Three weeks ago I wrote about Bitcoin losing its 200-week moving average and grinding into what I called a bottoming zone, not a confirmed bottom. It's July 20 now, and before I get into today's actual topic — whether altcoin season is arriving — let me grade that call, because I said I would.
Quick Grade: The June Bottom Call
On June 29, Bitcoin was sitting in the $59,000s, just under its 200-week average near $61,000, with realized price around $54,000 as the next floor. My read was specific: the bottoming zone was here, but not confirmed, and I expected it to be messy rather than a clean reversal.
As of this morning, Bitcoin is trading around $64,700 — about 8-9% above where it sat on June 29, and comfortably back above that 200-week average. No dramatic new low, no scary wick into the mid-$50,000s. So far, that call has held up better than my June 2 timing call did. I'll take it, but three weeks is not a track record — keep that in mind for everything below.
So What's Actually Happening With Altcoins Right Now
Here's the specific data I'm looking at today, July 20, 2026, pulled from multiple live trackers rather than one source:
- Bitcoin price: around $64,700 (Yahoo Finance market data, this morning).
- Ethereum price: around $1,875 (Yahoo Finance market data, this morning) — still well off its highs, and the ETH/BTC ratio sits near 0.029, which is weak by the standard of past cycles.
- Bitcoin dominance: sources don't fully agree right now, which is itself worth noting — CoinGecko has it at 55.5%, other trackers put it at 56-57%, and it was as high as ~58% earlier this month. Take the exact decimal with a grain of salt, but the direction is consistent: dominance has been sliding for a few weeks, not climbing.
- Altcoin Season Index (blockchaincenter.net): 57 out of 100 as of today. The official threshold for "altcoin season" is 75 — if 75% of the top 50 coins outperform Bitcoin over a rolling 90-day window, that's altseason. We're not there. We're also not in strict "Bitcoin season" territory (below 25) either — we're in the wide middle, which is most of the time, if we're honest about it.
- Total crypto market cap: roughly $2.2-2.3 trillion — treat this as an approximate figure rather than a precise one, since aggregators calculate it slightly differently.
Put plainly: dominance easing and the index climbing toward 60 is real, but it is not altcoin season, and anyone telling you it's confirmed is rounding up. What we're looking at is the early, ambiguous phase where capital is starting to test altcoins again after Bitcoin led the recovery off the June lows — which is a normal, well-documented pattern, not a starting gun.
A Quick History Lesson: What Real Altseasons Looked Like
It's worth remembering what the last two genuine altcoin seasons actually looked like, because it puts a reading of 57 in perspective. Late 2017 was the textbook case: Bitcoin ran first, then capital rotated hard into everything else, and altcoins as a group wildly outperformed for weeks — that's the kind of broad, sustained outperformance the index is built to detect. 2021 had two separate altseason-style runs, first around the DeFi boom in the spring and again around the NFT and Solana-ecosystem surge that fall. Both times, the index sat well above 75 for extended stretches, not a single day.
What both of those periods had in common: Bitcoin dominance fell hard and kept falling, altcoins led the headlines for weeks at a time, and it was obvious in hindsight (and honestly, pretty obvious at the time too) that something structurally different was happening versus a normal week. Nothing about the current setup — dominance chopping in the mid-50s, an index in the high-50s, Ethereum still lagging badly on the ETH/BTC ratio — resembles that yet. It resembles the on-ramp to it, at best.
Why This Pattern Usually Shows Up First
This isn't a new script. In every cycle I've watched, Bitcoin tends to bottom and recover first, because it's the asset with the deepest liquidity and the one institutional money moves into first when risk appetite returns. Altcoins lag on the way down and lag again on the way up — until enough confidence builds that capital starts rotating out along the risk curve looking for bigger percentage moves. The Altcoin Season Index climbing from the 40s toward 57 over the past several weeks looks like exactly that early rotation, not the rotation completing.
The Solana vs. Ethereum piece I wrote back in March is relevant here too — the altcoins actually pulling ahead of Bitcoin right now tend to be the ones with real usage, not the ones just riding sentiment. If a genuine rotation builds from here, I'd expect it to show up unevenly across projects rather than lifting everything at once.
What Would Actually Confirm Altseason
I don't think it's useful to just say "watch the index." Here's what I'm specifically watching before I'd call it:
- The Altcoin Season Index breaking and holding above 75 — not a single-day spike, which happens on volatile days and reverses fast.
- Bitcoin dominance breaking cleanly below the low-50s and continuing lower, rather than chopping in the mid-50s like it is right now.
- ETH/BTC actually trending up off current levels. Ethereum leading is usually the first real confirmation altcoins broadly are participating, not just a handful of narrative-driven tokens.
- Total market cap growing faster than Bitcoin's market cap alone — meaning new money is entering the altcoin side specifically, not just Bitcoin pulling the whole market up by itself.
None of those are confirmed yet. Some are trending the right direction; none have crossed the line. And even if they do cross, I'd want to see it hold for more than a few days before treating it as real — indexes like this one are noisy day to day, and a single green candle across a handful of large-cap alts can spike a reading temporarily without anything structural actually changing underneath it.
My Take
The honest read on July 20: Bitcoin's recovery off the June lows has been real and the June bottoming-zone call has held up so far, but the altcoin rotation everyone's asking about is still in its early, unconfirmed stage. An index reading of 57 and dominance drifting down from 58% is worth watching — it's not worth repositioning your whole portfolio around. If you're going to lean into altcoins here, I'd treat it as positioning for a rotation that might build, not chasing one that's already here.
I'll keep grading my own calls in these posts, good and bad, because that's the only way this series is actually useful to you instead of just more crypto content.
Disclaimer: This post reflects my personal opinions and is not financial advice. Always do your own research and consult a financial advisor before making investment decisions. Cryptocurrency is extremely volatile and you can lose money.