By Sebastian Higgs, Co-Founder & COO, Cordial Systems
Over the past decade, the crypto market has grown into a diverse ecosystem where traders and institutions balance Bitcoin, altcoins, stablecoins, and emerging assets in real time. Every few years, narratives shift and capital rotates across the crypto spectrum. As Coinbase and others call for an alt season in the second half of 2025, trading firms face a dual challenge: anticipating whether the market will rally and ensuring they are operationally ready to capture the opportunity.
In this piece, I’ll share a perspective on market signals for alt season, highlight the standout launches of 2025, look at the next wave of projects, and explain how Cordial Treasury gives trading firms the operational edge they need to execute at scale.
The Macro Picture: Reading the Signals
When traders talk about “alt season,” they are really talking about capital rotation. Bitcoin dominance has long been the key barometer, with drops in BTC’s share of total market cap serving as an early warning sign that liquidity is rotating into higher-risk assets.
As of August 2025, Bitcoin dominance sits at 59%, down from 65% in May. That’s not yet confirmation of an altcoin rally, but it’s a notable shift. At the same time, Ethereum is up 15% over the past month while Bitcoin has softened, consistent with past cycles where ETH led the charge before broader alts followed.
Meanwhile, Bitcoin itself just printed a new all-time high around $124,000. This move reflects broader macro conditions as much as crypto-specific ones. When central banks, particularly the Federal Reserve, adopt monetary easing measures which leads to more liquidity in the financial system, risk assets such as equities and Bitcoin tend to rise as well. Historically, Bitcoin has been the first to rise with altcoins following in its shadow, but in sustained rallies altcoins eventually take center stage.
And then there’s the stablecoin supply. According to DefiLlama, USDT and USDC are both up meaningfully in circulation, 2.4% and 5.8% respectively in the last 30 days. For all the talk of cross-border settlements and corporate treasury usage, the reality remains that over 90% of stablecoin activity still fuels crypto trading. More stablecoins in circulation usually translates to more dry powder for trading.
All of these signals add up to a simple takeaway: the setup for alt season is building.
Winners and Bright Spots in 2025
This year, a few standout launches have already caught traders’ attention by outperforming Bitcoin and ETH on a relative basis.
- Hyperlane (HYPER) – an interoperability and messaging protocol, launched April 22, 2025, with a public IDO price of $0.03. Today it trades at $0.32, a 10x return.
- Zora (ZORA) – a creator economy and social protocol, launched April 23, 2025, at $0.03 and now trades at $0.10, a 3.3x gain.
Why the surge? For Zora, a Base/Optimism-driven “creator coin” rally and rapid exchange listings fueled momentum. Hyperlane’s success was tied to the interoperability narrative, incentivized staking mechanics, and an active airdrop strategy.
By contrast, several high-profile 2024 launches like Berachain (BERA), Story Protocol (IP), and LayerZero (ZRO) saw profitable trading windows early on but have underperformed Bitcoin this year. At Cordial Treasury, we supported many of these launches early, a proof point that having the infrastructure in place matters even when token price trajectories diverge.
Q4 Altcoin Launches to Watch
The most exciting launches of 2025 are still ahead, and two projects in particular stand out from our vantage point:
- Monad: An EVM-compatible blockchain pushing 10,000 TPS with optimistic parallel execution. It decouples execution and consensus layers, a design much discussed in academic and research circles. Already over 100 projects are building across DeFi, wallets, gaming, and oracles on testnet. With strong institutional backers, Monad’s mainnet launch later this year will be closely watched by traders.
- FogoChain: Built on Solana’s SVM with the Firedancer validator client, FogoChain is showing block times as fast as 40 milliseconds and throughput over 48,000 TPS. The implications for on-chain trading, derivatives, and AI-driven strategies are massive. High-frequency trading firms are already circling this one.
Both of these L1s are actively supported by Cordial Treasury today in testnet, and we’ll be ready for mainnet from day one.
Cordial Treasury: An MPC Wallet Built for Alt Season Readiness
If there’s one lesson from every alt season, it’s that operational readiness determines trading success. Traders can’t afford to wait weeks for wallet providers to add support for new chains, or to manually patch together fragmented custody and connectivity solutions.
That’s where Cordial Treasury stands apart.
Fastest Chain Support in the Industry
We already support 60+ L1s out of the box, including many poorly supported elsewhere (APTOS, SUI, TAO, ES, HYPE). And when clients need a new chain, we deliver it in under two weeks on average—sometimes within 24 hours. We even open-sourced our chain library so developers can add what they need without waiting on us.
This is why firms like Jump Trading Group, Backpack, and SwissBorg rely on Cordial Treasury to keep pace with their front office.
Seamless Exchange Connectivity
Most new coins launch on exchanges like Binance, MEXC, Bybit, Huobi, and Gate. Cordial Treasury is already integrated with many of these venues, with more on the way. That means you can not only custody and stake new assets but also automate funding strategies and run rebalancing scripts directly from our control framework.
Scale for Institutional Volume
Some of our clients move billions of dollars on-chain and perform 500,000+ transactions per month. Cordial Treasury’s policy engine scales with this volume—our infrastructure has supported clients hitting our MPC signer 200 times per minute.
Whether you’re a market maker, OTC desk, hedge fund, or institutional investor, Cordial Treasury provides the operational backbone for alt season strategies:
- Making markets in newly launched coins
- Managing exotic OTC flow
- Trading fundamental launch events
- Holding and staking tokens post-TGE
- Supporting client-driven trading flow across exotic assets
The Road to Q4: Readiness as a Competitive Edge
Alt season may or may not play out exactly like past cycles. Some argue that the days of massive retail-driven rallies are behind us. But whether the rally is broad-based or selective, the operational demands are real: supporting dozens of blockchains, integrating with multiple exchanges, and scaling with client and counterparty flow.
That’s why we built Cordial Treasury to be the only MPC custody platform that keeps up with the front office.
As we enter Q4 2025, ask yourself: is your firm operationally ready for alt season? If not, we’d love to show you how others are using Cordial to stay ahead. Schedule a demo today.
