¶ Intro
Exactly. And really, the further the separation goes here between bitcoin and gold, the more encouraged you should be of an inevitable bitcoin run, especially because so many people are flocking out of crypto right now, that just increases the likelihood of an eventual catch up because those people who are flocking out, where are their coins going. They're mostly going toward key stakeholders.
Hey, folks, welcome into the Thinking Crypto Podcasts. You're home for cryptocurrency news and interviews and joining me today is Brian from Sentiment and we are going to do a deep dive into the metrics round bitcoin and the top all coins to get an idea what's happening in the crypto market. And if Brian, you should leave crypto and go to precious metals.
Yeah, Cliff notes the answers, No, I don't believe that we need to go anywhere, And I'd say that whether I was working for a crypto company or not, I think we do have a lot of people who are pretty impatient and agitated right now by the lack of fun crypto has provided for a couple weeks now. The
month started off great. If you remember the first week of January, it was like, Oh, we're finally awake again, and now we're kind of back to this sideways slumber and waiting for crypto to catch up to gold and silver, which has been the huge talk this week in particular.
Well, yeah, look, gold is a shiny object, so is silver. But man, don't you got to be careful because you look at their charts, they're going parabolic. It's green candle after green candle. And I've seen that in crypto, and usually that is a sign of watch out because everybody's getting greedy. They're lining up to buy these assets and much more, and the market always does the opposite exactly.
All the fomo, as many of you have seen on your timelines, appears to be flowing toward precious metals from people who've never owned gold and silver in their lives or a mining company, what have you. They're suddenly very interested because that's where the prices have been moving up. And we've all seen the charts of early adopters versus late adopters and which side tends to do well. And
spoiler alert, it's not the late adopters. It's the people who were in on the initial incline of gold and silver, and yes, they've been doing very well for a while. They've outperformed the bitcoin. Gold's up seventy ish to eighty ish percent over the past year. Silver's up i think over three x now or close to it in the past year, while bitcoin's down about ten to twelve percent depending on the timing of when you're watching this video,
over the past year itself. So from what I'm seeing, the FOMO is finally hitting its peak for gold and silver because people have just had enough of waiting for big coin and which random alt coin might temporarily pop, and they're just saying, well, look at gold and silver, they've been going up for a long time. Now, clearly that's the play. Now that's the new crypto, and people are are flocking out of crypto, which historically is a good thing. That's showing that we're finally getting close to.
That crowd capitulation absolutely the keyword. They're capitulation, right, and you have the herd, the crowd, you know, giving up. They're getting depressed and much more. And as we always talk about, the market always does the opposite of the herd exactly.
¶ Bitcoin analysis
Yeah, and we'll look at some greed and fear for crypto as well, but I figured we'd start off just by checking out the seven day returns. Also notable is the fact that Bitcoin's discussions are up forty seven percent over the past week compared to the week prior. That's not because crypto discussions were dead last week. It's because crypto discussions are way up this week for Nike reasons.
People are bashing bitcoin for being a quote unquote dead asset simply for not keeping up with gold and silver. It's only down ten to twelve percent over the past year. That's not that big of a deal in crypto and can literally be made up for in a day, and that suddenly is back to neutral. But because of the context, because it shows such a lag behind precious metals, it's
really getting a lot of negative discussion. Just this week with all of the all time high discussions related to gold and especially silver, which has just been on a crazy too well, I guess, a crazy one year run, but especially in the last two weeks, it's really emerged.
You know, as far as the sentiment compared to you, I don't know if you have the calculator so to speak of showing you know. Bitcoin mentions are generally negative, and then with gold and silver it's positive right now.
Yeah, let's take take a look at just bitcoin by itself really quick, and then I'll show a really interesting chart that compares how much discussion is going on for each sector, so just in terms of the ratio of positive versus negative commentary. It actually peaked here ride on New Year's as we suddenly saw bitcoin get back about ninety K, and then it's gradually fallen back down as prices have essentially failed to launch, and we're back here at about eighty seven point five K at the time
of this recording. So nothing too major. We're not seeing any fud. It's mostly just kind of neutral, regular discussions relating to bitcoin. Overall, social volume is up for it, but it's not at a point where there's some really encouraging fud, at least on this particular chart context. What does look encouraging is the fact that bitcoin make this a little bigger Bitcoin here in blue. The actual discussions related to it, Like I said, they're pretty stagnant. Silver
going through the roof right now. As you would expect with what Tony and I have just mentioned about, silver were hitting all time highs and all the hype going that way, and then gold actually kind of got its peak two weeks ago when it was making all time highs and silver wasn't doing enough to separate itself. Well, now even gold is starting to go back down because
all the attention has moved towards silver. So even if you are deciding to get into silver or gold right now, this chart should tell you gold might be the better option between the two because Silver's fomo is just through the roof at the moment. But what fomo isn't through the roof is Bitcoin, which is continuing to show arguably a slight decline. I mean, especially going back to mid November when it really bottomed out and the thud was
at its peak. But it's kind of fallen. If I just isolated really quick, you can see how it's kind of trickled down a little over time as more and more discussions have been cannibalized by silver and gold and other sectors out there. You know, meme coins had a run at the beginning of the year two, So Bitcoin is being a little left in the gold and silver dust if you will.
