While it's holding ten or more bitcoin, dropping about eleven three hundred and thirty one bitcoin during that time. That's quite a bit and it did affect the markets instantly as soon as that dump started, with prices going down a little over eleven percent ur in that time. But since March third, now about ten days, we've seen accumulation go back up.
Hey, everybody, welcome into the Thinking Crypto podcast. I'm your host, Tony Edward and my guest is Brian from Saniment And as you all know, we are going to do a deep dive into the metrics round Bitcoin and the top all coins to get a lay of the land and what's happening in this market after a massive Q four run up and now we are in a corrective phase and some are saying it's the bear market, but Brian, we're going to use the data to figure out what's happening.
Yeah, good to be here, Tony. It's obviously been a rough couple of months, but at least in the last two to three days, things are looking a lot more optimistic, especially on a big Friday here.
Yeah, Brian, isn't it fascinating the dynamic of market sentiment and how it flips. You know, in Q four it seems like the rally is not going to end, is going to keep going higher. There are crazy price predictions. Everybody's euphoric. But usually when you see that herd and I know we're going to look at the data, when you see the herd gets so euphoric, it's time to
be bearish. And now that things are in the dumbs and the herd is feeling depressed, they're like, it's over, it's over, Brian, Now is the time to get greedy again.
Exactly. Yeah, it's amazing how how quickly the crowd can flip on a dime, and they've been pretty down for the last couple of weeks, so this was kind of a almost a given that we'd see some sort of relief rally to punish all the people selling and selling and selling, because the retail typically gets it wrong and the whales and sharks typically typically get it right because
they're the ones pushing prices up and down. So now, on the short term, the only concern is whether the crowd is starting to now you know, spam lambos and rocket emojis and we're back all over the place. So we're hoping that they're they're not really believing in this rally because that can aid in the rally continuing.
Yeah, and I think also the backdrop of the macro factors has a lot of people nervous, like tariffores and recession and look the stock markets selling off. So but you know that all those things, while they can have an effect on markets, it's not a permanent effect where oh, the market's just going to keep going down to zero. No, that we've seen, whether it be COVID crash or two thousand and eight, markets rebround. As long as people are alive and they have to buy and they have to live,
markets will rebound. And whether it's on the micro the macro, you know, depending on how big the correction is.
It's a good way of looking at it. It's always kind of cyclical. What goes down must come up, what goes up must come down. And we've seen time and time again in crypto where people think that the run is over and crypto is finally gonna die off, and not only does it not die off, it makes a new all time high within like the next six to twelve months after that narrative was formed. So it's it's amazing what continues to happen.
And I know some people are going to be watching and listening and saying, well, how the hell do I navigate these things? Well, Brian, let's show them. Let's show them the data. Let's start with bitcoin and what's going on with bitcoin sentiment, and what Wales are doing and much more for sure.
So I'm I'm looking at some of the primary bitcoin metrics that we like to check out when we do our analysis. Transaction volume is nothing special right now. This is showing the overall USD being traded on chain on a daily basis, So we're kind of hovering inwhere between ten to about twenty to twenty five billion dollars per day. When it was at its highest point in early December, we were seeing like over sixty billion dollars in a few given days here, and that was kind of actually
indicating that we were getting toppy. So for those who think the transaction volume needs to go up for Bitcoin to go up, that's not necessarily true. In fact, a decline kind of is reflective of fear because the retail truck crowd in particular tends to sit on their hands when prices have this kind of momentum for a long period of time, so nothing too scary. Their active addresses has been up and down, circulation is up and down.
But this is the big one I wanted to check out here MVRV showing that the average returns, So those traders you're competing with, because they are competitors, their average returns for anyone active in the past thirty days is sitting at around negative three percent, while those active in the past year, just anyone who's made at least one transfer, their average is at about plus one percent. So this is actually about as neutral as you'll ever really see
things on both the short and long term basis. The ideal points to buy are something like this on February twenty eighth, when we saw short term traders down over
fifteen percent, long term traders down almost five percent. You want to buy in when there's blood in the streets, lots of pain going on, and right now there's because of the mild bounce we've seen in the last three days or so, everything's kind of neutraled out here and where we're right at the point where things can essentially go either way according to just the raw math of how traders are doing in a zero sum game.
