Yeah, I was getting worried along with you. I mean this, We've rarely seen over the past year, almost two years, points in which this bright green line has gone down, and when it does, it usually.
Takes the prices with it pretty quickly.
But this was the turning point about three weeks ago where things quickly started to recover, and only a matter of time, especially right here when we bottomed out on March ninth.
Hey, everybody, welcome into the Thinking Crypto Podcast. I'm your host, Tony Edward, and joining me is Brian from Sentiment And as you all know, we are going to break down the metrics, run big point of e theorem, salon and XRP and what's happening in the markets. Guys, We're going to look at the data. Brian's great to see you.
Good to see you, Tony.
It's looking a lot better now compared to about a week and a half ago when things were pretty grim. But we've had a nice rebound crypto wide, and I'm excited to talk.
Some numbers, so, Brian, isn't it funny? You know we've been on this theme of going against the herd. Right the herd they the market does the opposite of the herd, and we saw a lot of people were bearish right down in the dumps, depressed, and all of a sudden, the market is having a rally. Now, this could be just a relief rally, but again the market doing the opposite of the herd. At the sentiment, which we've been tracking.
Exactly right, Yeah, we saw one and a half to two weeks ago we were seeing some of the most bearish signs from the crowd that we've seen in some time, even though the metrics on chain were looking fine.
For most assets.
It was just a matter of kind of waiting out this retrace that have been going on since the Trump inauguration back in mid January. So now that we've seen a bit of a recovery, the question is have we swung the other direction and is there now a bunch of euphoria and people talking about, you know, going all in once again.
Absolutely, So let's start with bitcoin as we usually do, and start looking at this sentiment around point, at what people are saying, and this year we can use that as a measuring stick to get an idea how the crowd's feeling, and will look at whale activity and things like that.
Totally Okay, so looking at the price action really quick, we do see that, you know, we have this new Trump meme coin that's kind of dwarfing the axis, but you can see all these tiny little green spots that are indicating that everything else is or most everything else is up money over the past week, Bitcoin up about
seven and a half percent, Ethereum up ten percent. We've talked in previous episodes Tony about how Ethereum was one of the biggest underperformers of the past year or so and people were really starting to write it off and calling it overrated and Metallic doesn't know what he's doing, all sorts of narratives going around. But Ethereum has made a nice recovery, and in general we've seen a nice
rebound among most large cap mid cap assets. The overall market cap is pretty even up only up at zero point one percent, but we do see trader volume overall up about nine percent. And if we move over to bitcoin specifically, we aren't seeing anything special going on. Utility wise, transaction volume is actually kind of declining over the past month. Active addresses circulation even those are down a tiny bit here.
But what I do think is important is that we look at the average returns right now because this is reflective of what your peers are doing and how they're performing right now, to give us an idea of what an actual by low versus a sell high opportunity looks like right now. And obviously the big by low spot was about two weeks ago March tenth, we were hitting
that seventy eight K level for a second time. And during this spot we saw that the average returns for while it's active over the past thirty days was down about seven percent or sorry, thirteen percent, and long term, while it's we're down about seven percent. So when you see both the short and long term well below zero, that's generally a great bytime and this was a perfect signal. Now we've run things back up where both the short and long term while it's on average are in the positive.
Again not by much, not on a scary zone whatsoever. But whilst in the past thirty days are up about three and a half percent, past year they're up about four and a half percent. We've seen several times where they've both gotten way into double digits, and we aren't even close to that right now. So consider us kind of in a neutral territory right now, meaning you'd be buying or adding onto your position right now at a pretty neutral spot compared to the entire history of bitcoin existing.
Interesting. So I know, seasonaley wise with the stock market and crypto, April made June are usually good months, and then you know you have the summer lull by and excuse me, sell and may and go way as usually saying. Right, So, nothing guaranteed here, But could this be the start of
that next rally upwards? Right? Maybe bigcoin goes to new highs and then pulls all coins for the next phase up Like we had the run up in Q four, we had the correction in Q one, and now come Q two is the next run up?
