TLDR:

• • Altcoin sell pressure on CEX spot markets has reached its highest extreme in over five years of data.
    
  • Cumulative buy and sell volume for altcoins has trended negative for 13 consecutive months without relief.
    
  • No institutional accumulation patterns are visible in current altcoin spot flow data across exchanges.
  • Capital appears to be rotating into Bitcoin or cash, leaving altcoin order books thin and highly vulnerable.

Altcoin sell pressure has reached a five-year extreme, according to recent on-chain and exchange flow data. 

For over 13 consecutive months, altcoins excluding Bitcoin and Ethereum have recorded net selling on centralized exchange spot markets. 

Analysts warn this is not a routine correction. The data points to a structural shift in how capital is moving across the crypto market, raising serious questions about the timeline for any altcoin recovery.

Cumulative Sell Volume Signals No Signs of Absorption

The cumulative buy and sell volume difference for altcoins has collapsed to levels last seen five years ago. 

This metric, which tracks net buying versus selling activity on spot markets, has moved in one direction throughout the period. 

There has been no meaningful flattening or stabilization in the data. Bounces have been consistently sold into, and breakout attempts have lacked any real follow-through from buyers.

Market analyst account Our Crypto Talk flagged the chart on X noting that even the 2022 bear market did not produce this kind of sustained one-sided pressure. The account wrote that sellers are “overwhelming buyers month after month” with no base forming. 

That context makes the current situation historically unusual, not just uncomfortable for bag holders. The absence of any accumulation curve is what separates this period from prior downturns.

Tokens such as LINK, KAS, ONDO, RENDER, TAO, SUI, and SEI have all lost substantial value from their cycle highs. 

Holders of these assets are down significantly, with some tokens trading more than 90% below peak prices. 

A kind of drawdown, sustained over more than a year, reflects broader structural selling rather than temporary volatility. It also suggests that retail participants have largely stepped back from active buying.

Order books across major altcoins have thinned considerably during this period. Liquidity has dried up, making price movements more volatile in both directions. However, the net effect remains persistently negative. Until measurable buying pressure returns, each rally attempt remains vulnerable to selling.

Capital Rotation Away From Altcoins Raises Questions on Altseason Timing

Capital currently appears to be rotating toward Bitcoin, cash positions, or assets outside the crypto market entirely. No observable data suggests quiet institutional accumulation in altcoin spot markets at this time. 

When serious capital enters a market, volume patterns shift, and cumulative flows stabilize. That pattern is absent here.

Our Crypto Talk stated directly that “the idea that alts will randomly explode any day now without flow confirmation is just hope.” That framing reflects what the flow data currently shows. 

Watching cumulative delta and waiting for absorption is the approach the data supports. Premature calls for altseason are not grounded in the present market structure.

Risk management during a confirmed distribution phase looks different from positioning during accumulation. Traders anchored to previous cycle highs may be misreading current conditions. 

The data, not sentiment, should guide positioning decisions right now. Until flows reverse, the distribution narrative remains the one the market is telling.

WLFI, the token tied to Trump-affiliated World Liberty Financial, rose roughly 10% after a $3.5 trillion asset servicer said it would test the firm’s USD1 stablecoin as a settlement rail for tokenized funds.

WLFI’s uptick during the Asia morning hours was higher than bitcoin or ether, which were both down 0.5%, according to CoinDesk market data.

The rally comes as speakers at the World Liberty Financial forum at Mar-a-Lago on Wednesday pitched stablecoins as central to U.S. financial leadership.

“The reality is the entire financial system is going to look very different in the next five years than it has looked in the last 50 years,” Senator Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio) said during the event. “This will happen somewhere. We’re going to see a massive amount of innovation in financial services. The question is, will it happen in America or somewhere else?”

Sen. Moreno emphasized that lawmakers must “get this market structure bill across the finish line in the next 90 days,” arguing that clear rules for digital assets are critical if the U.S. wants to lead the next phase of financial innovation rather than cede it overseas.

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong also spoke about the importance of the market structure bill at the event and said banking trade groups – not individual banks themselves – are responsible for the stalled progress.

World Liberty Financial co-founder Zak Folkman framed USD1 as more than a retail stablecoin, describing it as “an institutional-grade dollar” designed for real-world settlement and cross-border use.

