Analysis
Altcoins Are Outrunning Bitcoin Again. Last October Is Worth Remembering
This week Bitcoin Cash, Ethena and Litecoin each rose more than 25% while Bitcoin gained 3.4%. The last big stretch of altcoin enthusiasm, in early October 2025, ended with some tokens losing three-quarters of their value in minutes.
A quick scan of the past seven days on Binance shows a familiar pattern. Bitcoin rose about 3.4% and Ether about 2.2%, while a long list of smaller coins moved much further: Bitcoin Cash about 33%, Ethena (ENA) about 32%, Litecoin about 25%, Bittensor (TAO) about 18.5%, Hedera (HBAR) about 15.5% and XRP about 10%. Many of those moves came with daily volumes two to four times their recent averages.
Nothing about that is a warning sign by itself. Broad altcoin strength often shows up when risk appetite improves, and it can last for weeks. But it does change the risk profile of a portfolio, because the coins that rise fastest in good weeks are generally the ones that fall hardest in bad ones.
The most recent vivid example is only a year old. In early October 2025, altcoins were rallying hard; on the evening of October 10 a surprise tariff announcement set off a market-wide liquidation cascade. Bitcoin fell about 17% peak to trough that day. Fetch.ai's FET fell about 76% in roughly 35 minutes, from $0.468 to $0.113, and a week later was still trading around half its pre-crash price.
The takeaway isn't that this week's gains are about to reverse; there is no way to know that. It's that the size of a position in a smaller coin should reflect how far it can fall, not how far it has just risen. We've written up the mechanics — thin order books, leverage, collateral and correlation — in a new guide, and added the FET crash as a Historical Replay scenario.