I could see it.
Yeah, I mean seasonality I always take with a grain of salt because I just don't think, even with crypto existing for about sixteen years, I don't think we have nearly enough of a sample size to deduce that these months are always good. These months are always bad. There's been lots of a lot of coincidences and circumstances that have made like November an amazing month for crypto and January not so good of a month. But generally the
start of each quarter. You know, there's there's some arguments that there's some extra capital being put in every January, April, July, and October and that can have positive impacts on prices. And we're about what seven six days away from April first hitting, and that means, you know, we have new whales and large capital investors injecting some money, shuffling their
money around things like that. So I could see it, for sure, but from a raw math perspective, I like to just see, you know, how how good are investors doing with their average portfolios, regardless of the timing of the month, or the week or the year. And this shows that we're just slightly above water right now when looking at other traders and how they've been profiting as of late.
Yeah, for sure, And great point on the seasonality, because there are no guarantees and it doesn't mean that past performance is an indicator of future and that it must play out that way. But as you say, though, we look at the different pieces of the puzzle so to speak, to make sure our thesis is as close to accurate as possible, and using the data is of course a strong indicator. So you mentioned whales or you may have some other data here before we look at whales.
Yeah, well, I just wanted to mention funding rate actually looks pretty healthy right now, especially on Binance. There's a healthy amount of shorting that are being sprinkled in here
as the funding rate data comes out. Ever since March hit, we were getting quite a bit of bias toward people trying to profit off of Bitcoin dropping in value, and that usually is a good thing if you're bullish, because whatever direction traders are tending to skew it, exchanges are constantly looking to find ways to liquidate those.
Biases.
So when we're super long, like we were back here in mid January as Trump was getting inaugurated, those longs got liquidated and sent prices way down, and it just continued down with the momentum and large capital investors taking some profit. And then we got here in the first week of March and suddenly there's a bunch of shorts getting liquidated. It temporarily sent prices up, and we've kind of ranged ever since. And we were correlated with the S and P five hundred, which I'll get to later
in the call. So right now, yeah, we're seeing a little bit of shorting right there. And that's a good sign because we kind of bounced right off of that red bar and have been going up a little bit ever since, back up above eighty eight k for the first time in about a little over two weeks.
And then I know, usually it gets a point when the shorts build up or thelongs build up, right, there's usually a reversal liquidation. It's funny, exact, and it's so good to like look at this data so you can see, oh wow, there's a build up of a ton of shorts. Maybe there's your shorts squeeze coming up if other factors align, and likewise, you know, there's a lot of lungs, you know what might be coming. As we saw kind of like in January. Right in February, a lot of longs liquidated.
That's exactly right.
So with shorts being sprinkled in, we're hoping that they continue to contribute to the positive price momentum we've been seeing. Now on the whale side of things, we're seeing plenty of whale transactions still going on. There has been a decline since the end of February, but we do see this uptick that just happened a couple days ago, and this appeared to be accumulation. And if we take a look at this chart, which we've gone over in most of our shows, Tony, we do see that the bright
green line here is moving up. This is representing the amount of bitcoin held by wallet's with at least ten BTC in them. So Ever, since this little profit take that we saw from mid February to about early March, they've actually accumulated pretty well, adding about a hundred no sorry,
e two hundred eleven btc over the past three weeks. Meanwhile, the you know some people say, especially when you look at wallets that hold over ten thousand bitcoin, which is a pretty unfathomable number, those are mostly held by exchanges, and we've seen that the wallets specifically holding between ten to ten thousand, which is excluding some of those huge exchange wallets. In this bright green line, even this dark green line is starting to rise again, representing the ten
to ten k wallets. And right when we started to really get momentum and go into the high eighty eighty ks, it was boosted by the fact that these middle tier ten to ten k. While it's we're really starting to accumulate once again and they're holding the most they have in about three weeks.
Yeah, you know, Brian, I was looking at this chart over the past month, and I have to say I was getting a bit nervous because I'm like, are these whales done?