“This is what we did when we wanted to build an institutional-grade dollar,” Folkman said, adding that the token will feature “real-time proof of reserves, powered by Chainlink,” allowing users to verify backing on-chain.

Earlier in February at Consensus in Hong Kong, Folkman teased an upcoming World Liberty Forex platform.

On Wednesday, Folkman positioned USD1 as a bridge for global payments, saying the project would begin with the U.S.-Mexico corridor before expanding to support up to 40 currencies. “This is USD1 as a settlement bridge,” he said.

Looking ahead, Folkman tied the stablecoin’s use case to artificial intelligence-driven commerce.

“We’re entering a world where AI agents will need to transact autonomously,” he said. “AI agents can’t open bank accounts, they can’t sign checks, but they can hold stablecoins.”

“What we’re building is a complete financial system,” Folkman added.

Privacy has been a recurring narrative in crypto for years. Just weeks after Bitcoin (BTC) launched, Hal Finney pointed out the problem in only his second tweet about it, but the concept didn’t gain wider traction until Monero (XMR) arrived in 2014. Since then, privacy has repeatedly re-emerged as a core promise of decentralised money, especially during moments of regulatory pressure or heightened concerns around financial surveillance. 

Analysts are positive that crypto’s future will continue to be defined by the privacy narrative. Investor Balaji Srinivasan argued privacy will define the industry’s following eight years; meanwhile, a16z crypto said privacy will be the industry’s most important “moat” in 2026. Indeed, privacy coins have rallied at the end of 2025 and continue to fluctuate into the start of the new year. At their peak, the sector reached a combined market capitalisation surpassing $40 billion, before falling back to roughly $17 billion. 

Zcash (ZEC) was a key driver of that resurgence, rising by more than 1,300% from late September 2025 to its all-time high and remaining up over 600% at current prices, briefly overtaking Monero by total market volume. Yet despite renewed interest and price momentum, actual privacy usage remains strikingly low. Zcash’s shielded pool continues to hold just above 30% of the circulating supply, while roughly two-thirds of transactions remain fully visible on-chain.

This disconnect exposes a deeper issue. If interest in privacy is rising, why are users not migrating into the very privacy layers designed for that purpose? The answer could just be structural: opt-in privacy is failing crypto.

Opt-in privacy was a design compromise 

In 2013, the pseudonym Nicolas van Saberhagen published the CryptoNote v2 paper, which explicitly framed transaction privacy not as a “nice to have,” but as a core requirement of electronic cash. This paper argued that Bitcoin’s transparency made it pseudo-anonymous at best, and outlined two properties a truly private payment system should satisfy: untraceability and unlinkability.  Andrey Sabelnikov, now co-founder of Zano, worked alongside Nicolas to bring this vision to life, implementing the protocol he had designed. From the start, CryptoNote made privacy the default, baked into every transaction rather than offered as an afterthought.

But as the industry evolved, many projects lost sight of this principle. Rather than pushing the boundaries of privacy-preserving technology, they took the path of least resistance, prioritizing compatibility, performance, and mainstream appeal over user protection. Privacy-preserving cryptography was still expensive and unfamiliar, so newer designs retreated to opt-in models.

This compromise had serious consequences. Privacy became a feature to be toggled on rather than a baseline guarantee. Users who chose the private option effectively marked themselves as having something to hide, while the default transparent experience left the majority exposed. This trade-off may have seemed pragmatic at the time, but it fundamentally betrayed the original vision that CryptoNote had established: that true electronic cash must protect user privacy by design and wasn’t something to bolt on later; it had to be designed into the core transaction model itself.

The biggest network carrying the original default-privacy philosophy is Monero. Launched in 2014, it adopted the CryptoNote protocol, preserving the principles that Nicolas and Andrey had already established. Instead of asking users to choose between public and private modes, the design assumes that financial transactions should be private by default, and that privacy improves when everyone shares the same protections.

Through this philosophy, privacy does not just become a feature, but a network effect. A privacy system is only as strong as the crowd it can hide in. When privacy is optional, the network fractures into transparent and private activity. The private pool becomes smaller, the anonymity set shrinks, and the privacy model weakens in practice, regardless of how sophisticated the cryptography may be.

