And here we continue to see them climb up even though prices were going down. So this looked like a good bullish divergence, but insiders call it what you will. They knew something was up because they immediately started to dump as prices were dumping, maybe due to the fact that these tariffs were going to go forward in a couple of months or a month and a half.
Hey, everybody, welcome into the Thinking Crypto podcast. Joining me today is Brian from Sentiment, and as you all know, we're going to go into the data and look at what's happening with Bitcoin and the top all coins and how things are playing out for this market. Brian, good to see it, but wish the market was better, of course.
Yeah, good to see you too, Tony. The very very small minority of people who've been shorting this tariff madness are pretty happy. But for the vast majority of people, we are certainly in a time that is pretty unprecedented.
It's a very.
Man made retrace that we're seeing right now. Obviously, with voluntary choices contributing to.
Where we are right now.
And even though neither of us really are political experts, I think that's fair to say we can say that this does appear to be a very global economic type of retrace that has We really haven't seen anything like it other than Black Thursday from March of twenty twenty, which was in a very different realm related to COVID.
So crazy stuff right now. Yeah, you know, Brian, some people were asking me, is this a black Swan event? And I'm like, well, it's kind of a pseudo black Swan event because we had some idea from Trump as a campaigning that they would approach or have tariffs, but I don't think anyone knew that this was a way
he was going to go about it, whether right or wrong. Right, and not to get into the politics of it, but the fact of the matter is it's having a big effect on the global markets and we are seeing pullbacks on the stock market, crypto gold, even even though gold was pumping the other day. So this is like some sort of pseudo black Swan we want to call it that.
Yeah, No, I think that's fair to say. It's it's kind of a game of chicken right now. It appears that people are sort of waking up to that as the realistic situation we're in right now. And you know, Trump made these tariff announcements last Wednesday, the second he was talking about them even before he was elected. For those who who were following along, and people kind of said, we're going to vote for him anyways. We know this is a possibility. We'll see how it goes when we
get there. Well, we're now there. In fact, tomorrow is the official day where most of these rifts are actually going to be implemented. A lot of people think it's kind of already happened, but the announcement was last week, and there's a lot of negotiations right now. We had talks yesterday about him putting a ninety day pause on all these tariffs. Turned out to be a false rumor that CNBC and readers apologized for, I believe, but that
caused chaos in the markets. It's an ultra sensitive time where every piece of news that comes out right now is contributing to like two three four percent rise or fall in the S and P five hundred, and with crypto being correlated to it, it's going along for the ride right now.
Yeah, it's it's wild man, and I've been trying to not be or keep up with it because there's so much back and forth, red light, green light confusion. You mentioned what happened yesterday. It's just wild. So Brian, let's look at the charts, and let's start with bitcoin, because we use bitcoin as the measuring stick for the entire crypto market. What are you seeing from a sentiment standpoint, what are people saying around the tariffs? You know, is there a lot of fear around that?
Yeah, as you would expect, there is a lot of fear. I can briefly show how the correlation has kind of stayed intact. It's interesting because we had this moment right about here on April fourth. This was Friday, right before we kicked into the weekend last week, where crypto was actually going up and everyone was saying, Okay, there must be a decoupling going on because the S and P is going this way. Here in Teel, bitcoin was bouncing back up above eighty four k at the time, so
people were quite optimistic. Turned out that it we just needed a couple of days for crypto to catch up to the downside of what the stock markets were doing, and it saw about a ten thousand dollars market cap drop just over those next you know, not even two days about a day and a half and then it bounced and we kind of ended up.
Back around the eighty k level.
As of this morning, about three hours ago seven thirty am my time, things were looking pretty good, but it was happening almost like a regression to the mean, you know, kind of a dead cat bounce.
If you will.
It appeared based on the news that Trump is really ramping it up against China, the other largest economy in the world, and China is showing strength themselves and explaining that they aren't going aren't going to cater to what Trump is asking for. So all this talk was going on as markets were rising just a few hours ago, and then the inevitable happened and we started to see the effects of the increased likelihood of a trade war
really starting to blast off. And now we're back in the negative for the day for a fourth straight day. So the sentiment is all over the place. The sentiment is full of TA traders saying, oh, here's the support and resistance level. But in my opinion, this kind of goes beyond a normal analysis of usual support and resistances because we're comparing times in which bitcoin tends to top or bottom versus here when we didn't have, at least to this extent, tariff fears because Trump hadn't made his
announcement yet. So it's kind of like doing TA analysis during COVID five years ago.
