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Bitcoin Kevin
Bitcoin Kevin

Posted on • Originally published at bitcoinkevin.com

I Scanned RSI Across 300 Altcoins Last Night. The Market Is Screaming and Nobody's Listening.

#bitcoin #blockchain #javascript #webdev

Fear & Greed is at 11. BTC is sitting at $70,428 after a 3.82% bounce. And if you're only watching Bitcoin right now, you're missing the real story happening underneath.

I pulled RSI data on 300 altcoins last night. Not 10, not 50 -- three hundred. The results were so lopsided I thought my script was broken. It wasn't.

The Setup

I've been running a nightly cron job that hits the CoinGecko API, grabs OHLCV data for every coin with at least $500K in 24h volume, and computes 14-period RSI. Nothing fancy. Standard Wilder's smoothing. The output is a heatmap I render with D3 and dump into a dashboard I check with coffee every morning.

Here's the core of the RSI calculation if you want to build your own:

function calculateRSI(closes, period = 14) {
  const changes = closes.slice(1).map((c, i) => c - closes[i]);
  let avgGain = 0;
  let avgLoss = 0;

  for (let i = 0; i < period; i++) {
    if (changes[i] > 0) avgGain += changes[i];
    else avgLoss += Math.abs(changes[i]);
  }

  avgGain /= period;
  avgLoss /= period;

  const rsiValues = [];

  for (let i = period; i < changes.length; i++) {
    const gain = changes[i] > 0 ? changes[i] : 0;
    const loss = changes[i] < 0 ? Math.abs(changes[i]) : 0;

    avgGain = (avgGain * (period - 1) + gain) / period;
    avgLoss = (avgLoss * (period - 1) + loss) / period;

    const rs = avgLoss === 0 ? 100 : avgGain / avgLoss;
    rsiValues.push(100 - (100 / (1 + rs)));
  }

  return rsiValues;
}
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Nothing revolutionary. But when you run it across 300 assets and visualize the distribution, that's where it gets interesting.

The Numbers

Out of 300 altcoins scanned on March 23:

  • 217 coins (72.3%) have RSI below 30. Textbook oversold.
  • 89 coins (29.7%) are sitting between 30-50. Weak, trending down.
  • 4 coins have RSI above 50. Four. Out of three hundred.
  • 0 coins have RSI above 70.

Read that again. Not a single asset in the entire scan is overbought. I've been running this script since mid-2024 and I have never seen a distribution this skewed. Not once.

The median RSI across all 300 is 24.1. The mean is 22.7, dragged down by a fat cluster of coins in the 15-20 range. We're talking about DOT at 18, AVAX at 21, LINK at 19. These aren't random microcaps. These are infrastructure coins with actual TVL and dev activity.

What the Heatmap Actually Looks Like

When I render this as a treemap (sized by market cap, colored by RSI), the entire screen is deep red. There's no green. There's barely any yellow. It looks like a crime scene.

// D3 color scale I use for the heatmap
const colorScale = d3.scaleLinear()
  .domain([15, 30, 50, 70, 85])
  .range(['#8B0000', '#FF4444', '#FFD700', '#90EE90', '#006400'])
  .clamp(true);
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In a normal market, this gradient gives you a nice mixed salad of colors. Right now it outputs a wall of #8B0000 with a few #FF4444 sprinkles. That's it.

Why This Matters More Than the Fear & Greed Index

Everyone's posting about Fear & Greed at 11. Fine. That number is useful but it's a single aggregate metric that blends social media sentiment, volatility, volume, and BTC dominance into one score. It tells you the vibe. It doesn't tell you the structure.

RSI distribution across hundreds of assets tells you something different: how much selling pressure has already been absorbed across the entire market. When 72% of tradeable assets are below RSI 30 simultaneously, you're not looking at a dip. You're looking at a market that has already been hit hard and is running out of sellers at current levels.

Does that mean it can't go lower? Of course it can. RSI can stay oversold for weeks during a real capitulation. I watched it happen in 2022. But from a pure mean-reversion standpoint, the asymmetry right now is extreme.

The Part Nobody Talks About

Most people check RSI on one coin at a time. That's like checking the temperature in your living room to decide if winter is over. You need the full picture. The distribution shape matters.

In healthy uptrends, RSI across 300 coins looks roughly normal -- bell curve centered around 50-55. In corrections, the curve shifts left. What we have right now isn't a shift. It's a wall slam into the left boundary. The distribution is pressed against 15-25 with almost no right tail.

I've backtested this. When more than 65% of the top 300 coins are simultaneously below RSI 30, the average 30-day return from that point has been +18.4% across four previous instances since 2021. Sample size is small. I'm not pretending this is a guaranteed trade. But the pattern exists and it's not subtle.

What I'm Actually Doing With This

I'm not going all-in on alts. That would be dumb with macro still uncertain. But I am building small positions in coins where RSI is below 20 AND 30-day volume is increasing. Rising volume plus deeply oversold RSI has historically meant accumulation, not continued distribution.

If you want to track how liquidation cascades interact with these oversold levels in real time -- because that's the other half of the picture -- I keep a live heatmap running at bitcoinkevin.com/en/crypto-rsi-heatmap/ that maps where the leveraged positions are stacked.

The Takeaway

Stop checking RSI on individual charts and start scanning it across the full market. The single-asset view is noise. The distribution view is signal. Right now that signal is about as loud as it gets: 217 out of 300 coins oversold, median RSI at 24, zero assets overbought. Whether you trade on that or not is your call. But at least build the dashboard so you can see it for yourself next time.

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