Altcoin season has not officially started yet. But traders are already rotating, and the numbers are getting tough to shrug off.
In the past 30 days, meme-launch platform PONS has jumped more than 350%. In DeFi, Uniswap’s UNI has gained more than 110%, Arbitrum’s ARB has risen more than 150%, and AI-focused NEAR is up around 180%. Privacy coin Zcash hit a new high last week and pushed past $1,600. Bitcoin layer-2 token LIT and meme issuance platform token PUMP also landed among the best performers in that same stretch.
These gains are coming from very different corners of the market, not one tidy theme. Still, they hint at something pretty clear: plenty of traders are looking harder at projects that have an actual business case people can point to.
The rally is not centered on one narrative
ARB, UNI, Jupiter’s JUP, and Ondo’s ONDO have all put up sharp gains. Bankless podcast host David Hoffman said last Friday that these projects have one thing in common: they generate revenue and bring in real income. His read is simple. This looks more like a rally tied to application value than one driven only by raw speculation.
That does not mean the market has gone fully fundamental. Far from it. Sergej Kunz, co-founder of 1inch, said meme coins saw the strongest buyer growth over the past 30 days, while DeFi protocols, privacy tokens, AI projects, and tokenized assets also pulled in heavy capital attention.
"The current pattern starts broad and then goes deeper," Kunz said in an interview. More wallets are buying a wider mix of tokens, but the average ticket size is still fairly small. "The caution visible in the data actually confirms this broader pattern of selective participation." Put plainly, users are building targeted exposure instead of making all-in bets.
The index is rising, but the threshold has not been met
It is still too soon to say whether this altcoin cycle will look truly different at its core. CoinMarketCap’s official Altcoin Season Index is now at 64 out of 100, up from 48 a week ago, but it remains below the 75 level needed to count as a formal altcoin season.
Market structure says something else too. A small group of assets is still doing most of the heavy lifting. Data from trading firm Talos shows the top 10 altcoins by market capitalization now make up about 80% of total altcoin market cap, versus roughly 70% at the end of 2024.
Hoffman said the current move is being led by protocols that can generate revenue. Samar Sen, head of international markets at Talos, said the data "shows capital concentrating in a small number of assets rather than spreading broadly into long-tail smaller tokens."
Sen also said Talos flow data for September shows an "extremely strong buying bias," with buyers in control on nearly every trading day. That is a sharp contrast with late 2024, when buying and selling were more balanced and the post-election rally lifted a broad mix of tokens, including DOGE, ADA, and HBAR.
What the market is buying
According to Sen, the strongest pockets are specific narrative-driven sectors: revenue-generating protocols, on-chain perpetuals, and DeFi projects. He cited HYPE, LIT, UNI, and MORPHO among the names. Privacy-linked assets such as ZEC, NEAR, and XMR have also done well, along with AI-related tokens including VVV and TAO.
Talos has also recorded a jump in trading activity tied to meme-launch platforms such as PUMP and PONS. The Robinhood ecosystem and the meme coin USELESS have posted standout gains too.
PONS was the top-performing token over the past 30 days, based on CoinMarketCap data.
Kunz and Sen are broadly on the same page: the market is using a much tougher filter this time. As Kunz put it, "Investors are focusing on specific narratives and ecosystems rather than blindly going long altcoins as one broad category."
Buying interest has also picked up in tokenized gold and tokenized stocks. AI tokens have moved higher too, though from a smaller base.
Even so, this is not a full shift from speculation to value investing. Not even close. 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 have already started to blur. Tokenized stocks can now trade directly against meme coins through pairs such as BONER/HIMS and SPACEHOOD/SPCX. One of those pairs posted high trading volume in early September.
Can fundamentals drive this altcoin cycle?
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 previous cycles.
"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 real deployment," he said.
He pointed to stablecoins as an obvious example, especially their use in on-chain foreign exchange and fintech applications. In his view, the biggest driver would be continued integration between crypto infrastructure and the real economy. If that demand keeps building, it could bring a new source of buying power into this altcoin cycle and push crypto infrastructure beyond serving crypto trading alone. Whether that happens is still uncertain.
Who is driving the move
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, even as fund flows keep showing strong net buying.
Sen said, "This is a clear difference from the previous altcoin rally and suggests liquidity providers and market makers have so far played a weaker role in this cycle."
At the same time, getting access to these trades has become easier. Before, traders had to go straight to decentralized venues such as Raydium and Orca to get that exposure. Now those same trades are available on mainstream platforms. Sen said that has "lowered the barrier to entry and expanded retail participation."
Professional traders also have more tools to track capital in this cycle, including wallet tracking and copy trading. So they can follow flows across wallets, protocols, and chains.
Sen said that has created a new setup: retail traders have wider access, while professional traders can use more mature tools to spot where capital is clustering.