What Bitcoin Did - Market Chaos: Is the Bitcoin Bull Run Over? | Checkmate

Episode Date: October 13, 2025

Checkmate is a Bitcoin analyst known for his on-chain & macro research. In this episode, we get into the weekend’s deleveraging event across the markets, the structural fragility it exposed, and why Bitcoin’s resilience through it all might mark a new era of maturity for the asset. Checkmate breaks down what caused over $20 billion in liquidations, how cascading leverage turned minor sell-offs into total wipeouts, and why market makers simply “walked away.” He also explains why Bitcoin’s fundamentals, ETF inflows, spot demand, and deep capital pools make it better positioned than ever despite short-term volatility. We discuss how Bitcoin is becoming the world’s 24/7 macro signal, why "crypto" may be entering terminal decline, and what the data says about sentiment, and the critical price levels that will determine whether this was just a reset, or the start of a broader bear market. In this episode: - The $20 billion liquidation and what triggered it - How leverage cascades break the market - Bitcoin’s structural strength - Why Bitcoin is the world’s macro thermometer THANKS TO OUR SPONSORS: IREN RIVER ANCHORWATCH BLOCKWARE LEDN BITKEY Follow: Danny Knowles: https://x.com/_DannyKnowles or https://primal.net/danny Checkmate: https://x.com/_Checkmatey_

These big de-levergings, they're not uncommon. We're going to go into an increasingly volatile environment since April, since the April low. Before that, I'd say, as a very spot-driven market, since April, it's just been leverage up and to the right. But I think Bitcoin's actually in a far better position. If you look across the other side of the pond, true, just carnage. And it's FTX level. And by the way, the reason Bitcoin is say, stay humble stack sats, Bitcoin only, is because

many of us, most of us, we've gone through this. We've liquidated our account. We've bought a shit coin that's gone down 95% and then gone down 95% again. The reason we say these things is because we have already learnt these very, very, very, very painful lessons. But once you've touched the stove and your fingers have healed up, don't touch the stove again. Thanks for doing this last minute. I was like, do I cover it? It's like a crypto thing. Is it the right thing to do? And I was like, no, we should. But wild fucking few days. So I was in Nashville. I was at the HRF event there and I was flying to Vegas, took off and everything seemed normal and then landed and the world was burning. So we need to get into it. There was, I mean, I think this was really more of a crypto thing than

a Bitcoin thing. Bitcoin obviously went down a lot. Like it was nearly 20% in a few hours. But on the crypto side, people got totally wrecked. It was something. like, was it $20 billion of liquidations? And I saw a report saying 1.6 million traders got wiped towel. Yeah, it's pretty savage. So it's kind of tough to work out how some of these data providers calculate. When they say liquidations, do they mean, so there's kind of two ways that futures, let's go back to the base here, futures markets were a massive part of what happened over the weekend. Now, there's a liquidation, which is where you have your account just goes to zero. Now, that happened a lot. There's a lot of that.

there's also just people getting force closed, right? So as the market falls, you hit your stop loss, but you may, you know, you may liquidate your 5% of your account, but your whole thing. So it's a little bit unclear to me whether all of these data providers are like, do they say liquidations or open interest decline? But it doesn't really matter. The point is it was a massive unwind. I mean, for Bitcoin specifically in the data that I look at, 2.5 billion or 2.4 billion, which is about on par with what we saw in 2021 in that middle 2021 sequence. And really, I think this is the key thing as it relates to Bitcoin. These big deal leveraging, they're not uncommon. They do happen. They're not frequent. They are a event that occurs. We've been building up a lot of futures open interest for a long time. And I've been writing about saying, like, guys, we're going to go into a increasingly

volatile environment since April, since the April low. Before that, I'd say, is a very spot-driven market. Since April, it's just been leverage up and to the right. This includes Ibit options. it includes futures. Now, in my work, I basically only look at Bitcoin. It very, very rarely touch alt coins. In fact, I just don't.

I will cover them moving forward because you're right, this is very much an alt-coin story because some of these price tickers literally went to zero, like actually went to zero. Now, they bounced back, but what we really saw here was just a massive cascade of leverage. You're right that like the damage, like the Bitcoin chart took a punch.

There's no question. Technically speaking, it's not the funest. of events. However, when I really take a step back and just look at the overall environment, the Bitcoin price chart, it actually hasn't set a new lower low, even on the daily chart. So yeah, it's got some damage and yeah, we may have some time to kind of work through this, but I think Bitcoin's actually in a far better position. If you look across the other side of the pond, true, just carnage. And it's FTX level. Now, of course, in terms of dollar value, you can eat by far the biggest liquidation event, but obviously the market's much bigger.

But what I just didn't understand, and because I just don't look at it, is how much leverage built up in the old coin space. And if I understand correctly, basically what happened is as the market started falling, right, Trump's put out his tweet about tariffs. All markets took a bit of a hit. Bitcoin, I think it was down 12%. I think we're down 12% from the all-time high as it stands, which, by the way, guys, 12% from the all-time high, it's not. You know, it's all right. It's all right. Hang in there. So 12% down is meaningful. but some of these went 60, 80 to zero. And if you imagine, it doesn't matter what your leverage profile was. If you were 2xed, if you were 1.5xed, if your token goes to zero, you get liquidated.

So what essentially happened here is that one guy's stop loss became another guy's liquidation price, it became another guy's stop loss. And when the volatility spikes like that, the market makers have to widen their spreads because they don't know if they're going to get, if they get filled or, you know, they take one side of the book. They don't know that they're going to be able to offload that and actually make money. So they widen their spreads. And eventually the volatility got so big in such a short span of time that their algorithmic models just said, walk away, get away, close all orders. And what we found with alt coins is that there is actually no bid.

There is no bid for any of this stuff. So when the market makers turned off their market making software, suddenly there's just no one to buy. And these tickets like, you know, fell 70%, 80%, just like these massive wicks. Now, these things kind of equalize, but, you know, when I take a really big step back, we're seeing all of these ETS coming for the crypto universe, you can't be a money manager and allocate to something that literally goes to zero on a weekend because of a tweet. You just can't. So like, and on top of that, I think for a long time, people have underestimated the damage that FTX did

because A, just nuked a lot of people's value. It just destroyed retail capital. We're in an environment where, like, inflation is high in retail. It just doesn't have as much money anyway. People keep asking where is retail this cycle. I'm like, I think a lot of them are just genuinely broke. And they've kind of had enough with crypto after FTX. The survivors, the ones who still had conviction in your ripples and your sueyes and all this stuff, they just lost everything.

And like, it sucks seeing all these. And like, I slowly see them filter through because my Twitter feed just has very little old coin stuff in it. But you just see people retweeting. I lost everything. I lost 15 million. I lost 400 grand. I'm back to zero. And you're just like, like, honestly, my feeling when FTX blew up is, okay, that's a pain in the ass. Price is down. But coins are in cold storage. I'm like, I actually lost nothing. Sure, price is down, but it's going to come back. And I just have the same feeling here. There's a lot of people out there who just actually nuked everything. And like, I just can't honestly see where serious capital can't allocate to these stuff anymore, the old coins.

and I think all the retail guys who survived all the post-FTX thing, they're gone as well. So like there's no money left for this stuff. So I think it's a real veil-off moment. And look, it really sucks. I'm sure there's a lot of people listening to this who did lose money. And truly it does suck. It's okay, right? It comes back.

