A market commentary translated by PANews says the latest altcoin move is not following the usual script of traders piling into whatever is hottest on a given day. The article argues that buying has started to return to older projects, with two factors standing out: many of these tokens are already fully unlocked, or close to fully unlocked, and they still have technical narratives that the market can understand and trade around.
The author wrote that the market has been in “easy mode” since Aug. 19, with prices rising across the board. Even so, the piece says many participants may still have lost money because they kept chasing the coin that was hottest that day. In the author’s view, that FOMO behavior pushed traders away from the actual outperformer and into so-called catch-up alternatives.
Isolated rallies are not the same as alt season
The article uses ZEC as a case in point. It says ZEC traded at $50 a year ago and is now at $1,300, which works out to a 26x return. On that math, $100,000 would have turned into $2.6 million. But instead of buying ZEC itself, the author says many traders looked for “beta” elsewhere, naming NEAR and STRK as examples, and went long those tokens instead.
From there, the commentary steps back to ask what alt season actually means. Its answer is that a true alt season is broad. It is not just a handful of tokens posting sharp gains in dollar terms. It is a period in which most altcoins outperform Bitcoin over time, showing relative strength against BTC rather than simply rising alongside it.
The piece cites BlockchainCenter’s altcoin season index and says the benchmark is specific: among the top 50 eligible coins, excluding stablecoins and asset-backed tokens, at least 75% must outperform Bitcoin over 90 days.
That distinction matters throughout the article. A token can go up and still lag BTC. If that is true for most of the market, the move does not meet the definition of a broad alt season. By the same logic, a few dramatic rallies do not say much on their own about the health of the wider altcoin market.
Why older projects are getting bought again
The author says one clear trend lately is that traders have started buying older coins again. The explanation given is straightforward: many of those projects were built to solve a real problem in the first place. ZCash is one example in the article, described as an attempt to create a version of Bitcoin with privacy features.
Starknet is presented through a different lens. The article says the project has regained attention because of a “quantum-resistant” narrative. According to the piece, an article published last week argued that supercomputers and AI could break cryptocurrencies that are not quantum-resistant, prompting some investors to revisit that risk. The author frames the issue in practical terms by asking readers to imagine digital assets disappearing from a wallet the next day.
The commentary notes that older tokens like these were once joked about as “dinosaur coins,” and their rallies were often treated as a sign that the cycle was near its end. This time, the author says the setup may be different. The reason given is not just rotation or sentiment. It is also that many of these projects are already fully unlocked, or nearly so, while still offering a technical direction that can be debated and repriced by the market.
How the Starknet narrative was repriced
The article names Eli Ben-Sasson as a central figure in the Starknet discussion. It says he has floated the idea of leaving Ethereum and becoming an L1, with the goal of building “the first fully quantum-resistant network” by next year.
The author links recent buying to a wave of quantum-security FUD. The piece also references Justin Drake’s “bunker mode” article, which said the cryptography protecting crypto wallets could be broken in “months rather than years.” Whether investors agree with that timeline or not, the commentary says this is one reason those tokens are attracting bids right now.
The article’s broader point is that the most important signal in this altcoin move may not be the extreme rise in a few names. It may be the return of demand for older projects with limited unlock overhang and a technical story that still resonates with the market.