Yeah, great point, and it's so fascinating to see the almost what you may say, is rotation between the precious metals. So gold obviously was ripping cool down in silver's turn, and I think I've been seeing copper or even palladium their charge are starting to run. It's very similar to what happens in crypto. Bitcoin runs. Then you get the you know all season as they will call it, exactly.
And that's a good point, Tony. I mean, it's not even just gold and silver now, it's like anything tangible, especially during times of uncertainty, you know, heightened fears of war. You know, we don't need to get into the political
will they won't they? And geopolitics related to tariffs, which there was good news about a week ago with Trump pulling back on the tarff threats to those eight European countries and he's working something out with Greenland behind or with NATO regarding Greenland behind the scenes at the moment. Not much specific infos come out about that, but regardless,
it does. You know, just the fact that gold is going up this much, it isn't just like a random alt coin that a bunch of dgen traders, if you will, are pumping money into. This is a real tangible asset that is getting bought up by very large players and institutions as a reaction to the uncertainty of the world right now, and god forbid even a fear of war or something like that. That typically is what pumps these precious metals up. And clearly, just based on price is
going up this much. I wish I had silver to show as well, and we should have that on San Bay soon. I've been talking to the devs about it. But at the very least we have gold showing. This is kind of a fear indicator in my opinion.
But yeah, for sure, and we've seen this throughout history, you know, the markets where gold runs and these times of uncertainty, and you know, there's been lots of talks of like central banks have been buying gold and ramping that up. So's it's a very different time. And you know, hopefully, you know, those of us in crypto we get our turn. But I don't know how long this run lasts for these precious metals exactly.
And really the further the separation goes here between bitcoin and gold, the more encouraged you should be of an inevitable bitcoin run, especially because so many people are flocking out of crypto right now that just increases the likelihood of an eventual catch up because those people who are flocking out, where are their coins going. They're mostly going toward key stakeholders, large players who want to get as many coins as possible. Obviously, Sailor is by far the
most notable name. It's been well documented just how many coins he's been accumulating over the last year two years, especially, you know, micro Strategy has been memed to death over the last few months, but he's still there. He hasn't been liquidated, and he's not the only whale who's buying either, so he's In general, whales are still something to watch,
¶ Bitcoin whale activity
and I can pull up that chart very briefly. It's been a little underwhelming. There's not been any major movements, but at the very least we can see the difference in key stakeholders here in bright green and retail and red. You can sleep see it's been a slight fade for the supply held by wallets with ten to ten thousand BTC, which we called the key stakeholder tier, and a slight
uptick in retail. So it's it's kind of just been moving sideways in context here, but retail is still down a lot over the last what is it sixteen ish days that we have, and whales during that same time period are actually slightly up, So I'm not too worried unless there's a huge move all of a sudden, And I think it's actually a good sign that there's not like crazy levels of dumping, just a very small fade going on with the key stakeholders.
Yeah, on the micro days, a lot of ebbs and flows, but when you zoom out you see the larger trend. Right, So last time we met, we were seeing the retail going down when we're seeing the whale investors starting to pick up. But yeah, on a micro any given week, it could be ebbs and flows there exactly.
I mean, these are the big moves. Like if we have an all time high here on the fifth or sixth, depending on your time zone, and then all of a sudden you get like this crazy dump between what the twelfth and novembreth, that's the sign that we're in trouble.
But since then they've actually been pretty good. And the only thing holding holding me back from getting super excited is retail is also kind of accumulating, so it's kind of that middle class that's been hemorrhaging coins to these two, I'd like to see retail start to really move down and show signs of direness and fear and frankly just being super pissed off rather than just frustrated and annoyed like I think the majority are right now. So Brian,
you know, this could be a sign. Not guaranteed, of course, but maybe in the coming month or so, there's another catalyst. In addition to precious metals ripping and going parabolic, a further drives retail to capitulate, Like you're you know we were talking about earlier.