Markets come back. But these are lessons to learn. And I think Bitcoin is for a very long time. I've just been saying, and by the way, the reason Bitcoin is say, stay humble stack satsats, Bitcoin only is because many of us, most of us, we've gone through this. We've liquidated our accounts. We've bought a shit coin that's gone down 95% and then gone down 95% again. The reason we say these things is because we have already learnt these very, very, very, very painful lessons. In fact, we had a really good moment the other day at the Sydney Bitcoin meetup. And sorry,

Alec, I'm going to call you out here, but it was a great story because he goes, you know, I lost a bunch of money in FTX. And I had to clarify that wasn't for. from the blowup, that was actually just trading perps. You know, like, but I've done that. I've blown up my options account on Deribit many times. Like, you know, selling put options and whatever, and they're just getting imploded in March 2020. Losing money on leverage, it's a lesson that we all go through.

But once you've touched the stove and your fingers have healed up, don't touch the stove again. You know, it's a real lesson than a veil-off moment that there just is no actual bid for this stuff. And I think it's going to be a bit of a wake-up call. Many Bitcoiners were born on this particular sell-off, I would say. Yeah, I think that's definitely true. I saw someone tweet, yes, they created a number of, like the new wave of Bitcoin Maximilus. And 2018, I did the same thing.

Like, end of 2017, early 2018, I did the same thing. I believed in shitcoins. They blew up. And I had to reassess and be like, huh, I'm either going to run away or I'm going to figure out what's real and what the real signal is. And that's when I, like, went Bitcoin only. But it's, it's like a hard lesson. Like, people are going to be feeling really shit right now.

Do you think this could really be, I don't even want to overstate it, be like the end of altcoins. That's a very definitive statement. But do you think this has markedly changed like the altcoin world? I think the change has been happening over many years. So I put out a tweet the other day, basically likening the Bitcoin dominance chart, which had a massive, massive candle. I think it must be the biggest Bitcoin dominance candle we've ever seen. I liken it to the gold silver ratio. Now, and I say this is someone who owns both gold and silver.

I'm very, very confident that if you look at the gold silver ratio, which is really gold dominance, it's kind of the same thing. When you look at that ratio, it's been in a macro scale uptrend since 1971, right? Since they broke the gold standard, silver actually lost its main selling point, which is divisibility, right? Why would you own the second best? Fiat currency kind of solved, as shitty as Fiat is, fair currency solved the divisibility problem,

and frankly, the internet kind of solved it as well with ETS for gold. So you don't really need fractional silver coins to back up your gold coins anymore. That's gone. So silver is slowly being demonetized to an industrial metal. Sure, it's going to go through pumps and moves, and it's having an all-time high at the moment. But if you look at the gold-silver ratio, it used to be it like it would come down to 30.

I think the atomic ratio is like 12. I just don't think it's coming back down to that level ever again. I think it has been demonetized. It is on that long, half-century-long journey towards being an industrial metal. And there's going to be some last gasps, and it's going to rally at some points in time. But overall, gold is just destroying silver in terms of value. Same concept. In 2017, there was a lot of people who truly believe, from 2017 through to 21,

truly believe that altcoins had a chance at flipping Bitcoin. at actually creating some value. There's a lot of speculation around this and like, you know, they're building all these use cases and defy and all this stuff. And then 2022 happens and everyone just realizes, I don't really need this stuff. FtX happens and people go, and also there's no kind of value here.

And then in 2023 and beyond, people just like, you just watch the ETHBTC ratio get nuked. And then you watch Solana perform. And then it starts to look a little bit like the ETHBTC ratio, just, you know, a cycle behind. And suddenly people realize, oh, wait a second. if I tokenize the entire world stock market on the Ethereum chain.

First of all, it doesn't work because it doesn't scale, but second of all, there's no value transfer to the ETH token. So suddenly everyone's just going, wait a second, we're actually struggling to justify the current prices. And then, after all of that, ETFs are coming, regulations are favorable. Then you get in a moment like this where just people realize there's actually no buyers for this stuff. And the veil, how many more veils can we pull away?

So look, I don't want to say it's the end of old coins, because the reality is that people are going to speculate on this stuff. However, do I think that Bitcoin dominance is ever going to go back to the 2017 peak? No. Do I ever think that Bitcoin dominance are going to go back to the 2021 peak? Probably not. Just suddenly your confidence that these things are going to actually accrue value. Like, let's face it, we're more than a decade into the Altcoin experiment.

And Bitcoin is still 61% of the market. And that includes stable coins. If you remove stable coins, we're still at like 66%. two-thirds of the market with a boring old orange boomer coin, guys, where's the value creation? Where's the product? There's just so many,

like really, at the end of the day, they just keep making new versions of a casino. And I just like, yeah, there's a demand for a casino, but, you know,

you're in Vegas. I'm sorry to a casino. Go and, go and, go and argue what one of these casinos is worth, right? Now it's a global casino. All right,

multiply it by 10. It's not half a trillion. You know what I mean? Like, it's just not half a trillion. for these things. So I just think the value proposition is just increasingly scarred. And I don't know how people keep justifying it. It's quite remarkable. But I think today, or yesterday, I really showed that it's kind of the market makers keeping the price at the level it is because there's not

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That's B-I-T-K-E-Y dot world and use code WBD. What happened to the market makers during this? Because where did all the liquidity go? Because I understand that these aren't anywhere near as liquid as Bitcoin, but there was some liquidity in them. How did we see flash grasses to zero? Yeah, so basically, if you're a market maker, the idea is that people are buying and selling,

and you want to have captured the spread. They want to buy off you, and then you sell back, and basically you're playing that middle spread of the orderbook. Now, when volatility picks up and markets start really moving, if people are selling to you, you actually don't want to get left. Like market makers try to do a delta neutral position, which means they actually don't want to take inventory risk.

For any long they have, they want an equivalent short. They actually don't want to hold too much of a token. So this is actually a good case study. Now, to the best of my understanding, one of the many things that FTX now are made a blew up is they have this, they had this system where when they were liquidated,

so Trader A gets liquidated. As you'll notice in most charts, when you get a big de-leveraging event, usually the market bounces. So when the market bounces, the FTX exchange wouldn't actually liquidate their account. It would hand the position to Alamator. And then Alamator would ride the bounce and then exit. So they're kind of capturing that spread.

The problem is when Luna imploded, Luna didn't stop going down. It exponentially went to zero. So they kept getting handed all these liquidation levels, but the price never bounced. It just went down, down, down, down, at an exponential fashion. So suddenly their own exchange nuked them because they were. got handed a pager's steaming pile of dog shit that just kept going to zero. And if you think about like a market maker, they don't want to be that alameda entity. So when the volatility gets super high, they open, they widen up the spreads. And then eventually if the volves too high, they're like,

oh man, I don't want to take any of this stuff. And they just turn off. They turn off the algorithm and so I can't touch it. They would have risk thresholds where it says when the volatility hits this level, just turn it off, walk away. I don't want to be involved. Let the market clear. And the problem is, then you've got an orderbook of the actual buyers, the actual buyers, the actual people who have a bid for Ripple. And if you got all these sellers, suddenly you feel Mr. I want to buy Ripple for $50,000, suddenly $50,000 of the book's gone. And then it's just, there's nothing underneath it. It just goes down. So suddenly there's no buyers whatsoever. So it really was just a market maker step back. There's no actual liquidity in the books. It cleared all the people who

wanted to buy, of which there weren't very many. Price just keeps going and people just keep selling because a lot of these things are algorithmic. So as it's cascade sells, more people sell, and shorts pile in. And, you know, it really just flushed out every buyer that existed. It's, um, this is probably the most I've ever talked about shit coins on the show. Um, but the reason being, like it, first of all, it's quite interesting. It's interesting to see what happened over the last few days.