You can't compare.
Twenty nineteen to March and April of twenty twenty, because March and April of twenty twenty we're in this whole new world of fear and a new kind of world order, if you will. So it's the sentiment is kind of just has anybody heard any news? Does anyone know what China's going to do? Did Trump say anything? That's that's pretty much what we're limited to it this at this moment.
Yeah, great points, it's unprecedented or even if you want to use that word, it's just on a global scale. It's macro. So your TA is not going to hold up that great here because this thing changes from minute to minute, hour to hour sometimes and day to day, of course, and it involves almost all the countries in the world, So it's like, how do you chart or do analysis on that. To your point, we need the resolution, some sort of conclusion to all of this stuff before we can get back to normalcy.
Exactly, And it's a combination of people who are taking it really seriously and then people who are kind of rolling their eyes because the whole.
Like chat GPT.
Allegations that appear to be true, as though the administration was using some sort of AI technology to come up with their percentage terrors for each country. So it's it almost feels surreal, like this is a very real thing impacting four oh one k's and rots and various investment accounts all over the world, yet it's being controlled by an administration that people aren't sure what to make of right now, whether this is all just manipulation and a
big initiated game of chicken. Basically, it's so strange. We've never seen anything like it.
Let's take a look at what bitcoin whales are doing, the guys who move the market right Are they accumulating? Are they dumping? Because this has been very telling over the years, we've been watching these statistics totally, so it's kind of twofold.
The overall amounts of bitcoin held by all wallets that hold ten or more BTC, that's actually climbing quite healthily right now. It's looking very good. There is an asterisk to this line because you're including all the big exchange addresses out there and liquidity providers. That's why we also
include this one. And this one aims more at the reasonably sized shark and whale while it's holding between ten to ten thousand btc, and this one seems to have a bit more correlation with Bitcoin's price as of late. You can go back to you know, right after Trump was elected here on November fifth, both lines climb in unison. That's a very good sign. And then you see the ten to ten k line going down the smart money if you will, that don't include as many exchange addresses,
and then prices go down with it. That's what these big green bars are. Then you can see it starts to go back up. Prices go up. We hit that all time high on January nineteenth or twentieth, depending on where you are in the world, and that's the day Trump is inaugurated.
And here we.
Continue to see them climb up even though prices were going down. So this look like a good bullish divergence. But insiders call it what you will. They knew something was up because they immediately started to dump as prices were dumping, maybe due to the fact that these tariffs were going to go forward in a couple months or
a month and a half. And this is where you see the split where even though the ten plus BTC wallets are all getting richer, when you get more precise with the ten to ten k BTC wallets, they're going down for a while, do manage to go up. We see a slight rebound as they do go up, and then they started dropping again, and they've kind of wavered throughout April so far as we get to our lowest price essentially since Trump was elected back in November. So
right now, moral of the story is it's a little split. Overall. The massive wallets are getting richer, but the shark in whale smaller whale addresses are actually shrinking just a tiny bit. So it's kind of a wash at the moment.
Yeah. The one good thing I was happy to see is that coming out of the January to February down trend that was starting, we kind of plateaued and then you saw to pick up a now a bit of a slowing right now. I'm just glad the down trend that you know, that slope had me worried a bit there in February. Yeah, when both of these lines are going down together, It's it's pretty bad news. So this this was definitely the signal to take some profit. And
then this rebound was kind of a relief rally. But right around two weeks ago is when things started to look a little concerning again. So obviously this goes beyond what the smart money's doing. I actually think this paints a pretty positive picture that crypto. Crypto's key stakeholders.
Are hanging on tight and they're not dumping into this rally the way that you know, institutional investors are in the global stock markets, and for good reason. You know, crypto is not an imported or exported commodity or product. Therefore it it should have some insulation. But because it's so correlated with the S and P five hundred and other stock markets, there's always going to be a negative impact when you see stock markets have the biggest implosion in five years.
Yeah, and look, if you remove this tariff scenario, right, let's say it never happened. There are so many bullish things setting up for bitcoin and crypto. I mean, you have the most pro crypto government, you have the sec dropping cases, you've got a bitcoin reserve in play, you've got crypto legislation being worked on by Congress. It's just the terrorists put this massive macro uncertainty and fear out there.
But otherwise, if you're just looking at crypto, it's like, oh my god, this setup is bullish for the price appreciation, whether it be months or years exactly.
