Unchained - Bitcoin’s Outlook, ETH's Next Major Support and Why Zcash’s Run Isn’t Over: Bits + Bips - Ep. 950

Episode Date: November 15, 2025

Bitcoin continues to look weak, falling through the psychologically important $100,000 level. Is the cycle over? In this episode, Fairlead Strategies founder Katie Stockton joins Unchained Executive Editor Steve Ehrlich to break down the charts. She explains how the Bitcoin market has changed and Ethereum's potential trajectory. She also takes a look at the state of the DAT sector and Zcash's steep rise. Thank you to our sponsors! Mantle Uniswap Guest: Katie Stockton, Founder and Managing Partner of Fairlead Strategies Links: Unchained:  Why the Crypto Markets Seem Down Bad as Bitcoin Dips Below $100K A Musk-Style Reward? Anthony Pompliano Could Earn $400 Million From ProCap Canary XRP ETF Set for Nasdaq Launch as Shutdown Ends Why the Privacy Coins Mania Is Much More Than Price Action Timestamps: 🚀 0:00 Introduction 📊 3:56 How liquidity impacts crypto market analysis 🎞 5:44 How much history a token needs to do proper market analysis 🎯 7:31 Key market indicators used by Katie 💡 14:19 Why the character of the Bitcoin market has changed 📉 18:36 What to watch as MSTR diverges from Bitcoin 🧱 20:22 Ethereum's next major support level 📈 23:21 The outlook for ETH DAT Bitmine long term 📍25:10 What to watch as spot XRP ETFs go live 🔎 27:54 Does $ZEC still have room to run? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Since I'd say late 22 to 23, the character of the market in Bitcoin, at least, has changed. And we have to be adaptable with that in mind. These environments can change. The market structure can lead to changes. We've had that in the equity market with the advent of ETFs, exacerbating these passive flows. Hi, everyone. Welcome to the very first edition of Unchained on Air's Bits and Bips Live, The Interview. I'm your host, Steve Eark, executive editor here at Unchained, and I am thrilled to have Katie Stockton from Fairlead strategies to kind of walk us through the ebbs and flows of the crypto market.

There's been a lot happening in the news these days. A lot of people are looking with a bit of worry at the Bitcoin price as it's falling beneath its 200-day moving average and psychologically important level of $100,000, plus plenty of other things going on. Mantle is pioneering blockchain for banking of revolutionary new category at the intersection of Tradfai and Web3. Follow Mantle underscore official to learn more. Are you a builder who needs to add on-chain trading to your product? The Uniswap Trading API from Uniswap Labs offers plug-in-play access to some of the deepest liquidity in crypto, all with zero hacks. It's on-chain execution at an enterprise level.

More liquidity, less complex. Visit hub.uniswap.org to learn more. Welcome, Katie. Thanks so much. Yeah, there is definitely a lot to talk about. Yeah. But before we get into this, I just want to make sure that we, everyone watching and listening understands who you are and what you do.

Because your approach to understanding the markets, you have a very esoteric niche. I've called it during previous conversations, technical analysis, And I remember you bristle a little bit at that and you said, no, it's charting. You really look at charts and in particular look at price movements to understand different things like momentum, et cetera, to really get a sense of where assets are going to go next. So why don't you just briefly explain what you do and sort of how you apply it to various crypto assets? Of course, yeah.

So it is technically technical analysis, right? but we are charted at heart, and we're following price trends primarily and really understanding the supply and demand dynamics as it pertains to all asset classes, including cryptocurrencies. I do think charting is one of the best ways to understand the crypto market and to benefit from it because there is so much volatility, and the charts can help us manage risk. They can help us stay on the right side of prevailing trends,

and look for catalysts, right? Technical catalysts as opposed to fundamental catalysts. And I think that can be incredibly valuable. And it's something that's become more popular too. So there's so many outlets out there that are covering the charts and putting out key levels and things of that nature. We have a real process here at Fairlead Strategies. We've been covering crypto since 2019 on a weekly basis.

