Glassnode Flags Altseason as Bitcoin Dominance Stalls below 60%

Glassnode's Altcoin Cycle Signal pointed a new "altcoin season" reading this week, hitting 81.25 on its 0 to 100 scale. For a holder, the practical effect is straightforward: the metric flips when the combined market cap of the 250 largest cryptocurrencies, ex-stablecoins, is, for the moment, rising faster than Bitcoin's.

Bitcoin did move this week, briefly touching $86,000 and pulling the wider crypto market back above $3 trillion. Its share of that pot, the figure traders call "dominance," has refused to climb back over 60%. It sat at 59.7% on Monday, against 59.2% on August 19, a roughly flat month at the same ceiling.

What the signal measures

The Altcoin Cycle Signal is Glassnode's rolling read on the market-cap ratio between the broader altcoin pool and Bitcoin. When that ratio crosses a threshold, the dashboard prints "altcoin season." The 81.25 is a normalised score, not a percentage gain, and the exact methodology is not disclosed.

What readers can take from it is the shape of the move. Glassnode drew the line between this leg and the last in a post on X: "The first rally in August saw altcoins stay relatively flat while BTC moved. However, today's rally has ignited the full breadth of the altcoin market." In other words, more tokens are moving this time, not just a handful of large caps.

The numbers behind the call

The combined altcoin market cap reached $1.19 trillion on Tuesday, the highest reading since late January. Since August 19, the day US Treasury bond-market intervention news triggered a sudden bid across crypto, that figure is up 33%.

Bitcoin is higher across the same stretch. It has simply not pulled away. Dominance is up a fraction of a point, not the four-point move that would have extended the prior trend.

Where the rotation is harder to read

The verified reporting does not split that 33% gain by sector. There are no figures identifying layer-2 tokens, AI-linked projects, memecoins or DeFi specifically. A reader looking to name the strongest-performing basket would need data this reporting does not carry.

The sceptic's case

Trader Matthew Hyland argued, in paraphrase of his post on X, that Bitcoin investors were showing "complacency," and that the June 2025 high of 66% already marked the dominance cycle top. The available material records his framing but does not pin down the date of that call.

ETF flows keep doing their own job

US spot Bitcoin ETFs took in $999 million on Monday, the largest one-day haul since October 2025, per Farside Investors. Spot Ether ETFs added $270 million the same day, also a multi-month high. The Bitcoin ETF cohort's average cost basis sat just below $86,000 at the end of last week, which is also where BTC was trading into Tuesday.

That price now acts as both the ETF average and the chart support. Hold there and the relative-rotation argument stays intact. Lose it, and altseason has to do more of the work on its own.