But more than that, I'm interested to know what you think this means for Bitcoin. Because like, while it was nowhere near as volatile as, as the other stuff, it, um, it went down a lot. And I'm curious what you think that means in terms of like the structure of the market right now and where that leaves Bitcoin. Yeah, so it's a good one. So I prepared a couple of charts to kind of go over and explore this dynamic because it is important. So to give people a bit of context over the last, I would say, I mean, basically since that first 124K all-time high, as we came off that level, I started writing and saying, look, guys, this kind of looks like an all-time high failure. and what we need now to do is just see how investors respond. And through the course of that process, as we're correcting down,

we came back down to the short-term cost base, which I'll talk about in just a second, as we pulled down to that level, what it really showed, there was this giant pool of supply, which we'll touch on at the end of this slide deck, that pool of supply above 95K, I called the Hodler's Wall. And the reason why is it, it looks like,

you know, I'm a ground engineer by training, and the shape of where everyone bought their coins looks very much like a gravity retaining wall. So I called it the Hodler's wall. And the idea was when you get too many bitcoins underwater on their position, like we can take a bit of a hit. 12% we've taken this before. But once people are down 30% and you get like more than half of all Bitcoin underwater and suddenly people are just feeling a bit more sensitive, you can just really bust sentiment.

So we're going to try and explore, like this is my current thinking about the system. So this is just the liquidation profile. It shows you how a mammoth and monstrous it is. So for folks listening, we're looking at the long liquidations that occurred. 2.4 billion on this sell-off. And you actually have to go back to the mid-2020 sell-off. So there's two sell-offs that I really want to just like anchor to and use as a base case here. In the event that we have actually broken market sentiment, that's really the thing I want to look for.

Have we broken sentiment of the bulls? That mid-21 sell-off, I believe, killed the bull. I know we went to all time high after, but sentiment was just destroyed. You can look at 50 metrics and they all tell you that we just broke something on that sell-off. And that's the second all-time high is the one

that you call the scam all-time high anyway. Correct, correct. So there was a lot of Fugasey going on there with Alamator and FTCS and all this. Anyway, we'll come back to that. So that's the first major sell-off and really you have to go back to that level to find, I mean, that was the highest, 2.5 billion in liquidations versus

today at 2.4. Now, this is for Bitcoin, by the way. So when you hear those big numbers of like, you know, $19 billion, that's because the wider alt-coin space was just far bigger in terms of the damage. Now, the chart we're looking at now is open interest priced in USD. And if you think Bitcoin's been in a bull market, open interest has been in an even more ripping bull market. Absolutely mooning. Now, here's where I highlight those two sell-offs.

Mid-2020s, this is kind of May period. Open interest declined by 58% went from $24 billion to $10 billion. The second one I want to flag is in December 2021. Now, open interest declined by 32% went from 22 billion to 15 billion. Now, that event, I remember very clearly because I was working for Glassnote at the time, and we released a video like as the market was selling off. And that was, for the whole time that I worked at Glassnow, that was the all-time high views that we ever got.

And it was always the target to try and get back there. But obviously it was the start of the bear, and we just watched everything deteriorate from that point onwards. So those two are really my kind of anchor points for things that killed the last bull market. If it wasn't May 2021, if you don't want to argue that, then it was December. And both of those involved a massive futures deal leveraging. So now if we come across to where we are at the moment, OI dropped by 25% for Bitcoin from $94 billion down to $70 billion. So a pretty meaningful shot, right?

It's basically wiped out everything through until maybe the last four months. thereabouts in terms of OI growth. Now, by the way, this is actually not a bad thing because when you get a forest fire like this that clears out all the leverage, you've cleared out a lot of the leverage. Now, that doesn't mean it can't regrow and that doesn't mean that there aren't people bidding underneath,

but a lot of people are going to be going, oh, shit, I've got to peel back positions, I've got to just like take risk off the books. People are going to just make more sensible decisions. So I would argue that Bitcoin's 12% below all-time high. It's not the worst thing. actually do have cleared out a lot of this leverage. And this has been one of the things I've been right about saying, guys, look, be aware that there's just a lot of people gambling. And a lot of

this open interest, by the way, it's not coming from CME. Since 2023, the CME exchange has really groaned. It overtook Binance in terms of open interests. It has been flat to stagnant in terms of OI growth since November. And honestly, I think a lot of that's to do with the Ibit options coming live, Wall Street just prefers to play with options rather than futures. But what we have seen is a massive growth in like the hyper liquids and the buy bits and a lot of these exchanges like exchanges that you've never heard of. A lot of them I just put in the bucket of other and other just keeps exploding higher. So we've seen a lot of this degenerate leverage, I would say, on exchanges you never heard of. A lot of that got washed out, right? This is not coming from CME. Some of it's on Binance and the like,

but a lot of these are all these backwater exchanges you've never heard of. So just go back one second to that other chart because in there that was maybe, I don't know when that would be, February, March 25, there was a pretty big de-leveraging event. I would, is that around when Trump announced the initial tariffs? Trump tariff, V1. Okay, so we recovered pretty well from that. Do you think we may enter a similar thing now where this is kind of a V-shaped recover and we end up being, you know, absolutely fine from here? So that's obviously, that's definitely a scenario. And many long-term Bitcoins will know the Dalai Lama candle.

That's really what we're hoping for. We're hoping for the Dalai Lama candle where we actually do get this V-bottom and it recovers. We could also, I mean, generally speaking, when you get a big event like this, there's just a lot of people who are going to be more risk-averse. A lot of people are licking their wounds. So we do have to be just cognizant that the damage isn't as bad for Bitcoin. There's no question about that. Like I think old coins are in a world of her moving forward,

just because the fundamental case of why you would ever, own them is like not that it was there in the first place but like the market structure is now not there either whereas for bitcoin it is a different animal now that doesn't mean that people can't have their sentiment broken so i try to look at all these problems from different angles uh the first one is like derivatives and what's going on at like a market structure level up until this week the ets were just ripping in terms of inflows so let's see i suspect we'll get outflows on monday tuesday but if if we get outflows sustained all of now next week, probably not a great sign, and the market price will probably take a hit accordingly.

If the ETFs don't actually have a major outflow and they start to recover, and we've seen this many times, you get an outflow for a couple of days or a week, and the next thing, you know, you're back to three times the size of inflows. And not that ETS are the only buyer, but it's a very, very just, like, classic example of the demand profile. So let's see what the ETF investors do, because generally speaking, what you see going on the ETS is pretty coincident with what's going on in the on-the-on-chain world, them like outflows correspond with futures de-leveraging,

which correspond with people locking in losses on chain. And when it flips around, when the bull starts stepping back in, the inflows pick back up, the futures open interest picks back up, so on and so forth. So these things all generally speak the same language. So one thing that I saw you tweet and something I'd also been thinking about is how basically the entire market, global market, not just sort of Bitcoin crypto, but like everyone is going to be watching Bitcoin this weekend to see what's going to happen on Monday. And I think that's one of the really interesting.

things about Bitcoin being a 24-7 market. Because basically, if Bitcoin starts ripping, people are going to start thinking that we're going to have a V-shaped recovery. And just to add to that, one of the really interesting things is, did you see that Bitcoin was dropping before the Trump announcement? And I love this idea of Bitcoin almost being like a prediction market of macro events. No, there's two ideas that I want to float here, which I think are quite interesting. The first one is gold, I think, like I think gold and big. Bitcoin are special assets. Obviously, we know that Bitcoin's a special asset, but I think that for that specific reason, they're actually more information. They're as much information as they are an asset.