And with that, we really have gotten to know the character of these markets from a technical perspective. And they're not, I wouldn't like them, liken them to, you know, large cap equities necessarily. I know that's a comparison folks make a lot. But to me, they have their own distinct character. And, you know, the liquidity is sometimes an issue when evaluating these assets on the charts. But we do have enough to work with, certainly. And volatility is really the only guarantee, I think. So what would you say is kind of like the point of demarcation

when it comes to having sufficient liquidity, trading volume, to look at assets. As you mentioned, I mean, the top assets by market cap account for 95, 97% of the entire crypto ecosystem. So I know in your reporting, you typically just focus on the large cap tokens, the Bitcoins, it's Salina, et cetera. But what would you say is that point of demarcation? You know, for the bigger coins, I think they're all certainly liquid enough to evaluate certainly the top 20 or so. You can see reliable trends, the levels matter, things of that

nature. Where it runs into a problem, I would say, is more the small cap or even microcap penny stocks that are trying to leverage these trends in crypto, you know, the digital asset treasury companies. Some of them are really just too thin to analyze, I think, from a technical perspective with any confidence. Because when you look at a chart, a bar chart, it is you want to see some continuity from bar to bar or from day to day, week to week. And some of these penny stocks look like almost like they've been acquired or something like that. They just kind of grind sideways with no discernible trend. So that can be problematic or and or they'll gap up and down constantly.

And it's hard to find key levels with that in mind. So once you get down to that kind of sort of spotty-looking bar chart, that becomes problematic in terms of using technical analysis. So we try to stick to the larger cap coins, the larger cap companies, and they can help guide us for the smaller caps. Two more quick ones, and then I want to get into some of the assets. For one, how much does history matter? I know when we've spoken in the past, I mean, stocks go back decades or even centuries at certain points.

Crypto has only been around, I guess, for, I mean, we're almost coming up close to 20 years or so, but most assets are about five, six years old, with the exceptions of Bitcoin and you. ETH. But we also have discussed before how crypto tends to condense market cycles, like 10-year cycles into a year. So how much longevity, how much history do you typically need in a token to feel comfortable putting out analysis on it? You know, it's funny because it's a viable question for equities as well. When you have a pretty new IPO, it's tough to have an opinion until you have at least, I'd say, six months of history. And then your opinion can really only be very short term, because you don't have a long-term trend to reference

or those longer-term monthly indicators won't be viable yet. But I think we have plenty for most of the cryptocurrencies out there to understand the prevailing at least intermediate term trends. And we can get some information on the shorter-term ones, whether something's overbought or over-sold perhaps, even if we don't have a good sense of trend yet. So I think we have enough to work with for sure. and for Bitcoin and Eath, of course, there's plenty of history to lend itself to evaluating cycles

and for back testing purposes. The data really became quite good, I would say, in 2014 for Bitcoin on the charts. So we feel like that good 10-year-plus period is helpful enough and can provide guidance for the rest of the all coins. Okay. And just last thing before we get to the good stuff, there is an alphabet soup of, different types of indicators, metrics that can be used in technical analysis. Can you just maybe share two or three of your favorite ones, ones you rely on most? And to the extent you can, I guess, somewhat succinctly talk about how sometimes you try to integrate them together, because

I know from, again, some of our previous conversations, you can also get conflicting indications from some of the indicators you look at. Yeah, for sure. And I, I think it's a matter of multiple time frames, and that's where some of the confusion sets in. The methodology, the best way I can describe it is that we have three categories of indicators, so trend falling or momentum, overbought, oversold metrics, and relative strength input. So all of those things taken together can give us a good takeaway. And then we look at those same indicators over multiple timeframes that I would just break down as short-term being a daily bar, intermediate term being a weekly bar and long term being a monthly bar to simplify it.

And it's with all of that taken together that we arrive at a bias, so a long-term picture, an intermediate term sort of swing idea of where we are. And then for the market timing and perhaps also risk management, we're honing in on that shorter term picture. So they're all very valuable for different reasons. As an example, a long-term uptrend like Bitcoins, we're going to, to be more inclined to look for buying opportunities, right, versus selling opportunities within that context.

And it also can help us understand the indicators when things are changing. And that's the real value because I think we can all look at a chart and see a trend these days with all the tools that we have at our disposal like moving averages and the capacity that technology is allowing for. But it's when those trends are maturing, that's harder to identify.

And that's what our indicators do help us do. Their indicators like the MACD, which stands for moving average convergence divergence. It's a very common technical analysis tool. We use that. We use a stochastic oscillator that's an overbought oversold metric. For relative performance, we'll use ratios. We'll use relative rotation graphs to understand the coin rotations from a cyclical perspective. So we have some go-toes that we combine over those multiple timeframes. Mantle leads the establishment of blockchain for banking as the next frontier. UR is the access layer that transforms Mantle Network into a purpose-built vertical platform, the blockchain for banking, that enables financial

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structure and focus on building your product. Get access to the same liquidity that powers billions in swaps through one powerful API. Visit hub.uniswap.org to learn more. Great. All right. So let's get into it. First, Bitcoin, there's a lot of focus on the asset. I mean, many people in the industry are wondering when it's going to try to resume its uptrend, perhaps set new all-time highs. There's a lot of concern about Bitcoin debts right now. So, Why don't you walk us through the chart there? What are you seeing? What are the key indicators that you're looking for?

