What happened
CoinTelegraph Magazine published a piece on Monday, September 28, arguing that altseason conditions are building and that traders this cycle are behaving differently than in 2021. The report, flagged as high-importance by our editorial desk and marked bullish in tone, points to capital concentrating in protocols that generate real revenue rather than sweeping every low-cap ticker on the board.
That is the story: not a price event, but a composition-of-flows story. The publisher framed the rotation as selective, cutting across several narratives at once - a description that matters because it hints at fundamentals, not just liquidity, doing the sorting. CoinTelegraph did not attach a single catalyst, and no specific altcoin was named as the tell.
The piece read as a synthesis of trader behavior over recent weeks.
Why it matters
Altseason talk has been a recurring feature of every cycle, and most calls fail because they describe the destination without the mechanism. This one at least gestures at the mechanism: revenue-generating protocols pulling flow. If that holds, it separates the current setup from the 2021 pattern, where narrative and float mechanics did most of the work and fundamentals were an afterthought.
The implication for allocators is uncomfortable. A discriminating altseason means the tide does not lift every boat, and the tickers that led the last cycle are not guaranteed to lead this one. Cryptomat's read: treat the CoinTelegraph piece as a hypothesis about flow composition, not a price forecast.
The claim is testable within weeks by looking at DEX volume share, protocol fee accrual, and where stablecoins are actually settling.