Capital Floods Bitcoin & Ethereum as Altcoin Rallies Fizzle—Here’s Why Momentum Can’t Hold

Bitcoin and Ethereum are vacuuming up institutional capital, leaving altcoins gasping for air. Short-lived pumps across the broader market keep hitting a wall—liquidity is concentrated, and the smart money isn't budging.

The Big Two Eat Everyone's Lunch

While Bitcoin consolidates near its highs and Ethereum's ecosystem hums with activity, capital rotation into smaller tokens looks more like a fleeting experiment than a sustained trend. Every altcoin surge gets sold into—fast. The narrative of a rising tide lifting all boats? It's looking more like two luxury yachts with a flotilla of leaky dinghies in tow.

Where Did the Altseason Go?

Traders chase the next 10x, but the rallies are getting shorter, sharper, and harder to catch. It's a classic case of risk-on, risk-off whiplash. Funds flow into speculative plays for a hot minute, then rush right back to the perceived safety of BTC and ETH at the first sign of turbulence. The market's memory has never been shorter.

Liquidity is the New Moonshot

Forget revolutionary tech or community vibes—the real bottleneck is liquidity. Without deep, stable pools of capital, even promising projects get crushed by minor sell pressure. It creates a self-fulfilling prophecy: why park money in a token that could drop 20% because one whale wakes up on the wrong side of the bed?

The result? A two-tier market that's starting to feel permanent. The crypto old guard loves to preach decentralization, but the capital flows are telling a brutally centralized story. Maybe the most traditional finance thing about crypto isn't the regulators—it's the sheer, unadulterated herd mentality.

Market liquidity shifts in crypto 2025

Liquidity came into crypto in 2025, but where did it go?

Using Wintermute’s proprietary OTC flow, our Digital asset OTC markets 2025 report shows where capital actually went and why market structure fundamentally changed

Read on for our key findings ↓ pic.twitter.com/Zw2pYRrozB

— Wintermute (@wintermute_t) January 13, 2026

Trade activity in 2025 was significantly different from that of previous years. Wintermute reported that institutional entities stayed consistently overweight in majors beginning in the second quarter of last year.

The report clarified that institutional investors traded strategically in response to headlines in 2025. For example, many institutional investors abruptly shifted into Bitcoin following Trump’s tariff statement on April 2, 2025.  The OTC market review noted that investors started the year underweight in majors and remained net sellers throughout the first quarter. 

Bitcoin liquidity and positioning reached their peak in May and June of 2025. According to BTCsats, Bitcoin’s average price was over $103,434, with highs of almost $111,970 and lows of about $93,400 in May.  In June, Bitcoin’s average price increased to almost $105,714, with intraday highs exceeding $110,500, and the month ending close to $107,135.

The Wintermute report revealed that since 2022, most retail investors have been net sellers of major cryptocurrencies, choosing instead for exposure to altcoins; that pattern broke in 2025.

The report indicated that altcoins took a different trend, while majors absorbed most of the liquidity in 2025. It showed that retail investors switched back to altcoins during the second and third quarters of last year, before reversing into the huge 10/10 deleveraging event in the hopes of an altcoin season.

According to the report, the 10/10 MOVE triggered a sharp, forced unwind across crypto markets, resulting in approximately $19 billion in liquidations over 24 hours. The widely anticipated leverage had been building unevenly in altcoins before the event. 

Wintermute further reported that overall Open Interest reached approximately $230 billion. Notably, Open Interest worth around $70 billion was concentrated outside of Bitcoin and Ethereum. 

A larger portion of the Open Interest was subsequently flushed out, with altcoin Open Interest declining by roughly 55% to around $30 billion by mid-December last year. 

Last year, the aggregate performance of altcoins declined sharply, falling to sustain any significant gains, except for brief rebounds, according to the review. Wintermute noted that the average altcoin rally lasted only around 20 days on median days, compared to about 45 to 60 days in 2024, suggesting a decrease in conviction and an increase in tactical risk-taking.

OTC Options activity accelerates in 2025

The digital asset OTC market review revealed that engagement between counterparties increased despite muted price action.  OTC trades increased dramatically, indicating a more structured approach to trading. The report showed that many investors preferred discretion and capital efficiency offered by OTC markets.

Wintermute OTC data showed that trade counts increased by approximately 2.1 times compared to the first-quarter levels of 2025. Additionally, notional value reached 3.8 times by the fourth quarter, indicating consistent expansion in both ticker frequency and size. 

The OTC data revealed that the OTC desks were in high demand, as proven by the growing number of participants involved throughout the year.

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