No one is talking about altseason anymore. This could actually be a good sign.

I recently noticed an interesting phenomenon—on social media, discussions about altseason have fallen to their lowest point in two years. It looks like retail investors have completely given up, but historically, this kind of apathy often signals that altcoins are about to rebound.

The data supports this observation. Over the past two years, every time discussions about altseason surged, it corresponded to local tops in coins like DOGE. Conversely, every time everyone wasn’t talking about it, it was followed by a round of price increases. This correlation isn’t perfect, but it can be seen across multiple cycles—there’s a clear link between collective apathy and the subsequent price recovery.

Of course, retail investors giving up isn’t without reason. Since last year’s October crash, altcoins have been hit extremely hard. DOGE has fallen about 41% from its cycle high, Solana is down 36%, and Cardano is down 62%. The entire altcoin market has been bleeding relative to Bitcoin for several months now. Funds are flowing into BTC and stablecoins, and nobody is chasing low market-cap coins anymore. If you’ve been holding altcoins all along, there really isn’t much to get excited about.

Other sentiment indicators also confirm this fatigue. The Crypto Fear and Greed Index has spent most of February to March oscillating between fear and extreme fear. A major exchange’s premium index has stayed negative for over 40 straight days, indicating that US retail investors have little interest even in Bitcoin, let alone altcoins. On Google Trends, searches like “best cryptocurrency” are getting no traction—meanwhile, searches for “Bitcoin goes to zero” have hit a new record high in US history.

But there’s an interesting contrast here. On-chain data has quietly started showing different signals. Wallets holding 100+ BTC approached nearly 20,000 by the end of February, setting a new high. This suggests whales are picking up bargain prices. Although this doesn’t necessarily mean a rebound is immediate, given the ongoing Iran conflict continues to disrupt global financial markets, whale accumulation is still worth paying attention to.

For altseason to truly kick off, Bitcoin first needs to stabilize. The conditions aren’t quite there yet, but the sentiment setup is already in place. XRP has recently rebounded, driven by strong trading volume and whale accumulation, but it’s still within a larger downtrend and hasn’t confirmed a sustainable bullish reversal. Rakuten integrating XRP into its payment app—covering 44 million users, supporting exchanging points for purchases, and receiving XRP—these app-side developments are indeed happening, but market sentiment hasn’t caught up yet.

Overall, everyone is staying silent, and whales are stocking up. From a sentiment perspective, this setup is quite interesting.