While some believe that altcoin season may never come, others believe that the altcoin market has changed, indicating that another version of the long-awaited rally is in its early stages.
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‘Reverse Altcoin Season’ has just begun
On Friday, the market rebounded 15% from its multi-year lows, with most cryptocurrencies rebounding in the short term. Amid the recent crash, investor sentiment has hit rock bottom lowest levels since 2022, with many expressing concerns about the future performance of altcoins.
Market observer Ali Martinez discussed how the long-awaited altcoin season might have started, but not in the way most investors expected. In an
“During that entire period, many traders continued to wait for a traditional altcoin season: the familiar phase where Bitcoin rises and capital largely turns into altcoins, bringing almost everything together,” he noted.
However, unlike a traditional alt season, the market did not see altcoins rise all at once this cycle. Instead, many altcoins have simultaneously gone structurally bankrupt, with “channels that had lasted for years (…) failing, support levels (…) collapsing, and downward expansions (…) accelerating.” According to him, “we are witnessing what I would call a reverse altcoin season.”
Martinez noted the performance of cryptocurrencies such as Filecoin (FIL), Polkadot (DOT), Avalanche (AVAX), and Cardano (ADA), which have completed or begun the breakdown of their macro channel support. He believes that this is the place where new opportunities arise:
For traders willing to shift their bias, this environment has created meaningful opportunities, especially on the short side. (…) What is important is that this pattern has not finished playing yet.
As a result, the analyst confirmed that the new reverse altcoin season is still in its early stages, concluding that this cycle “didn’t arrive as a broad rally. It came as a selective unload.”
No More Broader Altcoins Rally?
During a Thursday panel at the Ondo Summit 2026, Bitget’s CEO Gracy Chen said discussed what crypto will look like in 2030. The executive predicted that the Real-World Asset (RWA) sector will grow significantly over the next four years, with “everything tokenized.”
However, she also shared the “controversial view” that the long-awaited alt season “may never come” and that altcoins will never be able to rise all at once again, which would be “a bit tricky” for crypto companies, she added.
Others have previously discussed market changes and whether the ‘old cycles’ for Bitcoin and altcoins still hold. Last year, analyst Altcoin Sherpa claimed that the crypto market is in a “hyper-accelerated regime.”
He explained that the previous cycles consisted of euphoric, corrective and accumulation phases before the beginning of a recovery phase. Meanwhile, the market is now experiencing short-term upward trends followed by medium-term downward trends under the new regime.
“We have 1 to 3 months of pumping followed by 2 to 6 months of downtrend and repeated flushes,” he wrote. “There’s no more euphoria where things go crazy for a whole year. Just 1-3 months and then it’s over.”
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Based on the new system, he advised traders not to expect market conditions like 2021 for most altcoins or a traditional Alt season. Instead, Altcoin Sherpa suggested that investors should take advantage of shorter rallies while being aware of their limited duration.
Nevertheless, he noted that unlike previous cycles, altcoins will also recover faster and will not take more than a year to reach the bottom and accumulate before a new rise begins.
Featured image from Unsplash.com, chart from TradingView.com