So, well, we're watching the long-term up trend primarily and watching some minor signs of upside exhaustion that we do have on the monthly chart, which I'll pull up for you now. On the monthly chart, you can see the up trend. It's very much evident in the rising 12-month moving average that you can see on the chart. There's an overbought downturn in our monthly stochastics that we're watching closely. It's a bit premature to get worried about. We've had them in the past without implications.

In fact, when they turn right back up, that tends to be a positive. But if we have that and then also we lose this longer-term momentum, that could suggest that Bitcoin's either moved into a trading range environment or a bare cycle. So we're keeping an eye on those monthly gauges. But for now, it's almost always right to assume the prevailing long-term trend will maintain itself until you have enough weight of the evidence otherwise. This is a weekly bar chart of Bitcoin, and it has something called the cloud model.

It's the shaded area. And you can see it acts as a support level at times. You can see where the breakout was back here in late 23, acted as support here. So it is a gauge of support, and it does show that Bitcoin has upside potential into the second quarter of 26. So we do still operate in the mindset of this uptrend maintaining itself, just given the nature of this indicator.

And yet we don't quite feel like we have that high conviction entry point from the more like market timing oriented indicators. But we are on the lookout for that, at least for a short to intermediate term reentry point. One of those is the stochastic oscillator that you see here. it is when it goes below 20%, that's your so-called oversold reading, but it's when you see that upturn that you tend to have opportunity. So if you look at past upturns near that 20% level, they've been great entry points for Bitcoin. So we are watching exactly for that.

And it could take weeks. I mean, we could be there very quickly before even year end. Okay. And I'm just curious, too, does this particular, I guess, formation, for lack of a better term or chart, remind you of any prior timelines, time periods in Bitcoin. It actually is very unique. I know your job is not to bring in the fundamental drivers of what's happening here, but Bitcoin's retracing on the back of a massive bull run on the back of President Trump and then the DAC craze. And right now, we're kind of looking for that next drive forward.

Are there any historical precedents that could kind of inform what you just walked us through, or is it really just a matter of kind of waiting and seeing for the technical stars to align, as you just described? Yeah, you know, what we've identified is that since I'd say late 22 to 23, the character of the market in Bitcoin, at least, has changed. And we have to be adaptable with that in mind. These environments can change. The market structure can lead to changes. We've had that in the equity market with the advent of. of ETFs exacerbating these passive flows. So it has changed, which means we don't necessarily

have an exact comp, but it doesn't minimize the value of the indicators. What we've noticed in this environment is that there's a propensity to stair step higher. Like the bulk of these up moves occur very, very quickly, even at times in just a one week period, and then it goes into a prolonged sort of stare or consolidation. So those up moves, you really want to be there for those up moves because they can be pretty explosive.

So that's been the character of the market of late. And you can see it's quite different when you go back over history. They're just totally different environments. This was almost a parabolic up move that was very quickly retraced, which we've seen in other asset classes, of course, but we had not yet seen in Bitcoin. So there's definitely a sort of a dynamic nature to the markets. that we can try to leverage by just adhering to the methodology. And knowing, I'd say this is the hard part, is knowing when to wait different indicators at different times.

An example would be, you know, wait, momentum gauge is like the MACD, perhaps, over an indication that would suggest it's overbought or oversold. And that is more the subjective nature of charting. And, you know, sometimes if, you know, people have said, well, the charts failed us here. No, it's not the charts that fail us. It's actually the interpretation of the charts. But that's where I think the error can come in.

And we are always adherent to key levels. And for Bitcoin, 100,000, as you sort of honed it on there, is a key level just because of the psychological significance of it. Got it. OK, so let's kind of stay on Bitcoin, but maybe you can add in or however you'd like to do it, just talk about two other Bitcoin adjacent. stocks. One is the debt that we all know and love, strategy, MSTR, and then Iris Energy,

Iran, one of the Bitcoin mining stocks that is surging on the back of AI excitement. It has been a little bit of the stocks have kind of going in different ways. I mean, Bitcoin debts, as we discussed and people watching and listening are well aware. they've certainly been coming down over the course of the fall as we move into the winter. MNAF premiums are dropping and in a certain way, micro strategy, I'm sorry, strategy, I think might be the only Bitcoin that that still has a premium. And that's just because of Michael Saylor's ability to, or proven ability to continue to raise money accretively, especially through preferred offerings in the market.

