CryHow to determine the “altcoin season” and whether to expect it this time?

The rise in the Bitcoin rate to $52,000, which occurred on February 15, contributed to the rise in price of a number of altcoins, some of which over the past week have outpaced the market leader in terms of growth dynamics. It is clear that demand for bitcoin is supported by activity in spot exchange-traded funds (ETFs), launched in January, whose issuers buy back bitcoins daily to secure shares. The funds already manage about $37 billion; BlackRock’s ETF alone, according to data on the official website, holds more than 100 thousand bitcoins, and the daily influx of assets into the company’s ETFs for one trading day on February 20 exceeded $150 million.

As a rule, after a Bitcoin rally, there is often a rise in less capitalized coins, but this time they were joined by already established crypto assets. The second largest cryptocurrency — Ethereum (ETH) — also updated its maximum, reaching $3 thousand for the first time since the spring of 2022. The market capitalization of Ethereum, according to Coinmarketcap, exceeded $350 billion. Our expert Konstantinas Sizovas tells which cryptocurrencies can grow after a jump in the Bitcoin rate and Ethereum and whether we should expect massive growth of the entire crypto market in the near future.

The growth of the rate is facilitated by the expectation of approval of spot ETFs for Ethereum from regulators in the United States, applications for which were submitted by BlackRock, Grayscale, Ark Invest and Fidelity Investments. The deadline for the first decisions is set for May of this year.

Investors are now turning their attention to Ethereum. This is evidenced by the sharp jump in ETH trading volume. If earlier in the first week of February the daily trading volume of ETH rarely exceeded $10 billion, now it has almost doubled and exceeded $19 billion. The expert associates the growth of Ethereum with investors’ expectations for growth with the March update of Dencun on the main network, hopes for the launch of Ethereum- ETF, as well as with the expectation that Bitcoin has partially exhausted its growth momentum in the coming weeks. Due to the limited range of Bitcoin trading, traders are paying attention to altcoins that have not yet reached local maximums and have not realized the full growth potential of the cryptocurrency market. However, our expert believes that the growth of altcoins is associated with a slowdown in the growth rate of Bitcoin and it is premature to talk about the onset of a full altcoin season. The fact is that for the altcoin season, the share of Bitcoin remains too high — over 50%. At the same time, the share of ETH has not grown so significantly since December 2023 — by only 1 percentage point, to 17.2%. The share of other altcoins, in addition to ETH, USDT, BNB, SOL, is still 20% — against, for example, 36% in December 2018.

Altcoin season usually occurs a year after the Bitcoin halving. Instead of short-term trading, the expert recommends developing a strategy for long-term investments by creating a portfolio that includes infrastructure tokens of popular decentralized exchangers (DEX), coins of blockchain platforms for decentralized applications (DApp) and tokens of projects related to artificial intelligence. For example, the price of Worldcoin (WLD), the leading cryptocurrency in the category of artificial intelligence (AI) tokens, was also in the spotlight this week. After the news about the launch of the Sora neural network from OpenAI, the token increased in price by 150% and reached an all-time high. The company behind Worldcoin is Tools for Humanity, co-founded by Sam Altman of OpenAI. The market capitalization of the token increased to $800 million. The news flow around the launch of the graphical neural network Sora was also reflected in the leading tokens of projects in the artificial intelligence category. In parallel with WLD, the price and capitalization of a whole list of altcoins related to the development and implementation of artificial intelligence increased. Trading volume in tokens from the “artificial intelligence” category increased by more than 83% and amounted to about $9 billion in a week. One of the growth leaders in the AI category was the token of the SingularityNET (AGIX) project, “the first decentralized artificial intelligence marketplace” running on the Cardano blockchain. Its capitalization exceeded $650 million, and the price rose by more than 30% over the week, setting a new all-time high at $0.59.

Our analyst recommends paying attention to several altcoins with good potential for further growth, including the token of the domain name registration platform on the Ethemreum Name Service (ENS) blockchain and JASMY, a coin of the Japanese Internet of things IoT platform created by Jasmy Corporation. Technical analysis of the ENS token on the daily chart indicates the formation of a “bowl with handle” figure, which hints at further growth of this crypto asset. The current price of the token is $22.34 with a market capitalization of $680 million. The analyst attributes the 100% growth of JASMY in recent days to the permission of the Japanese regulator to invest in crypto for professional market participants. If the resistance level around 0.012 is successfully passed, the price may rise by another 100–200%.

Against the backdrop of inflows of funds into Bitcoin ETFs and the growth of the price of the first cryptocurrency, the “Fear and Greed” index in the crypto market rose to 76 points out of 100, which means that the sentiment of market participants has shifted to the “extreme greed” sector. The current value is considered extremely high; it was last observed in early November 2021 — before Bitcoin reached an all-time high of $69 thousand. In this situation, one of the legitimate and stable forms of investment to obtain consistently high passive income is investing in the ASTL project (Hong Kong), which gives investors the opportunity to directly invest fiat and cryptocurrency assets into stable passive income, which obviously exceeds inflation expectations and is not subject to any sanctions , blocking or confiscation. The ASTL project is a simple and elegant solution for potential investors — investing in the development of the real sector of a diversified portfolio of cryptocurrencies with a fairly high annual interest rate (up to 14%) with payments in a stablecoin (USDT) and the possibility of a full return on investment through the subsequent sale of accumulated ASTL tokens on leading crypto exchanges. Details can be found at https://astl.world.