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As Covid spread across the world, leading to lockdowns and memes, we all took the news of swans and dolphins reclaiming the canals of Venice as a positive sign.
Perhaps there was a silver lining to this whole ordeal. This is the moment when the natural world will spread its wings and people will re-evaluate their consumption habits.
Unfortunately, it was fake news. There were no dolphins in the canals of Venice, and after the pandemic, global coal production increased sharply. The earth is no closer to returning to its original state.
Nearly five years later, the cryptocurrency is now looking for its own fake news about dolphins. This is a signal that altcoin season will indeed return in a big way, and with it a massive comeback.
It could be XRP that upends SOL as markets briefly turn away from AI and memcoins.
However, “altcoin season” as a concept has been lost in anticipation. Definition used here in Empire The newsletter is conservative and is intended to reserve the label for periods when profits are both sustainable and enormous.
And we are really getting closer.
Altcoin Season: When Altcoin Market Caps Rise – How It’s Presented to Everyone outside the top 10 — eclipses Bitcoin from the bottom of the cycle for three months or more.
Thus, altcoin season could potentially begin when the purple line in the chart above rises above the orange line. Since this happens quite often, an altcoin season is only properly confirmed when it outperforms Bitcoin in market cap growth over an extended period – when the altcoin pumps are real enough to keep it all going.
This is a retrospective model. Backward analysis shows three distinct altcoin seasons since 2016, with the last one ending when the previous bull run peaked in November 2021.
This season lasted throughout Bitcoin’s bull run, spanning a year and a half. This happened 1,118 days ago, making it the longest gap to date.
Here’s the good news: the altcoin market just posted its best weekly performance (moving average) against Bitcoin in the entire cycle that began in November 2022.
BTC’s market capitalization fell by 0.3%, while the altcoin market (excluding the top 10) grew by 13.9% – a difference of 14.2%.
From this point on, the altcoin capitalization will only need to grow by about 20% for our first condition to be met: Bitcoin is trading sideways.
Sounds like a lot. But in the last five weeks alone, the altcoin market has more than doubled.
Cryptocurrency heals.