A lot of people are wondering what's going to happen because both Dats and Bitcoin miners are supposed to be like high beta plays on Bitcoin, but they are diverging, at least right now. So maybe you could talk us through what you're saying from those two as sort of representative examples of their overall, I guess, market segments. Yeah, I mean, I think you're spot on in that they're diverging. And maybe there's information in that. You know, it's a relatively new sort of market environment for these debts where we've seen a strategy for one. diverge on the downside from Bitcoin. Both have been trending lower for more than a few weeks, but strategy has actually broken that cloud-based support that Bitcoin is still holding. So

the charts have really diverged and strategy is now testing former support. So back at these lows from February and it seems to be breaking. And that would put next support in this range. So it does have support nearby. This is between about 183 and 200. So that would be the secondary support level that we'd watch. We don't have any buy signals from those overbought oversold metrics. What that would look like would be maybe an upturn here in the stochastics on this weekly bar chart or something from the demarc indicators, which you can see that the demarc indicators are those numbers that are floating above and below the price bars or another one of our trend exhaustion inputs. When you see 13s, those are signals. So that would be a cell signal here. We'd love to see a 13 unfold on strategy

on the buy side. The soon as that could happen is in about seven weeks, and that would be somewhat hopeful. So I think it's more of an early Q1, perhaps indication that we'd have some opportunity to benefit from an oversold condition here. So that's our thinking with these. It feels early to bind to weakness, but we do see there is support. Support is quite strong for Bitcoin itself and also strategy. Okay. So let's turn to ETH. Heath was a big star through, I guess, the middle part of the year on the back of some significant demand from ETH DATS, Sharp Link, Bitmine, Ether machine, etc. But it has climbed down significantly from, I believe, I think it said an all-time high earlier this year. So what does the ETH chart tell us? We had a big breakout in ETH, and it's a breakout that we feel

was pretty high probability in that we had a long-term triangle formation. Hopefully you can see this here on the monthly chart completed to the upside. Triangles are one of our favorite price patterns. What they essentially reflect are a converging series of lower highs and higher lows. And when you see the breakout, that tends to be bullish. And in this case, it would be a very long-term pattern, so a very long-term bullish indication. It doesn't mean necessarily that it runs away from us on a short-term basis. We saw some good follow-through initially, but then, of course, a good retracement that you can see more clearly on the weekly bar chart here of Ether. So the next support, sort of unfortunately, for Ether is back here, which is about 2750.

And as mentioned, the only guarantee here is volatility, right? And we certainly had our share of it with ether. But even back at 2750, that triangle breakout, I think, would warrant, you know, sort of more buying interest than something that this is like the start of another crypto winter. As far interested buyers into additional weakness, we'd love also to see from ETH some kind of oversold buy signal here as well. well, you see the stochastic oscillator in the bottom window is approaching oversold territory. When you see that upturn, that becomes compelling as just one of several indications that we look for. What's been also interesting is just watching the ether and Bitcoin comparison. In our research, we like to do a ratio of the two.

And it's been a good, I'd say, helpful way to gauge risk appetite within crypto. And we can gauge it outside of crypto in other ways. You know, for the equity market, we'll use something like the VIX or the Fear and Greed Index. There is actually a Fear and Greed for Bitcoin, which is somewhat helpful too. So we like to have a sense of what risk appetite is. And when there is a good risk appetite, we tend to see Ether do better. So this corrective phase naturally has been generally associated with Ether underperformance versus Bitcoin. Okay.