Yeah, and I saw on the fear and greed index the sentiment was as low as we saw in March twenty twenty and even December twenty twenty two. People are really scared, Brian, and I think part of it is the macro factors, the backdrop. But you know, I personally bought the dip on those crashes, not financial advice, of course, And I personally think this is a local top but I could be wrong because we don't have a crystal ball.
But when I saw the sentiment at those levels, I was like, I seen this story before.
I'm buying. Yeah, there were three big points. I'm looking at the past three months of sentiment on a given day. So here in right before Christmas in late December, we saw two really big negative points as prices were declining, and it eventually ended up being a great bounce opportunity. And then more recently, this was when right before Trump announced his strategic reserves February twenty seven, twenty eighth, we really bottomed out, got about down to seventy eight k everyone.
I mean, we had five straight days where there were more negative comments than positive, it looks like, and then we see an immediate bounce from that until people start to get over confident, and then it top forms and then we go way down once again to that same level seventy eight K, and we see March ninth and March tenth, huge negative sentiment forming once again, people saying,
all right, this crash is for real. Get ready, everybody you know, see you at sixty K, see you at forty K. All these predictions coming out, and then they get punished once again with a nice mild bounce we've seen. But the warning sign here, because we have to be realistic, is the fact that we've now seen a couple days in a row with rising positive sentiments starting to form again.
Not quite euphoric, nothing like this we saw, you know, the week after Trump was inaugurated and people were already pre celebrating another amazing crypto year we were about to have. We're kind of in this mode where it's it's leaning bullish according to the crowd. People are are starting to
attribute this as the dip to buy. In hindsight, just because we've we've jumped about six k in market value for bitcoin, I wouldn't be surprised if this causes a little bit of stagnancy from here, and you know, Friday's bounce that we're seeing today is a little bit of just a regression to the mean where we've had so much blood that it was bound to come up a little.
So the people buying now and saying now it's time to buy, get your get all that dry powder out from hibernation, it's time to uh get into bitcoin and al coins, et cetera, be a little careful of that. I wouldn't necessarily say we're going to see a reversal and now just fall back down again, but ranging could could be a likely path based on just sentiment and the fact that like MVRV that we just discussed is like as neutral as it gets right now.
Yeah, that's great insight. So there may be some patients needed before bitcoin really starts finding some strength. And you could certainly have what they call bull traps, right like this rally we're seeing, this small uptick could be a bull trap, or it could be the start of the reversal. We don't know it, so you have to be cautious.
Right and also to mention, you know, Fridays are the most positive return day of the week, so take that with a grain of salt too, when you see a big outbreak at the end of the week and everyone wants to just have a good bookend to what was otherwise a pretty miserable week. Sometimes sometimes this happens, but it doesn't mean really anything for the upcoming weeks or months. So, just as Tony said, practice patients right now and understand this isn't the signal you were waiting for to suddenly
buy with confidence. But it also isn't a signal that you know, markets are are still going down to sixty k forty k, like some of the biggest bears out there are spouting.
Yeah, for sure, So what are the whales doing? Because Brian, I was looking at the Santame chart and I saw a bit of a dip, but then it started recovering, and I was like, when I saw that dip, like about a week and a half, I was like, oh, no, it is really the top. You what are you seeing from this?
This for sure was a bad stage right here from here to here. So February twentieth to March third, we actually saw while it's holding ten or more bitcoin, dropping about eleven three hundred and thirty one bitcoin during that time. That's quite a bit, and it did affect the markets instantly as soon as that dump started, with prices going down a little over eleven percent during that time. But since March third, now about ten days, we've seen accumulation
go back up. They bought back a little more than half of those six and thirty one bitcoin back into their wallets. So a tale as old as time. Whales dump, send prices down and then start buying back in when you know they can get their bitcoin for eleven percent cheaper. And that's essentially what we're seeing right now. Man.
