Signs Pointing More and More Toward a Crypto Relief Rally!

And what I'd like to see or anyone who's bullish on Bitcoin would like to see is the rest of the crowd starting to get very bearish once again. Right now they're pretty neutral. U so you know let's say we go below 65K by the end of today or the next couple of days. I won't predict that but it could happen. That may be another support level that gets breached that changes the mood of the optimists out there and we suddenly start to get doom and gloom across our timelines once again. Hey everyone, welcome into the Thinking Crypto podcast. Joining me today is Brian from Santiment. And as you all know, we're going to do a deep dive into the metrics around Bitcoin and the top altcoins to get an understanding of what's happening in the crypto market. Brian, great to see you. — Good to see you, Tony. Still not the uh needlemoving bullish momentum we're hoping for, but we are going to go into some context here as to what's going on with markets and what may be around the corner. We both kind of agreed before the call that um we do see that there's a potential relief rally coming. Obviously, not investment advice, but um we're optimistic right now, so we'll see what the numbers say. Brian, I think back to our last two episodes where we looked at whale data and the trend that was happening. And one of the things we talked about was the the story that's been we've seen over time and what was playing out was that retail continued to be bullish while whales were distributing being bearish and then look what the market did and maybe that was the reset we needed for some sort of relief rally and it's the same cyclical pattern playing out over and over. — Exactly. Yeah. We really the biggest signal that I typically look for in my reporting is whether smart money is accumulating and um you know the retail is dropping off. And we do see here there's a little bit of a turning point going on. Um the 10 to 10k BTC whales, those with anywhere between 10 to 10,000 Bitcoin in their wallets, collectively hold a little over twothirds of all of Bitcoin supply at about 68. 09%. 09%. While retail holds just under a quarter of a percentage, which doesn't sound like much, but this red line does represent the mood and the overall sentiment of the overall crowd because 0. 01 BTC or less is realistically what most people are holding. Call that about what 66 uh $660 or less right now. Um so right now we do see that smart money has accumulated over the past few days while retail appears to have topped. Uh whether this is the capitulation point and this is as high as it's going to get for a while. We don't know. We hope so because we want to see retail really start to sell off smart money accumulate and that's what really drives markets upward. Um, you can see the last time they really jumped up was that second week of January and things were looking really good. Sentiment was getting bullish. We'll go over that in a moment. And then they start to flatline and when they flatline, so does price and it begins to collapse all the way back to, you know, the $6,600 or $66,000 range that we're in now. — Yeah, absolutely. And this is something we've been tracking for a long time. And I love this chart. I look at it almost every day on Santammen and uh it's one of those pillars so to speak that I go to say well what's happening in the market let me see what the whales are doing um and it gives me an indication of where things are at um you know with all this happening with the big flush we saw last week Brian what's the sentiment around Bitcoin is it fearful extreme fear you know how are people feeling — yeah so as you would expect things really bottomed out just as uh sentiment was getting at its most bearish among the crowd. So you can see this gray line here represents the five minute fluctuations of Bitcoin over the past month. These big red bars are the negative sentiment. As you would suspect, the negative sentiment went through the roof when we almost dropped below 60,000. At least on Coinbase, I saw $60,01 before prices began to bounce. So, call that, you know, all of the limit buy orders firing off, whatever it was, it allowed prices to hit that support level bounce off of it. People got excited when it got back over 70K. So, there was like a plus 19% quick rise. If you nailed the bottom there and you had a limit buy at 60K, great, great. You know, good for you. But then it started to flatline once again and it's been fading ever since. Interestingly, these gold lines which represent the ratio of all the bullish comments on social media versus all the

