The long-awaited altcoin season may fail to meet expectations, according to comments shared by well-known market analyst Ted Pillows. In a recent post on X, Pillows pushed back against the popular belief that gains from Bitcoin and traditional safe-haven assets will naturally rotate into alts. This outlook is based on the analyst’s reconciliation with the fact that the structure of today’s crypto market is very different from past cycles.
Why Bitcoin Gains Have Not Flowed Into Altcoins
Many crypto market participants have been waiting for many months for a capital rotation from Bitcoin into altcoins, a trend that played out in previous market cycles, most especially in 2021. However, this has yet to play out as expected, as the crypto industry’s dynamics have matured from speculative inflows from investors since then.
Particularly, Pillows pointed to the current 2024/2025 market cycle as a clear example of misplaced expectations among altcoin holders. According to his assessment, the rotation into alts never materialized because the dominant buyers of Bitcoin were institutions, not retail traders.
Institutional participants, he noted, tend to accumulate Bitcoin as a long-term asset and do not actively rotate capital into altcoins the way retail investors did in previous cycles. This market behavior from the new cohort of investors has contributed to a strong Bitcoin dominance even during periods of corrections. According to CoinMarketCap’s dominance index, Bitcoin’s dominance is currently at 58.9%.
The analyst extended this logic to current expectations around gold and silver. Right now, gold and silver are trading near record highs, with social media interest in these precious metals also at remarkable highs. Gold is currently trading above $5,270 per ounce and is steadily pushing to new highs. Silver is also pushing to new highs, currently trading around $113 per ounce.
Some market participants believe that strength in these precious metals could eventually translate into Bitcoin inflows and then into altcoins. However, according to Pillows, this won’t happen again, which might leave altcoin holders disappointed. He pointed to the fact that the primary buyers of gold and silver today are central banks, not retail investors.
What Needs To Change Before An Alt Rally
Despite the skeptical outlook, Pillows did not claim that altcoins are permanently sidelined. Instead, he outlined conditions he believes are necessary for a widespread altcoin rally to take shape. One is meaningful regulatory clarity, particularly through the approval of the Clarity Act, which could improve institutional confidence across the digital asset space. The Clarity Act, however, is currently facing delays in Congress.
The other condition for an altcoin rally is a return to aggressive liquidity expansion similar to the quantitative easing environment witnessed during the 2020/2021 cycle. Without those conditions in place, only a small subset of altcoins will manage to perform well, while many others will gradually lose relevance and slowly dump to zero.
Featured image from iStock, chart from Tradingview.com
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