Key Takeaways
The ‘Uptober’ effect. Why October has historically delivered outsized gains for crypto markets.
Why 2025 is a key year in this narrative when we look at the seasonality trend.
Chart of the week: Bitcoin dominance – why capital may be about to flow back to the king.
October occupies a strange place in crypto market lore. If you’ve never heard of this, take a few minutes to search ‘Uptober’ on your favourite social media platform and you’ll quickly see what I’m talking about. It’s cult like.
To save you some time, the market often expects the performance of Bitcoin and altcoins between October and the end of the year to be bullish.
In this week’s Squawk, we’ll spend some time deep diving into why October is such a revered month for the crypto world, and figure out what the possibilities are heading into the final chapter of an exhausting year for markets.
Let’s dig in.
Historical Trends
Let’s take a look at historical price performance. Below I’ve curated a table of three major cryptocurrencies by market cap.
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Right away the trend doesn’t make sense right? It’s not always a sure thing that the markets have seen huge upside in past Octobers. We’ve got plenty of red months in the mix.
But this is the kicker. There is particular focus in this narrative of Q4 being a bumper period for crypto in post-halving years. So that would be in years 2013, 2017, 2021 and – that’s right, 2025.
Now with additional context to look at the data, during these post-halving years we can see that Bitcoin has seen a +47.6% average move in October. Not bad at all. However, for the likes of Ethereum and XRP, the trend is still muted. So really, based on this data, Uptober is more of a Bitcoin thing.
So, let’s tie that into the bigger picture. If we do see a potential rotation into Bitcoin being the next real move for the market, what would that look like on a chart?
Chart of the week: Bitcoin dominance – why capital may be about to flow back to the king
Bitcoin dominance describes the amount of market capital currently parked in Bitcoin vs. the entire rest of the market. When this chart trend lower, that best describes visually when capital is flowing into assets other than Bitcoin. These are periods where altcoins outperform. And the opposite is true when it goes higher.
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Right now, Bitcoin dominance is sitting much closer to its year-to-date lows than the highs we saw back in June. If we frame the chart between those recent highs and lows, it suggests dominance is consolidating in a range.
This leaves us with a key question:
Does Bitcoin reclaim share from alts?
Or do we see Dominance fall another leg lower, setting the stage for an altcoin rotation into the end of the year?
These two scenarios describe a base case of how we could see fresh all-time highs for Bitcoin in 2025. This is of course barring any political headwinds, something unexpected. This is also a timely point to remind everyone that the US government is still in shutdown. One thing we’ve learnt in 2025 is to expect the unexpected when politics turn to negotiations.
So for that reason, lets finish round out another scenario we should all be considering, where Bitcoin dominance can also move higher on a potential sell off or de-risking event.
An interesting few weeks ahead!
 Swyftx Flows
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The buy-to-sell ratio for unique Swyftx orders is nominally >$20,000 AUD (rolling data over the last 7 days, captured at 09:00 am AEST).