bearish comments on social media, they the ratio was super bearish here obviously as prices bottomed out with uh like a 3:2 ratio of bearish versus bullish comments. But then it started to really rise up and it's gotten all the way back to slightly bullish once again. It's still not nearly where it was when things were normal uh back in mid January when prices were looking like they could challenge 100k anytime soon. But it's this is like the perfect uh symbolism of how sentiment typically lags behind whatever price is doing and then helps cause reversals. So there's fairly bullish back here. They get more and more bearish as prices go down. a little bit of optimism when there's a bounce, bottoms out here where there's way more bearishness, people saying Bitcoin's a scam, going to zero, what have you. And then we start to get more optimistic as 70K gets breached again. There's a little bit of volatility. And what I'd like to see or anyone who's bullish on Bitcoin would like to see is the rest of the crowd starting to get very bearish once again. Right now, they're pretty neutral. Uh so you know let's say we go below 65K by the end of today or the next couple of days. I won't predict that but it could happen. That may be another support level that gets breached that changes the mood of the optimists out there and we suddenly start to get doom and gloom across our timelines once again. — Yeah, great point. It looking at the charts, you know, Bitcoin is down today. um we could go retest 60K or go below it. You know, the charts look like it could go to 50K. Obviously, not financial advice. We're just speculating here, but that could be to your point the move that final capitulation just breaks the retail um you know, confidence and then sets itself for the real rally. I've seen these things before, so it looks like it play out that way. — Yeah. And I wanted to highlight this. This is kind of part two of the sentiment picture and it shows that the last time we had this huge surge in buying or bullish keywords being mentioned alongside Bitcoin or BTC was like around the third week of January. Huge surge right here. And then right when that surge happened, that's when the collapse really began to take hold. And then it went all the way down until suddenly people are talking about selling. — They didn't want to sell when Bitcoin was above 85K, almost 90k, but suddenly they do want to sell when it's, you know, threatening to go below 60K. So that's just the nature of the um emotional reactive retail trader that you guys watching this are competing with out there. they are going to be very emotional and very much um you know irrational when it comes to their decisions based on not what's in the news but what's actually been the latest price action. It's kind of like what have you done for me lately on a daily basis in crypto for most traders. — Yeah. And I tried my best to tell folks on the podcast that, you know, when the herd is greedy, that's when you want to be fearful. And when the herd is fearful, that's when you want to be greedy. And you want to look for buying opportunities if you know it makes sense for you financially. You do your research and all that. But when there's fear, that's the time to buy. And uh it's funny, just many are still caught up in the emotional roller coaster, right? Oh, the price is pumping. That's the time I got to buy. Oh, the price is dumping that means the time that's the time I got to sell. But it's actually the inverse. Exactly. Especially if the mainstream media starts to cover it and they say, "We're on a pretty historic bull run, folks. You know, it's not a guarantee that it's about to reverse. " But that's your sign that it might be time to run for the hills. But on the inverse, if the mainstream media is saying, you know, has crypto been a scam this whole time, pretty good signal to buy. And on that note, I think uh I saw I'll give two examples articles that came out that were talking about the demise of Bitcoin and know the Financial Times, you know, when the price hit like 69 or 70, they were like Bitcoin is still uh should not be trading at 70,000 essentially should be going to zero. I saw other people saying that this is it. Bitcoin's done. Uh so some of the you know death of Bitcoin articles are popping up again. So, I saw that as a very good sign because like I said, I've been here for multiple cycles and I've seen that story before. I've seen the Time magazine cover with the asteroids heading down to Earth or whatever it is and you know, talking about the demise of crypto. — Yeah, I mean, I can understand where

these articles are coming from. I mean, the raw picture has not looked great, right? We're seeing some of the price changes just from the past week. Bitcoin's down almost 10%, Ethereum, same thing. Um, a few exceptions like Aster has really taken off. Uh, Rain has been making it rain and other than that, it's kind of just a sea of red. You know, the overall volume has declined. So, clearly, people aren't sure what they want to do right now. This isn't the kind of volatility that's causing people to suddenly panic sell or buy the dip. It's just been kind of a gradual uh decline over the past week, which tends to get a little boring and make people freeze up. It doesn't look much better if I change it to 30 days. You know, Bitcoin is now down 27% over that 30-day span. That's a one of the largest declines we've really seen in a 30-day span over the past 3 to 5 years. Um really 20 2022 was the last time we saw this kind of sustained fade and that