The Zcash paradox 

Zcash illustrates the central contradiction facing much of today’s privacy ecosystem. On paper, it offers some of the most advanced privacy technology in crypto, including zero-knowledge proofs that can fully shield transaction details. In practice, however, the majority of network activity remains transparent.

Despite renewed market interest and strong price performance, Zcash’s shielded pool continues to hold just above 30% of the circulating supply, while roughly two-thirds of transactions remain fully visible on-chain. The technology exists. The privacy guarantees are real. Yet most users do not use them.

This gap is not a failure of cryptography, nor a lack of demand for privacy. It is the predictable outcome of opt-in design. When privacy is presented as a separate mode, something users must consciously enable, it introduces friction, uncertainty, and behavioural drop-off. Many users default to transparent transactions simply because they are easier, faster, or more familiar. Others may be unaware of the distinction altogether.

The consequence is a fragmented network. Public and private transactions coexist, but they do not reinforce one another. Instead, the private pool remains small, limiting the size of the anonymity set and weakening privacy guarantees for those who do opt in. Ironically, using privacy in an opt-in system can make a user more conspicuous rather than less.

Privacy can only work when it is the default

Privacy is not a behaviour users reliably opt into. It functions as a collective property. The more participants who share the same privacy guarantees, the stronger those guarantees become. When privacy is optional, networks fracture into public and private activity, shrinking anonymity sets and weakening protection for those who do opt in. In practice, optional privacy often makes users more conspicuous, not less.

The repeated cycles of privacy coin interest show that demand is not the problem; design is. Systems that rely on users to actively choose privacy struggle to translate narrative momentum into real adoption. If privacy is to become crypto’s defining moat, it must be treated as foundational infrastructure, not a feature toggle. Financial privacy works best when it is automatic, universal, and secure by default.

Bitcoin (BTC) trades in a tight $65,000–$70,000 range on Wednesday, a structure that has held for the past two weeks.

The lower time frames show a bullish divergence, signaling fading short-term selling pressure, while futures data indicate fresh long positions opened from $66,000.

Analysts say the compression may precede a breakout attempt, with liquidity clusters below $66,000 and above $71,000 being the zones that may define the next directional move.

Bitcoin’s bullish divergence rests near a support level

On the one-hour chart, Bitcoin is forming a descending channel similar to last week’s structure that preceded a move toward $70,000. Within this channel, a clear bullish divergence has developed in the relative strength index indicator (RSI).

A bullish divergence occurs when the price makes lower lows or equal lows while the RSI prints higher lows. This sequence suggests that selling pressure is losing strength on the shorter time frame.

A sustained break above $68,000 may confirm momentum, leading to a price rally toward the external liquidity and resistance level above $71,500. 

The invalidation level sits below $66,000, where internal liquidity is present near the $65,000. A breakdown beneath that region invalidates the divergence setup and shifts focus to the higher-time-frame support range between $62,000 and $60,000.

Derivatives data shows aggregated open interest has climbed 3% to $15.50 billion from $15.10 billion over the past two days, even as the price drifted lower.

The aggregated funding rate has ticked higher to 0.046%, suggesting a growing long exposure from futures traders. 

Since Feb. 15, roughly $250 million in aggregated long liquidations have occurred, forcing leveraged positions to close below $67,000. These long-side sell-offs reduce excess leverage, which may stabilize price and create better conditions for an uptrend once traders re-engage in the market. 

Related: Bitcoin’s tech stock divergence is a ‘fire alarm’ for fiat: Arthur Hayes

Futures momentum and macro positioning

Crypto analyst Amr Taha noted a sharp drop in Binance Bitcoin futures power 30-day change, which tracks the net change in price, funding, and open interest. The index fell to -0.18, matching levels last seen between April and May 2024.

Taha said that this may mark a turning point for BTC, as similar deep negative readings between April and May 2024 led to a strong rebound that pushed Bitcoin above the $100,000 level, once the index turned positive in the latter half of 2024. 

Meanwhile, crypto analyst Dom said that the spot order books show thin liquidity between $66,000 and $69,000, describing the current activity as neutral, with BTC’s price compressing ahead of a breakout attempt. 

Liquidity heatmaps shared by BTC trader Daan show dense liquidity clusters below $66,000 and above $71,000, pointing to areas where stop orders and resting positions are likely concentrated.

Related: Bitcoin 2024 buyers steady BTC price as trader sees $52K ‘next week or so’