And let's take a look at what that setup looks like in terms of just some fundamental charts here. Because I agree with you, I've actually been a little more bullish than a lot of other analysis channels out there. I didn't think we were about to rebound to a quick all time high, but I at least thought that bitcoin would be on the road back to the ninety k's pretty soon, had this tariff situation not just thrown
a huge wrench into everything. And one of the main reasons why is because the average holding returns, so people that have been active over the past thirty days, they went way into the negative at the end of March, and they kind of have spent most of March in the negative and finally kind of went positive a little bit briefly right before the tariffs happened. But when you see both the short term and long term MVRV lines
here significantly in the negative territory. It's usually a signal that we're gonna get some sort of relief rally, because this is a zero sum game, just like any other sector out there, and there needs to be enough profiters along with losers to justify all the buys and cells that are going on on a given day.
Yeah. Absolutely. I was talking to someone about this that after a strong Q four run up, incredible performance, right, it gains on crypto and the stock market, a natural, healthy correction and pull back, whatever you want to call it, was due, and I think a lot of people anticipated in January, but like you said, the monkey wrench of the taros took us way further down and then anybody was expecting, obviously, and it's gonna probably We're probably gonna
be stuck here until we get some sort of clarity from the governments because this is a global thing that's happening.
Yeah, and people have different opinions about the timing of that healthy retrace you referred to, because it obviously happened right as Trump was inaugurated, so people are like, look at Trump, what's he doing. He's caused stock markets to crash and crypto to crash. Well, he inherited the country essentially after about a two year bull run. Right, twenty three and twenty four were objectively amazing years for the
majority of those months for stocks and crypto. So he's coming in to office when you've already got you know, the long term MVRV for MVRV for bitcoin excuse me,
at plus thirty one percent. So he's he's inheriting the presidency of the United States when the average traders are way up in the long term and way up in the short term more than they should be, Meaning there's supposed to be a mathematical retrace anyways, no matter who comes in as president, and I think gradually both due to just raw math and due to fears of how much these tariffs are going to impact the world for
the indefinite future. It's been a combination of both that pushed crypto down quicker than it otherwise probably would have gone down.
Anyways, what are you seeing on the stable coin side, you know, as far as tether and supply and exchanges.
Yeah, so on dry powder for tether and USDC, they're both kind of moving down. Keep in mind, this is the top exchange addresses, So we're just looking at the top ten right now, which of course holds a significant percentage of all the stable coins on exchanges. But I can update this chart if you don't mind waiting for ten to fifteen seconds, and then I'll add supply and exchanges.
Here.
Take off these two for a moment, and then we'll do the same for USDC. Okay, So these are the new up to date overall ratios of Tether and usd coin on exchanges, and they're both going down pretty significantly. February third, you know, we saw the overall amount of Tether in terms of percentage of overall supply at about
fifty six point one percent. Usd coin was at sixteen point four percent if I hold down shift to drag to the right here, So about four point four percent less Tether is now in exchanges of the overall supply, and about six and a half percent of usd coin has declined in terms of percentage of exchange. So the two top stable coins are seeing significantly less on exchanges at the moment, while Bitcoin actually looks continuously very low.
We have had a little bit of an uptick since the tariffs really spoot traders but this is hardly a rise compared to how much we've fallen over the last six months.
Interesting. Yeah, I mean, my my takeaway, and it may not be the full thesis on everything that's happening here, but it seems like overall a lot of people slowing down here on accumulation. Maybe you know, whales who usually use tether stable coins to buy their coins on different exchanges, maybe slowing down here. Not as much minting because everybody's watching the macro uncertainty waiting for something to come to a resolution. Right.
It's all kind of supply and demand, and if there's less demand for stable coins on exchanges, they're going to be tucked away for safe keeping until the demand picks up. So I think because we've seen such a decline and less and less enthusiasm for buying the dip as this three month retrace has gone on, it's natural for stable
coins to not be as available on exchanges. They basically just hold a kind of a moving goalpost of stable coins to be available to traders, and when there's just less demand, they'll tuck them away somewhere else.
And I think that's essentially all that's happening here. Interesting let's take a look at the top all coins. Maybe we can start with Etherorem. It may be the same story for all of them, but you know, there's any interesting statistics around each. We'll talk Etherorem XRPCE to Lono.
