Altcoin season may already be here — it’s just very different

This is a segment from the Empire newsletter. To read full editions, subscribe.

---

If you’re not ready to give up on a monster altcoin season — one on which to stake the future of your entire family bloodline — I totally get it.

Luckily, I’m here to make the case that we really are in the middle of one. It’s just hard to tell, because it’s happening to much smaller coins.

I spent the morning mapping the most recent all-time highs for the current top 1,000 coins by market cap. 

The goal: Find how many coins have set new price records in the past few months, as well as the number of coins that have not yet returned to their all-time highs set during 2021’s altcoin season.

Because the sample size was very broad — including coins valued at under $30 million — coins that did not have at least $1 million in trading volume in the past day were filtered out. 

Same with stablecoins, liquid staking tokens and other types of wrapped assets. I just wanted the coins that could moon on their own merit.

That left 361 different coins. And of those, 136 (~38%) had set their most recent all-time highs in 2024 or 2025.

Meanwhile, there were 124 coins that had established price records in 2021 — peak altcoin season — that are still not broken today. That counts ETH, AVAX, DOT, SHIB, 1INCH and GNO.

Another 42 were set in 2022, mostly before Terra imploded in May of that year. Including TWT, SWEAT, COW and WAVES.

So, at the very surface level, the past two years have seen a comparable amount of coins reach all-time highs at least once to 2021. Which is impressive, all things considered.

Even better is that out of the 136 coins to break price records across this year and last, more than half have done so since December. 

That’s 70 chances that traders have had to catch a coin on its way to all-time highs in the past nine weeks or so.

Does all this an altcoin season make? Maybe. It doesn’t fit the mold I’ve previously sketched out, but it does say something about the state of the market.

And here it is: 50 of those 70 chances since December were memecoins or coins tied to AI agents. Which mostly first launched in that same period.

Perhaps, altcoin season is already here. It’s just really hard to capitalize on it. 

I had initially figured that small-cap coins would be symbolic of our bull market — market caps of between $250 million and $2 billion.

Except as it turns out, it may well have been localized on smaller coins, micro and nano-caps worth much less, which have demanded traders be so much quicker to enter and exit than in the past. Great.

---

Start your day with top crypto insights from David Canellis and Katherine Ross. Subscribe to the Empire newsletter.

Explore the growing intersection between crypto, macroeconomics, policy and finance with Ben Strack, Casey Wagner and Felix Jauvin. Subscribe to the Forward Guidance newsletter.

Get alpha directly in your inbox with the 0xResearch newsletter — market highlights, charts, degen trade ideas, governance updates, and more.

The Lightspeed newsletter is all things Solana, in your inbox, every day. Subscribe to daily Solana news from Jack Kubinec and Jeff Albus.