was obviously a very rough year for traders. — Yeah, absolutely. So speaking of traders, what does the Bitcoin MVRV look like? — So let's check out the average trading returns right now so we can get an idea of what is actually u considered a buy low versus a sell high opportunity. And as you would suspect, it's looking pretty negative right now. This is a very good sign. So, if I draw a line here at about -15% for the MBRV 30-day, um, anything below this is an extreme opportunity zone historically. That means that if you buy now, you are doing so with much less risk. No guarantees, but much less risk of a bounce coming because so much pain has already occurred among the average wallets that have been active in the past 30 days that you'd be buying in while that normally zero sum game is um extremely underwater. Alternatively, you want to be weary if you're buying in while the average trader is well above zero, but obviously that's not the case right now. The last time we saw a really extreme zone was that bottom here in uh early February, whether it was the fourth or fifth, depending on your time zone. But if I zoom in here, I'll just make it a little easier to see. We're way down here at 15. 9%. And the long-term MVRV for traders that have been active in the past year is way down at aboutgative - 32%. So, both of these are indicating that traders are in enough pain to justify you buying in with much less risk than usual. Now, it may seem scary because you you're looking at the chart going, you know, what what's going to stop Bitcoin from just continuing to freef fall or just gradually decline. Um, the answer is nothing. you know, the prices can continue to do that, but the odds of it become much uh smaller while the average traders are already well into negative. There has to be some relief at some point to bring the zero sum game back to zero at some point. And this really is one of the lowest points we've seen, I guess, at least since last week. I know it hasn't been that long, but if we zoom out, um, just to show you here, like both of these combined, you haven't seen the blue line alone, the long-term MVRV really this low just combining the past week since uh — I think it was like the tariff situation last April. M — so you know obviously that was a buy zone and that was much different circumstances but you know this picture should encourage you where you know that the lower the lines go the better the buy opportunity the higher the lines go the worse the buy opportunity. Yeah, absolutely. This is another chart I've been looking at on Sentiment's platform because it's been so oversold. Bitcoin that is. There's so much extreme fear and the RSI on the regular charts has been touching levels of the previous bare market bottoms like after the FTX crash December 2018. And then you have this additional factor here. And it just seems like we're setting up for some move whether that's just simply a relief rally doesn't go to new highs or the maybe the low probability of moving to new highs. Maybe the we get completely surprised and shocked and bigger and goes to 140k. But again, I'm giving that a lower probability. But it seems the these sentiment these metrics

are such at a low that markets don't go in one direction forever. It's not going to fall down to zero. Is there's some reversal coming. Exactly. Just to cap to cap what you're saying, the key metrics that indicate when people are in extreme fear, extreme pain due to actual losses, the RSI being extremely low, all of these combined are putting Bitcoin in kind of a top 5% opportunity zone, which means we rarely see uh prices as low as this relative to what they should uh based on the zero sum game and the you know es and flows of momentum that RSI displays. So it doesn't mean we can't follow the 50k in the near term but for the long term we've declined enough mathematically to justify a reversal is more likely than not in the near future. — Absolutely. So I'm curious how the altcoins are fairing. Um let's start with Ethereum. We could do sentiment and then MVRV or whichever one is easier to pull up first. Yeah. So, Ethereum looks very similar. You can see the huge mention of sell in the third week of January. Then right at the bottom, I'm sorry, huge wave of buys here in the third week of January. Then a bunch of sell mentions right as things dropped. Um the sell mentions have calmed down. Um let's just look at the past week. So, it's a little easier to see without that huge skew. Yeah, it's kind of going back and forth now. So, there's not any clear buy or sell signal. Not as much like favoring of the bearish narrative compared to Bitcoin. But if we look at the overall mentions of positive versus negative for Ethereum, yeah, it's been kind of in a similar situation to Bitcoin. You can see how much things dropped actually a little bit earlier than Bitcoin because Bitcoin's sentiment dropped its lowest right at that bottom. Ethereum was already getting such a huge amount of FUD at the end of January and then it's picked up a little bit since, but this is still pretty low relative to