It’s altcoin season, as they say in crypto, and that could mean a bitcoin price peak is imminent, according to Morgan Stanley. During altcoin season, investor attention shifts away from bitcoin to smaller and newer coins in which they see high potential for profit. They usually have little or no intrinsic value and rely on secondary marketplace listings. “Speculative activity has returned to some parts of the crypto market,” said Morgan Stanley analyst Sheena Shah. “The number of new cryptos created and listed on Uniswap exchange has doubled in the past month, a pattern that, since 2020, has often occurred around market tops.” Bitcoin price peaks both large and small have in recent years coincided with increases in speculative token listings, she said, highlighting April and November 2021 and March and August 2022. Throughout 2021 bitcoin’s price had an inverse relationship with the pace of new token listings, according to Shah. “This tells us that token creators aim to monetize on the recent price-driven speculative demand but that rising token issuance meets a market that soon becomes exhausted,” she added. Almost any cryptocurrency outside of bitcoin and, in more recent years, ether, are considered “altcoins.” Altcoin is a portmanteau of “alternative” and “coin.” At the beginning of the month ether rallied and the Bitcoin blockchain saw a record high in daily transactions amid a surge in interest around new memecoins and NFT-like tokens on Bitcoin called ordinals . “We will be watching to see if the same pattern repeats or if we are at the start of a new bullish bitcoin price cycle,” said Shah.
