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Bitcoin dominance doesn't just measure market share - it signals rotation. Understanding how dominance shifts precede altseason reveals the mechanical reality behind crypto market cycles.
In early crypto cycles, token emission schedules and vesting cliffs shape price more than product roadmaps. Understanding supply mechanics is the structural edge most retail traders overlook.
Crypto market cycles follow a structural logic that repeats across every bull and bear market. Understanding accumulation, markup, distribution, and markdown gives you a framework for positioning - not predicting.
Notes on markets, tempo, and optionality
A crypto cycle is the same sequence playing out under different names. Accumulation, markup, distribution, markdown - the Wyckoff phases map onto crypto with enough regularity that ignoring them is a choice. The narratives change, the leading tokens change, but the structure underneath stays recognizable because human behavior under uncertainty is consistent. The point is not to predict tops and bottoms. It is to know where in the sequence you currently stand.
What moves a cycle forward is capital, not sentiment. Money enters through Bitcoin first, and dominance rises while it absorbs the inflow. When that absorption saturates, capital rotates - into Ethereum, then large caps, then mid-caps, then the speculative tail. Falling BTC dominance is the visible output of that rotation, not its trigger. By the time the dominance chart confirms altseason, the setup has been underway for weeks, readable earlier in correlation breakdowns, funding rates, and relative performance.
This tag collects observations on how cycles behave. The four phases and what each one masks - distribution dressed up as continued strength, accumulation that nobody notices. How narratives form to justify capital that has already moved, then collapse under accumulated contradictions. Why late-cycle altseason runs on leverage and sentiment rather than fresh inflows. Why tokenomics - emission rates, vesting cliffs, float ratios - decides early-cycle price more than product utility does.
The framing is structural, not predictive. Cycles are knowable in shape and unknowable in timing. The phases are real, the rotation is real, the supply mechanics are real - the ability to time them precisely is not. These notes document where capital tends to sit, what each phase rewards and punishes, and why the pattern repeats as every new cohort meets a markup for the first time. The value is orientation, not forecast.