Many new retail investors actually do not understand the essence of altcoins.
Because they did not experience the years 2020-2022,
many new retail investors have no concept of what 'altcoin season' is.
The most intuitive is that retail investors entering in 2024-2025, besides stable investors who only buy BTC and ETH,
most high-risk preference players cannot distinguish the difference between the MEME market and the altcoin market.
The high learning cost also makes new retail investors hesitant; in fact, the animal world of 2021 once overshadowed the altcoin market.
The logic of altcoins is completely different from $BTC and $ETH; it is more like a tradable benefit certificate of a project, a cake-slicing tool issued by the project party.
Altcoins, in terms of economic attributes, are closer to equity in early projects, but they are not equivalent to equity; they can be likened to a call option or lottery with unlocking and inflation, of course, they are also the incentive budget used by the project party to purchase growth and consensus.
However, in the eyes of most new retail investors, there are only BTC and other projects (that can multiply tenfold), which has led to the altcoin market not benefiting from either institutions or retail investors.
In the best-performing year of the crypto market in 2024, the total net inflow of digital asset investment products was $44.2B, with BTC at $38.0B; even though ETH performed poorly, it still had $4.8B, while SOL, as the second-largest public chain, had an inflow of only $69M, and other altcoins besides ETH had a total of only $813M.
As for the tokens that can currently attract institutional growth, besides projects like $SOL and $LINK that are bound to ETFs, there has been no significant short-term net inflow of large institutions throughout 2025; even $ZEC has seen continuous speculative funds accumulating.
Some people say that altcoin season is generally in the concluding stage; we are still in the adjustment period of a bull market, and of course, the current weak trend makes it difficult to guarantee that altcoin projects can remain stable for the next market stage.
