The Breakdown - Is It All Over for Crypto?

Episode Date: October 21, 2025

After a brutal flash crash and a week of weak trading, many in the crypto world are asking if the cycle is done. Bitcoin has held above $100K, but altcoins have been crushed, sentiment has cratered, and major voices like Chris Burniske and Ansem are turning bearish. Still, some analysts think we’re just seeing the most hated rally in history. Plus: Stripe’s $5B Tempo blockchain raises big questions about the future of institutional crypto—and China clamps down on tech giants issuing stablecoins while Japan’s banks push forward. Enjoying this content? SUBSCRIBE to the Podcast: https://pod.link/1438693620 Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheBreakdownBW Subscribe to the newsletter: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://blockworks.co/newsletter/thebreakdown⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Join the discussion: https://discord.gg/VrKRrfKCz8 Follow on Twitter: NLW: https://twitter.com/nlw Breakdown: https://twitter.com/BreakdownBW

Welcome back to The Breakdown with me, NLW. It's a daily podcast on macro, Bitcoin, and the big picture power shifts remaking our world. What's going on, guys? It is Monday, October 20th, and today we are talking about whether the whole thing is over. Before we get into that, however, if you are enjoying the breakdown, please go subscribe to it, give it a rating, give it a review, or if you want to dive deeper into the conversation, come join us on the Breakers Discord. You can find a link in the show notes or go to bit.ly slash breakdown pod. Well, friends, we're now a week out from the flash crash and price action has been pretty dismal. Bitcoin bled lower all week, culminating in a big flush to $104,000 on Friday morning.

Very weak trading on Saturday led many on Twitter to ask, is it all over? Chris Bernisky of Placeholder Ventures went viral with his assessment of the market heading into the weekend, tweeting, increasingly convinced last Friday's massacre broke crypto for a while, hard to quickly develop a sustained bid after such a meltdown. This cycle has been disappointing for most, which can paralyze action as people hope for blue or or former all-time highs. It's easy to get caught up in chart minutia, but when looking at Bitcoin and Ethan Linear Monthly, it reveals we're still in the elevated range, although showing cracks, if you're thinking of taking profits. Micro Strategy is slipping, gold is sending a warning,

as our credit markets, and stocks will be the last to get the message. We can always get another weak bounce, but I've taken action accordingly. Remember, it's never all or nothing when raising cash. I want to see how Bitcoin responds to 100K, but will likely get interested in the market again when I see Bitcoin at 75K or lower. This bull was different, and the next bear will be different too. Ansem also doubled down on his bearish view posting, There's no way for me to be bullish on this market looking at the swing failure pattern on XRP, Sol and Eith Weekly charts.

It reminds me of the failure pattern that Lightcoin had in 2021. When I couple this with Bitcoin trading back below its 2024 all-time high, I don't see a bull case. I see an end of momentum and price trooping over. A large 10-month distribution that is coming to an end. There is no fresh narrative. Micro Strategy topped in 2024 November. It's trading below the 200-day moving average for the first time.

since 2023 and acting as resistance. ETH BTC has already pumped as it does at the end of every cycle. The only way for me to change my mind is if we get back above 112K. One thing that's become really clear is that the crypto market is bifurcated. Bitcoin saw a 17% drawdown from the all-time high at the beginning of the month. Definitely not fun, but far from a sign that it's all over. However, altcoins got decimated by the flash crash and there seems to be very little enthusiasm to bet big on their recovery. Both Eith and Solana lost a quarter of their value of the same time frame, and it's not hard to find major altcoins that fell by 30, 40 or 50%. Luke Martin posted a chart of altcoin market cap and commented that it, quote,

perfectly illustrates why sentiment is bearish and tired, even though Bitcoin is still above 100K. A basket of the top 50 altcoins is now trading below where they were post-FTX crash in 2022. Trader Verac Bank asked, if not crypto, then what? Okay, so the dollar is dying. Stocks are overvalued. Crypto is already gigapumped. Europe is dead.

You can't trust Chinese assets. Gold is already up massive. What do we buy right now? You can't say nothing because that means buy dollars. Chow Wang of Alliance Dow believes there's a simpler analysis, commenting, regarding where we are in the cycle, the story is quite simple to me. There's one factor that outweighs everything else, including your favorite liquidity metric and technical indicator, and that's AI.

If the AI bubble pops, it's over. If AI stonks keep going up, all the bears are wrong. It's never possible to call cycle tops or bottoms with 100% conviction, but as far as I can tell, we are in the danger zone. Those views all seem informed by Alcoins dying a slow death, but Bitcoin analysis was a little less dire. Will Clemente wrote, After some thinking this weekend, I believe the last year of relative weakness for Bitcoin has mostly been transfer of supply from OGs to TradFi. Can see this in on-chain data.

This dynamic will be mostly irrelevant in coming years, just as everyone is focused on Bitcoin's relative weakness. CheckMedia agreed that this has been the story of the cycle, but disagrees it will end anytime soon. He responded, the sheer volume of sell-side pressure from existing Bitcoin holders is still not widely appreciated, but it has been the source of resistance. Non-manipulation, not paper Bitcoin, not suppression, just good old-fashioned sellers. Also, it won't become irrelevant. As we currently sit, it seems there's an overwhelming consensus that the cycle could be over. And of course, after that consensus formed over the weekend, Bitcoin staged a fairly significant rally on Sunday. Price regained 111K early on Monday morning, up around 7% from the local lows.

