BTC’s 50% Drop Could Be Setting Up a 2017-Style Altcoin Rally

Comparisons are being drawn to 2017, when altcoins surged after BTC stabilized following a steep decline from its all-time high.

Bitcoin (BTC) dropped below $62,000 on June 4, with the move coinciding with the first meaningful pullback in the flagship cryptocurrency’s dominance in nearly eight months, according to analyst CrediBULL Crypto.

This has prompted several observers to revisit the possibility of an altcoin-led market phase, as the assets have shown unusual resilience during BTC’s decline, a pattern that in the past appeared near major turning points in crypto market cycles.

What the Charts Are Showing

According to CrediBULL, the largest altcoin rally of the 2017 cycle started only after Bitcoin had already fallen 50% from its peak, stabilized, and then set off on a recovery run. That’s when the altcoin market cap tripled off the lows and pushed to new all-time highs.

They believe a similar setup may be developing now with BTC trading more than 50% below the all-time high it set in October 2025, and many altcoins having avoided the type of collapse seen in past bear markets.

“Many are noticing the relative strength in alts at these levels as BTC melts but many alts hold relatively ‘steady,’ sending BTC dominance down in the first significant pullback on BTC dom that we have had in nearly 8 months,” he wrote.

In a follow-up exchange, the analyst suggested there could be a series of “mini altseasons” leading up to a larger one that would arrive after a Bitcoin blow-off top that hasn’t happened yet.

There was a similar assessment of the market earlier this week from another analyst, Sykodelic, who described it as “an exhausted market in which alts are no longer responding to weakness.” They also noted that the OTHERS.D chart had closed above its 200-day moving average, a level that helped spark outsized moves in smaller tokens in the past.

However, Daan Crypto Trades offered a more cautious read, saying that the total altcoin market cap excluding stablecoins has been range-bound for more than 2 years, and the recent strength in the category that everyone has been talking about has mostly been carried by a handful of tokens.

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“For this to properly bounce, you’d need more life out of the likes of ETH and other majors,” he stated.

Indeed, ETH just touched a 14-month low near $1,700, with others in the top 10 losing between 8% and 4% in the last 24 hours. Across seven days, only Hyperliquid’s HYPE token held up, gaining over 18% in that period while every other cryptocurrency with an 11-figure market cap and above faltered badly.

What of Bitcoin?

At the time of writing, BTC itself was down nearly 7% in one day and over 13% in the past week. It was trading at around 500 bucks below $63,000, having earlier fallen to a four-month low of about $61,000.

The move wiped out more than 270,000 leveraged traders in 24 hours, with more than $1.6 billion in total liquidations, a majority of which were long positions. And the situation is just as bad around spot Bitcoin ETFs, which have already seen $1.4 billion in outflows in the first three days of June, per data from SoSoValue.