I was, like I said, I was breathing a sigh of relief when I saw the recovery because you know, for my personal bias, I don't want the Marball market to be over. I'm looking for higher prices. So I was like, oh, man, if these whales are selling, that means something is off here, then this may be the end. But I want to see more data, a larger sample size. I want to see an actual down trend. Thankfully, it
was just a dip here exactly. Yeah, we were we were definitely getting worried when we saw them really starting to take profit. But as long as they're moving back up, you know, we can see what has happened just over the past six months. Prices do tend to catch up if whales continue to hoard the coins that the retailers are dumping, So good.
Sign for sure on the supply. You go ahead, Tony.
Oh, no, I was going to say, because I noticed stable coin supply is on there, if you could talk about that.
Yeah, Well, from a whale perspective, we like to look at specifically whilets that hold anywhere between one hundred thousand bucks to ten million bucks in stable coins. This is kind of like that smart money sweet spot, and tether has been moving up. They bottomed out here around February fifteenth when they had only about twenty one percent of the overall supply of tether. Now they're up about twenty one point six so that's that's a pretty decent amount
of tether they've held onto or bought back into. But you can still see compared to the amount of dry powder that they had at the beginning of the rally started back in mid October, they do have a lot less, So we'd like to see that pick up a little bit. Us d Coin definitely is they hold twenty seven and a half percent after being as low as twenty six and a half percent, So both are moving in the right direction while they're adding more bitcoins, so that means
the money's coming from outside sources like Fiat. They're moving you know, bank account money back into crypto at some extent.
Interesting and then supply and exchanges as far as bitcoin, how's that looking.
Yeah, so on the tether and USD coin end, you can clearly see that they have been declining as Bitcoin's supplant exchange is rising. This is actually not the combo we want. We'd like to see Bitcoin continuing to stay off of exchanges, either being flat like we saw in late December early February, or potentially just continuing to plummet because they're being moved into cold storage for safe keeping
from those whales. But yeah, they did start to really move a lot of coins back onto exchanges beginning that first week of February, and roughly six seven weeks later, it looks like they've overall, between all the different tiers whales, fish, dolphins, what have you, there's thirty five, four hundred and eleven more Bitcoin on exchanges than there were back then. So it's not a ton when you look at it from
the perspective of where we were six months ago. But we'd like to see this calm down soon because more bitcoin moving to exchanges. It kind of signals that a lot of people are waiting for their price to hit so they can sell and get out. Yeah, great point.
I've been noticing. I was like, as I was watching the data this week, and I'm like, oh, I see the uptick, I see the decline with the whale was holding bitcoin ten or more. And I'm like, it seems like this is the start of something. Are they anticipating another major local top or a market blow up? Top come later or I should say, come end of Q two, Maybe it's around May or June.
Yeah, I mean, we haven't talked about it yet. But the the thing that is the elephant in the room is all of the macroeconomic factors that are affecting the S and P five hundred right now, and how crypto is still very correlated with the S and P. So not having control, even if you're a big wealthy whale, not having control over what Trump does next, what Musk or Putin or Zelensky does, whatever your opinions are. The
uncertainty of where the world stands. The uncertainty of whether you know Canada in the US, or Australia in the US, or China in the US can get a lot right now because of these tearff wars that are happening. That causes chaos and tends to get bigger capital investors a little more conservative and act safer when they aren't as confident about where the world is going to go next.
So I think that that explains some of the behavior that we're seeing with the supplant exchanges moving up and even some of their mild profit taking that they were especially doing in the second half of February.
Yeah, that definitely makes sense. It's certainly well. I should say, there's a lot of uncertainty out there, and I can see why. You know, people who are not looking at data are caught in a wilmin of that right and the emotional rollercoaster. But I love going to the data on sentiment and being able to put my emotions to the side and say, Okay, what's happening this This is just such insightful information.