I don't know if it's more terrorists, I don't know, whatever it is. You know, maybe bitcoin dumps down to seventy a k again and they're like, oh my gosh, it looks like we're going all the way down into a bear market. That's an event. The whales pick up momentum and retail you know, they're dumping.
Yeah, I mean, price is usually the biggest reason. Obviously. It's usually like if price goes down, traders will attribute it to something. They might say it's Powell and the interest rates. They might say it's Trump and the tariffs. They might say Putin and the ongoing war with Ukraine. Whatever it is, price is usually the start and then people are like, oh, this is why that price is moving down. Now that subject is a big big deal to me because it's reflecting in the price. So I
think you're spot on. Like sub seventy five K or something is something I've seen spammed a lot as like a key support level. It's a big round number. If we dip below that, expect this red line to really start to fall off a cliff, which would be the sign to buy.
Yeah, and even though you know it's a painful thing, it's actually a good thing for the market. You know, if we are going with this thesis of whales move the market, which I do believe they are, and clear the data supports that, it would be painful but very good for the rebound and the rally to continue from there exactly.
So you know, we're not saying it's definitely going to go be it below seventy five K, but if it does, I would expect behavior and the reactions to that to be the key to kind of light how the rest of twenty twenty six goes.
And how does the MVRV look for a big cooin.
¶ Bitcoin MVRV
Yeah. So actually it's looking pretty good right now, as you'd suspect with this retrace. It's gone down what prices down since the fourteenth, about nine almost ten percent now, and that's been enough to push the average trading returns for those active in the past thirty days down to about negative three point seven percent, So this is officially
slightly under valued. And then the three sixty five day MVRV is down at negative twelve point three percent, which is getting back to late December levels before we had that rebound. So I like the fact that both the short and long term average returns are now officially in negative together. They're not in you know, super crisis mode like they were here in November when we saw that
huge by opportunity. But we may never get to that zone. Really, the way to look at this is the lower it is below zero percent, the higher the upside is, or the less risk you have in opening a new position or adding to a current one.
Oh absolutely, and I wouldn't mind seeing that go down a tad bit more obviously, not like November or even you know, the Twerff announcement crash that we had the beginning of twenty twenty five. But to your point, both being under water is such a good sign. Maybe Again, Brian's sticking to the theme here that if there's some sort of catalyst that drives big and below eighty k right and the fear is here, the price is going on, precious metals continue to rip, you have the full capitulation.
These averages here continue to short and long term continue to go down. It's just a perfect setup again for like a face melting rally. You know, if those things are aligned, the stars align essentially.
Exactly, and especially if for USS go down below eightyk quickly, right, because velocity matters, like eighty k by next week is a lot different than eight sub eightyk in three months. So if that happens, you'd see very low mvrvs all of a sudden, the kind of rival what we saw here, and we might have a similar buy setup. So I think you're spot on.
Yeah, And there's something I was sharing with folks. You know where that price went below eighty k in November. You know, there could be like a double bottom forming before you move, and then that's like a chart thing. It's not guaranteed, but it wouldn't invalidate any structure, just be a retest of that support level that was hit.
Yeah, there's some whiz kid TA traders out there that really can follow like the cup and handles and all those patterns really well, we don't follow that quite as much, but I do know that there's from the psychology perspective, there's a lot of truth to the fact that when that first bottom hits, you know, the higher low versus
the lower low matters a lot. You know, recently, what January twenty fifth, just a couple of days ago, we got as low as I think it went a little like the low eighty six k's might have been the low eighty five k's. I'm kind of zoomed out at the moment. But if we go below that number on this next bottom, then we have a good argument to go all the way to eighty or seventy five. If we don't go below that bottom and then starts to rise, that could be a good sign that this bounces is legit.
Yeah. Absolutely. How's etherorem looking as the you know, the
¶ Ethereum Analysis
top all coin.
Yeah, so for ethereum, it's pretty similar right now, negative five a little over negative five or under negative five for thirty day traders and about negative nine four three sixty five. It had a nice little jump here in the middle of the month, that second week of January, but it's gotten hit pretty hard since the fourteenth, down a little more than bitcoin. Yeah, it's down a little
over twelve percent since then. Pretty similar mvrvs. I don't see enough of an argument from an MVRV perspective to put one in a better bizone than the other.
Good to see it's below, you know, the neutral, so that's a good sign. And how's sentiment around e theorem?