Right?
Is this the end of it? Because if they this is a true down trend of them not accumulating anymore, I need to start panicing. Well not I shouldn't say panic, but I need to start prepping for Okay, something's different, but it's good to see some recovery here. That's a healthy sign. And it wasn't a true down trend exactly.
Yeah, I was getting worried along with you. I mean this, We've rarely seen, over the past year, almost two years, points in which this bright green line has gone down, and when it does, it usually takes the prices with it pretty quickly. But this was the turning point about three weeks ago where things quickly started to recover and only a matter of time, especially right here when we
bottomed out on March ninth. The fact that we had already been starting to move back up even though the price was doing, you know, from that exact day doing that right, That's called a bullish divergence. When you see whales moving up but prices moving down, that should be a signal to you that maybe Bitcoin is starting to get a bit undervalued compared to what the largest key stakeholders are trying to do with the big picture.
Oh yeah, for sure, great insight. And then on the stable coin front, what are you seeing as far as tether supply on exchanges?
Mm hm, so tether is still moving down. Not a lot of dry powder on exchanges compared to what we were seeing about a month month and a half ago, there was about if we're talking specifically about the top exchange wallets, basically the top ten, there was about forty five point four nine billion dollars worth of tether during the first week of February. Now there's forty point sixty four so pretty sizable drop. Us D coin does look
a little bit better. It actually really jumped up here on March twenty first, twenty second, twenty third before coming back down. But we'd still like to see some improvement from the stable coins, especially the top wallets and how much they're holding, because that liquidity can really help fuel a lot of rallies because of how much buying power there is on exchanges.
Interesting. I know there's like people track I think tether dominance and even bitcoin dominance, so it's fascinating. You know, I personally don't know. I'm not as well educated as some analysts, you know, as far as the correlation. I know, it's like, if that supply starts to pretty much break down, it means more coins are theoretically going into biitcoin in
the crypto market. But you know, I'm not fully you know, I can say that with one hundred percent confidence because I'm not fully educated on that.
Yeah, it's it's a bit of a loose correlation. I do believe there's something there, but I certainly don't recommend trading just based on you know, the the raw amount of tether versus the raw amount of bitcoin on a particular exchange. I think that's you know, exchanges have their own functions and reasonings for adding more stables for liquidity purpose or taking some away, and you have to take
it with a bit of a grain of salt. In general, it's still good to see, you know, rising tether on exchanges over time, but if it falls like this, it isn't necessarily a sign that like there won't be enough stable coins for people to you know, use for their their trades and whatever they're requesting, especially when a lot of these are coming from like the top exchanges like Finance or Tether and USD coinbase for USD coin.
Yeah, great point, because I believe it or not for some who are listening, tell and stable coins are used for payments and you know other things people used to get yield and so forth, and then the sometimes burning right depending on what the individual or institution is doing, so exactly. Yeah. Interesting, Any other bitcoin metrics you want to share?
There was one other one that I think is worth watching, and that's the total amount of holders. We do see that retail traders. Since February February eighteenth, roughly five weeks ago, they have gone up by about three hundred and seventy four thousand non empty wallets, So they're even despite all of this volatility that's happened in the past five weeks, the overall network appears to be growing, which is overall a pretty good sign. It does indicate there isn't a
ton of fear. I'd love to see if you know a bunch of retail traders really thinking that prices are going to go down because that's when we typically see the biggest bull rallies. But the network does seem to be growing rather quickly, and especially a couple days ago when we were at fifty four point eight million non empty wallets. If we go back in time, we're pretty much at the highest point ever in terms of non
empty wallets. You can see it really really grew from twenty nineteen to twenty four and then there was this interesting flat line that's kind of happened ever since June of last year. So the growth is a little bit slower, and you can see during this rally when the growth was slowing, this was from a lot of retail traders just taking profit on the way up, not thinking we'd go all the way up to you know, one oh nine, hey,
like we did. But now that prices of retraced, we're seeing we're still seeing the network grow, but on a slower rate compared to what we saw, you know, three to five years ago.
