Kyle Doops' Relative Strength Screen Clears Just 3 Top-20 Altcoins, Led by HYPE

A Screen Built on Strength, Not Discounts

Crypto analyst Kyle Doops has run a relative-strength filter over the 20 largest non-stablecoin assets, and the result is stark: only three names still trade within 36% of their all-time highs — Hyperliquid (HYPE), TRON (TRX) and Monero (XMR). Bitcoin (BTC) does not make the cut, remaining far below the peak that closed its last cycle. The framework was laid out during a podcast interview recorded on August 28, where the Crypto Banter host raised no objection when the 36% threshold was put to him.

Relative strength, as Doops applies it, is deliberately simple: rank assets by how close they sit to their records, not by how deep the drawdown runs. His critique of retail behavior follows: newcomers hunt whatever has collapsed hardest and treat the wreckage as a discount — traders see something “down 99.99%” and buy, when the better question is which assets were never “completely wrecked.” Applied to today’s top 20, that logic empties the field below the three survivors. Chainlink, the oracle network underpinning much of DeFi’s data layer, sits 78% below its record; Cardano, a proof-of-stake chain, is 93% down; Polkadot is 98% down. None would clear the filter — depth alone, in Doops’s framing, is not a reason to buy.

HYPE is the screen’s strongest proof case. At the August 28 taping he flagged the token as trading “pretty much at all-time highs” even with Bitcoin heavily off its own peak. HYPE went on to print an all-time high of $89.60 on September 6 before easing back to $78.82 — a pullback shallow enough to keep it inside the 36% band. TRON qualifies on structure rather than raw distance from peak: its setup is a cup-and-handle pattern whose 100% extension targets $0.4359, fractionally above the $0.4313 record. Monero completes the trio — the privacy coin where transaction confidentiality is the default, and one of the few large caps whose market structure never fully broke.

Zcash Exposes the Filter's Blind Spot

When the interview was recorded, Doops put Zcash (ZEC) on screen at $791 and liked what the chart showed. By his own rule, however, ZEC fails: it sat 64% below its 2016 peak, well outside the 36% band. What followed exposed the awkward part. ZEC has since gained roughly 120% in a single month and cleared $1,000 for the first time in nearly a decade — and privacy coins now form the only sector trading above Bitcoin’s October 2025 high.

Investor Dan Held has added a footnote to the miss. He says Bitcoin whales urged him to buy ZEC months before the move, which in his view shows that a discipline buying only what has not been wrecked would have missed one of the period’s strongest rallies outright. The gap matters because the filter is backward-looking by construction: it ranks assets against an old peak, so a sector that re-rates sharply can stay invisible until most of the move is over. Momentum readings of the kind many traders track with the MACD would have registered ZEC’s acceleration weeks earlier; distance-from-peak alone did not.

Doops was no gentler with a larger casualty. Solana, now 66% below its high, drew a blunt verdict: “You have to call a spade a spade... as great as the narrative is, it’s still 64% down.” The story, in other words, has not yet caught up with the price. His broader conclusion reframes what altcoins are for. Rather than long-term holdings, he describes them as “a short-term vehicle to rotate capital” back into Bitcoin. History, in his telling, supports the caution: his own test once surfaced a single asset that beat Bitcoin cycle after cycle — Dogecoin — and DOGE now trades 89% below its high. Even the rare structural outperformer, the record suggests, eventually reverts. Readers tracking the market in real time can follow live spot and futures prices on Binance.

Rotation Logic Over Loyalty

Taken together, the two threads describe a market where capital discipline outweighs conviction. The August 28 interview recording is the primary record for both judgments — the HYPE endorsement near highs and the Zcash pass-over at $791 — and it lets readers check how each call aged within roughly three weeks: one validated, one overturned. Our desk’s reading is that relative strength works as a filter, not a forecast: it keeps traders positioned in leaders like HYPE while a fast re-rating sector such as ZEC can still slip through the net. Anyone running similar screens — across the best crypto exchanges or on-chain data feeds — should treat distance-from-peak as one input alongside chart structure and sector rotation, never the whole thesis.