So why would you go in old, an inert yellow rock or a magic orange coin, right? These are the two things. Why would you do this? They don't yield me money, blah, blah, blah. There's obviously a signal that people put in to buying these like just hard, scarce, serious assets. Gold, I think, tells us where we're going. Bitcoin tells us the road to get there. So let's just, one in terms of, of that, gold has told us that they're going to print the money. They have to debase to cover the wall, whatever whole forms. I don't know what the whole looks like, but you know that nothing stops the train and they've got it coming. Gold smells that first. Bitcoin is very, very sensitive to local conditions. So it may sell off telling you something is wrong with you.

Like this is the thing. Why all these traders are looking at Bitcoin? Because they know that the equity market is stretched on any valuation metric you want to pick. Now, that's obviously because the denominator is wrecked in fiat, but that doesn't mean that people, like not everybody believes the debasement trade at the same time. There's a lot of people who just look at their fiat number, and that's just their fiat number. So when the market starts to tank,

Bitcoin might actually be saying, guys, there's something wrong here, and the trade after the trade, the down before the up, is more or less what gold is telling you. So gold tells you where we're going, Bitcoin tells you the road to get there. The other one, and on that idea of like over the weekend,

and it's kind of hilarious how Trump tweets this on a Friday, afternoon when the markets are closed. I don't know why, but the bond market apparently is closed on Monday, and the bond market's the only thing that's going to call Trump's bullshit. So, like, the whole thing is just very on brand for 2025. But the other one is if you're a trader and you, like, yeah, Bitcoin's sold off and you're going to get all these tradfai analysts saying, oh, look, Bitcoin's a shit coin and not a store of value and blah, blah, blah. If you're a trader and you want to do something on Monday morning, it might make sense to hold a bit of Bitcoin because, sure, the price might be down 12%, but you can still.

tap that liquidity to do something with it on Monday. So it might make sense to get some. And if you're an investor, like you and I, generally speaking, Bitcoin actually recovers just fine after this. So suddenly you're like, well, if it goes down and then it goes up again, well, maybe it's a, maybe I should actually get some. Maybe this is an opportunity. So for both the fast money and the slow money, the fact that Bitcoin trades 24-7 gives you a liquidity tap when you need it, but also tends to recover after enough time, both of those are good cases to actually have some in the portfolio. So the case for Bitcoin is actually very, very strong. So they're the two kind of general ideas I want to share, but every single trader and macroanalyst in the world is going to be staring at the Bitcoin

chart on their Bloomberg terminal all weekend because it's the only information that they have. And the more people that do that, when Bitcoin recovers, because it will recover. I don't know when, but it will recover. They're all going to go, oh, all right, fine. Now I actually have to get some because I'm just wrong. I'm just wrong. I don't know if I'm being naive, because you see these things, I mean, this is obviously an exceptional event, but you see things like this happen all the time. And Bitcoin tends to, like, I'm, you know, leaning towards this idea that it's Saturday the 11th at the moment. Tomorrow we're probably going to have a pretty good day for Bitcoin and come into Monday, the market might call Trump's bluff and maybe a guess that he's not going to be quite as aggressive as he's sort of signaling. Is that where you're at?

Yeah, look, it is. This is going to come out on Monday by the. way, so we might like things like this. No, no, that's fine. And look, you know, I was on Marty's pod the other day and I said, look, if we get back to 110K, it's, you know, it's concerning. And truthfully, it is. So the short term cost base is about 140K. The reason I like that level, and it's, it's not a perfect price. It's a zone of interest. But the fact that we're below that price, it means that there's a lot of people who are now about 50% of all people who've bought recently are now underwater. So all of those folks, some of them are going to be serious bitcoins.

some of them are going to have bought and be like, oh shit, now I'm down on my position, not feeling so good, maybe I might not buy the next dip. So 110K is kind of the top bound where things can start to get a bit hairy. Down below 105, things get increasingly hairy and below 95. Things get really quite hairy, and I'll talk through those levels in just a second, because there is rationale and logic to it. But as always, we've just got to see how the market responds. There is absolutely a case that we get a V-shaped bottom or we get one more leg lower and then it goes.

But really, it all comes down to how much damage. does the sell-off do? And that's really what I try to model out and say, well, where are those tipping points when people start to feel a bit sensitive? Of that Hodler's wall, how deep does the crack have to get where all these people are suddenly underwater that it just breaks sentiment the way that it did in 21 in May and December of 21? And I would guess you're not looking at this as like a Bitcoin-specific potential like buyer market. I think really what's going to happen now is Bitcoin's going to tell us whether the entire market is going to go into bear market territory with these tariffs.

Potentially. Potentially. I mean, if we're talking about like the wider market with equities, yes, you could argue that Bitcoin is sending a signal that something is not quite right, generally speaking. I think that there'd be a lot. And again, I'm not an equity analyst, so I have no edge in this. But I certainly listen to a lot of guys talking about it. And it's kind of hard to find too many people saying that these are like the cheapest stocks

that we've ever seen. Like generally people, like it's kind of not the cheap. of stocks we've ever seen. In fact, it's quite the opposite. But again, we've got a debasement trade on. So, like, it's all these very, very tricky things of, like, what does the majority believe? I mean, for me personally, I think the biggest risk to Bitcoin is actually just the wider market, right? I don't think there's anything internal with Bitcoin. In fact, I wrote a piece on Friday, actually, which was more of a macro view. I was revisiting a study I did in January. Back in January, I basically said, look, I don't think we actually have had enough capital flow

in to justify a move to 150. So I revisited that study because obviously been chopping sideways and more or less gone nowhere since January. And now I'm actually of the view that we have had sufficient capital inflow to justify a move to 150. Now that doesn't mean it happens tomorrow, but it means that like from a fundamental standpoint, we have actually seen enough real measurable capital invest in Bitcoin to, in my opinion, justify the move to 150. So that doesn't mean we go to 150 tomorrow, but it does mean that like, that's, For me, that's where we belong. And the difference between now and January is I think we belong, we should stay there.

But that also means if we go down, you start entering value and deep value zones much sooner. Because like there has been that capital inflow. Now, of course, all things in markets, and I actually encourage everybody, this is a superpower in markets, always hold two competing ideas at the same time. At a fundamental level, I'm with a view that we actually deserve a run at 150. And therefore, the lower the price goes, the more undervalued, the thing actually is. Now, that doesn't mean that if we break through certain levels and you get too many people on the wrong side of this trade, you can start to shatter sentiment. So it doesn't matter where your fair value fundamentals are, because things can get, which oversaw can get way more oversolved and there's certain tipping points.

It might be worth going through now if you want. Yeah, let's do it. Okay. Actually, I just want to quickly just snapshot this chart, because I think this is a great, example of what just happened. You sent me this. Just to try and describe it. In fact, I can't describe it. I've never seen a chart like this.

I know, I know. It's amazing. So basically, you'll have seen like charts where it's like a quadrant. So for folks who are listening, this is basically a quadrant chart. And on the X axis shows me how much open interest increased or decreased in percent. So if you're on the left hand side of the chart, it means open interest got flushed out. If you're on the right hand side, it means that people are adding more leverage. and the vertical axis, the Y axis is how, what did the Bitcoin price do?

