CryptoQuant data tracked by analyst Darkfost shows 38.8% of altcoins are currently trading near their all-time lows, surpassing the 37.8% reading recorded immediately after the FTX collapse and marking the worst altcoin regression of the current cycle.
The prior reference points make the current reading land harder than the percentage alone suggests.
After FTX imploded in November 2022, one of the most destructive single events in crypto market history, 37.8% of altcoins were near their all-time lows. Bitcoin was trading near $16,000. The ecosystem was in genuine crisis. Contagion was spreading through counterparties, lenders were collapsing, and retail sentiment had reached multi-year lows.
The current reading is 38.8%. Bitcoin is at $65,700. We’re not in an FTX scenario. There’s no exchange collapse, no lending contagion, no systemic failure driving this. The altcoin damage is being done by sustained capital withdrawal, liquidity routing toward equities and commodities, and the simple math of assets that ran too far in 2024 and 2025 now giving most of it back.
That’s actually a different kind of damage. FTX was an acute shock. This is slow bleed. And somehow the slow bleed has produced worse altcoin all-time low proximity than the acute shock did.
The CryptoQuant percentage altcoins near ATL chart covers September 2022 through early March 2026 and uses a color-coded background to indicate severity levels. The pink metric line drops lower as the percentage of altcoins near ATLs increases, since the axis is inverted with 0% at the top and 40% at the bottom.
The chart shows three visible spikes toward the lower range, each corresponding to a period of significant market stress. The first is around late 2022 into early 2023, the FTX aftermath period. The second is April 2025 when the metric reached 35% during a correction phase. The third is the current spike, the deepest of the three, pressing past the 38% mark that the earlier events reached and continuing lower toward 38.8%.
Bitcoin’s price line, shown in white, sits near $66,000 at the current reading. It was near $16,000 during the 2022 spike and near $75,000 to $80,000 during the April 2025 event. A higher Bitcoin price has not protected altcoins. If anything, Bitcoin’s relative resilience has concentrated capital away from the altcoin category rather than lifting it.
Darkfost identifies the mechanism clearly. Liquidity in the market remains fragile and is being directed toward equities and commodities where volatility is creating trading opportunities. Retail and institutional capital that was parked in altcoins during the 2024 to 2025 bull run has rotated out, and it hasn’t rotated back.
The Wintermute and JPMorgan retail flow data covered earlier this week showed exactly this dynamic: retail flowing out of altcoins and into equities. The 38.8% altcoin ATL proximity reading is what that capital rotation looks like on-chain when measured across the full altcoin universe.
38.8% of altcoins near all-time lows also means 61.2% are not. That’s not a bullish statement. It’s a structural observation.
The altcoin universe contains hundreds of projects at various stages of depreciation. Those currently near ATLs are, by definition, trading at or near the lowest prices they’ve ever seen. That creates a category of assets where the downside from current levels, in percentage terms, is more limited than the downside from assets still trading significantly above their historical floors.
Whether that matters depends on which altcoins are near ATLs and why. An asset near its ATL because the project has fundamentally failed is different from an asset near its ATL because macro conditions rotated capital elsewhere. Darkfost’s observation that conditions this deteriorated historically precede emerging opportunities is directionally correct. It doesn’t specify which assets or when.
