Altcoin season explained, 17 of 50 coins beat Bitcoin: what to watch now

An altcoin season is the period in which the majority of large cryptocurrencies beat Bitcoin over several months. That is not a mood and not a feeling but a ratio: an index counts how many of the largest coins have performed better than Bitcoin over a fixed window. If that ratio reaches 75 percent or more, the altcoin season counts as confirmed. On October 23, 2026 it sits clearly below that.

This piece explains how to recognise an altcoin season, which metrics are fit for the job and which only look like it. It names no coins and no buy signal, but the quantities you can work out yourself, and the places where the common indicators mislead.

Altcoin season: what the term makes measurable and what it does not

An altcoin is any cryptocurrency other than Bitcoin. The term comes from a time when Bitcoin was practically the only market; everything after it counted as an alternative. An altcoin season accordingly describes a phase of relative strength of those alternatives against Bitcoin.

The word relative is what matters. An altcoin season says nothing about whether prices are rising, only that altcoins are performing better than Bitcoin. In a falling market an altcoin season can therefore mean that altcoins are losing less heavily. That is exactly where most readings fail: anyone taking the term as a promise of price gains has misunderstood it.

What the term does capture well is the capital rotation inside the crypto market. Capital rotation means money moving from one part of the market into another without the market growing overall. That shift can be read off three quantities, and you can check all three at any time yourself.

Bitcoin dominance: why market share alone is no rotation signal

Bitcoin dominance is Bitcoin's share of the market capitalisation of all cryptocurrencies. Market capitalisation means price times circulating supply. On October 23, 2026 Bitcoin dominance stands at 59.44 percent, with a total market of around $2.76 trillion. Ethereum comes to 10.62 percent. How that share has moved over the months is shown by our Bitcoin dominance chart.

Falling dominance is often read as a starting signal. That is too simple, for an arithmetic reason: the share can also fall when nothing at all happens to Bitcoin. Stablecoins are counted in most dominance calculations. If new money shoots into the market in the form of dollar tokens, the denominator grows and Bitcoin dominance falls without a single altcoin having become stronger. The same happens with a large new issuance, or when a tokenised money market fund is taken into the statistics.

On October 23, 2026 the two largest dollar tokens alone make up 9.20 percent of the total market. You should mentally strip out that block before concluding from a move in dominance that rotation is under way.

What dominance is good for anyway

As a trend quantity, dominance remains useful. A share that sits in a narrow band for weeks and then leaves that band to the downside is a hint that the relationship is shifting. As a single value on one day it says almost nothing. So: read the direction over weeks, not today's number.

The Altcoin Season Index: 75 percent outperformance over 90 days

The Altcoin Season Index is the best-known metric on the subject. It comes from Blockchaincenter and has a clear definition: if 75 percent of the top 50 coins beat Bitcoin over the last 90 days, it is altcoin season. Stablecoins and collateralised tokens such as wrapped Bitcoin or staked Ether are excluded from the basket. The index is brought onto a scale of 1 to 100; up to 25 it speaks of Bitcoin season, between 26 and 74 of a neutral market, and from 75 of altcoin season.

On October 23, 2026 this index stands at 53, squarely in neutral territory. The site itself puts it briefly: it is not altcoin season. We keep the current value and its history on our Altcoin Season Index page.

Two properties of this construction are worth knowing. First, the window is rolling: every day the oldest day falls out and a new one comes in. An index that rises sharply within a few days may be doing so because a strong Bitcoin week 90 days ago is dropping out of the calculation. Second, the index is equally weighted: a coin with a billion dollars in market value counts for just as much as Ethereum. That is deliberate, because the index is meant to measure breadth, but it means a handful of small breakouts lifts the value while the big money sits still.

Two indices, two baskets: Blockchaincenter counts 50 coins, CoinMarketCap 100

There is not one Altcoin Season Index but several, and they calculate differently. The variant from CoinMarketCap takes the top 100 instead of the top 50, likewise without stablecoins and wrapped tokens, likewise rolling over 90 days, likewise with the thresholds of 75 and 25, and updates daily.

