For years and years, the promise of investing in altcoins has been pretty straightforward: accept additional risk in exchange for returns that Bitcoin can no longer deliver as the market leader. That’s the theoretical part, at least. In reality, though, identifying the handful of alts that can actually outperform BTC over a longer timeframe remains remarkably difficult.
Fresh data from Glassnode illustrates the issue: only 9 of the 50 largest alts at the time of BTC’s peak last October have since generated returns better than bitcoin’s.
9 Out of 50
The winner is quite obvious: Zcash (ZEC). The privacy token stands comfortably at the top, delivering almost 14.5 times BTC’s return over the period. HYPE, which is second in line, stands far behind with gains of around 2.9x. XMR and NEAR have produced increases of 2.6x and 2.1x, respectively, compared to BTC. UNI, TRX, LEO, and TAO were also among the outperformers.
That means that 41 of the original top 50 were unable to beat simply holding the largest cryptocurrency. It’s worth noting that even though they underperformed against BTC, it doesn’t mean that they lost money in USD terms. The comparison instead illustrates the opportunity cost of moving capital away from bitcoin in search of larger gains from the more risk-on altcoins.
It also exposes one of the greatest difficulties with the familiar “altseason” narrative. Knowing that some (maybe just a few) alts could outperform is very different from pinpointing which ones beforehand.
Only 9 of the top 50 altcoins have beaten bitcoin:native since its all-time high.
ZEC leads by a wide margin, up 14x against Bitcoin.
HYPE, XMR and NEAR follow at 2–3x. pic.twitter.com/HDAbtE4XRW
— glassnode (@glassnode) September 24, 2026
Is This Starting to Change?
Glassnode’s latest deeper market data suggests that altcoins have recently begun putting up a much stronger fight. Over the past week, more than 72% of those tracked by the monitoring resource outperformed BTC, compared with a peak of just 39 during the breakout rally in August. Glassnode also found little evidence that the latest move was being powered by excessive derivatives leverage, with altcoin perpetual open interest barely increasing over the past month.
This change has even pushed Glassnode’s Altcoin Cycle Signal into altcoin-season territory. However, the broader scale is still different. Glassnode said earlier this month that alts had risen substantially in dollar terms without taking meaningful market share from bitcoin. The 90-day change in altcoin share remained negative at -0.9%, despite their combined market cap jumping 21% over the preceding month.
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