Interesting. All right, let's move to Ethereum and let's take a look at what it's happening with ETH. You know, there's been a lot of adoption news with folks building on ETH, but you know, ETH still continues to suffer from a price standpoint. I do think it will catch up, especially as staking is added to the ETF and much more. But you know what are you seeing on that front?
Yeah, Ethereum is out a nice week. It's up about ten percent, as we saw over the last week. And even though utility doesn't appear to be anything special right now with transaction volume, active addresses, and circulation all going down, there are some good long term signs. Obviously because it's been such an underperformer over the past year. Waltz are
still down on average about twenty nine percent. That's way below what we see for Bitcoin and Solana and XRP, so in terms of just a regression to the mean viewpoint, there's some argument that Etheroreum could be still one of the better bets for a bit of a rebound later in twenty twenty five, assuming that Bitcoin can start to really get its legs, and even the thirty day while
ITTs are still down just slightly. So I like how the MVRV looks a lot for Ethereum in particular, this is one of the strongest bullish signals I'm seeing for it right now. And then also funding rate, plenty of shorts that are being sprinkled in here over the past
couple weeks. We do see that we're a little closer to neutral normally or right now on finance, but look for you know, big short spikes like this as a good sign that liquidations can occur and prices really soaring quickly if the negativity starts to creep in again for the number two asset.
Yeah for sure. And maybe you know, there could be a catalyst, like I've been hearing rumors from the SEC that you know, they may add staking in the etherem ets and that big players like Fidelity and others have been filing for that. So could that be a catalyst to send it up and you know, help it get some strength from a sentiment standpoint, maybe, but absolutely it's a fair point.
Any any more ETF filings that get approved or ways for people to invest in ethereum outside of holding coins on chain, which a lot of people aren't comfortable with. And we all we have to accept that, you know that reality is is a thing that means that having ETFs is only going to help the cause for ethereum or the rumored you know x RP or Solana ETFs out there another handful of coins. To any of these coins that get approved ETFs, it's going only going to help the cause.
Yeah, absolutely, let's take a look at Solana or unless there's other info here on.
Eth nothing else on Ethereum. I just I continue to monitor the sentiment, which we can look at here. In fact, we can check out Etherium, Bitcoin and Solana and we'll do XRP two so all four of these sentiments for each of them can be found here on this chart. We're just measuring the overall level of positive comments according to our algorithm across social media versus the negative ones, and the ratio specifically between them as a good sign
of greed versus fear. So we saw actually just about three months ago on Christmas, there was this huge, huge positive sentiment spike and it didn't All it did was really send prices down, which is normal. Meanwhile, when you see some of these negative spikes, it actually can be a good thing. Like right here on February tewod when we were bottoming out and seeing Ethereum at twenty five hundred, we saw a pretty decent bounce right after. It didn't
last long, but you get the idea. This one as well. There was a bounce right after we really got negative, and now we've seen a few positive spikes. This one on March nineteenth was followed by a short retrace after people got a bit too excited, and then another one just yesterday March twenty fourth, very minor retrace, and now we're kind of back in neutral territory switching to bitcoin.
It actually looks quite positive right now, makes sense. We're back at eighty eight k for the first time in what about six weeks here, I'm sorry, not six weeks. I'm reading it wrong, about three weeks or so ago, and this positive sentiment is the highest in six weeks, indicating that we might be starting to see a little too much fomo. This is kind of a short term
reaction to seeing finally some positive momentum toward bitcoin. It doesn't mean bitcoin can't continue climbing into the ninety k's again, which many people are hoping for, but the amount of retail fomo looks a bit too high from just a short swing trader perspective.
It's just fascinating. I know, I say this like almost recording. It's just fascinating to look at this data and watch it play out for these assets, and understanding the human psychology that's behind it. Yeah, maybe I love looking at data and patterns and pattern recognition. It's so fascinating to me.
