CryptoMarketCycle
Market structure signal · Bitcoin cycle

Altcoin Season Index

Whether the broad altcoin market is beating Bitcoin — the risk-on / risk-off tell.

38
Bottom territory
Money is concentrating in Bitcoin.
Live · locks 00:00 UTC

What is the Altcoin Season Index?

The Altcoin Season Index measures what share of the top altcoins have outperformed Bitcoin over the last 90 days, on a 0–100 scale. High readings (“altcoin season”) mean money is spreading out across the market; low readings (“Bitcoin season”) mean it is concentrating in Bitcoin.

We compute it ourselves from public exchange data: the top 50 pairs by 30-day traded volume, each measured against Bitcoin over the same 90 days. Stablecoins, fiat pairs, wrapped tokens and leveraged products are excluded, because none of them is a bet on an altcoin.

For past dates the ranking is rebuilt as of that date, using only what had traded by then. That matters more than it sounds: of the 723 pairs that have ever traded, only 479 still do, and scoring history by today’s survivors would make almost every past quarter look like an altcoin season.

One of the 15 signals behind the Crypto Market Cycle Index — read alongside the others, not on its own.

Altcoin Season Index chart & history

0255075100JUN ’26JUL ’26AUG ’26AUG ’26SEP ’26CYCLE POSITION 0–100

Recent cycle position (0–100) of the Altcoin Season Index. Today's reading is 38 — Money is concentrating in Bitcoin.

How to read it

There's no magic threshold, but history gives rough bands. Think of these as context, not triggers.

ZoneReadingWhat it has meant historically
Bitcoin season● now 25 and below Money is concentrating in Bitcoin.
Neither 25 – 75 No clear leadership either way.
Altcoin season 75 and above Broad alt outperformance; historically late-cycle.
It's a signal about months and cycles, not days. That's why CryptoMarketCycle blends it with the other signals rather than reading it alone.

Common questions

The live reading is at the top of this page, updated daily. Above 75 counts as an altcoin season, below 25 as a Bitcoin season, and most of the time it sits somewhere between the two.
The common threshold is 75: three quarters of the top 50 coins beating Bitcoin over 90 days. It describes what has already happened over the last quarter, not what happens next.
We take the top 50 pairs by 30-day traded volume, compare each one’s 90-day return against Bitcoin’s, and report the percentage that came out ahead. Stablecoins, fiat pairs, wrapped tokens and leveraged products are left out. For historical dates the top 50 is rebuilt as it stood on that date, so past readings are not flattered by which coins happen to have survived.
Mostly because of how the top 50 is chosen. The published indices rank coins by market cap; we rank by traded volume, because volume is available from free public exchange data and can be reconstructed for any past date, while historical market caps cannot. The two lists overlap heavily but differ at the edges, so readings are usually within a few points of each other rather than identical.
Because that is when the data becomes good enough to trust. Ranking the top 50 coins by volume needs at least 20 of them trading with 90 days of history behind them, and public exchange coverage is too thin before April 2019 to reach that. On earlier dates we report nothing rather than a number built on a handful of coins, and the index simply runs on its other signals for those days.
Not by itself. Historically, sustained high readings have tended to appear later in a cycle than early, but the index describes the last 90 days rather than predicting the next. It is one of the signals in the median for exactly that reason.

Related signals

Bitcoin dominance
Bitcoin’s share of total crypto market cap...
 → Stablecoin share
Share of tracked crypto market cap parked...
 → Drawdown from ATH
Decline from the all-time high — how much...
 →

The Altcoin Season Index is 1 of 15 signals in the Crypto Market Cycle Index (plus 1 more coming soon).

See the full index →