Ethereum's 31% Weekly Rally Fails to Convince Altcoin-Season Gauges

Ethereum's fortunes have taken a turn for the better over the past seven days, with the token rising by nearly 31% to trade around $2,495.

Despite the run, two of the most watched altcoin-season trackers have not been convinced to call it an altseason, leaving traders to weigh a fast $ETH rally against gauges that remain stuck in neutral.

The rally is real, the breadth is not

$ETH trades around $2,494.68, up 2.59% on the day and 31.01% over the week. Bitcoin, which sits around $78,411, saw a weekly gain of 23.25%.

$XRP and Zcash ($ZEC) are among the few names that have performed better than $ETH over the same seven-day period, with $XRP up by around 49% and $ZEC up by roughly 64%.

Bitcoin still leads the market in total value, accounting for over 59% of market share, while $ETH's share stands at around 11.4% — so funds have not clearly rotated away from $BTC. Overall sentiment is stretched, with CoinMarketCap's Fear and Greed reading at 80 out of 100, deep inside the index's "extreme greed" band.

What the indexes actually measure

Two indexes define the term most traders throw around. The altseason, elusive for quite a while, is measured against criteria set out by CoinMarketCap and BlockchainCenter, each of which publishes an index to determine whether the season is on or off.

According to CoinMarketCap, altseason happens only when at least 75% of the top 100 coins beat Bitcoin over a rolling 90-day window. When 25% or fewer beat it, the site labels the period Bitcoin season.

BlockchainCenter runs a similar rule on the top 50 coins: if at least 75% of them perform better than Bitcoin over 90 days, it is altseason. In both cases, the question is how many altcoins are outperforming Bitcoin, only across different universes of coins.

As of the time of checking, the gauge stood at 43, below the altseason threshold — meaning fewer than half the coins in its universe have outperformed Bitcoin over the trailing 90 days. By its own count, BlockchainCenter listed that it has been over 332 days since the last altcoin season. Both indexes exclude stablecoins such as Tether and asset-backed wrappers like WBTC and stETH. The 90-day lens is also why one asset's sharp week cannot flip the verdict on its own: the gauges are built to reward breadth that persists across most of the market for months, not a seven-day sprint in a single token.

Glassnode wrote on X on August 24 that the altcoin market "has entered a state of optimism," reporting that 85% of alts had pushed funding rates — the periodic payments that keep perpetual futures prices tethered to spot — above their mean, a reading the firm called the highest for that metric since Bitcoin traded at all-time highs. "In an alt season, these conditions can last for many weeks," Glassnode added.

Hayes bets on Ether to lead

In an interview with Laura Shin, BitMEX co-founder Arthur Hayes said Ethereum is now his second-largest holding after Bitcoin, stating that $ETH's failure to reclaim its 2021 high near $4,878 leaves room to catch up and that it carries far less risk of going to zero than smaller tokens. He said a decisive break above $3,000 could carry the price past $5,000.

Speaking to the Altcoin Daily podcast, Hayes went further, predicting that $ETH would outperform every other large-cap asset in this liquidity-driven rebound and could help drag Bitcoin's dominance down toward 40%.

Why the caution is warranted

Recent history explains the hesitation. Cryptopolitan reported in June that altcoin selling had reached all-time highs, with the season index at 49, and on June 30 that more than 84% of altcoins were trading below their 200-day moving average — the longest such stretch since the 2022 bear market.

CryptoQuant analyst Darkfost noted then that altcoins had stayed tightly correlated to Bitcoin, so a strong $BTC no longer automatically pulls the rest of the market up. That pattern has favored short, narrow "mini" rallies in a handful of liquid names over the broad, all-boats-rise runs the indexes are built to detect. The checkpoints from here are public ones: the $3,000 level Hayes flagged, the 40% Bitcoin-dominance figure he targeted, and the 75% breadth threshold both indexes demand — three yardsticks for the same question of whether capital is genuinely rotating beyond a handful of large caps.

Source: CryptoNewsNet