Thanks man. Yeah, I'll affward that memo to the devs who are constantly working on suuring that we've got some relevant data that's easy to digest. And all this data, if you remember, is on the blockchain. It's not like we have proprietary information that the rest of the world doesn't. What we do is curate it and turn it into something meaningful and easy to evaluate through all these summarized
infographics and stuff. And then there's the social side, which I'm showing now, so we can see things like which coins are trending the most, which trending words are popping up across social media the most, And these are the kinds of things that really do impact markets pretty significantly.
We can see things like gold trending right now because when things get bearish for the midterm, like they have been, or at least the sentiments are turning bearish, that's when you see people talking more about getting into safe havens, things that historically never lose their value even when macroeconomic conditions get pretty dicey. So gold and silver have been talked about a lot more with people talking about the price levels. DOGE is actually referring mostly to the Musk's initiative.
I can't remember the abbreviation right now, but it's actually funny that dog is trending, even though it's mostly due to the doge that Musk is running. M interesting.
So let's go into some of the top all coins like Etherorem, and we'll talk about Salon and XRP as well.
Sure, so we'll start with Ethereum. I actually just yeah, it really has, and I just put an insight out about it yesterday. I'll show you will you steer into the ether fear. Please feel free to hire me if you're interested in these creative rhymes. Guys, it took me a long time, but yeah, the crowd sentiment has absolutely plummeted. I did a little infographic. It's maybe a little more busy than I wanted it to look, but you get the idea. This line means there's an equal amount of
positive versus negative comments. This is one and a half to one, This is two to one positive to negative, and this is three to one. So you definitely don't want to see sentiment way up here. This is where you tend to see tops and prices go down. Here, it's still a little bit too bullish most of the time. Here, it's actually pretty neutral. So like a resting state for social media is usually like one and a half to one for most of the top comments or top social
media platforms toward Bitcoin, Ethereum, XRP, et cetera. So when you see it start to go below there, that's when you know that the crowd is genuinely starting to get super scared and expressing a lot of fud. And as you would imagine with the year that Ethereum has seen, there's a massive amount of bearishness that's really starting to form here one, two, three, four, five straight days where we're below this line, meaning there's actually more negative comments
overall across social media than positive right now. And that's actually a good thing. So it's easy to fall into the trap of thinking, well, Ethereum's done, it's underperformed compared
to XRP and cardono and doge and Bitcoin. That's actually a good sign, especially when it's combined with the fact that the crowd has written it off, because this means that whales and sharks can easily hoard more coins, which they are, to an extent, looks better than Bitcoin, and then they can pump up prices once Bitcoin starts to recover and allow the rest of the markets to do its thing. So don't I kind of like this a
lot right now. It doesn't necessarily automatically mean Ethereum is on the brink of taking off, but from a mid or long term perspective, this is a great sign. The fact that, you know, just seeing these yellow bars declining over time the way they have, it's it's pretty clear that the crowd is just done. They're done with Ethereum. They believe it's it's a disappointment. And you know, XRP and maybe even Solana will pass it soon in market cap,
which would be a huge milestone. Ethereum has been in the number two spot for almost a decade now, so it's crazy.
Yeah, And you know I mentioned earlier I bought the dip. I specifically bought some eth Sui and XRP, just buying those lows, right, And I obviously I'm diversified, but I saw eth as a big opportunity because it's just so down and just the sentiment is so bad, and I'm like, like I said, I've seen this story before, and I put the majority of my diet, my funds, my dry powder in eathen in buying that.
Dip totally, I don't blame you at all, and I hope it ends up being a good decision for you. But based on the data, I mean, it seems pretty logical that there will be some regression to the mean eventually. Not just because it's underperformed price wise, and you know, prices tend to rubber band against each other, but if it's if it's underperformed and the crowd is is just giving up on it, that's a pretty good combination for sure.
So let's look at Solana and how that's been doing. I know, the mean coins that are you know, specifically on Solana that has been really hyped up with pump not fun. A lot of that market has died down. So how has that affect at Solana.