It is a lot of fun when you really start to understand with every price fluctuation, how it really skews people's minds toward a certain expectation just from like a simple price swing. You know, we were so negative just a few weeks ago, and then all of a sudden, we get to eighty AK and suddenly people think bitcoin's a great investment again.
It's it's just so fascinating.
I don't know if you've seen that meme where there's two guys at a booth right, and then the herd doesn't go for the lower price. They always line up for the higher price.
Yeah, or like the exact same price, like eighty K in November of twenty twenty four, everyone is incredibly excited and like fanning out their dollars, ready to pay whoever
they need to pay. And then eighty K in March twenty twenty five, everyone is kind of sad and like burying their face in their hands, even though it's literally the exact same market price, but people have different perspectives because it's all based on when they bought in, and obviously eightyk in March is a depressing thing for many retailers who were buying in you know, mid January at one oh five, one oh eight k, just before Trump
got inaugurated, expecting that prices we're going to balloon to one fifty k as soon as he took office, and obviously the opposite came true. So now we're back to playing the longer game and people are patiently waiting for you know, Bitcoin to reach those prices again.
All right, let's take a look at Solana and what's happening there. There were some huge news this morning actually about black Rock expanding there. Took an ice fun onto the Solona blockchain, yep.
And you can guess what happens when Blackrock gets involved with Solana and creates that positive news wave, the sentiment just sores. In fact, we're seeing over ten positive comments across social media for Solana compared to every one negative comment. This is the highest we've seen in a very long time, at least the last three months. I'm going back in time to see, yeah, this is today is the highest positive sentiment day for Solana in at least the past year.
I won't bother to go further back, but you get the idea of the magnitude of how much fomo is going on for this asset right now.
Are you guys tracking Solana like meme coin activity, Bundy, chance, because I know like that aspect of it has really dried up. Any data you can share there.
Yeah, I can go to the social side of things to see how much it's being mentioned.
In fact, we'll do We'll do two quick searches.
We can look at Solana, I'll do the full name as well as the ticker, and then I'll go and meme coins. That's fine, We'll just do meme coins to see how much it's being mentioned alongside meme coins. And just as you would expect, tony tons of social volume from late twenty twenty four up until early February, and then it just drops off a cliff. As you know, markets all just plummeted throughout the first half of February especially.
Yeah, it's interesting because look, I know there's people who are fans of me coins. I'm not so much a fan of it, but I do believe and I think a lot of people agree with me. A lot of liquidity was stolen from other all coins going into memes on Solana with pump that fun. So there's this like drying out of that market. And look, it will return. I think it'll return, you know, as the phase continues in the bull market. But we need the liquidity to go back to Bitcoin in the top bolts.
That typically is is what needs to happen in the long term cycle for all markets to go up. Yeah, we need to see meme coiners eventually get wrecked in some capacity stop believing in meme coins after that, and then meme coins start to pump and we see the profit redistribution from the bitcoin market cap growth happen all over again and rinse and repeat.
M all right, let's take a look at XRP. That's our final one and.
Then we'll I just wanted absolutely and I just wanted to check to see how much black rock is being mentioned.
So yeah, yeah, check that spike out.
That's today, So clearly that's that has a lot to do with that sentiment spike we just checked out.
Wow, yeah, that makes sense. That says a huge news, huge adoption news. M H.
And if I'm not mistaken, it's just a rumor right now, right there's nothing confirmed yet.
The folks are Securitize, which helped black Rock to launch the tokenized money market fund. They confirmed it.
Okay, that that makes sense then, so this is this isn't just to buy the rumor sell the news situation. It's confirmed news that can have a long lasting impact, probably once that FOMO dies down a little bit. You typically don't see huge Solona pumps while everyone retail wise is already expecting Solana to soar. But it'll eventually calm down and then we will likely see the impact of it, yeah for sure. And then on the XRP side, it
doesn't look like there's anything too special going on. Sentiment wise, it's sitting just lightly with more positive commentary than negative commentary. But xrp's obviously been a huge story for the past five months, in particular, ever since it went from what about fifty cents to where it is now about two forty five, jumping about three hundred and seventy nine percent
in market cap during that time. So kind of like the opposite of ethereum, you would expect there's going to be potentially a little regression to the mean because there were already so many people profiting off of that rally.