So sentiment wise, pretty run of the mill. It's very similar to Bitcoin right now, just average. Most days we saw a little fomo, this would have been the sign that Ethereum is getting a bit overheated, and we dropped right after, so that worked as expected. But we're waiting for something like this like we saw when we really bottomed out in mid November, and that negative commentary was over the ratio of positive commentary, and that kind of fueled this bounce we had.
And then how about XRP sentiment.
¶ XRP Analysis
XRP a little more positive. I haven't kept up with the latest news about XRP as much as some people have. I don't know if you've heard anything, but we've seen a couple of weird, isolated bullish spikes on the twenty fifth and the thirteenth that could have coincided with news. Either way, XRP has retraced quite a bit and it's back down to one eighty eight at the moment, retracing.
It hit its high a little earlier than Bitcoin and ethereum, but it's dropped a little over twenty one percent since.
Yeah, there have been some specific news items, but you know, to kind of like flash in the pan when news comes out, everybody's tweeting about it, and you know, you get a little bit of hype around it, but nothing sustainable. So I think that's where those spikes and sentiment are.
Yeah. I mean this spike here was as big with three and a half bullish comments per one bearish comment. This was about the same as this exact top that happened back in mid September. So that's not great. There might be a little too much optimism for XRP to
justify a big bounce right now. You know, we don't have any biases or bad things to say about XRP at all, and the argument for long term is still great, but I think from a short term perspective, you don't want to see quite this level of fomo that does appear a lot more prominent than bitcoin and ethereum.
Absolutely, And how does XRP m VRV look.
Yeah, pretty, I mean actually it looks a little better from a long perspective. It's way down at about negative twenty two percent, whereas thirty day is about the same as Bitcoin and ethereum because they had their big run a little earlier, but it was bigger of a spike like XRP really went and had a nice surge to start the year, going all the way up about twenty seven percent twenty eight percent before retracing the thirty day mild BI zone. Long term, it's in a legit BI zone,
so this is this is a good sign. It looks like a slightly less risk asset compared to bitcoin and ethereum. According to MBRV, good to see.
I know some people may not like this, but again I go back to you, good to see the short term. At long term MBRV below the neutral line. That's good. It means at least a setup is coming in the near term for a reversal, So let's see maybe an additional capitulation, you know, based on whatever news I don't know, and then we bottom out and.
Then we start moving exactly. And I wanted to show the trending coins too, because we've had a few interesting ones that are making the rounds right now across social media according to our data. So we've got the usual ethereum and Bitcoin here, Tether's actually been number one, which is often correlated with fear. You don't see Tether talked about a lot unless people are kind of frustrated with
crypto overall. They launched the US stable coin today, I think that's why, right, Yeah, so that's this appears to actually be optimistic news with a new US stable coin being launched, supported by Anchorage Digital Bank and Canter Fitzgerald. And it's also increased its gold reserves, which people are going to react positively too because they're increasing reserves and something that's been pumping like crazy. So they look really
smart to the average Joe right now. I don't know whether it's going to end up smart or not, but it's been enough this news to launch Tether into the number one slot in terms of trending coins. Right now, Etherium and Bigcoin are doing their normal thing. And then I've also seen Nexso in the news a lot mentions of Nexo's investment products, loyalty program, updates, regulatory compliance, utility of the Nexo token, and they've been in the news
a couple of days now. I can't quite tell, maybe it's related to some disappointment, but the bullish and bearish meter looks pretty neutral right now in terms of the crowd mood toward it, So for those of you following Nexso,
this might be interesting to you. Monaro hitting its all time high what a little over a week ago and has kind of retraced a bit along with the rest of crypto since, but it's still getting a lot of attention right now and being compared to, of course, z cash, which had its big development or developer fallout a couple of weeks ago, and it's still being mentioned next to
bitcoin for its privacy upsides. And then I also see Avalanche here with a potential Avalanche ETF or i should say, the launch of its first US listed spot, Avalanche ETF on Nasdaq, which is interesting. I mean, Avalanche doesn't quite get the press of like Solana and XRP or even ethereum. But it's certainly getting a lot of attention from people who may not have ever heard of Avalanche or never really paid much attention to it because of the ETF launch that is making the RMS right now.
Yeah, I saw the news yesterday. Very interesting, man. I hope crypto can catch up to these precious metals. What is the sentiment looking like for a Solana? Yeah, good question, and maybe we could even check Avalanche too. I'm curious with the ETF what that's done. But first Solana Solana
¶ Solana Analysis
appears to be a little on the high side. At least in the last twenty four hours, there's about five and a half bullish comments per one bearish comment, so it's pretty up there. The price certainly isn't.
