Perhaps not the happiest Monday morning in crypto land. 

There’s a fair bit of red to kick off the week, but let’s not obsess over it. Or, at least, try not to refresh the charts too often. 

As the Brits would say: Keep calm and carry on. 

Besides:

• Bitcoin’s back over $100,000 this morning after dropping below. Still down roughly 4%. 

• TRUMP’s holding on to $27, down nearly 45% in the past week. 

• Total liquidations stand at $905 million, after roughly 326,000 traders were liquidated in the past 24 hours.

🤷‍♂️ Good news/Bad news

Today marks day 799 of the bitcoin bull market. 

That’s about 26 and a half months of positive price action. A little more than two years. Cheers to that!

It’s tough to say exactly when bull markets start and end in crypto. Old-world definitions — based on 20% retracements from local highs and so on — have no power here. 

Drawdowns of that size just happen way too often on the way up. Still, by my very rough estimates, the past three bitcoin bull markets going back to 2011 have lasted, on average, somewhere in the region of 1,000 days.

So, usually it goes that it takes less than three years for bitcoin to go from the bottom of the previous bear market, through to cycle peaks, down to a crash that in retrospect clearly put an end to any upward trajectory.

The good news: Bitcoin is looking super healthy this cycle when mapped to the previous three. Even after this correction.

Bitcoin’s performance during this bull market — which started at the end of 2022 — is shown on the chart above in log view. It’s done 6.6x so far, going from $15,474 to $99,000 as of this morning.

Notice how, for most of the cycle, BTC has tracked ahead or just below the brown line, which plots its performance during the prior bull cycle between 2018 and 2022.

BTC diverged below around 50 days ago, at the start of December. But that’s okay: We already know bitcoin returns are diminishing every cycle. 

Its current trajectory better fits the pattern — all bull market cycles have followed a similar trajectory, it’s just less pronounced each time.

The bad news: We are no closer to a bonafide altcoin season, even after big rallies in coins such as XRP and TRUMP.

This one charts the market cap growth of bitcoin (in orange) and the altcoin market (purple) for this bull market. As you can see, altcoins are suffering deeper losses but have still done 4.4x.

The blue columns in the back show the relative performance of bitcoin to altcoins — bitcoin is now more than 210% ahead of altcoins, the largest distance of the cycle. That’s too much for any real altcoin season.

Like bull and bear markets, “altcoin season” has no formal definition. It’s more of a vibe. 

Empire has done its best to quantify it: Altcoin seasons potentially begin when the market gap growth of the altcoin market, over the bull market to date, exceeds that of bitcoin’s.

An altcoin season is only confirmed when altcoins have outpaced bitcoin for 90 consecutive days or more. 

Ninety days sounds like a lot, but backtesting with those conditions provides three distinct altcoin seasons throughout crypto’s history: 

• the early innings of the Ethereum ICO era between mid-2016 and early 2018,

• the first half of 2019 when many altcoins outperformed bitcoin, and 

• most of 2020’s DeFi Summer through to crypto’s all-time high in November 2021.

Perhaps the next altcoin season will look a lot different. For now, it’s still all about bitcoin.

— David

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• MicroStrategy’s taking advantage of bitcoin’s weakness and hitting the buy button. It added another 10,000 bitcoin to its stash this morning. 

• Thanks to DeepSeek, AI’s getting a bit of a wake-up call, and it’s having a negative impact on AI tokens. 

• Crypto M&A activity is still going strong after Jupiter announced that it acquired a majority stake in Moonshot.

🐢 Not so fast

The truth is in the data. That’s kind of our motto if you ask me. And the data around the Trump coin is very telling.

Last week, Chainalysis released some data on the Trump coin launch, breaking down who owns it and where they’ve come from. The most obvious datapoint is that the majority of holders have less than $100 worth, suggesting that it’s heavily owned by retail. 

According to Chainalysis, a survey of the wallet age shows that a lot of these retail buyers are new to crypto. In the chart below, you can see that the majority have just opened the wallets, compared to the 16% of holders who’ve had the wallet for at least a year.

But the real question, as posed by Dragonfly’s Rob Hadick, is are these new wallet holders going to actually become active participants in the overall ecosystem?

“A lot of people took [the Chainalysis] report to suggest that the TRUMP token was a mass onboarding event, primarily because 50% of TRUMP/MELANIA token holder wallets were net new to SOL altcoins,” he said. 

“But that continues to make the same wallet/user fallacies and misses the distinction between interest in TRUMP vs onchain users that are value additive and contribute capital to the broader ecosystem.”

The caveat here, he added, is that people outside of crypto have been asking about the space. And, personally, I can attest to that as well. But I think it’s fair to say that attention and action are two very different things, and so far we’re not seeing this lead to mass adoption. 

Honestly, perhaps that’s too much to ask. For now, we may have to settle with piquing people’s interest. Adoption can come with use cases. 

Or so I hope.

— Katherine

On our minds: The stickiness of SocialFi