2021 Altcoins: Why Most Haven't Returned to Their Old Highs

A lot of people are still holding alt coins they bought in the last bull run, waiting for one more alt season to get them back [music] to break even. Every time the market bounces, you check your portfolio and your coins are still nowhere near what you paid. And you're not alone. Of the biggest 100 coins in crypto in 2021, only 41 are still in the top 100 today. 13 of them are as good as dead, but a few old coins did get back to their records this cycle, and they all had one thing in common [music] that most alt coins didn't.

Some holders have even tried to force a comeback. On one of the biggest coins from 2021, they voted to stop printing new [music] coins for good, and the vote passed easily, and the coin is still about 98%below [music] its record. And for a lot of other alt coins, even if every dollar from their best day came back, the price still wouldn't get back to the old high, and there's a simple reason for that. And once you see it, you'll look at all the coins you hold differently. So, we went through what actually stops an alt coin from coming back, and what the few that made it had going So, by the end of this video, you'll know which [music] side your coins sit on.

Let's run it. All right, bull runners, welcome back to the channel. Now, the simplest reason an alt coin can't get back to its old price is how many coins there are right now. A coin's price is just its total value split across every coin that's out there in circulation. So, say a coin is worth $10 billion and there's 1 billion coins.

Each one is worth $10. Now, double the coins and keep the value at $10 million and each one is worth $5. Nothing broke. The same money just got spread across twice as many coins in circulation. And you can see this really clearly with Polkadot.

Back in November of 2021, when it hit its record of about $55, there were about 1.05 billion DOT out. Now, there are about 1.71 billion. So, if every dollar that was in Polkadot on its best day came back, DOT would only be around $33. So, even in the best case, with all of that money back, Polkadot would still be about 40%below its old high because of how much is in circulation. And that's the vote I mentioned at the start.

In September 2025, Polkadot's holders voted to cap the supply at 2.1 billion DOT, and 81% said yes. Before that, it was creating 120 million new DOT every year with no limit at all. So, the cap stops the printing from here on. What it can't do is take back the coins that are already out there in circulation. And at the time I'm recording this video, DOT is still about 98%below its record.

So, for a Polkadot holder, here's what that means. No new coins will pile on from here, and that definitely helps. But to get back to $55, DOT would still need enough money to cover every extra coin that came out since 2021. Now, Chainlink is the same story. There are almost twice as many LINK out now as its record back in May of 2021.

So, even with all of that money back, LINK would be around $29 against a record of about $53. And the newer coins are built this way on purpose. Binance Research looked at the coins that launched back in 2024, and some of them started with as little as 6%of their coins out. The rest stays locked for the team and early investors, and unlocks bit by bit. And across the market, that's about 155 billion dollars of coins unlocking between 2024 and 2030.

And when those coins unlock, the price usually feels it. Keyrock, a crypto trading firm, went through more than 16,000 unlocks and found that 90% of them pushed the price down. Now, Arthur Hayes, who co-founded BitMEX, one of the biggest crypto exchanges, he's been blunt about who those locked up coins end up getting sold to. Listen to this.

You need 10,000 or 100,000 people who feel like they got a deal that they believe in this protocol because it does something that's useful to them, and they financially can succeed as you succeed. Whereas now, it's hey, come use my product. You can't invest in this token until I dump it on you at the TGE at some ridiculous low float high FDV nonsense. And then the VCs have to dump on you because again, they have to do their fiduciary duty to their LPs to earn a return on the capital they've been given to invest. They're not doing anything wrong.

This is just a function of the capital formation process. And so then why is the retail person is not excited? So with any old coin you hold, it's worth knowing how much of it is still locked up and when it unlocks. If a big chunk is still coming, that's selling that you can see on the calendar. But more coins only sink the price if nobody new shows up to buy them.

