Small cap cryptocurrencies in danger
Altcoins that have small market caps are in extreme danger. According to latest stats by Bloomberg, the median duration of altcoin rallies has shrunk to mere 20 days.
At the same time, the open interest in altcoin futures has reduced to 55 percent since October of 2025. This alone has wiped out more than 40 billion dollars from the market. Bloomberg says investors are now more interested in more liquid and macro established assets like bitcoin and ethereum.
CoinMarketCap’s Altcoin Season Index, which measures the price performance of cryptocurrencies outside the top 10 by market value, shows the majority of small tokens have underperformed the largest ones over the past 90 days.https://t.co/RlQHJUa57j
— Authority Capital (@emphatic) January 13, 2026
Clearly, the capitalis moving from narrative driven tokens toward assets with cash flows, balance sheet backing and tokenization use cases.
That said, people are still very active with memecoins but those too have lost considerable charm. It would be very interesting to see what happens to memecoins and small altcoins when bitcoin actually entes a bear market.
People lost a lot of money due to pump.fun and letsbonk websites last year. Pantera capital says Bitcoin needs to make a new all time high to capture people’s interest. If bitcoin does not makes a new high soon, downward pressure on altcoins will be immense and people will loose even more interest in bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.