifting monetary policy and realizing that if this is going down this is going down too

so again we got to separate what we think is going to happen and what we want to happen and a lot of times like what you think is going to happen can turn into what you want to happen because you want to take advantage of it if you're right but I made a lot of enemies by being bearish on E Bitcoin right a lot of enemies and again it's just a reminder that markets change market conditions change and I actually hope that eth Bitcoin bottoms out soon um and and can go back the other way

uh it looks like we're getting pretty close to a final capitulation if it's not already in but just remember last cycle eth Bitcoin bottomed when quantitative tightening ended anyways guys we'll go ahead and wrap it up there thank you guys for tuning in make make sure you subscribe give the video a thumbs up and again check out the sale on intothe cryptoverse premium at intothe cryptoverse decom I'll see you guys next time bye