Everywhere I go, online and offline, I hear the same word: alt season. Everyone's waiting for it, everyone has an opinion on it, and most people saying it don't actually know what they're waiting for. So let's straighten that out first, and then look at why I think this time might play out differently than most people are hoping. What alt season actually is: Alt season is the period when altcoins, everything except Bitcoin, clearly outperform Bitcoin itself. There's even an index for it: the Altcoin Season Index, which measures how many of the top 50 altcoins have outperformed Bitcoin over the past 90 days. Above 75, you're officially in alt season. Below 25, you're in what's called "Bitcoin season": capital flows into Bitcoin, altcoins lag behind. The logic is simple. Bitcoin attracts capital first because it's the most liquid, most trusted asset. Once people take profit on Bitcoin and go looking for more upside, some of that money rotates into altcoins. Those tend to move harder in both directions, so in a good stretch an altcoin can do in weeks what Bitcoin does in months. Why it's such a hot topic right now: That's not coming from nowhere. The last two cycles, 2017 and 2021, both had a clear alt season where a broad range of altcoins significantly outperformed Bitcoin. Anyone who lived through what that did to a portfolio is now waiting for a repeat. That's human and logical: you expect a pattern that showed up twice to show up a third time. On top of that, Bitcoin hit a new all-time high around $126,000 in October 2025. Moments like that always spike interest in "what happens next," and historically the answer was often: altcoins go on a run. So search volume for "alt season" and "when is alt season coming" jumped, exactly as you'd expect. Why I think this time it happens less, or maybe not at all Here's where it gets interesting, and this is where my own doubt sits. While Bitcoin was hitting that $126,000, the biggest altcoins weren't. Ethereum, BNB, XRP, Solana, and Tron were sitting roughly 60 percent below their own previous all-time highs at that same moment. That's the opposite of what happened in 2017 and 2021, when altcoins moved with, or even ahead of, Bitcoin's top.

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