This article is brought to you by FBS. The 2025 crypto bull cycle won't just reward hype — it'll put a spotlight on the altcoins with real backbone.

After years of regulatory uncertainty and brutal bear-market volatility, institutions and businesses aren't speculating — they're looking for infrastructure, utility, and real growth.

This article is brought to you by FBS.

The 2025 crypto bull cycle won't just reward hype — it'll put a spotlight on the altcoins with real backbone. After years of regulatory uncertainty and brutal bear-market volatility, institutions and businesses aren't speculating — they're looking for infrastructure, utility, and real growth. In this new landscape, altcoins with serious technology innovation, sound tokenomics, and increasing adoption won't just stand out — they'll lead the way.

Hedge funds and macro desks have already begun positioning, following the ripple effects of major catalysts — Bitcoin's 2024 halving, the ETF arms race, and a market narrative that's finally flipping risk-on. And once the capital starts flowing, it flows fast — from BTC to ETH... and then into the sharpest names just beneath the surface.

"Altseason" is a period when bitcoin capital is transferred into other cryptocurrencies, producing large multi-month price increases for most altcoins. Throughout history, altcoins have lagged the strong appreciation of Bitcoin. As the price of Bitcoin stabilizes or consolidates following a peak, investors look for higher returns in potential altcoins. According to the Tangem report, "the rise in the inter-seasonal index signals a shift of attention away from bitcoin and towards altcoins." In 2025, a combination of several factors - improved liquidity conditions and potential regulatory clarity - may lay the groundwork for such a cycle.

Signs of Bitcoin's dominance support this thesis. Bitcoin's dominance in May 2025 was ~65%. Despite continuing to rise, the dominance has reached a critical resistance area from which it had previously bounced! When bitcoin dominance increases (as it did in early 2025, to ~65%), it signals that alts are either not growing as fast, or are falling. Most analysts are now signalling that a continued drop in bitcoin dominance to around 50-54% has been a precursor in the past to an altcoin season. In short, the macroeconomic context of 2025 - increased liquidity, Fed policy easing, and the resumption of channeling funds into cryptocurrencies - combined with bitcoin consolidation, may finally lead to the next phase of altcoin-driven growth.

Legislative changes are another driver. Besides ETFs for Bitcoin and Ethereum (approved late in 2023), US regulators are now considering dozens of proposed ETFs for altcoins. Bloomberg Intelligence recently cited a 90% probability that the Solana spot ETF will be approved in 2025, with similarly high probabilities for XRP and Dogecoin funds. If altcoin ETFs (or other products like ETFs) get approved, it could have the power to channel institutional and retail funds right into altcoin land. Such moves - and corresponding global changes in stablecoin regulation and digital asset management systems - can considerably enhance investor confidence in altcoins.

Now, here are the five altcoins that FBS analysts are watching in 2025.

Hedera (HBAR)

Hedera Hashgraph is a strong contender for the distributed ledger technology crown, abandoning the traditional blockchain architecture in favor of its own hashgraph consensus protocol. As opposed to power-devouring proof-of-work or probabilistic proof-of-stake systems, Hedera's "gossip about gossip" method provides deterministic completeness, extremely high performance, and ultralow power consumption. In practice, Hedera typically processes more than 10,000 transactions per second for fractions of a cent, and with completion time less than one second.

The biggest single reason to take Hedera seriously is the governance, which is widely recognized as likely to be one of the most institutionally robust to have been put forward by any major cryptocurrency. The network is governed not only by anonymous validators or open-source development groups but also by Hedera's Governing Board of up to 39 prominent worldwide companies such as Google, IBM, Boeing, LG, and Deutsche Telekom. Each board member gets one vote on decisions for the network, and no organization can own the ledger. The Council serves for a period of three years (two terms maximum), and the founder of the hashgraph protocol, Swirlds, is a permanent member of the council.

Hedera has been deeply involved in actual enterprise solutions since day one. Members like LG and Boeing were some of the earliest to explore uses for supply chain logistics and IoT networks. Hedera has been actively expanding in recent years in areas such as tokenization, digital payments, and decentralized finance. As part of a significant strategic initiative, the Board of Governors voted to create a $408 million ecosystem development fund in January 2025, valued at 4.86 billion HBAR tokens, to support new projects, startups, and dApps. Hedera's embedded tokenization model and asset studio allow for the issuance of real assets - bonds, stocks,