Did the price go up or do the price go down in percent terms? So if you think about these quadrants kind of clockwise, left, right, down, right? At the top, you've got the price rallied and people de-leveraged, which means it's a spot-driven rally. On the right-hand side, which is where we currently are, so basically the market over the last two weeks, went up into a spot-driven rally, price went up, but leverage wasn't so much, and then then we went to the right top right quadrant where open interest grew massively. People levered up and the market went up. And then we went crashing all the way back down to the bottom left-hand quadrant. So price got nuked. We went down on the y-axis and open interest got absolutely flawed.

Now, the default view on this chart that I have said on my website, it's like plus or minus five, 10% on either direction. I have to actually expand the range of this chart because the de-leverting that we just saw was so mammoth over the last seven days that it just blew out the chart. So basically people levered up into the rally and then we just got wiped right back down again. So that de-leveraging is the part of this that is just normal market dynamics that when things get over leveraged, people want to wash that leverage out of the system and the Trump news was kind of just an excuse to do that. Yes. Yeah. And I think that's another way to just like hold, if we're going to talk about bare market potential here.

As I think a lot of Bitcoiners know, Bitcoin hasn't quite gone up as much as you would have liked in 2025. It is very obvious to anybody looking that we've had a slow down a momentum. Now, what we saw over the last like two months since we hit that first 124K all-time high, we'll talk about this in just a second. A lot of people have bought, like a lot of people have bought above 95K. This zone is really where Bitcoin lives now. And so therefore, if you go below it, things can get hairy very, very quickly.

but we haven't with kind of the bull market momentum has slowed down meaningfully and sometimes markets just look for an excuse to just like the straw that breaks the back and it could be that because everyone's looking at the Bitcoin price now and the old coin price they're now going to go oh shit maybe I should take some risk off my equities on Monday and then that risk off on equity it creates downside elsewhere and then you get this cascade so just be very very cognizant that we could we may there is a possibility that we have actually just like broken spirit across the board. And then we go back to my original analogy and saying gold is showing us where we're going. Bitcoin's showing us the road to get there, probably down to go up, if that's the

case. If, on the other hand, we don't get those things play out, right? And Bitcoin does get back above, I would say 118K is an important level, because that's where, like, in our local trading range, that's where the most volume is. It's what's called the point of control. If we get above 118K, then I think we're off to the races, right? And by the way, I said that before, we went to 126K because that was kind of that threshold where if we get above it, it's good news. And then now that we got above it, it's like, well, we kind of have no place going below it. And yet here we are. So the fact that we're now below it, you've now got to just at least put a caution goggle on and just be cognizant that we may just have snapped sentiment.

We may not have, but we just be aware that that is a possibility. All right. Let's go on to the next one. Okay. So this is really where I think the meat of my work has been over the last couple of months. So, again, for folks listening, this profile, basically we're looking at like a bar chart, and it shows on the X axis is the Bitcoin price. And the height of the bars, it's called the URPD, it basically shows where all the supply was.

Now, this is in BTC terms. So you can kind of see there's a whole stack coins down at $0,000, because that's all the Satoshi and early miners. There's a whole bunch of coins down at like 55K to 70K. There's a gap between 70K and 85K or 80K. But if you look at the bulk of when the majority of BTC are, right, in terms of recent history, 30% of all Bitcoin have a cost basis above 95K, 30% of all coins, and above 110K, where we are right now, 15% of the supply.

So if you kind of think about our current price range, 95 is the bottom, and then 110 is the midpoint. So we've got half above, half below, all of the recent buyers. Now, you can see in the red there, basically all the coins that are, in loss right now. And it's pretty meaningful. So just for those who are kind of watching the chart, envision that the price goes down to 95, suddenly all of those coins that are above that red line there are all in loss. They're all people who've bought recently. They could be ETF buyers. They could be treasury company buyers. They could be retail. They could be investors, traders, whatever it is. Suddenly all of those coins are underwater in their position. And the ones that boarded 120 and 125,

they're going to be down a whole lot more than the ones that bought it. 95, but the guys who bought at 95 have been waiting all year to not be underwater. And suddenly they're underwater. You can imagine the hit that that puts onto our overall sentiment. So this chart kind of lock the overall profile into your mind. This is in Bitcoin terms. But as we know, the vast, vast, vast majority of people, except for the hardcore bin at Bitcoin is out there.

And even you probably still think about things in Fiat terms. Sure, 30% of all the dollars invested are up here. But if you price every coin when it last moved, being like an estimate of their real, like, invested capital, the dollars people have invested. So, Satoshi's coins are worth zero. So now they disappear off the chart. 62% of all dollars invested are above 95K. Wow. Now, yeah, exactly.

So, and above 110K, 35%. So 35% of all the dollars ever invested are now underwater. And if we go down to 95, 62%. That's a majority. So then you start saying, well, what is going to break people's sentiment? It's not going to be their Bitcoin being under war. It's going to be their investment portfolio and the green number going to a red number.

That's the thing that can break sentiment. Now, as I've said before, like we're down 12% from the all-time high. We've recovered from this. We've actually seen this kind of damage many times. What we are looking at right now is not at typical for a bull market. In fact, it's actually quite normal for a bull. But once we go down in 95, we start testing the level of like, we haven't really recovered from that many sell-offs in the past with that much damage.

So it's one of those things to just be aware of that it gets worse in terms of sentiment, in my view, at an accelerating rate as we go from 110 to 105 to 100 to 95. It's like an exponential curve of how nasty it is. And this is why I say, like, we have no place at 110. Here we are at 110. We go to 105. If we had no place at 110, then we have no place at 105. and we have no place at 105, you start going to 100.

So you can see how this like bare market potential, and that's why I talk about that December sell-off, it just kept going lower, and it just kept breaking people's sentiment. And that's what I would, I generally call a top-heavy market. You have too many people that bought too many coins at too high over price, and that is really defined by as the price comes down through those levels, people just start to move into loss.

So, again, hold two thoughts in your mind at the same time. we have recovered from dips like this many times. Right now, not atypical. But the gap between not atypical and kind of nasty is between here and 95K, which is not a very big price range and it won't take a lot to get down there. So just be really, really sensitive to that, really to how sensitive the market is. One of the things that keeps me up at night is the idea of a critical error with my Bitcoin cold storage. This is where Anchor Watch comes in. With Anchor Watch, your Bitcoin is insured with your own A plus rated Lloyds of London insurance policy, all Bitcoin is held in their time-locked multi-sig bolts. So you have the peace of mind knowing your

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Bitcoin. So to open an account today, head over to river.com forward slash WBD and earn up to $100 in Bitcoin when you buy. That's river.com forward slash WBD. You've been talking about that 95K level for a little bit now. And if we do get there and that I completely agree that sentiment will be shot at that point in a lot of ways. We enter like a real bear market potentially. What percentage chance do you put on us actually revisiting that price? Yeah, that's a very good question. So if you had, honestly, if you had to ask me before this sell-off, I probably would have said, like, I don't know, maybe 10%, something like that. Now I'd say, I mean, again, gut feel, probably 30. I would probably put it as a, you know, one in three. And honestly, that, in order to get that one in three, it very much depends on what we see the equity market do Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. If we just see like just this thing metastasize and things really start to fall down, then the odds just, and as it, the odds rapidly increase. And the lower we go, this is kind of the nature of markets, right? You have to always be so flexible as things come to light. My thesis was we have no place at 110K, once we broke to all time high. Here we are.