the average we saw throughout December. So, — I'd say that's a pretty good sign for Ethereum in terms of sentiment and the overall bearishness that the retail crowd is spewing at the moment. Yeah, that definitely makes sense because altcoins, they typically bleed out against Bitcoin as it's going down and they experience more or worse volatility. — Totally. And by the way, Ethereum's network has really blasted off in spite of this price decline. Um the network growth is prospering like just massive amounts of new [clears throat] wallets being created right now. daily active addresses are at their highest level in a couple years. Um, you know, the theory is that staking has really started to uh become popular because people don't want to trade Ethereum or many altcoins right now. So, they're putting it in um, you know, staking avenues, DeFi, all sorts of stuff to try to make passive income. So, new wallets are just being created right and left due to the disinterest in actually trading it, which I think is a fascinating development. — I don't blame them because I'm doing the same thing, Brian. I put more of my ETH holdings into staking. Even though I had some sitting there, um I'm just it's you might as well because if the market's not doing anything, you can at least earn your passive rewards. Yeah, it makes the pain of market caps going down feel a little less painful because you're at least getting some passive income as the price bleeds. And eventually when it doesn't bleed, that passive income is still there. As far as MVRV goes, we are way down at about -4% for average 30-day returns. Compare that to the -15 and 16 for Bitcoin. And Ethereum looks like an even better bet in terms of an eventual reversal. this drop here getting down to -30%, we haven't seen that in a couple of years and even right now at -24 you can see it rarely gets to this moment and when it does it was very similar during the tariff week in April. Uh that's when you see a huge bounce. So, you know, we're not guaranteeing there's going to be a massive catalyst like, you know, Trump gradually rescending the tariff threats and having us go on a massive bull run the next 6 months. But this is a promising sign just based on the math that you'd be buying in while there's already so much pain for Ethereum wallets on the short term as well as the long term, which is sitting at - 38% right now. Both of these fluctuate around zero historically. So there needs to be something to bring it back to zero at some point. — Yeah. And that's where that relief rally

um can come into play or a move to new highs. And to your point, Brian, you know, in an ideal world, it would be amazing if I'm not saying, you know, I'm against or for, but rather if the Supreme Court was to say these tariffs are unlawful. They have to roll it back. they have to send the checks to the public uh to the citizens of the United States the two case right because I think that's part of it they would have to you know give that money back in some way um and then the other aspect is the clarity act gets passed if you have a dovetail of those things happening could that lead to a major relief rally or a move to new highs — well said yeah how about XRP MVRV and sentiment so on the XRP side it's been a little more overlooked the XRP crowd which is norm normally quite vocal has been quieter on this slump. You know, the price if we go back 6 months just about from its top is down about 59% now. So, it's really gotten hammered and the sentiment has remained pretty cool. Really just less overall discussion overall compared to what we've seen, you know, even just in the past six months. Way bigger positive and negative social volume bars. and now it's very quiet. Um, but the ratio is pretty normal. So, I don't see much noteworthy uh stuff on the sentiment side. But if we go to MVRV, it is going to look very negative, similar to Ethereum. The 30-day is more like Bitcoin sitting at about -12%. But -41% for the long term for MVRV for XRP's MVRV is enough where we can not all time but we can definitely go back about three years. So it's by far the lowest we've seen going all the way back to 2022 I would believe. September 2022 was the last time we saw XRP's long-term MVRV this low. And back then the price was at about 40 cents. Now it's sitting at about a buck 37. — And that's the weird thing Brian that's different about this cycle or bare market if you want to call it that is that we are we have seen big price crash but we're the metrics like the RSI and all these things are touching levels of like deep depressive bare market like after an FTX collapse. So it's so strange but we're not we don't have any of that going on. So it is very different. — Yeah. I mean 2022 we just saw waves of like negative 20% days anytime like interest rate hikes happened because if you remember back then that was uh kind of a compensation for all of the cuts they had done during COVID and when 2022 mid20202 is coming around they were trying to get interest rates back to where the Fed thought they should be. uh and that just caused a cascading