Everyone’s Waiting for Altseason… But Has Bitcoin Season Even Started Yet? | Daily Crypto Deep Dive

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Welcome back to the Daily Crypto Deep Dive. Everybody is talking about alt season again. XRP starts moving, Solana has a good week, a few smaller coins suddenly put in double-digit gains, and within about five minutes, your timeline is full of the same thing.

Bitcoin dominance is about to collapse, alt season is here. This is where the real money gets made. But I think there is a much more interesting question we should be asking. Before we start talking about Bitcoin handing the baton over to the alt coins, has Bitcoin actually finished its own race? In fact, has the real Bitcoin season even started yet? Because look at where we are right now. Bitcoin is trading at roughly $84,000. That sounds expensive until you remember that its all-time high, reached in October 2025, was roughly $126,000.

Bitcoin is still more than 30% below that record. At the same time, it has recovered dramatically from the summer lows around $58,000.

So we've had an enormous recovery, sentiment has changed, money has come back into the market and suddenly everybody is trying to work out which altcoin is going to do the next 5X. But Bitcoin itself hasn't even returned to the price it was trading at 12 months ago.

Before we go any further, this isn't financial advice. And if you are buying Bitcoin, Ethereum or anything else we talk about on this show, Kraken is the exchange we use and trust. If you want to support Crypto News Today while helping us keep these episodes free from traditional adverts, use our Kraken link in the description. And if you're already sorted with an exchange, you can still help massively by dropping us a 5-star rating on Spotify. It genuinely makes a difference. Now, here's where this gets interesting. Depending on which alt season indicator you look at, you can get two completely different answers right now. CoinMarketCap's Dashboard currently has its altcoin season index at around 55 out of 100, while another widely followed measure is sitting around 56, with 75 normally required before it officially declares an altcoin season. So under that definition, no, we're not there yet. We're somewhere in the middle. But then look at Bitwise's shorter term altseason index, and it recently hit 90%, meaning 9 out of 10 of the altcoins it tracks had beaten Bitcoin over the preceding 7 days. Over a month, around 65% of the tokens in that index had beaten Bitcoin. Bitwise also reported roughly $166 million flowing into altcoin investment products excluding Ethereum, the strongest week of the year. So, if someone says they're seeing the beginning of altseason, they're not necessarily imagining it. Some of the short-term evidence genuinely supports them. And CoinMarketCap's head of research, Alice Liu, went even further this week. Speaking to The Block, she said CoinMarketCap believes we may already have arrived in an altcoin season, pointing to improving altcoin performance and an index reading which at the time was around 52

Bitcoin Cash and Uniswap were among the coins she highlighted after strong moves. So this isn't just anonymous accounts on X shouting altseason. Serious market researchers are seeing a rotation as well. But here's my problem with calling the Bitcoin phase finished. Bitcoin dominance is still sitting at roughly 59%.

Think about what that means. Almost $6 out of every 10 in the crypto market's capitalization are still represented by Bitcoin. Ethereum is around 11%.

Everything else combined is fighting over the remainder. That doesn't look like Bitcoin has suddenly become irrelevant. More importantly, look at where the fresh institutional money is going. US spot Bitcoin ETFs have just gone through a remarkable reversal.

On September 18th, they attracted around $433 million.

September 21st brought another $999 million in a single day. September 22nd added roughly $364 million.

And the bigger picture is even more striking. According to recent data, Bitcoin ETFs have absorbed around $2.84 billion across six consecutive trading days. Earlier this summer, their net position for 2026 had fallen to approximately $5.8 billion.

That deficit has now been wiped out and the year has moved back into positive territory. That matters because when people talk about the traditional crypto cycle, they often imagine the same pot of money moving around the market. Money goes into Bitcoin. Bitcoin pumps. Traders take their Bitcoin profits and buy Ethereum. Then Ethereum profits go into Solana, XRP and the bigger alts. Eventually, everyone loses their mind and starts buying coins with pictures of dogs and frogs on them. But what if that isn't how this cycle works? What if new institutional money keeps entering Bitcoin at the same time that existing crypto money rotates into altcoins? That could completely change the relationship between Bitcoin season and alt season. You could theoretically have an institutional Bitcoin bull market and a retail or crypto native altcoin cycle happening at the same time. BlackRock doesn't need to sell Bitcoin, so somebody on Coinbase can buy Solana.