If the Bulls don't make a stand here, then they're even more on the back foot. So like, I would call 95K, that's like the Bulls last stand. And I say this all the time to my subscribers. It's like, if we get to 95K, it's the Bulls last stand. It is the level where the bulls are going to put up the biggest fight. But the second idea you've got to hold, the competing idea is, why did they let it get there in the first place? So you've kind of got to hold that view. Like, we can hold the last stand, but you really shouldn't have got to the last stand in the first place. So getting below 140K was important. That's the short-term cost basis.

That's that tipping point, 50% of all recent buyers are underwater. You know, we're just in that really sensitive point where the bulls have to step in. They've got to step in in in the near term because the, The gap between here and nasty is not much. You know, on a more sort of macro level, Trump just says stuff. And with this, he just shot from the hip, said he was going to tariff China an additional 100%. I don't know if that's feasible, if he's doing art of the deal stuff and what that will actually wash out and be. But he will obviously have seen this, you know, what's happening in the market since he made that announcement.

Do you think he'll allow that to continue or do you think he'll have to backtrack on his words and the tariffs won't actually end up being. you know, as aggressive as how he's telegraphed it so far? That's a very, very good question. And I certainly am not going to say that I'm an expert on Trumpisms. My gut feel, my gut feel is, yes, it probably is a bit of out of the deal because if you put 100% tariffs on China, I think the US isn't major problems. I just don't see how that's tenable. Kind of make sense why you do this on the weekend.

But I also worry that like, because valuations have been so stretched for such a long time, And again, if I, if, like, and I do, I believe Bitcoin is an information index as much as is an asset. Bitcoin not really ripping while equities and gold have been going. It's just had this caution flag and be going like, why? Is it actually telling us that something ain't right? And this could just be the straw that breaks the back. And Trump may think that he can then just like, oh, no, don't worry. I'm having the meeting with she again.

And the market says, I don't care, man, I'm done. I'm out. I'm finished. Like the damage is too bad. I've got to get out. He might set away a train that he just hasn't kind of thought through stopping. it kind of depends what the bond market does as well, which we're not going to know until Tuesday, US time.

So there's just a whole lot of things that he may, maybe, I don't think he can put 100% tariffs on. I would say that there's a back down, a taco trade. But again, what are we going to do? Based my thesis on what Trump says. I mean, it's a tricky, tricky state of affairs. I mean, trying to guess what Trump's going to say is almost impossible. But the interesting thing as well,

in terms of like Bitcoin has obviously been a signal that, the market is going to be paying very close attention to. But I think gold is also. And while everything was selling off massively, gold was fine. I think gold was up on the day. It was still above 4K. What's that saying? I think that's the trade after the trade. I think whatever comes between here and now, if you close, like if I had to make a call what I think happens from here, I think we probably have some downside across all markets. That would be my gut feel. I think we have some downside. And then I just think that the liquidity can and has to come in right now. The challenge is, is how much does the fall have to happen?

Because we know that that's the response, and it tends to be a response rather than be a prophylactic, where they come in and just do it anyway. So I think we actually have to, like the down to go up. And I think goal is telling us where we're going, and I think Bitcoin is telling us the road to get there. That's my kind of general base case thesis. I don't like the road 110K, honestly,

because I don't think we belong here. I think we belong higher. And that tells me maybe there's something wrong, just like external to the world. And Bitcoin is actually just telling us information. And, you know, as a Bitcoin analyst, I like to listen to it. It's one of the most interesting times in a long time. And just to get the popcorn out, I'm quite enjoying it.

But let's go on to the next one. What have we got here? Yeah. So I want to just close out this section because, you know, as we talk about this whole thing, I've mentioned some thresholds here. And again, they're kind of these nice 5K increments, which, again, aren't that far apart. 114s, the short-term cost basis. We're below that.

Half of all recent buyers are underwater. $110K. Right now, if you look at the Bitcoin market cap, 2% of it is currently unrealized losses. Now, we can also then model. Now, by the way, that's very, very normal. The next chart, which is the last one, will help just explore, like, how bad does it get during these major set, like bare market starting sellers. And by the way, just, again, for people in the audience who are listening, we're looking

at that same bar chart, except instead of looking at things in terms of Bitcoin terms or USD invested terms, we're looking at in terms of the profit and loss. the paper gains they're holding. So now Satoshi's got billions of dollars of unrealized profit. The guy who bought it at 125K, he's down that 12% on his purchase price. It's showing us the dollar value of unrealized profit and loss using on-chain, where basically the UTXO set. So right now, 2% of the market cap is underwater. So let's now imagine that the market sells off further. We go down to 95K, suddenly 5% of the market caps underwater. We get at 85K, 10% of the market caps underwater. We're get out of 15K, 75Ks where 15% is underwater. So the reason I've highlighted these price levels,

so again, 95K at 5%, really an important one to just flag, if we look at the next chart, which is the final one, of that Bitcoin market cap, this is what the unrealized losses look like in bull and bear markets and very, very different in bulls to bears. So in a bull market, we've seen regular like 5%, 10% of the market cap go underwater in both 24 and 25, both of those correction, chop consolidation phases, we had about 10% of the losses. They're somewhat high, relatively speaking, so the bull market has actually sustained some pretty nasty punches. Where we are right now, you actually have to squint to see it.

So if we go down a 100 to 95K, suddenly you're at that bull's last stand and the losses start to get meaningful enough. but once you get above 10%, once you get to like 15% or 20%, this is what we saw in mid-20201, this is what we saw in December 2021, it's what we saw at the start of the 2018 bear market, there's just a certain level of damage to people's portfolio. And I have this feeling where we have a more sensitive audience now.

Tradfly guys don't want to see a 30% pull-wack. This is a bit much for them, right? They're calling the Fed for a bailout at 10% down. So if we go down to these kind of levels, I think it's like that the sensitivity is actually arguably more. So really, if we get down to 95, that's why I think it's that bull's last stand. 5% of the market cap is going to be underwater. There'll be a bunch of people taking panic profits as well, which brings more and more coins up to that level. There will be people locking in losses, but like generally speaking, I think that that's kind of my, for now, that's my working thesis of like, we've got to hold that level.

And if we don't want to get there, then really we've got to hold higher up because things just get, acceleratingly nasty as we go down. Let's get into the last one, and then I've got a few questions for you. Yeah, so that kind of picks like where the state of the market is, at least from my view. And again, all we can do here is theorize over when investor behavior changes. And that's how I like to run my analysis. It's not about predicting the future. It's about saying, if we get to this threshold, upside or downside, where do I think the

tipping point of investor behavior is? Now, again, a lot of people are looking at, oh, it's price suppression. oh, there's, you know, why isn't the market going up and it's all bullshit. The sell side pressure from long-term holders is massive. 2.5 billion a day, a day in coins coming back to markets. Whenever you see sailors bought like, you know, $400 million worth, like, okay, good. Long-term holders sold like six times as much as that on a single day. And some people will argue and say that, oh, you know, coins that are six months old,

they're not long-term holds. It's like, it doesn't really matter because one-sold Bitcoin is one-sold Bitcoin. The whole idea is that after six months, the odds of that coin having, come back to life is insignificant compared to coins younger than six months. So they all behave in a very, very similar way. And that is that they don't do much until they sell usually in bull market trends. So just like a broad picture, there's a lot of sell side pressure. We've clearly had this de-leveraging event. There's a chance that we have kind of just tweaked people's sentiment. You know, all this being said, right, I still actually believe that we end the year higher. However,

my tipping points are very, very well defined because the lower we go down towards 95, just the the less bullish I can be at an objective level because we have seen this story many times before. We're only 12% off the all-time high, right? We're a long way from this getting broken, but that long way is a small price move. So really, it's all about what the bulls do from this point onwards and whether we see a relaxing of some of this sell side, because right now it's pretty sizable. So it sounds like you're still bulls do.

bullish but cautious at this point. The question I would have for you there is like when we've spoken in the past, I always complain about this not being an exciting enough bull market and you always tell me to manage my expectations. But we've not had the same exponential run-up that we've had in previous bull markets. And the thing that you quite often say is that sort of the bull market will author the bear market that follows. So what, if we are now entering a bare market, let's say that 30% chance or whatever it is, like what do you think a bear market looks like?