collapse among stock markets, crypto, etc. Um this time around, you know, stock markets haven't crashed. They've kind of been staying very flat over the past couple of weeks, if not all of 2026 so far. Uh but crypto is really falling behind. Um, and it it's a very like gradual drop from crypto rather than like huge volatile waves where people, you know, rush in panic cells or dip buys to react to them. So, this is quite a bit different. Um, let me see if I can pull up just the comparative chart. So, so this is the picture with the stock market. Looks fine. The teal line, it's just been kind of flat for the past month or so. Gold, yeah, a little more volatile. It dropped down um at the start of the month and it's rebounded since, but Bitcoin has not really followed the path of the S&P the way it normally has the past three or four years. And uh just over the past four weeks, it's down about 31%. So, I guess the good news about this is when crypto isn't following the S&P 500, those are typically when the biggest bull runs can start because there's zero correlation. If it's tightly wound like it was back in November, December, it's not really able to break away because it's kind of at the mercy of whatever the stocks are doing. So, this is kind of like the eye before the storm. Yes, we could see even more blood for Bitcoin before things turn better, but I actually am strangely encouraged by the fact that Bitcoin is no longer kind of at the whim of whatever you know equities are doing at this time. — Yeah. And you know, going back to the 2022 comparison, you know, at that time

you highlighted rates were going up, we were in quantitative tightening. Fed was, you know, reducing their balance sheet and all that. Now we're in the opposite. They've been cutting rates. where quantitative easing, they officially ended it in December. Um, you have things like the market structure that's here and there's no crypto companies collapsing. There's not some major scam happening or whatever. Yes, there's some FUD around like Binance and so forth, but no way. We're not seeing Celsius collapse 3 hours capital, right? There's nothing like that happening. In fact, we're seeing some of the biggest news like today we heard about Black Rockck uh embracing DeFi and they're going to build on Uniswap, the decentralized exchange. they're going to buy some of the token. Um, so completely different environment, but still it sucks to see crypto, Bitcoin, you know, struggle. But to your point, could be a decoupling temporarily and then it blasts off. By the way, did you see the news that SBF is now challenging the bankruptcy that he claims he never consented to, which I think is very interesting. So, in a strange way, there's kind of a cult following that's rooting for uh FTX and, you know, this comeback story from what was kind of the biggest catalyst at the end of 2022 when we dropped all the way to like 16 15K or so. um and now he obviously it has to do with his prison time and he's trying to claim that he was never um fraudulent. But there's also like this strange side story about one of the biggest exchanges that collapsed three and a half years ago suddenly uh trying to resurrect itself uh and kind of change the narrative and how people perceived one of the biggest scams of the past decade if not the entirety of crypto's existence. — Yeah, it he's been trying everything. Uh he's been throwing whatever he can at the wall to see if it sticks. He's trying to get a pardon from Trump. I hope that does not happen. This guy, — he's extremely Republican now. Yeah. — Yeah. He's putting out post. I never like Biden. He was always It's like, dude, really? You donated I don't know how much millions uh to Democrats. And look, he also did it to Republicans, but you know, he was very cozy with the Democrats and then he was stealing customer funds. I mean, get out of here, man. Stay in jail. But I digress. — Yeah. I mean the moral of the story is scams are always going to exist in crypto. It is the nature of the anonymous uh type of currency that crypto is. But I think the lack of massive scandals that are happening is actually very promising. Uh because normally when you see this level of decline, it's related to like a Mount Gaus level or FTX level of scam that cascades into just this huge level of distrust by crypto traders. But I think most people who have exited crypto have done so just because prices have been so disappointing for the past fourish months now. Um but as soon as prices start to get more intriguing, those same traders and investors can return because this isn't a situation where they lost trust due to something like FTX or Mad Gox. It's more so prices are boring. I'm going to go to something else. — Yeah, for sure. Um are we able to look at unis swap given the news um today black rockck by the way folks we're recording this on Wednesday February 11th and black rockck announced they are embracing defi building on unis swap buying some of the token as well. — Yeah so we do see this massive social volume spike that happened today. So this integration from