Yeah, definitely. In fact, before we go to those same on chain metrics, we can also check out the positive versus negative sentiment for the top four non stable coins. And what really sticks out here Solana a couple weeks ago, before we really started to fall, they had this absurd level of positive commentary going on. I'm I'm ninety five percent sure that this was bot driven. So it's it's like this strange anomaly, and that's that's the problem with
the current state of social media. Until they really start to clean things up, we're at the bit of the bit of mercy of like how these these different social media accounts, how authentic they are. So Solana had this weird, weird anomaly, they're still showing way more positive sentiment than the others, even though there's no clear reason why it's suddenly getting so much bullishness. I'm just going to remove it for the time being so we can focus on the other three.
And by the way, just and some color that does look manipulating, because there was actually some negative news that came out the other day where the staking unlocks and whales Alana wheels were dumping.
I heard about that, and there was a lot of talk about the network stability too, as maybe once or twice a month we get something potentially going wrong with Solana's network and it causing even if it's for like a minute, you know, if transactions aren't working or going through at the speed they normally do, it becomes a talking point. So the fact that we saw a positive sentiment just going nuts to levels we hadn't seen before
was highly unusual, and I agree with you. But as far as Bitcoin, so it's sitting a little under average right now. There's a slight bearish bias, as there probably should be when you see you know, the top asset and crypto dropping to the extent it was. Ethereum is way down there as well. Ethereum's a little below where Bitcoin is only getting about one point one positive comment comments for every one a negative comment, So that's essentially
like net neutral, which is unusual. Usually it's more like one and a half to one for each of the top assets, and then XRP is actually way way high, which is interesting to me. If I switched the price over really quick. It hasn't done anything too special, but you know, there might be some news I'm unaware of either way.
This yeah, go ahead. There was actually news Ah shit, what was it? Yeah? Oh, today, I think the first XRP ETF goes live. It's a two x long ETF, but it also rippled it a massive acquisition for like one point twenty five billion. I just saw that news this morning, honestly and thought I was like, wait, whoa, this is huge. It's like the biggest acquisition in the crypto market or industry, you know, since its inception. So I think that might be driving some of it.
What an interesting day to launch an ETF and announce an acquisition. It's probably getting fairly swept under the rug, except for the XRP community that's of course tracking this stuff. So that makes total sense because this is the highest positive point we've seen for XRP since November twenty eighth, almost a yeah, a little over a four month high, So there's a lot of bullishness there. I don't think
that's necessarily going to push xrp's prices down. But the general rule of thumb, folks is when you see super high positive sentiment, it marks tops. When you see super low sentiment, it marks bottoms, because prices always go the opposite direction of the crowds expectations.
Yeah. Absolutely, eight. How is it looking? Because I know eth is men. I'm an ETH holder, so I'm feeling the pain that you know. It's it's been rough and the charts and the eighth BETC chart is brutal.
Yeah, you took the word out of my mouth. Rough is the best way to describe it. It's been by far the most disappointing top ten, top twenty non stable coin out there for about the last year, almost two years now. It's had its moments, very short bursts, but overall, Ethereum has gotten hammered. Since the top on December fifteenth, we've seen the price drop about sixty three percent. Just to give some perspective of how painful this has been.
It's kind of been dabbling in the low to high fourteen hundreds lately, and we haven't seen that price since late twenty twenty two, when the actually yeah, right before the FTX collapse.
No, my mistake.
This is it's very close. But October twenty twenty three we saw similar prices. It was a little after the FTX collapse, if you want to say January. It was technically the last time we saw it, but huge, huge drops in market cap and mostly drops in utility following that. So we did see a big transact action volume spike yesterday. This was about a four week high, and that sort of reflects in daily active addresses, circulation, and network growth,
which are all plotted here. In short, they're all kind of declining because demand is drying up. But if we add on fees, just to give one upside to all of this madness, the fees are almost nothing right now. It's per transaction. You're paying about twenty one and a half cents forever each transaction. Compared that to the spike of seven dollars twenty three cents on November twelfth. I've seen times when it was twenty five dollars plus back in twenty twenty, twenty twenty one, so this usually is
a good sign of a bottom occurring. You can see it kind of happened here in early to mid September, when fees get low and demand is at its lowest. You're essentially getting invited to start using the Ethereum network a lot more, because one of the critiques about ethereum is how expensive it often can get for making transfers,
and right now it's not, so that's a good sign. Also, the average returns are just absolutely ridiculously low at the moment, negative twenty percent for while it's active in the past thirty days, negative forty eight percent for those active in the past year, and especially that last number. We haven't seen it that low since the FTX collapse, when we saw ethereum getting as low as one thousand to eleven hundred or so.
So that's a very good sign to me.