Yeah, so from a discussion standpoint, they're pretty much at their lowest point since uh pre Trump election. They they really have seen a deep fall off from a price perspective. We went down, man, more than I thought. It's down somewhere between forty seven to fifty percent since it's high back on right before Trump's inauguration. So the discussion rate is in the toilet. There's just very little discussion compared
to other alt coins right now. And then from a sentiment just overall, like positive versus negative sentiment perspective, I'd be surprised if it's not bearish. Right now, it's definitely bearish. So look at this just compared to where things were that like late December early to mid January. Interestingly, here I found this odd that the huge surge that happened on the eighteenth and nineteenth resulted in very bearished discussion.
If I remember, there were some weird network issues though happening at that time, so it might have been kind of skewed due to having trouble with transactions Solana. Sorry for the Salona fans, but they do have some network issues famously from time to time that other al coins have not. Maybe over the long term that'll pash itself out, but that does impact sentiments a lot for Solana either way. Right now, it looks like people are pretty low on
it compared to other old coins. You can see pretty visually hear how things have declined in positive versus negative comments.
Yeah, and then there's been a lot of controversy of course around meme coins and pumped out fund which are you know, Solana based. So I think with that aspect of the market drawing up, it's probably affecting Solana. Not entirely obviously, because you got the entire market sentiment down, but a lot of Solana's utility was coming from meme coins over the past year.
Yeah, that's actually a good point. And I was just checking out the overall mentions of Salona meme coins over the past three months here it looks like things have really cooled off in discussions. So despite there being controversies, it's mostly just resulting in people not wanting to talk
about it much at all. Meme coins in general, as we've talked about in previous episodes, Tony, they're just kind of being abandoned at at the moment because people are so scared of losing another you know, twenty percent in a given day.
Yeah, and then you know, there was that big I think, what was it, Javier Malay, president of Argentina Argentina and what happened there. That was a pretty bad one. So look, I know I'm a bit biased. I don't believe in meme coins, although I believe in people's freedom to invest in what they want, but I'm not a fan of men coins. But obviously there needs to be some control where the law enforcement needs to act on people who
are creating rug polls. You know, there are legit meme coins out there that have community, a brand, doge and so forth, but you know the ones that I was started last night or last week, that those are the ones up more against.
Yeah, I think you're like me, Tony, where the more you can actually analyze a coin and have some predictability to it, the better the investment is. And the thing with meme coins is they're literally a lottery. You're betting on how other people are going to perceive the coin
that you're investing in. So when you don't have that power to look at things like development activity, because there really isn't development activity when it comes to meme coins, and there's unpredictable on chain activity, and you know, there's such a centralized proportion of the coins being held by
the founders. It's just it makes it a bit of a luck factor that I think for people who've been in crypto a long time, it tends to make them pretty uncomfortable if it's all about luck and there's no ed or ability to analyze to an extent where things are going to go next.
Oh absolutely, that's definitely how I feel, all right, let's wrap it up with XRP and what you're seeing there on multiple fronts.
Yeah, so XRP should look a little bit better because it's it's actually held up pretty well, so just like other old coins. I mean, it's definitely dropped from it's high on the sixteenth or so. It's down about twenty nine percent, not nearly as much as the fifty percent, soalanas down. It had its big run ups right after Trump's election, mainly I think that was mainly due to the SEC turnover, and out of all the top caps, you can think of XRP as the one that's had
the most roller coaster ride with the SEC. So when they hear that Gensler is going to be out of office, an asset like XRP is going to get a lot more money poured into it. So that's exactly what happened. But obviously over the last couple of months turned down
just like everything else. Active addresses, though, is interesting. There's been a sudden influx, and I wish I knew what this was related to, but pretty much two weeks ago from today, we started to see address activity go from like maybe fifty eight fifty nine thousand active addresses per day to now at least over the last seven days one hundred eighty thousand, so it's tripled during that time.