And if we look at MVRV, just like we did for ethereum, Yeah, so this was all this blue here was off the axis because if you check out the top left of my screen, while it's were up an average of one hundred and fifteen percent one hundred twenty as I drag left and right like insanely high numbers, one hundred and thirty four percent on January twenty before
it finally started to calm down. You don't want to be in an asset when you see extremely high while average average profits across all the other traders that you are competing against. But now we've calmed down, the average wallets in the past thirty days are actually down about zero point six percent. In the past three sixty five days,
they're still up about forty two percent. I'd love to see that the MVRV drops down to like maybe below twenty percent for this teal line here, and the orange line maybe gets down to negative five, negative ten percent. That would indicate that you're starting to get into a really good by territory. If you're looking for an ideal point to get into XRP.
Interesting any other data you think might be worth highlighting here.
The other thing with XRP is the whales are very inactive compared to what we were seeing during these peaks in early February and right before Trump's inauguration. So right now we're only getting maybe like one hundred and twenty ish wallet or transactions per day that exceed a million dollars in value versus about one thousand to eleven hundred wallet transfers that are over one hundred thousand dollars in value.
So compare that to this.
Spike where it was five eight hundred and seventy eight hundred K plus transactions and seven hundred and sixty two million dollar plus transactions. So whales are inactive, but it doesn't necessarily mean they're dumping. We can actually look and see like the amount of XRP held by wallets with like at least a million XRP, and if we make it a different color than dark gray, there we go.
Yeah.
I mean they've they've continued to climb over time. I'll go back a little bit to like the last five years, and you can see the point in which they really reversed direction. In December of twenty twenty two, they were holding about forty one point seven billion then and they old forty six point four billion now, So they've they've really started to.
Increase their bags.
In fact, they already have been for about two what almost two and a half years now. Eleven point one percent coins more coins held compared to December of twenty twenty two. That's a really nice looking metric for the long term outlook of XRP.
M interesting. That's definitely a good sign. Actually, as you're you know, we're talking about XRP, some news just broke from Ripple's chief legal officer that the SEC and Ripple it's done. It's one hundred percent done, the case is over. Ripple's going to probably fifty million dollars in a fine set up the one hundred and twenty five. So that should probably help. I don't know, you know, it's like we're seeing a lot of bullish news for a lot of coins today.
Yeah, I was actually checking this out today because it's been on and off kind of made official over the past week or two. But xrp's very complex relationship with the SEC has had a lot of price impact over the past couple of years, as you would imagine, so I can compare it directly to price. I'm just putting an XRP anytime it's mentioned with the words sec or lawsuit,
and we can go back. Let's just go back to the past year and you can see the points in which there was news about the sec or a lawsuit. This one was actually a top. I know it's hard to see with this green line, but it kind of halted xrp's rally from last August right there. This one was kind of flat. And then you can see precisely December first when everyone talked about the lawsuit that marked a top. This one in mid January marked the top, and then even this latest one from a week ago
mark to top. So I'm curious to see whether this has a positive or negative impact on xrp's short term price. If we judge by history, it actually may cause a slight top. And then after people give up on XRP, that's when the effects, the positive effects of this good news really starts to take effect.
Oh yeah, for sure. Interesting Brian, As always, my friend, great information, great data, and as I always say, maybe in two weeks you know, next two weeks we are at higher prices, and you know, if everything goes according to plan, you know, maybe we're hitting new highs come May or June. But we'll have to wait and see how the market plays out.
I'm looking forward to updating in a couple of weeks and yeah, just like you, we're hoping for the best and we continue to see a nice recovery so we can get back to those January all time highs.
Oh for sure.
Bask PST, PST, PST, PSK,