Great question. So my base case as it stands today, there's a model that, sorry, a lot of people will be aware of the realized price. Now, the realized price is the average cost basis per unit of Bitcoin in the whole supply. So it includes a tocio, it includes all these folks. We have hit that in every previous bear market. Now, right now, from memory, it's like 55K or something. I think that's too brutal. And there was a study that Dave Puehl and I did in 23, I think. or 22, I forget, called coin time economics. And in that study, it's a big monster of a piece, like 122 pages of on-chain wizardry and strange, you know, nuance. What we basically found is that the realized price, it doesn't quite make sense moving forward. We expect it to lose signal over time. And the reason to be at the break-even level, which means price goes down to 55K, we're at the realized price. For price to be at break-even, you need guys who buy. at the top, people who are active and actual real people, to have losses equivalent to the

massive profits held by Satoshi and lost coins that don't respond to the market. So you've kind of got these, let's call them dead entities, and they've got massive profit. And in order to be at break-even, you've got to offset them with massive losses. Now, sure, that's what bare markets are, periods of massive losses. But I think that Bitcoin is just a different animal now. It's just matured to a different level now. People actually want to buy it at a serious level. Like, you know, we talk about two and a half billion dollars a day and we're 12% off the all-time high and this has been going on for months. Guys, there's a lot of demand here. One sole Bitcoin is one bought Bitcoin at the same time. So in that coin time economics piece,

we came with another model called True Market Mean. And we actually developed this purely from first principles. We get rid of like, we get rid of what's called the thermo cap and production costs and all that stuff. And we only look at active investors. People are active in the cycle. Now that model, after we developed reverse principles, when we run the statistics of how the price actually oscillates around it, it's quite remarkable. Dead center. The long-term mean and median of how the price oscillates around it is one, and we've spent 50% of our time above it, 50% below it. Very, very strange, but dead center. So it was right in the middle of that 2021 cycle, about 30K.

Right now it's about 80K. What else is at 80K? Well, the average cost basis for the ETFs is at 80K. Sailor is like 75, I think. The class of 2024, if you just like do a on-chain volume weighted price is about 80K. So there's a lot of like cluster down there at 80K. And that, to me, that's where I've been looking at being the most likely place. If we do just bear out, we probably go down somewhere to like 80K zone.

And then from like a more fundamental standpoint, I think Bitcoin proved that we're a trillion dollar asset in 2024. I really do. And that's 50K. So, you know, let's add a premium to that because honestly, we belong above a trillion. Let's not kid ourselves here. You know, that 2024 chop consolidation range, the top of it was 75K. We bounced off it in the tariff tantrum in April. And again, I think things have to get really nasty to get down there. Like I truly, and I say this honestly, I do believe Bitcoin belongs to stay there. We've seen the capital inflows to justify this now. So anything below that to me is just The lower you go, the more the deep value. But being aware that markets take time to process this stuff.

So that's my general view. What's the price that Bitcoin's at $2 trillion right now? It's roughly like 50K is a trillion, 100K is $2 trillion. So I mean, 100K will be a big buy zone for a couple of reasons, one for being just a nice round number, but also that $2 trillion market cap. 55K seems extreme. although one of the things that I truly believe in is that the funniest outcome is always the most likely. And I think honestly, the fact that this all happened on the day that Core V30 released is proof that that's the case.

Oh, that's great. Yeah, Core tanked the market. And they ended everything from equities to, yeah, to Bitcoin the whole lot. And so maybe that makes me think we just, 58K is the bottom. It's 58K forever. The other argument, look, the other argument is that Core managed to nuke old coins to zero. So, you know, we've got to give them props for that. Like, yeah, that's a win. There you go. Okay. And then if we take the bullish scenario here that this is, ends up being, you know, just a short-term event, V-shaped type recovery, and everything's kind of good.

How much do you think this slows down the, you know, price narrative? And do you think we then just hover around this kind of level for a long time before we go up to 150 or whatever we go to? No. Look, my general view here is that we either have, like, I think the market wants to go. go somewhere. I think it's time to move. We've spent enough time up here. The market's ready to move. I think we either go into a bare market or welcome to euphoria. It's going to be one of the two. So that's why I think it's actually quite an exciting time, especially for me as an analyst, right, trying to just like see how the investor response evolves over the coming like week. This to me is,

you know, we're going in one direction or the other. I don't think we just go sideways for six months. I think the market's ready to move. Interesting. So there's a, this is the time to pay attention. Totally, totally. And, you know, for me, this is just like a big puzzle. I just love trying to work out like what, what. I'm not trying to predict the future. I'm just trying to like get a read on how Bitcoin is behaving, how that Bitcoin a behavior pattern changes now that we have an institutional audience. Again, Bitcoin is taking two and a half billion of spot sell a day at the same time that we have this de-leveraging going on and 25% of open interest clears. If you put that two and a half billion of sell side, the old coins go to zero, let alone the de-leveraging.

So the divergence, all right, I think that's really, if you can take one thing away from this whole event, the divergence between crypto and Bitcoin, it just opened a whole different chasm because everybody, everybody has just seen that there is no second best in terms of liquidity profile. You just can't own the stuff that goes to literal zero on a weekend because of a Trump tweet. You just can't. Bitcoin down 12%. How many times have we seen this, right? kind of another day in the office, noting all the, you know, can deteriorate from here, of course. I think I still lean bullish. Just with, I don't think Trump, Trump definitely doesn't want to see the markets crash. I think he's going to be very aware of what's happened. I think he maybe will

course correct a bit, out of the deal, things will end up panning out a little differently to that initial tweet. I think we're like likely going to have another couple of rate cuts at least through the end of the year. I don't know. Gold saying everything wants to go higher. J.P. Morgan are talking about a debasement trade. It seems like there's too much lining up for this to turn into a bear market right now. Gold tells us where we're going. Bitcoin tells us the road to get there. If we do go into a bare market now, is that the four-year cycle thesis playing out,

and we were all wrong talking about this being over? That, I mean, my base case for a long time, I think since like 2023, has been, I don't think that the four-year cycle breaks on the upside. I think it breaks on the downside. So, look, we may have, we may have some kind of a, you know, If we top out here, yeah, four-year cycle. But I think what actually breaks people's head, let's just imagine, right, we go down 30%, 40% from the all-time high.

Are people going to reset their cycle chart being down 40% or are they going to wait for the 60% or the 70%? Right? We went 90, then we went minus 85, they went minus 75, people going to be waiting for the 65 and they get a 35 or 40. Are they going to reset all their cyclical analysis? Maybe, maybe not. Right.

