The altcoin market, which is valued at over $879 billion at the time of this writing, is poised for its next major leg up toward its previous all-time high of nearly $1.2 trillion, according to crypto trader and market analyst Michaël van de Poppe.
The Total3 market cap, which tracks the total market capitalization of the entire , excluding Bitcoin () and Ether (), has maintained critical support around the $784 billion level, Van De Poppe .
The price of Total3 is also inching back toward the 365-day moving average, another critical support level, according to TradingView data.
In October, the Total3 hit an all-time high of nearly $1.2 trillion, but quickly retraced after a rocked digital assets, causing the total altcoin market cap to decline by about 33% in a single day.
Investors, traders, and analysts are attempting to gauge the potential start of the next altseason, a period of , following a disappointing 2025 marked by changes to crypto market dynamics and historical patterns.
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Investors typically rotated BTC gains into higher-risk altcoins during the latter parts of previous crypto market cycles, which were driven, in part, by Bitcoin’s four-year cycle theory.
However, after a disappointing 2025 for BTC, which saw the — a historic first for BTC in a post-halving year, the 4-year cycle theory has been invalidated, according to analysts.
The number of cryptocurrencies has also grown significantly. There are over 29 million listed coins on , all competing for limited investor capital and attention.
The proliferation of altcoins has , with too many tokens, preventing altseason from kicking off, according to some crypto analysts.
Analysts also say the launch of crypto (ETFs) by creating liquidity siloes for digital assets with an ETF that kept funds locked and not freely flowing within the crypto ecosystem.
This prevented capital from any potential Bitcoin gains or other tokens from being rotated into altcoins and dampened the altseason phase of the market cycle that seasoned crypto traders had come to expect.
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