That's that's huge. It doesn't necessarily automatically signal bullishness, but it means that the utility of XRP is just surging right now. From an MVRV perspective. Short term wise, there's some meat on the bone for a little more rise because traders are down about five percent. But long term, because it had such a huge end of twenty twenty four, average traders are still up about thirty eight percent. That
scares me a little bit. You can see even back here was off the access where average traders were up like one hundred and fifty two hundred percent on average. These are just like comically high numbers, which signaled we were bound to see a top around here. And even here anytime, it's like over one hundred percent returns for just any address that's been active on average. That's a little terrifying, but it's it's at least calmed down a little. I'd like to see, you know, maybe sub twenty percent
long term. MBRV as a good signal you can buy in or add on with confidence. It just it still looks a little overheated on the long term. But obviously there's you know, real world factors with the SEC at play that can or like any being announced later this summer, that's something a lot of people are anticipating, and that can just change everything and throw a lot of these metrics out the window.
Yeah, that's a great point because exactly where you're saying, there's such a huge connection between Ripple and the SEC and at anything that the SEC does in favor of crypto kind of automatically pushes this bullish sentiment towards Ripple and XRP because it's just such this long standing thing. It's like its own meme, so to speak. Yeah, everybody's aware of it, and the SEC has been dropping cases and then new new SEC chair is coming in. Then
you have all these XRP SPOTTYTF applications being filed. So there's like this strong correlation with sentiment there exactly.
I just saw yesterday on x there was one of the featured headlines on that right panel was like SEC and XRP lawsuit finally maybe coming to a conclusion, And I was like, didn't that already happen? Like I can't even keep track of the I'm sure the people who are heavily invested in XRP know a lot more about it, and they might be rolling their eyes at what I'm saying. But for people who just follow all coins versus just one particular coin, it's actually really difficult to keep up
sometimes with all these developments. Because I know that the lawsuit happened almost two years ago. Now there was an appeal, the appeal never really got to the table, and now the secs it kind of picked and choose and chose it a few other things with XRP, and then I guess where we're at now is that's coming to an end now too. So XRP and it's large community, you may finally be able to breathe and just focus on, you know, the innovation and improvement of its asset, just
like every other all coin. Yeah, I think a lot of people are waiting in anticipation. I think the final thing is just that resolution. There's one hundred twenty five million dollars. Fine, but there's reports that Ripple may be pushing back on that, given that the SEC's taking a different stance overall to the crypto market. And I personally have the theory that they may be waiting for the chair to new chair, to Paul Atkins to come in
to resolve some of these more complex things. But the point is the market and the community and so are looking I think people are looking at it positively like this is going to resolve. We know, because we're under the most pro crypto regime and the SEC's changed their stands, no more against them and hopefully to some resolution soon. Right, Yeah, thanks for that clarification. You know more about it than me,
but hopefully hopefully there's a resolution. And I was just checking out, like the one million or more holders, So this is you know, people with with XRP at about two dollars thirty cents. This is anyone with about two point three million dollars or more. Consider them sharks and whales. They hold about seventy three point eighty six percent of the supply and about forty six point four to two billion XRP. The overall supply is going up, but the
percentage of supplies stringing down just a little bit. We'd like to see that start to move positive soon. In fact, there's definitely some correlation with the price. I just want to show you this, so I'll just hide the overall amount. From a percentage standpoint, yeah, you can see they really took a lot of profit beginning in early December, right at this top when it got to like two eighty four, and even during this high or high, they were already
kind of taking profit, which is interesting to me. Even back here, you can see they were accumulating as price was going down, and then they really started to take profit again after that rise. I know this this looks small, but this was still a pretty big percentage gain back here. So I'd still like to see the smart money moving in the positive direction again. But you know, it's just one element to many of many different analytic perspectives we can look at.
This is such great insight, Brian. So I love Santaman's platform and being able to go through it because, like I said earlier, with the turmoil of the markets, and we're all human, so we feel the emotional impact of price movements, and to go to the data and say okay, this is what's happening and filter out the noise and all that is really great. So hopefully when we meet in another two weeks, things are in a much better spot and bitcoin is fighting some strength and moving up.
He's hoping man looking forward to the next talk. Awesome thanks Brian Tak