People have been waiting years for something that historically lasted about 20 days. I'm talking about altseason. The version most people remember is pretty simple: Bitcoin runs first. Bitcoin cools off. Capital rotates into alts. Then almost everything goes up together for weeks or even months. I wanted to see how much of that memory actually survives the data. So instead of defining an altcoin rally by a handful of coins doing 2–3x, I used a much harder test. At least 70% of altcoins had to be positive over the previous 20 days and outperform Bitcoin. That gives us a decent picture of the periods when participation was genuinely broad. And even during the cycles people remember as great altseasons, those periods were surprisingly rare. In 2017, only 18.8% of trading days met that threshold. 2020: 17.8%. 2021, probably the cycle people associate most with everything going up: 22.5%. Even then, the longest uninterrupted stretches were generally around 20–23 days. So maybe we've been remembering a few exceptional weeks as entire seasons. In a strange way, people may have spent years waiting for an "altseason" when what they were really trying to catch was a 20–25 day window. But that's only half of what changed. Look at the same measure today: 2024: 5.5% 2025: 6.0% 2026 YTD: 2.3% The longest streak in 2026? Two days. Broad altcoin participation hasn't disappeared, but it has become much harder to sustain. Then I looked at where the returns themselves were coming from. In 2017, the top-performing 10% of coins accounted for roughly 54.5% of the performance in the sample. In 2020 it was 53.3%. In 2021, 59.7%. There were always leaders. Altcoins were never an equally weighted money printer. But compare that with more recent years. 2022: 81.0% 2025: 94.6% 2026: 79.8% That's a very different market. You can open X and see five coins up 100–200% and feel like you're somehow missing an altseason. Meanwhile, most of the market may be doing almost nothing. A few extreme winners can distort what the entire market looks like from the timeline. So I tried removing the winners altogether. Take out the best-performing 20% of coins each year and look at the typical 20-day return of what's left. In 2017, the remaining market was still around +5.6%. 2020: +2.6%. 2021 remained slightly positive too. That's what broad participation actually looks like. You could miss some of the biggest winners and still participate in the expansion. Now look at the recent structure. 2022: -11.1% 2024: -3.8% 2025: -10.8% 2026: roughly -5% Remove the leaders and you're increasingly left with a losing market. That distinction matters. If the leaders rally and everything underneath them also rises, you have broad expansion. If the leaders rally while the median coin underneath them loses money, you have a leadership rally. Those are not the same market. And I think that's where a lot of the frustration around altcoins comes from. People keep asking when the next altseason will begin as if there's supposed to be a long period where owning almost anything works. History doesn't really support that memory. Even the strongest cycles gave you relatively short windows when participation became exceptionally broad. What's changed is the quality of those windows. They appear less often. They don't stay open as long. And when they do open, fewer coins seem to capture a disproportionate share of the returns. That also means simply being "in altcoins" matters less than it used to. If returns are becoming more concentrated, you have to pay much closer attention to where participation is actually expanding, which parts of the market are being left behind, and where capital is concentrating. So I've become less interested in asking: "When is altseason?" I think a better question is: "Is participation actually broadening?" How many coins are joining the move? How long are they staying there? Is performance spreading beyond the top 10–20%? Can you remove the leaders and still find a healthy market underneath? Those questions tell me much more than watching a few altcoins explode and deciding rotation has arrived. Maybe altseason was never really a season. It was a window. And lately, that window has become narrower.