It's down to about one twenty four at the time of this recording, so it it does tend to get some very jarring bullish spikes like back here, like eight and a half bullish comments per bearish post, and that coincided with the top as you would expect. This one coincided with the top temporarily as you'd expect. The last time I really saw people showing fud toward It was on January first, and that was when things took off.
So if you're a Salona fan, wait for something a little more reasonable, at least from a sentiment perspective, if you want to buy with confidence right now, Right now, the optimism among all your peers in Solana seems to be quite high.
Yeah, I know, last week they had a big announcement about a new standard for like tokenization, similar to what exists on etherorem. So I don't know if that's what's causing that spike, but it could be.
Could be. I saw like a twenty four hour webinar with like the cryptoburb team and stuff, and that got a lot of positive press. But for whatever reason, I mean, Solana's marketing is doing a great job and they're constantly coming out with new initiatives, so it keeps the crowd optimism pretty high on it consistently.
Oh for sure, you mentioned avas. You could take a
¶ Avax Analysis
look at that as the last one. Yeah, let's see what this ETF news has done. Interesting, Not much at all, so either it's being a little swept under the rug, but it's certainly enough to get on our trending coins list. But I see this positive spike here, but there's still a lot of negativity with it, and I would have
to presume it's just because people don't care much. I mean, just in the past two weeks it's down twenty percent, but like it's tough to launch in ETF when you go back four months or so September twenty third and it's lost two thirds. If it's a market cap, I mean, Avalanche has been absolutely hammered price wise. Well yeah, yeah,
and it doesn't get as much attention. It's kind of like it comes in after eth and Solana, as you know, as far as they do similar things right, so they don't they don't get as much presence, even though you know it's I think it's a solid project. And to your point, it's coming in after a Salona ETFs launch, after an e etf IS launch, and you know, those communities are large, they get a lot of partnerships and things like that, so it's pretty tough to for them to kind of break through.
Yeah, I would agree. I'm also I'm noticing this huge flash crash. I know there were a handful of assets that had just insane crashes during that temporary tariff threat in mid October. That got lifted a couple days later by Trump and he worked it out with China. But this this drop was just jarring. I forgot that this happened for a few notable assets, and Avalanche was one of them. And of course a lot of fud came
right after and didn't really make a difference. Avalanche has just been following its namesake, if you will, and having an Avalanche.
Yeah, oh man, I am an avax soaken holder, although I don't you know, I have more ethan Salona of course, but I'm hoping it can recover and do all this cycle. But good to see if it's getting an ETF so at least that could help drive demand.
Yeah. I mean there's only a few coins out there that have them, so we'll see what it can do.
Absolutely good stuff, Brian, you know, as always, hopefully and the next time we meet things are in a better position. But it is what it is. And folks, if you want to check out these charts and all this great data, go sign up for Santa Man, Brian. You can get a free account where you can get access to some of these charts.
Right, yeah, take take a trial for two weeks. No charge, no nothing, and if it suits you and helps your trading strategy, you know, become a member. Even memberships are quite affordable. And yeah, I appreciate the shout out on that, Tony.
Well, yeah, so the links will be in a description. Folks, check it out. You want to be educated and informed as much as possible as you're navigating this market. And obviously we'll keep bringing you guys the updates. But you if you have an account, you can go pull up the data at any point and take a look at it for yourself. And you know, build your skill sets around the market understanding sentiment and movements of whales and retail and all that jazz.
So be sure to check it out.
Brian, Let's see, should I reverse jinks myself, you know, say, you know, maybe we'll be in the crash and oh, next time we meet and things are going to be bloody.
You'll have a handful of viewers who are annoyed no matter what you predict. But you know, I think we're all kind of hoping for a little bit of a wake up call for crypto eventually, you know, whether it's news or maybe some gold and silver profits coming back into crypto. Let's hope that the month ends strong and we go into February with a little bit more to root for you.
Yeah, and I hope you know, a big cattlest could be the Market Structure Bill, and we'll see how that makes its way through Congress. But we know there could be potentially a government shutdown at the end of this month, so you know, maybe that's a catalyst that drives things a bit lower.
Yeah, that didn't I don't think it really hurt crypto the last time that happened, so maybe it could benefit well. Well, of course, try to hold off on analyzing until it actually happens. But there's there's some things to look forward to here.
Well for sure. All right, Brian, good stuff catching the next one, you bet you