Altseason index at 64 of 100, and dealer participation halved

Traders have become more selective, says the argument, and the numbers behind it say something sharper. The index everyone quotes sits at 64 of 100 and needs 75 to call a season. Over the same stretch, the share of dealers trading altcoins at all has fallen by half.

“Capital is clustering around a smaller number of assets rather than rotating broadly into the long tail.”

— Samar Sen, Talos

Samar Sen, head of international markets at Talos

Four numbers carry this story:

• CoinMarketCap's Altcoin Season Index reads 64 out of 100, up from 48 a week earlier. An official season starts at 75.
• The top 10 altcoins hold about 80% of total altcoin market cap, against about 70% at the end of 2024.
• Dealer participation in altcoin trading has fallen from around 65% at the end of 2024 to 32% in September.
• Two memecoins made last week's 20 biggest gainers. In 2024 the post-election rally carried DOGE, ADA and HBAR together.

Start with the concentration. The top ten holding 80% of altcoin market cap against 70% two years ago sounds like a ten-point shift. Read it from the other end and it is larger: the long tail's share went from 30% to 20%, a third of it gone. Every altcoin outside the top ten now splits two dollars in ten where it used to split three.

Half the dealers, twice the noise

The participation figure is the one that deserves a second look. Dealer involvement dropping from about 65% to 32% is a fall of roughly half, and it did not happen because traders grew wiser. There are simply fewer of them in the market. Prices can rise on a thinner book, and they often rise further on one, because it takes less money to move a price when fewer people are standing on the other side. The index measures how many of the top 100 beat bitcoin, which is a statement about price dispersion, not about how many people showed up.

The leaderboard against the thesis

The leaderboard sits awkwardly beside the thesis. Capital is supposed to be moving toward protocols that earn revenue, and UNI, ARB, JUP and ONDO fit that description. The biggest gainer named in the piece is PONS, up 350% in 30 days, and PONS is a launchpad for memecoins. We watched that corner of the market in early September, when a record on Robinhood Chain lasted about a day.

The names leading this run are also the ones that broke hardest this week. NEAR is up 180% and Zcash set a record above $1,600, and we counted in September how NEAR rose 23% routing Zcash trades. On Monday zcash fell 7% to just above $1,540, three and a half times harder than bitcoin. Concentrated leadership cuts both ways, and the assets that lead a thin market lead it downward too.

The honest summary is that the index says not yet. Sixty-four is not seventy-five, and the distance between them is where the argument lives. If participation recovers alongside the index, the selective-buying story holds. If the index reaches 75 while dealer involvement stays near a third, what arrives will not be an altseason so much as the same money moving faster between ten tickers.

Nothing here should be read as personalised investment advice. The index, the share figures and the participation data are as cited by Cointelegraph and describe what has already happened.