Memecoins Rally as Traders Bet on Fed Rate Cut and U.S. Altcoin ETFs

The memecoin sector is heating up as fresh altcoin season talks are starting to grow on social media, partly driven by expectations that the Federal Reserve will this coming week cut interest rates, a boon for risk assets.

Bitcoin’s market dominance has dropped 3.5% in the past month, and its underperformance relative to altcoins has now seen altcoin season indexes, which measure the performance of top cryptocurrencies against $BTC, enter “altseason” territory.

Altseason, short for altcoin season, refers to a period in which alternative cryptocurrencies significantly outperform bitcoin. It often starts as capital rotates out of bitcoin amid growing risk appetite.

Those include indexes from CoinMarketCap and CoinGlass. Over the last 24 hours bitcoin moved up just 0.3%, while the CoinDesk Memecoin Index (CDMEME) rose 7.1%.

Pushing up prices in the CDMEME index are some tokens like SHIB and BONE, which recently puzzlingly surged after Shiba Inu’s layer-2 network Shibarium suffered a flash loan exploit.

The growing performance of altcoins stems from growing risk appetite, as lowering interest rates makes safer investments like government bonds less appealing. This renewed risk appetite is fueling a cascading rotation of capital across markets.

Traders on prediction market Polymarket now see a 92% chance that the Federal Reserve will cut interest rates by 25 basis points this month, and a 7% chance that rate will be 50 bps. On the CME’s FedWatch tool, odds of a smaller cut are at 93%, while odds of a larger cut are at 6.6%.

Against this backdrop, a wave of altcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) is in line to hit U.S. markets in the last quarter of the year if these are approved. These even include a DOGE ETF and a TRUMP ETF.

If approved, these ETFs could bring more retail and institutional investors into the altcoin space by offering regulated access to cryptocurrencies beyond $BTC and ETH, whose spot ETFs in the U.S. have amassed billions in assets.