The larger basket shifts the result systematically. Places 51 to 100 are smaller, swing more widely and more often perform worse than Bitcoin in quiet phases. Two indices on the same term can therefore sit far apart on the same day without either of them calculating wrongly. When you read a figure for the Altcoin Season Index somewhere, it is worth checking which basket sits behind it.

The practical consequence: never compare two values from two different sources. Take one source and follow it over time.

Market breadth measured ourselves: 17 of 50 coins ahead of Bitcoin over 30 days

Market breadth is the share of assets carrying a move. This quantity is the most honest on the subject, because it is distorted neither by stablecoins nor by market weighting. We compiled it ourselves for this article.

The basket covers the 50 largest crypto assets other than Bitcoin by market value, without dollar tokens, without tokenised money market funds, without gold tokens and without wrapped or staked images of other coins. The smallest asset in the basket still carries around $1.1 billion. Each is compared against Bitcoin over the same period, as of October 23, 2026:

• 30 days: 17 of 50 beat Bitcoin, so 34 percent. Bitcoin itself is at minus 6.2 percent, the median asset in the basket at minus 10.1 percent.
• 24 hours: 31 of 50 beat Bitcoin, so 62 percent. Bitcoin sits at minus 0.9 percent.
• Twelve months: 17 of 48 beat Bitcoin, so 35 percent, against a Bitcoin loss of 24.8 percent.

The daily reading of 62 percent looks like rotation and is not. On a single day that ratio swings widely without anything changing in the relationship between the asset classes. Only over weeks does the number carry weight, and over 30 days as over twelve months it stands at roughly a third. That is the opposite of an altcoin season.

Why looking at the list matters more than the ratio

Behind the 17 assets that beat Bitcoin over 30 days stands no breadth but a handful of individual cases. The strongest four are at plus 152, plus 94, plus 24 and plus 19 percent; after that it thins out, and from tenth place the values are already below zero and beat Bitcoin only because Bitcoin itself is in the red. Fifteen assets in the basket lost between 19 and 35 percent over the same 30 days.

A genuine rotation looks different. Then it is not the top that pulls, but the median. Which tools take such analysis off your hands without a spreadsheet is shown in our comparison of analytics platforms.

The ETH/BTC ratio as an early indicator of capital rotation

The ETH/BTC ratio is the price of Ethereum expressed in Bitcoin instead of dollars. It counts as an early indicator because capital leaving the Bitcoin block has, in earlier phases, moved first into the second-largest market and only then further down the rankings.

On October 23, 2026 one Ether costs 0.02955 Bitcoin. Over 30 days the ratio has lost 7.1 percent, over 90 days it has gained 1.4 percent, and over twelve months it has lost 15.0 percent. It is 19.4 percent short of its highest level of the past twelve months.

The same can be calculated for other large assets, each in Bitcoin and over 30 days: Solana loses 5.8 percent, XRP loses 8.4 percent. Over 90 days the picture partly turns: Solana stands at plus 10.8 percent there, Ethereum just in the black, XRP at minus 4.5 percent. That very inconsistency is the finding. A rotation shows itself in the large alternatives gaining against Bitcoin together, not in one of three doing so over a quarter.

How to work out the ratio yourself

You need no tool for it. Divide the coin's dollar price by Bitcoin's dollar price and note the result once a week. If the number rises, the coin is gaining against Bitcoin; if it falls, the coin is losing, even when its dollar price has risen. That second case is the most common reason for the feeling of falling behind despite green numbers.

Altcoin market capitalisation without stablecoins: $866 billion

The third quantity is the market value of all altcoins, adjusted for dollar tokens. Subtract the Bitcoin share and the two largest stablecoins from the total market of around $2.76 trillion, and around $866 billion remain on October 23, 2026, or 31.4 percent of the market.

That number is the test on dominance. If Bitcoin dominance falls and the adjusted altcoin market value does not rise at the same time, then no money has rotated: only the denominator has grown. The two values together answer the question that neither answers on its own.