DC investor isn't convinced it's all over, tweeting, Look, I may be totally wrong, but I'm simply not prepared to overindex on a bunch of trash shalt's dying one day as being the defining event of this crypto bull market, which by all indications is very obviously mostly ETF and institutionally driven. One big point to take away from the flash crash was that this wasn't on the radar for the institutions that have been driving this cycle. The crash happened on a Friday afternoon, largely outside of trading hours. There were minimal liquidations on the CME, and for institutions it seemed like just another spade of Bitcoin volatility, not a cycle-ending crash. J.P. Morgan analysts wrote last week that the crash was

largely driven by crypto-native traders, with the implication being that crypto-native retail is really just a minnow in the current market that can be safely ignored. It's very possible that we just saw sentiment bottom out on crypto Twitter with Bitcoin still trading above 100K. Economist Alex Kruger commented, we may be about to see the most hated rally in the history of rallies. The other big controversy of the weekend centered around Stripe's tempo blockchain. Back in August, Stripe announced their intention to build their layer one for stable coin payments in conjunction with paradigm. The news was met by a huge backlash of DeFi folks who believe that they should build on pre-existing blockchain. Stripe later announced plans to launch a stablecoins as a service product, basically allowing

any company to piggyback on their infrastructure to launch their own stablecoin. In that context, it made a ton of sense why Stripe would want their own infrastructure and have decision-making power on matters of compliance and security. Friday's news was that Tempo had raised 500 million at a $5 billion valuation. It's not clear exactly what the structure is, specifically whether VCs were investing in a Tempo token or if Stripe had spun off a new company to take equity investments. Stripe had previously announced that the blockchain would be stablecoin agnostic when it comes to gas fees, implying that no native token would be issued. Legacy internet and infrastructure are brittle, plagued by downtime, coverage gaps, and outdated financing models.

Communities and builders are left behind while capital sits locked out. Althea is changing that. Since 2018, their technology has powered resilient, sustainable networks across the U.S. and abroad. With Althea L1, they built the world's first blockchain purpose-built for utilities and telecom, turning infrastructure into a transparent, investable asset class. Through liquid infrastructure, networks can now be financed in real time, operated more efficiently and scaled to meet the $3 trillion telecom and utilities market. This is fintech for infrastructure, connecting capital directly to builders

and returning revenue seamlessly to funders. No middlemen, no bottlenecks, just sovereign, resilient infrastructure that works for people, communities, and investors alike. Learn more at Althea.net and find them on Crackin to join the future of infrastructure finance. Alongside the fundraising announcement, Ethereum developer Donkrad Feist announced that he's joining tempo. He said in a statement, while payments used to be front and center in the early days of crypto, I see a special opportunity to finally achieve this ambitious goal with relentless execution on both the technical and distribution fronts. Feist had played a core role in Ethereum

development since joining the foundation in 2018. Most recently, he lent his name to dank sharding the scaling mechanism designed to improve layer two scalability. Now, it's becoming increasingly clear that institutions aren't going to build on public blockchains unless there's a clear incentive to do so. Ryan Sean Adams of the Bankless podcast wrote, I'm not sure who needs to hear this, but tempo is 1,000% going to maximize for tempo, not for Ethereum, not for ETH. That's what they're already doing, by launching an NL1 by hiring Ethereum's talent. David Phelps commented, yes, it's disappointed that Donkrad is leaving the Ethereum Foundation, but the kind of attitude that expects him to work there for decades out of altruism to public goods is

exactly why people leave. Workers will take the best career opportunities and Ethereum needs to be able to offer than these. While this might be a fork-in-the-road moment for Ethereum, it's a much larger indication of where institutional adoption is going. At the end of the day, crypto networks have no real moat beyond liquidity and attention. The technology is largely open source. While duplication isn't trivial, it certainly isn't impossible, especially if you hire the people who built it the first time around. Sticking with stablecoins, Beijing has stepped in to stop Chinese tech giants from issuing their own stable coins. The Financial Times reports that orders have come down from the CCP, that Ant Group, the parent company of Alibaba and JD.com, will not be allowed to issue their

own stablecoins. These are the two e-commerce giants in China, and both had planned to issue Yuan-peg stablecoins under the new regulations in Hong Kong. Sources said that Beijing was uneasy with the idea of tech companies issuing any type of currency. One source noted that private stable coins were viewed as a competitor to China's central bank digital currency. At this stage, 77 firms have expressed interest in issuing a stable coin under the new Hong Kong framework, and it's unclear if Beijing is looking to squash the entire project, or if they only have narrow concerns around the tech giants. Meanwhile, in Japan, Niki reports that the three largest banks in the nation are teaming up to issue a joint stablecoin. Mitsubishi

UFJ, Sumitomo Mitsu, and Mizahou are forming a consortium to issue stablecoins pegged to both the Japanese yen and the U.S. dollar. The goal is to create a common standard for corporate clients and cross-border payments. Multiple other stablecoin and tokenized deposit projects are planned in Japan. Riple and SBI are aiming for an early 2026 rollout for their U.S. dollar stable coin, while the Japanese Post Bank, which has over 120 million customers, plans to introduce tokenized deposits by the end of the year. Continued Stablecoin announcements week after week highlight the idea has reached escape velocity around the world. During past cycles, we would see all sorts of announcements of blockchain

plans during the bull market, but each time those plans would be scrapped after the industry detonates and we find ourselves in another crypto winter. This cycle is very different. Even if the top is in for crypto assets, institutional crypto projects aren't going away. Stablecoins in particular are so far along that we'll see multiple high-profile products come to market even if Bitcoin crashes. The narrative could get very out of sync if that's the case, but it could make the next bare market truly just a bare market rather than an icy crypto winter. Although for that, we'll have to wait and see for now that is going to do it for today's breakdown. Appreciate you listening as always, and until next time, be safe and take care of each other.

Peace.