And for some of the biggest coins of 2021, the buyers are exactly what disappeared. The clearest example of that is a game called Axie Infinity. Back in 2021, it was the game that everybody in crypto was talking about. People were playing it to earn crypto. And on August 6th that year, it brought in $17.5 million in a single day.

Over the last 30 days, it brought in about $132,000. So, one day in 2021 made more than 130 times what the game makes in an entire month right now. So think about that. Back then, Axie Infinity made more in about 11 minutes than it makes in a whole month today. So, AXS went down with it.

It peaked at about $165. At the time I'm recording this video, it's around $1. So if you put $1,000 into Axie Infinity near the top, it's worth about $6 today. The players just stopped coming and nothing else had to go wrong there. And for a coin, that's what matters most.

When people use a network, they usually need its coin to do it. Whether that's paying a fee or playing a game. That's buying that happens every single day, whatever the market is doing. When the users leave, that buying stops and the only people left are the holders deciding whether to sell or hold. That's the part most people miss when they look at a chart.

So, the users leave first and the price is the last thing to move. Now, the same thing happened to Sandbox, one of the biggest metaverse coins back then. In 2025, more than half of its 250 staff were laid off. And at the time I'm recording, SAND is down more than 99% from its peak of about $8.40. And it wasn't only the games, NFT trading, the digital collectibles a lot of these coins were built around hit $57.2 billion in 2022.

And by 2024, it was down to about 13.7 billion. That's about 75%of the trading gone from the thing these coins were made for. And the money that built these games pulled back, too. Investors put over $1.8 billion into blockchain gaming back in 2024. In the first 9 months of 2025, it was $293 million.

And if you bought one of these, it's easy to feel like you did something stupid, but you didn't. You bought a coin people were actually using. The people just moved on. And nobody on social media sends you a message when it happens. So, if you hold a coin like that, keep an eye on how many people are actually using it.

That number usually drops long before the price does. And most of them didn't leave crypto, they just went to whatever the next big story or the narrative was. On one day in November 2021, Axie Infinity, Decentraland, The Sandbox, and Gala Games were worth about $27 billion together. Now, they're worth about $600 million. That's about $26 billion dollars that went somewhere else.

And most of it never came back to them. So, in crypto, money follows a story. In 2021, it was gaming, NFT, and metaverse. In 2024, it was AI coins and meme coins. And every time a new story takes off, a lot of the money rushing into it comes out of the last one.

So, if you bought the 2021 story near the top, you were buying right before the money moved on to the next one. Then, in 2025, it flipped again. The biggest coins in real world assets, things like bonds and funds, moved onto blockchains, rose about 186%on average. AI coins, the hot story the year before, fell about 50%. Meme coins fell about 32%, and a lot of the money went somewhere that isn't an altcoin at all, stable coins.

The digital dollars ended 2025 at a record $311 billion. So, betting on real world events through prediction markets went from 15.8 billion in 2024 to 63.5 billion in 2025. And one of the people who noticed this is Mike Novogratz. He runs Galaxy Digital, one of the biggest crypto firms in the world. Here's where he thinks the people who used to buy altcoins went instead.

Listen to this.

And the other thing that's happened is we've got sports betting and same-day options. And so, and now betting on Korean stocks. Right, every young kid that used to buy Solana is buying Hynix or or some memory, you know, company. And so, a lot of the oxygen of that speculative frenzy shifted. And you just like in macro, you saw it, you know, there was a gold and silver bubble, it popped, right?

That was the top. That's what tops look like. Uh crypto had that same topping pattern.

So, the young people who used to buy altcoins now have a lot more ways to bet from their phone, like sports betting and same-day options. And every dollar that goes there is a dollar that doesn't go into your altcoin. You can see it in what happened to the 2021 top 100 altcoins. The 46 coins that fell out, but are still trading, have lost about 93%of their value. One of them is Theta.

Back then, it was worth $6.35 billion, and now it's worth about 136 million. There are a few big altcoins, too. In 2021, about 105 altcoins were worth more than $1 billion. Now, it's about 58, and the top 10 hold about 82%of all the money in altcoins. So, even when money does come back to altcoins, most of it goes to the same few names.

