Altcoin season has not been officially confirmed. Still, traders are already moving money around, and the numbers are getting tough to shrug off.
In the past 30 days, meme launchpad PONS has surged more than 350%. In DeFi, Uniswap’s UNI has jumped more than 110%, Arbitrum’s ARB has gained more than 150%, and NEAR, which the report places under the AI theme, has climbed about 180%. Privacy coin Zcash set a new high last week and pushed past $1,600. Bitcoin layer-2 token LIT and meme issuance platform token PUMP were also among the biggest gainers over that same stretch.
These winners come from completely different corners of the market. So no, this is not one clean, single narrative. But it does hint that plenty of traders are spending more time on projects that at least have a visible business case.
This rally is not lifting everything
ARB, UNI, Jupiter’s JUP, and Ondo’s ONDO have all made strong moves. Bankless podcast host David Hoffman said last Friday that these projects have one thing in common: they produce revenue and real income. His take was simple. This looks more like a rise tied to application value than one driven only by speculation.
But fundamentals are not the whole story. Just two meme coins landed in the top 20 gainers last week, yet 1inch co-founder Sergej Kunz said the market is not rewarding fundamentals alone. He said meme coins posted the strongest buyer growth over the past 30 days, while DeFi protocols, privacy tokens, AI projects, and tokenized assets also pulled in heavy capital interest.
In remarks cited by the report, Kunz said the current setup is broad first, then deep. More wallets are buying a wider list of tokens, he said, but average ticket sizes are still fairly small. He also said the caution showing up in the data fits a wider pattern of selective participation. Traders are building positions bit by bit, not throwing capital in all at once.
The altcoin season index is rising, but it is still below the line
Whether this cycle really shows the kind of market discrimination Hoffman described, or whether it still ends with joke tokens and dog-themed meme coins taking over, is too early to say.
CoinMarketCap’s official Altcoin Season Index now sits at 64 out of 100, up from 48 a week earlier. That is still short of the 75 threshold needed to satisfy the platform’s formal altseason standard.
At the same time, most of the market’s value is still packed into a fairly small group of assets. Data from trading firm Talos shows the top 10 altcoins by market capitalization now account for about 80% of the total altcoin market cap, versus roughly 70% at the end of 2024.
Hoffman said the current rise is being led by protocols that are able to generate earnings.
What capital is buying
Samar Sen, head of international markets at Talos, said the data points to capital bunching into a smaller set of assets instead of spreading across long-tail tokens. He added that Talos’ September flow data also showed an extremely strong buy bias, with buyers in charge on nearly every trading day.
Sen said that looked very different from conditions at the end of 2024, when buying and selling were much more evenly matched. During the post-election rally back then, tokens like DOGE, ADA, and HBAR rose together across different parts of the market.
For this cycle, Sen said the strongest pockets are specific narrative trades: revenue-generating protocols, on-chain perpetuals, and DeFi. The report names HYPE, LIT, UNI, and MORPHO. Assets linked to privacy, including ZEC, NEAR, and XMR, have been strong too, along with AI-linked tokens such as VVV and TAO.
Talos has also recorded a rise in activity around meme launchpad tokens including PUMP and PONS. The Robinhood ecosystem and the meme coin USELESS have also turned in standout gains.
According to CoinMarketCap data, PONS was the best-performing token over the past 30 days.
Kunz and Sen agree on the broad point: the market has become far more selective. As Kunz put it, investors are focusing on specific narratives and ecosystems rather than buying altcoins as if they were one giant undifferentiated bucket.
Buying has picked up in tokenized gold and tokenized stocks as well. AI tokens have climbed too, though off a smaller base.
Even so, the wider market has not fully moved from speculation to value investing. Several narratives are fighting for attention at once. Earlier this month, Robinhood listed a large number of non-traditional trading pairs, and the lines between sectors began to blur. Tokenized stocks can now trade directly against meme coins, with pairs such as BONER/HIMS and SPACEHOOD/SPCX mentioned in the report. One of those pairs logged high trading volume in early September.
Could this become a fundamentals-driven altcoin season?
Michael Egorov, founder of Curve Finance and Yield Basis, said he is seeing more attention on real-world use cases and institutional demand than in earlier cycles.
He said: "Overall, the market right now favors protocols that are genuinely useful, can connect the crypto world with real financial activity, and can be verified in practical deployment."
He pointed to stablecoins as an obvious example, especially in on-chain foreign exchange and fintech use cases. In his view, the biggest driver would be the continued integration of crypto infrastructure with the real economy. If that demand keeps expanding, it could bring a new source of buying power into this altcoin cycle and push crypto infrastructure beyond serving crypto trading alone. Whether that really happens is still an open question.
Who is driving the rally
Talos data shows market-maker participation in altcoin trading has dropped from about 65% at the end of 2024 to 32% in September this year, yet flows have stayed firmly tilted toward buying.
Sen said this is a clear break from the last altcoin rally and suggests liquidity providers and market makers are still playing a smaller part in the current move.
Meanwhile, access to trading keeps getting easier. In the past, traders often had to go straight to decentralized venues like Raydium and Orca to get exposure to certain tokens. Now that exposure is available on mainstream platforms. Sen said that has lowered the barrier to entry and expanded retail participation.
Professional traders also have better tools to track capital in this cycle, including wallet tracking and copy trading, which help them watch flows across wallets, protocols, and chains.
Sen’s view is that the market now reflects a different structure: retail traders have more entry points, while professional traders are using more mature tools to spot where capital is actually concentrating.