What I'd like to see still is more shorting going on. That's usually a clear sign of a body. You do see this little tiny red sliver right here indicating that traders on binance are beginning to bet against the asset, and usually that's an indication that we can see a turnaround soon with those short liquidations adding as rocket fuel to prices bouncing back up. But this all just has to be taken with a grain of salt, considering the unique global economic circumstances we're in right now.
Yeah, for sure. And one of the things I'm hoping for and what we've seen with other assets, that if the herd is thinking Etheroreum is dead, oh it's horrible, it's never going to recover. I think we saw this with XRP. I think it was that the market does the opposite, right because there's so much negative sentiment and it's kind of like this that it forces the crowd to buy back in because they're like, oh my god, etherorem is moving again. We all thought it was dead exactly. Yeah.
The ideal set up is when you've got every other person on your timeline telling you to stay away from an asset because it's no longer relevant.
You shouldn't trust it. It's dead, like you said.
And time and time again we've seen that be the catalyst for a huge breakout. So, Brian, any other you know data sets for XRP, Salona or eth I know, it's like.
It's all everything's down right now. We're waiting for this macro uncertainty to be lifted. But anything else to call out, you think.
Yeah, just to give a quick update on Solana since we didn't really talk about it other than the bought manipulation. It's not being talked about much at all. In fact, this is some of the lowest levels of discussions related to Solona since well at least since mid mid to late March. But I would anticipate it's going to start dipping even lower than that as it kind of just blends it into the other top caps for the time being.
So there might be some upside because it's.
Under the radar at the moment, you know, completely independent from what the body accounts are doing right now. I think it's it's really starting to see some negative sentiment similar to Ethereum. If we were to remove all of those bots, they seem to be kind of in similar spots.
So you know, if let's say the tariff situation gets solved an hour after this recording between us Tony, I think the first assets you want to look at are the ones that are getting you know, poo pooed on the most, if you will, and that starts with Ethereum and Solana. To me, I even prepared this chart, long story short. When these bars are over this dash line, it indicates that all of the average trading returns of people in the midterm, like thirty sixty or ninety days.
There they're in severe pain, making the asset under bought or slightly undervalued. It doesn't mean tomorrow we're going to start seeing a huge bounce because it's so based on this unique economic circumstance. But if and when that unique and strange circumstance goes away, all of these are candidates for big bounces, especially the ones. Coincidentally, this one named Bounce is seeing one of the most underbought signals we've got linear powerpool REEF. Most of these are pretty obscure assets.
Most of you aren't tracking, but there's a reason they're in like the most pain, and they've fallen off the map so much that there's probably going to be some point in which they begin to catch up. But almost every asset on here is showing anywhere between a mild semi underbot like Bitcoin to a significant underbot signal like some of these.
Interesting Well, Brian, I'm hoping that maybe by the next time we meet in a couple of weeks, that this terrort situation is resolved and maybe markets can start to balance. Maybe there's some good news from the FET they're cutting rates, maybe doing some liquidity injections to help the markets. Who knows, and we can put some of this stuff behind us, But right now it's still max pain.
It seems like, yeah, it's I still remember what was it yesterday or two days ago when Trump was talking about how you don't want to panic, and to me, that's not good. You don't want your president telling you to not panic because that seems to be a sign that there's some manipulation at play, and he's telling people what to do with their investments, which normally doesn't happen from.
The leader of the country.
So we're just we're kind of at the mercy of all the policy shuffling and bluffing and games of chicken going on right now. And the best thing you can do is not go to extreme in either direction because so much is an unknown.
Yea, you know.
The last thing you want to do is buy a ton and watch things go down way further, or sell a ton and watch tomorrow be the day of salvation for everybody. So I just recommend being safe right now and keeping your mind off of things and waiting for that big headline that'll change the markets a bit.
Yeah, great tips, And that's what I've been doing. I've been telling folks, I'm just waiting to see. I'm not buying a whole bunch of dips. I'm not selling anything. I'm just watching. And also, you know, I look at the markets from the macro and I don't I'm not putting money that I can't afford to lose or that's
going to keep me up a night. So even though the market's down and my portfolio is down, I'm still paying my bills, I'm still living, and I try to, you know, tell people be careful, balance it out, don't put too much of you can't afford to lose, because markets move up and down different points based on different catalysts. But from the macro, the markets go up, right, as long as they keep debasing currency and printing money, markets will go up.
Great advice, Tony. Hopefully people are staying safe out there.
For sure, all right, Brian, great stuff, Thank you so much, And like I said, hope we were in better conditions two weeks from now. Fingers crossed man