Over the past 24 hours the total market has lost 3.6 percent, Bitcoin 0.9 percent and Ethereum 1.2 percent. That Bitcoin loses less than the market it makes up 59 percent of means, by arithmetic necessity, that the rest loses more. The daily ratio of 62 percent from the section above therefore counts only how many assets do marginally better than Bitcoin, not how much capital is moving.

Liquidity and spread: what rotation costs with small coins

The spread is the difference between the best bid and the best ask. It is the price you pay immediately when you open a position, and it grows the thinner a market is.

That is the blind spot of every rotation calculation. An index treats place 48 like place 2; your trading venue does not. With an asset turning over a few million dollars a day, the spread eats part of what the index reports as outperformance, and on the way out you pay it a second time. With Bitcoin and Ethereum that item barely registers; further down the rankings it is part of the decision.

On top of that comes the question of whether the asset is tradable in Germany at all. Some of the coins sitting in the indices are not listed with the providers licensed here, and since the European crypto regulation MiCA the exchanges review their offerings regularly. A signal on an asset you cannot buy is no use for your decision.

The three most common false conclusions about the Altcoin Season Index

First false conclusion: the index is a forecast. It is a look back over 90 days. A value of 53 describes what was, and says nothing about what is coming. Anyone reading it as a lead indicator is reading a rear-view mirror as a windscreen.

Second false conclusion: a rising index means rising prices. It means relative strength. In a falling market the index rises when altcoins fall more slowly than Bitcoin. That is exactly the situation on a daily view on October 23, 2026: 62 percent of the large assets stood better than Bitcoin, and the total market lost 3.6 percent in the process.

Third false conclusion: the altcoin season applies to all altcoins. The index counts heads, not capital. Even at a value above 75, a quarter of the assets stay behind Bitcoin, and the index does not say which ones. In earlier phases the gains concentrated in individual sectors each time, and the order was different every time.

A fourth point sits slightly to the side but belongs here: the term assumes a recurring rhythm in the market. Whether that rhythm still holds is disputed among market observers, and the Altcoin Season Index does not answer the question. It measures a state, not a law.

Tax in Germany: every swap into an altcoin is a disposal

This part is regularly overlooked, and it costs money. Anyone swapping Bitcoin for an altcoin sells Bitcoin under German tax law and buys something else. The swap is a private disposal under section 23 of the Income Tax Act, even when not a single euro reaches your account.

Three things follow. The one-year holding period starts at zero for the newly acquired coin, and the period already built up on the coin given away is spent. If the holding sold is less than a year old, the gain is taxable as soon as the total of all private disposal gains in a year reaches the exemption limit of €1,000. And because it is an exemption limit and not an allowance, one euro above it makes the entire amount taxable, not only the part above the threshold.

In practice that means every swap needs a date, a quantity, a euro equivalent and the acquisition date of the holding given away. Anyone reshuffling several times in a rotation phase quickly has a three-digit number of transactions to document by the end of the year. Reconstructing that after the fact is barely possible.

Altcoin season: only above 75 on the index does the relationship really turn

The picture on October 23, 2026 is clear and unspectacular: index at 53, Bitcoin dominance at 59.44 percent, a third of the large assets ahead of Bitcoin over 30 days and over twelve months, the ETH/BTC ratio 19.4 percent below its twelve-month high. That is a neutral market with a narrow top, not a rotation. Three steps with which you notice the next shift before it reaches the headlines:

1. Settle tradability first. Before you calculate anything, check whether the asset is listed with a provider licensed in Germany and how large your order would be relative to daily turnover there. Our comparison of regulated crypto exchanges tracks the state of the licences.
2. Note three numbers weekly instead of thirty daily. Bitcoin dominance, the adjusted altcoin market value and the ETH/BTC ratio, in one line every Sunday. If all three shift in the same direction for four weeks running, that is solid. What the venues cost in fees and spread is shown in our exchange comparison.
3. Open the tax file before you rotate. For every swap, the date, quantity, euro equivalent and acquisition date of the holding given away belong in the record. The programs that pull this together from exchange data are in our comparison of crypto tax software.

(As of October 23, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)