I think that the bearishers are going to kick in and people aren't going to know where to reset the chart. Was that part of a super cycle? Is the bull still going? Right? We've had two 32% drawdowns in the parts. If this is a 32% drawdown, was it a bear market? And if so, was 2024 a bear as well?

What about 2025? Maybe that was a bear market. Like, I just think people lose side of what's really going on. And that's part of the fun. Oh, so that's interesting. So you think the fact that the bear market won't be as brutal as previous ones is what actually breaks the four-year cycle? I think so.

And like, you know, shop consolidation has a lot, like the 2024 and the 2025. I said this at the Sydney Bitcoin meetup as well. The thing that's interesting about chop consolidation, in my view, is that it builds floors, not ceilings. Like, go back to some of those charts we just looked at. 62% of all the dollars invested in Bitcoin have a cost basis above 95K. That's a big number. That's a big number.

Like, two hold two competing thoughts. Bitcoin belongs above 95K. The market has said it belongs above there. If we go below there, watch out. You know, they're the two competing. ideas you've got to hold. Cautiously bullish. All right. Checkmate. Thank you man. We only did a show a couple

of weeks ago, but when this all happened, I was like, I've got to do a show, and it's got to be with you. So I'm glad we could do this sort of last minute. I'm going to try and get this one out as quick as possible, because otherwise we're going to look like fools when the market tells us everything we said was wrong. But I appreciate you, man. Thank you for doing this. Good on your folks. And again, if you've taken a gut punch over the course of this thing,

it gets better, right? It's all right. But always learn your lesson. I think everybody listening to this has blown up an account here or there. It sucks losing money. We've all done it. But it is part of the journey. And the quicker that you can learn the lesson and then write the ship. And leverage is a painful beast.

And I think it's very, very clear that a lot of people would have had like 2x leverage on. If the price goes to zero, it doesn't matter what your leverage ratio is, it goes to zero. Very clear that Bitcoin is just in a different league to everything else because down 12% is very different to being. down 100. Totally. And just for your sanity, like, I've deposited lots of money to Bitmex that's never come out. I've done the shitcoin casino. I don't think I've ever withdrawn for Bitmex.

No, absolutely not. And when these things happen, just the piece that you have, knowing that everything's just in cold storage and you're not going to sell anyway, so it's just entertainment at that point. It's a different frame of mind. It's the right place to be. I have a very, very similar feeling to what I had when FGX blew up just thinking, okay well I didn't actually lose anything which is again very comforting yeah I'm the number go down

but viewers go up when this sort of chaos happened so it's all good hopefully it's not the all time higher like it was in my video back in December hopefully not checkmate you're a legend thank you for doing this such short notice mate um you should tell everyone about the newsletter I saw it come in on Friday that was the signal that things weren't necessarily as bad as people thought but but give it give them a shill yeah so um you'll find us over at check on chain dot com we've got a newsletter and a charting So all the charts we looked at today, they're all available for free so you can check them out and poke around with those. Basically, we do two posts a week, just trying to help people understand this stuff. Like, again, I can't predict the future.

No one can. I just like to try and help people think about these scenarios ahead of time and try and give a evidence-based database view, at least from my perspective. We do two posts a week, written and video. And, yeah, as the market was selling off, I got up early on Saturday morning and ripped a quick video just to help people kind of visualize what is going on. And that's what I think is so cool about Bitcoin in general, but just like the amount of data that we have to watch the futures markets, to watch the options markets, to watch the on-chain space. Like you can visualize where people, where their sentiment is. You can see where their cost bases is. You can see where their leverage profiles are.

And then you just kind of map out and say, well, if we go below this and you're going to hit this guy's liquidation, which is going to put all these guys underwater, probably a sensitive line in the sand. I can make my decisions accordingly based on that. So that's really how I just try to frame things and just help people navigate the volatility because, you know, we're all hodlers. And when Bitcoin does this stuff, and I get this feedback all the time, most hoddlers do not care. The price goes up or down. They just want to know why. Because they're fascinated by it. So, you know, and I'm much the same.

That's why I do it. Yeah, go and subscribe. It's one of the best newsletters out there, if not the best. You're kind of like one of the only analysts that still made it. There's not many of you around anymore. No. And the truth is I don't post as much on Twitter anymore because I just, you're kind of, you're not. just prefer doing the long form and actually writing and like putting the thought into it.

And I just find Twitter's just too noisy. I don't particularly want to talk about treasury companies. But, you know, that's just kind of the narrative at the moment. Notts and core and treasury companies, I'm like, I'm just going to write about the stuff that I find interesting. Actually, saying I don't want to talk about treasury companies, before we close out, can I ask you a really quick question on that? Because we've talked a lot about whether that business model is kind of dead at this point. do you think something like this could really crush it? Oh, totally.

I mean, I think it was dead. Look, shit coins just went down 80%. Most treasury companies have been down 80% for weeks, months. So, again, I've been saying this for a long time. I don't understand how a treasury company that is too small to tap debt markets, too small to tap preferreds hasn't reached the scale necessary. I don't know how they re-expand their MNAV. I would love to see it happen because then I can learn from it, but my thesis is if your primary

means of accumulating Bitcoin is selling your stock to buy Bitcoin at a premium, then your stock no longer has a premium. Why would someone invest in it? And then you kind of look at it from another perspective. If the argument is that they get acquired by a bigger treasury company, well, guys, no one acquires a company that's not distressed. So you're going to get bored out. And actually, it reminds me of I worked on a mine site in the UK. And the mine, a lot of people, like you go on like the forum of retail traders, they were paying 40 pence per share. And the mine, by the way, went ahead.

But the company that they were buying shares in went bankrupt, a big American miner came in and bought them at 50p on the dollar. All those investors got bought out at a shitty price, and then the mine goes ahead anyway. So like the thesis was correct, but you get wrecked by market structure. So I think that's going to happen. So if you're going for this like M&A proposition, well, you're not going to get bored out at a good price.

You're going to get bored out at the worst price. A lot of these treasury companies, you know, I made fun of them calling them penny stocks with a coal cart. A lot of them are now literally penny stocks, right? They're trading below a dollar. They're going to have to do reverse stock splits just to stay listed. This is a really tough proposition. So like I get it.

I think the business model by, you know, the meta planets and the strategies, there's a case to be made for some of these things. I don't know if there's a case. to be made for thousands of them, hundreds of them, even 10 of them. I think there's a handful of these things. And like, you know, for strategy, for example, if Bitcoin goes on a proper run, you know, you've got 640,000 Bitcoin worth of beachball that's going to inflate. At a minimum, the stock's going to chase the Bitcoin price. Like, at a minimum, it's just too big. If you've got a thousand Bitcoin and Bitcoin goes to a million dollars, well done. You're a billion dollar

company. What are you going to do with a billion dollars in today's world? Like, it's just irrelevant. size matters a lot and, you know, growth matters a lot. And there's only a handful that are of a size and growth potential that they can do anything about it. So I just think that the Pareto distribution, like shitcoins, they will, like shitcoins will not die. But a lot of them just did. And I would say treasury companies, not all treasury companies will die. But I think a lot of them are zombies walking. It is probably the most interesting time in the markets in, you know, since FTCX really right now.

I think it's going to be a really crazy few weeks. We'll see how this plays out. But thank you, mate. It's been awesome. Welcome to 2025. It's all very on brand. Perfect. I will speak to you very soon, mate.

I always appreciate it. Thanks, mate.