Part 2 of The Last Great Crypto Bull Run, Why This Alt Season Is Unlike Any Other
Last time I laid out why this run is the last of its kind and different from the other cycles, because it’s the convergence moment, the supersaturated solution waiting for one tap on the glass. Every time I go into my daily news feed, I see more and more articles about BTC, ETFs, Banks and approvals to trade, it’s happening so fast now it can’t and won’t be stopped.
If the last article was the map, this is the guide on how not to give up your stack. With more and more people asking me what I have bought, I am sitting down to address the uncomfortable facts. The ones that tell you exactly how people bleed out in alt season and how not to become the liquidity they trip over. Again, if you missed the first piece, read it now.
No knuckle-cracking, no warm-ups. Let’s get straight to the part everyone avoids until it’s too late.
Centralised venues are not your friends
Exchanges are businesses, pure and simple, period. Their job is transactions and flow and your job is PnL. Those goals only align occasionally and often by accident. Internal MMs, maker/taker spreads, listing games, ‘earn’ products during drawdowns, it’s a veritable feeding station, and you are not the chef. Rotate through them if you absolutely have to, but don’t stay there for the love of god. Keep size on self-custody, hear this and listen, ‘keep size on self-custody’, use limit orders like a professional, and never assume your withdrawal window will be open at the precise second you panic. I once lost a quarter of my entire stack when an exchange went bye-bye overnight. We have all been there.
KOLs are exit signs, not entry signals
You don’t follow influencers, you follow distribution. When someone with a seven-figure audience hits publish on your tiny mid-cap, ask the only question that matters, who’s selling into that announcement? Treat viral threads as the bell that rings at the top of your local move. Do your research when the room is quiet. Buy boredom and sell applause.
Bots run the casino
Sandwiches, snipes, latency wars, you know them all and you should know, you are not faster. Don’t play speed games with people who pay for block space because you will lose, almost every single time. If you are going to degen, set yourself some rule and don’t let greed change your mind:
- Ladder in, never chase a green candle with size. Remember patience is a virtue and almost none of these goldfish have it today. Markets are designed to transfer money from the impatient to the patient.
- Set the sell the moment you buy, target and invalidation. Have a goal, set and forget and be happy when you get there, don’t keep moving the goalposts. It’s what poor people do.
- Cap your ‘stupid budget.’ A fixed, sacrificial percent for pure degen. When it’s gone, it’s gone. Don’t get upset when projects don’t work out. Some are out of the founders control, some aren’t building anything other than hype and some just aren’t right time and place. It’s OK. But make sure you don’t end up being a Karen and chasing people for the next year yelling, you just look like a desperate idiot. Set and forget.
The crowd has changed, so must your playbook
Institutions discovered on-ramps and retail is still waking up. That means the early flows don’t look like 2017 or 2021. The biggest mistake you can make is trading yesterday’s market with yesterday’s heuristics. Now this is a tough one because history is our best teacher, and until we see things changing, they have to be assumed to be the same. These cycles are getting wider and lasting longer, patterns are changing. Expect delayed FOMO, violent rotations, and narrative pivots that feel engineered because, surprise, they almost always are.
Narratives stack now
AI eats everything and memes don’t ask permission. Infra keeps quietly compounding. The winners won’t wear one badge, they’ll proudly wear three or more. If you’re allocating, think baskets, not mascots:
- Core: the things that survive winters. So platforms, L1s and L2s, DeFi, some gaming and financial applications and products, for example.
- Rotations: the narratives with undeniable momentum (AI x creator economies x gaming, infra with real usage). These will be the bangers in this run.
- Venture-sized flyers: a handful of asymmetric bets you can forget about for months. These are tough to find but its so much better when you’re not refreshing the price every 5 minutes.
Rebalance without romance, this is important. If something doubles, it just volunteered to fund your next position by selling half and keeping a free roll.
Liquidity is the real TA
Forget the big words and acronyms for a minute. Watch where the money can go, not just what a chart did. Thin liquidity books? Treat every candle like a liar, because they aren’t telling you a real story yet. New listings with gigantic FDVs and tiny supply float? Wonderful if you’re early, catastrophic if you’re late and you have huge 3BN unlocks on your doorstep or 10% unlocks around the corner in a bull. TVL that migrates? Follow it. Liquidity always leaves footprints, influencers leave stories and scars.