So, if you're holding the all coins that simply won't recover, expecting them to go up when the liquidity returns, pay attention to the rest of this video. The rallies are getting shorter as well. Wintermute is one of the big crypto trading firms, and it looked at how long all coin rallies last. In 2025, a typical one lasted about 19 days. In 2024, it was 61 days.

So, if you're waiting for all season to get you back to even, the window is a lot shorter than it used to be. That's less than 3 weeks to get out if a rally ever lifts your coin at all. Now, like I said at the start of this video, a few old coins did get back to their old highs. So, what did those coins have that most all coins didn't? Well, they beat the problem that we started with, all those extra coins.

Let's start with XRP for example. In July of 2025, it hit a new all-time high of about $3.65, and it had a lot more coins out by then. There were about 39 billion at the 2018 peak, and about 59 billion when it hit the new record. So, XRP needed far more money than last time, about 216 billion against about 132 billion in 2018, and it got there. Think about what that means.

If you've held XRP since 2018, the number of coins went up by about half, and enough new money still came in to push XRP past its old high. Although not by much, it still made it there. Now, BNB got back a different way. In October of 2025, it hit a new record above $1,280. And right around then, its network hit a record 58 million active addresses in a single month.

More people were using BNB than ever before, and BNB has fewer coins now than it did in 2021. Because every 3 months, the BNB chain destroys part of the supply for good. And in July of 2026 alone, it burned about $932 million worth. So, every time people used it more, there were a fewer coins to share that demand. So, that's what the coins that come back had in common.

The money coming in grew faster than the number of coins. For BNB, the coins actually shrank. For XRP, there were more coins, but even more money came in to cover them. Now, getting back to a record once doesn't mean it sticks. At the time I'm recording this video, XRP is about 64%below that record, and BNB is more than 40%below its high.

So, even the coins that made it back can slip again if the money and the users stop coming. So, will your altcoin get back to its old high? Well, some can, and you could check yours against three things. First, are new coins coming out faster than the new money coming in? Look at how many coins are out now compared to the old high, and how many are still locked up.

Second, are people actually using it? If the users have moved on, the daily buying has gone with them. And third, is the market still chasing that story or that narrative? When the money moves to the next one, it rarely comes back to the last. If a coin is missing all three, waiting for alt season is all it has left.

If it passes all three, it's built more like the coins that made it back. The hard part is running those checks honestly on coins that you own without your emotions involved. You see, the price you paid can keep you in a coin long after the reasons to hold it are gone because you want to get back to a break even or profit. The old high is the number you remember. So, every time the price drops, the coin looks cheaper and a better entry, and you hold on a little bit longer.

And somewhere along the way, you stop checking how many coins are still coming out in circulation or whether anyone's still using it. And that's a lot easier with someone who doesn't remember what you paid. You see, on a call with an expert on my team, my team goes through every coin you hold one check at a time. They look at how many new coins are still coming in, whether people are actually using it, and whether money is still chasing its story or narrative. Then, we work with you to sort out which of your coins are still worth holding.

So, if you want a second set of eyes on your portfolio, you don't reveal your private keys, you keep full custody of your crypto, we're not managing your funds. We just show you where there might be gaps in your portfolio and we give you the best strategies for the up and coming run. So, it's the first link in the description. Click it right now, the one that says get your free crypto portfolio review. If you're watching this on mobile, just tap more, it's right at the top.

Watch the short video, fill out the form, it takes less than a minute, and schedule a time to speak with an expert on my team that works best for you. That calendar fills up very quick, so do that right now. And either way, the next time the market bounces, run your coins through those three checks. That'll tell you a lot more than waiting to see if the price gets back to what you paid. So, as always, I'll see you on the next video through the link below right now.

I'll see you at the top. You know what to do. Stay bullish. [music] [music]