Yeah, I was actually going to ask you about. the Bitcoin-Eth ratio, so I'm glad you brought that up. And can you briefly talk us through BitMine just as a sort of proxy for the ETH debts? And I'm interested in any divergences or consistencies with strategy and the Bitcoin debts. Of course. Yeah. And listen, it's been a little bit rough lately for this segment. And it's not limited or specific to any one of these deaths. It's simply related to just what we were talking about, which is sentiment in the space, and then, of course, the downside momentum. So this is an example of one of those sort of thinner charts. You can see

the character. This is on a weekly, too. So the fact that we can see that on a weekly, not just a daily, is really reflective of sort of that gapy, range-bound type of chart that's not that helpful. But I think we've moved out of that sort of phase for BitMy, with this breakout. That's a major long-term breakout. And it is bullish long-term in the same way that that ether triangle breakout is bullish long-term. Near-term, however, of course, you've seen the momentum shift. It's very well evidenced by the weekly MACD here. You see that the histogram ticking down, down, down. We don't have any kind of oversold indications as of yet from an intermediate term perspective. And that's what I would love to see to feel confident in revisiting.

you know, the bit mine, but also some of the other ones that perhaps are highly correlated to it. But I think we're seeing more and more charts do this, where they go from a very thin, sort of liquid type of feel to them, to something that's more mainstream. And it shows that institutional adoption is growing. And I can see it via the charts. There's, of course, other ways to measure that as well. but it's something I think that's worth tracking. And the more and more that we can apply these charts and analysis in a professional and consistent, I'd say, manners,

the more we can get out of them. Here is that Bitcoin to Ether ratio, by the way that we mentioned. We had seen Bitcoin underperform Ether for a pretty good period when we saw them both rally. But this counter-trend move is reflective of the risk off that we've seen over the past three months or so in the space. Got it. Okay, I know you're getting close to time, but I want to just ask you to walk us through two more assets

that have been in the news recently. One, XRP, as we're talking, I believe they're going, the first spot XRP ETF is going to begin trading today. So, or has already begun trading. So can you talk about what you've seen recently in the XRP price chart? And perhaps if this asset, this product does see widespread adoption where it could go.

Yeah, of course. So it's been somewhat range bound. Despite the range, you can see that XRP has managed to hold the cloud. So the cloud, as you can infer, is one of our primary sort of trend falling in support inputs. And it is good to see that there is that cloud-based support. The indicators are mostly neutral, I would say, for XRP at this time. So this big corrective phase has brought it closer to support.

But it would be nice to see some kind of catalysts. And we're on the verge potentially of that on the daily chart. So if we were to zoom in, what we've seen with this corrective phase is a bit of an improvement in short-term momentum. What I would love to see is XRP get back above both the 50 day and 200 day, which you can see have converged here. That would just mean I move above about 263. so not terribly far from current levels. And it just the whole takeaway is that we're always looking for catalysts to act upon. Maybe the ETF will actually exacerbate the short-term improvement and momentum,

and we can get above that 50 day and 200-day as a positive technical catalyst to act upon. I'm a little concerned, and this goes for the broader space by some of the deterioration that we're seeing on the monthlies, but it's not strong enough that it would be any reason to reduce long-term exposure. If we do see cell signals, those start to unfold in the monthly MACDs, I would certainly take issue with that because it would be more indicative of a more prolonged sort of bear cycle. Great. And then just finally, privacy coins have been in the news and no token has benefited more than Zcash. In fact, they just got their very first debt yesterday. So please watch. walk us through there. Is there more room for Zieg to run or are we going to be looking at a drawdown

and just due to buyer exhaustion? And if so, where might it revert to? I mean, I think that yes, we will see a drawdown at some point, right? I guess the question is more, does it come from higher levels or not? A short-term pullback has already started to unfold. But the big picture is this, which is on the monthly tree, you can see this massive breakout, even above this 2021 high, and then all the way back to 2018 when it was launched there. So really pretty intriguing long-term breakout. You can obviously see it has a visual sort of sense of being overextended. Surprisingly, though, we're not seeing a cell signal yet. It could happen as soon as a couple weeks out. So it feels like it's sort of on the verge of that.

based on a combination of our weekly stochastics and demarc indicators, but we don't have it yet. So if a client were to ask me, well, you know, what do I do with this position? Do we think this pullback is the beginning of a major retracement? I would say probably give it a chance to see some follow through because of the long-term breakout, but because also it doesn't have any of the cell signals

that you might expect it to have, you know, after such a steep up move. The other thing I would add on the Zcash is that with, any kind of steep up move, this is on the daily chart, there is a good spread to initial support. And like, let's say we were to use the 50-day moving average, it's really well below 287 is the level. So because there is such a spread to initial support, there needs to be some attention to risk management. And that means different things for different people, maybe just a stop loss or watching the curvature of a moving average. But it definitely warrants that.

Okay, well, Katie, thank you so much for taking time to walk us through all of that today. Really appreciate all of your insights. We'll have to have you back. You'd love that.