Governance ≠ value (until it does)
Tokens love to pretend bylaws are business models. They aren’t, unless the cash flows, burn, or rights actually route to holders. Read the docs like a beady-eyed hawk. If you can’t point to the mechanism in one sentence, “Value reaches me when this event happens”, you don’t own an asset, you own an entry ticket to a social club.
Product > press release
Real users spending real time and value on-chain is the only antidote to frothy markets. If you build, ship loops, not slide decks. Onboard in seconds, reward actions that matter, and make your first thousand users irrationally happy. If you invest, measure usage velocity, not followers. Announcements evaporate but habits pay out bigtime.
Risk isn’t what you think it is
Most people manage price risk and ignore timeline risk. The longer you hold a thing with no catalyst, the more likely you’ll sell the week before the move. Solve that in advance:
- Write your theory or argument on one page.
- Define three invalidations (market, product, traction), for example.
- Put review dates on your calendar and stick to them.
The three-bucket discipline
You can be aggressive and still be sane by splitting your stack:
- Conviction (50–70%), liquid, defensible, you’ll hold through a 30% drawdown without breaking. These are the ones you believe in and know that a move like that is covered, in time.
- Rotational (20–40%), active trades based on dominance shifts and narrative flows that keep you informed and researching.
- Degen (≤10%), permission to be an idiot on purpose and to so many of us, that comes very easily. Hard cap and absolutely no exceptions.
Everything you buy must know which bucket it lives in before you click buy. If you don’t understand this then you won’t be able to make money.
Rotation triggers to watch (without pretending you’re a prophet). Those who appear to have crystal balls are just well researched and have bigger balls.
- BTC Dominance breaking down through key zones, namely the 60% mark, which we have talked to death.
- ETH/BTC strength on weekly closes (risk appetite goes up), at the time of writing its 0.04 and it’s always been 0.058 at the start of a full blown alt season.
- Stablecoin dominance falling as sidelined cash takes risk. Many of us keep powder on the sidelines, watch the powder as they are the power moves.
- Funding + OI spikes slapping you in the face (chill Winston, take a breather).
- Liquidity migration across chains/protocols (go where the water is flowing).
You don’t need to call tops because you won’t be able to, you need to survive them.
Most people won’t make it
They’ll find a cult, marry a ticker, leverage the wedding, and hold the bag through the reception only to become stalkers for the next 2 years, yelling at themselves and others. Don’t be most people. Be the boring operator with a boring plan who quietly stacks and yields while everyone else cosplays wolf-of-every-street.
What to do this week (yes, start this week, because we are running out of weeks)
- Audit every position: write the one-sentence value pathway or hit the eject button.
- Move idle size off exchanges: Prove, today, you can withdraw it, because tomorrow torches in this space.
- Pre-commit: take-profit brackets when things start to really run.
- Pick one narrative basket: and one builder you’d be proud to hold through a storm. One that you think is in the right place at the right time and try and get them before the noise and before they get some FOMO injections.
- Set your max drawdown per day: and walk away when you hit it, you can’t live life with rear-view mirrors. You’ll end up angry and pulling on pantlegs, driving only yourself insane in the process.
This is the last cycle that will feel like this, raw, chaotic, almost unfair in both directions. You don’t need perfect timing but you do need rules, discipline, and the ability to shut the screen when your plan says so.
Alt season doesn’t care how badly you want it. It only rewards people who behave like they’ve been here before.
Learn to listen to what adds value, block and ignore things that don’t, and make sure you have conviction in your actions and your trades. Don’t be swayed, don’t be shaken out, and for the love of god, set your targets or you will be left holding the bag and you will then have to start up alt accounts to display your anger for years, like a total nut-job.
Now go make money.
*This is not financial advice, its just common sense, according to a random guy on the internet.*
The Final Rotation: How Not to Donate Your Stack This Cycle was originally published in The Capital on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.