Live BTC markets: An 'altcoin season' signal flashed, but bitcoin's slide is what set it off

After nearly two years of declines, alts have run out of sellers and steadied, while bitcoin has dropped hard, sliding back toward $63,600.

Perpetual futures tied to SpaceX stock are now the sixth-largest in the world, with a notional open interest of $812 million, according to data from Laevitas.

Notional open interest refers to the dollar value of the number of active or open contracts at any given point in time.

That OI figure places SpaceX well ahead of the perpetuals tied to the leading privacy-focused token zcash (ZEC), but still behind payments-focused cryptocurrency XRP.

Exchange-level data points to a heavy concentration of SPCX activity on a select few exchanges. Decentralized exchange Hyperliquid holds the largest share at $333.2 million, accounting for 41% of total SPCX open interest, followed closely by Binance with $291.33 million.

Together, the two venues command nearly 77% of global SPCX positioning, highlighting a notable reliance on a handful of dominant liquidity pools for price discovery and risk management.

A widely watched indicator has flipped to "altcoin season," for the opposite reason the label suggests. Glassnode's Altcoin Cycle Signal, which reads above 50 when alternative coins, or alts, outperform bitcoin, has climbed to 86. Alts are not rallying. Bitcoin is just falling faster than they are.

The signal tracks relative performance, so alts can lead either by rising or by falling less. This is the second case. After nearly two years of declines, alts have run out of sellers and steadied, while bitcoin has dropped hard, sliding back toward $63,600, per CoinDesk data. Bitcoin, as Glassnode puts it, "is still doing most of the work."

A real altcoin season has capital rotating into smaller tokens as they climb. This is the hollow version, where the reading turns bullish for alts because bitcoin is selling off, which is bearish for the market as a whole. Relative strength is not a rally.

Until alts start rising on their own rather than holding while bitcoin falls, the signal says more about bitcoin's weakness than about demand for anything else.

In May, combined exchange volumes fell 3.45% to $4.41T; the lowest since September 2024. RWA perpetual futures volumes rose 10.4% against the trend, hitting a new all-time high.

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