black rockck is enough to really raise some eyebrows and cause some discussion about it. Um, and if we look at the overall sentiment for unis swap and what was the number there purchasing again? Was it 1 billion? — I believe so if I'm not mistaken. Uh, — I think I saw that just before this call. Yeah. But — um, it doesn't Let me zoom in just a little because it's a little skewed. Yeah, I mean the price spike is massive, but we don't see any huge reaction from the crowd yet. It's still mostly a bearish narrative for unis swap which like I said it tends to get kind of ignored unless there's something huge. So this is a good sign to me the crowd has not really reacted to it yet. And we of course see that initial pump of what plus 25% then it fades from the people who maybe had limit orders um in case unis swap went above four bucks all of a sudden which it did. But I still think this could be a longer term reaction to Black Rockck's involvement and then we suddenly can pump until we see like a FOMO spike like this, but we're nowhere near that. It doesn't look like the crowd has been paying much attention because the amount of people

checking on crypto right now is very low anyways. So that could benefit um a potential rally for something like Uniswap. — Yeah. Uh, and I'm wondering, you know, with these news items, they catalyst to start some sort of relief rally. Again, not guaranteed, not financial advice, but uh, you know, we also got news of uh, Robin Hood and their tokenization efforts on Ethereum and with Arbitrum and Citadel. They're going to invest in layer zero. All these big players all of a sudden releasing these news items. And sometimes we've seen that this is a precursor to the market building momentum again to the upside. Yeah, I mean, unis swap is the 33rd largest market cap in crypto. It's not just a little side story from a altcoin that no one's ever heard of. So, when there's big news for a top 50 market cap uh and institutionals are starting to invest in them once again, generally it's a good sign and can very well be a catalyst. — Um, can we end it with Binance? if there what are people saying and feeling you know on social media it's pretty rough um where the sentiment has gone negative with people complaining about CZ Binance and the October 10th liquidation event and much more it seems pretty nasty out there yeah there's a reported $17 billion worth of withdrawals in the last week which is massive so the distrust toward Binance appears to be very real and that October 10th collapse Um that was kind of a mystery at the time. I always attributed it to the uh Trump temporary tariff threat that he gave to China on that date. It was just like 4 days after the all-time high had hit and all of a sudden he's saying that he's threat he's going to implement 100% tariffs on China once again. And then two days later he withdrew that threat um and said that they've been working it out or something along those lines. BNB isn't showing anything special sentiment-wise. It's I I don't know. Obviously, it's the native token of Binance, but I've never seen it as like a direct representation of how people see Binance. — So, a better way to go is looking at the overall mentions of Binance or we'll include CZ in there. So far, yeah, I mean, there's a little uptick, but it isn't significant enough to show that this is like a massive story. Maybe in the near future, we see an even bigger spike if the withdrawals like exceed, you know, 20 million over this week-long span, but for now, it doesn't look like it's moving the needle enough. We can even check by platform. Telegram's definitely talking about it. Reddit hasn't really picked up on this story too much yet relative to their normal discussion rate of Binance X is normal. 4chan, Bitcoin talk, a little bit of Farcaster talk about it, but yeah, I think other than Telegram, uh, nothing really out of the normal rate of discussion toward Binance or CZ. Well, Brian, um, you know, when we meet again in a couple weeks, um, you know, maybe by then we'll have another flush out or a retest of the lows and, uh, sentiment will reset and some sort of relief rally will be started, but, you know, we'll have to wait and see. Yeah, I'm looking forward to talking about something other than like how uh, fearful the crowd is getting. And obviously this is the most fearful and best the MVRV has looked from a reversal perspective. So we'll see if the timing is finally going to align with our next call. Uh I hope it does for sure. And everyone, if you want to take a look at the data we looked at today, definitely sign up for a sentiment account. The link will be in the description. So Brian, we can sign up and get a free account, free trial account, right? — Yeah. Two weeks. Check it out. See all the real time data that we've shown on these videos. um uh use Tony's link that he puts in his video. Um and you know, you can basically decide whether you want to continue using it after those two weeks. No risk. — Good stuff, Brian. Thank you so much. And we'll chat in a couple weeks. — Thanks, Tony. Thanks, guys. —