¶ Intro
So they are awake.
They being the whales, they seem to really be accumulating confidently now. And you combine that with the fact that retail is dumping significantly at the moment.
They over the last three days have dumped.
I mean it's it's very minor, but it was like point seven percent of the supply. That's actually a lot for them.
Hey, folks, welcome into the Thinking Crypto Podcast. I'm your host, Tony Edward, and joining me today is Brian from Santiment, and we're going to do a deep dive into the metrics for bitcoin and to top all coins to get an idea of what's happening in this crypto market. Brian, great to see you. Good to see you. Nice day for us to meet here, Tony. Two months high for bitcoin. Yeah, I've been following like the whale accumulation data on santamand
you know, watching it. What's happening, and we're seeing the correlation the things we've talked about for so many years now and the prices up. So I'm happy and hopefully this rally continues.
Whales move up, so does price tail as old as time here, so we'll show that and lots of other stuff that's going on right now as we get into mid January.
For sure, why don't we kick it off with bitcoin sentiment. How are people feeling?
Absolutely, So we will start by kind of just looking
¶ Bitcoin analysis
at the ratio of all the bullish comments across social media divided by all the bearish comments across social media. That's all that is showing here in terms of these gold bars. So when it's super high, as you suspect, that's when people tend to be very bullish. We'll arbitrarily called this line or above right around the foam o line, and then anything below right around we could even say maybe here ish that's about the break even line between
bullish and bearish comments. There's always a bit of a bullish bias. Anything below that is where there's a little more bearishness than bullishness, and that tends to be when prices go up. So what did we see, well on the thirteenth and actually earlier today these are eight hour bars. We actually saw a bit of fomo and then it fell back to neutral. Once it fell back to neutral,
that seems to be when price is blasted off. Now, grain of salt, it's going to be correlated a bit with the S and P five hundred, So perhaps the market open had something to do with this. I don't know if that would be the case today wouldn't be the best argument, because markets, the equities markets, or at least the S and P five hundred are down while cryptos up and that's a nice breath of fresh air.
But as of now, what's interesting, Tony is even though prices have climbed, sentiments has fallen back down, almost to that point where we're getting more bearish comments than bullish comments. So people are not believing this pump whatsoever. Even when wemp up to ninety seven point five K, not really any sort of blip in you know, fomo spiking all of a sudden there. So I'm very encouraged by this pattern on the sentiment side.
Yeah, that's a very.
Good sign that the crowd is not buying it or they're in that disbelief stage maybe, right, that's very good, And it could be they're a bit jaded, right, Brian, from what happened in Q four and failed rallies, and you know, maybe this psychological level they need to see is one hundred K right now. It's like, eh, okay, Bitcoin bounce, but show me one hundred K plus.
Yeah, totally.
I think the crowd, or at least the average trader out there, tends to believe that whatever happened last time one time ago is likely to repeat. I've noticed it's it's kind of a cyclical process where if if there's a bull trap last time, especially if we go up to the ninety five K level, like we did just about nine days ago on the fifth year, we got almost to ninety five or so, and then we fell back down. I think because people got hyped over this and then got fooled, and we're like, oh no, I
don't want to get bull trapped ever again. They see the same thing happen here and they kind of shy away or they just take profit, thinking it's going to happen again.
If you know.
That that popular chart where it's like the dumb traders tend to think this way, and then there's a big bell curve around the average trader, and then it goes back down to like the hooded geniuses who are like behind their computers and like doing all of this extra
taculation that most people don't think of. The hooded people and the really perceived dumb traders tend to think similarly, and they'll actually take each cycle on its own face rather than us putting this bias toward whatever happened last time. And I think what a lot of average traders who are trying to break into being a really good trader are trying to do now is get away from that pattern of always thinking that whatever happened last time is
going to repeat itself. There's too common of a feeling across social media where history always repeats itself, even if the circumstances are a lot different.
Yeah, absolutely so, I'm this actually makes me very optimistic to see what's going to happen as we continue later into this month. And you know, we've often talked about the herd, and market does the opposite of the herds, so people don't believe it. You know, that makes me optimistic exactly.
And we've got a lot to cover, of course, But I think sentiment is a really important thing to keep an eye on now because based on the pattern just over the last few days, it does seem like there's a lot of doubt there. And the other big argument that a lot of you know, trusted KOLs that Santaman follows are making right now is the fact that the S and P five hundred and Gold are continuing to make all time highs. You got another all time high just a couple of days ago for the S and P,
and it did drop today. I have to make sure the last couple days were refreshed there. Gold did jump to a new all time high temporarily earlier today.
And then fall.
But here comes Bitcoin all of a sudden starting to play catch up. You see that big divergence. Let's just market with a bell here. That's fine divergence that started right around early to mid December December tenth, eleventh, twelfth. Bitcoin goes down while Gold and the S and P
start to really take off here. So that's a sign that because of the fact that the correlation between Bitcoin and the S and P especially have been so prevalent the last three es years or so, maybe even close to four now, there should be some sort of regression to the mean that favors Bitcoin and allows it to play catch up. Of course, the other scenario is that the S and P five hundred tanks and Bitcoin doesn't have an opportunity to catch up because the S and
P just falls back down to where bitcoin is. But this gap here is still showing a nice setup for Bitcoin to continue rallying toward one hundred k and potentially beyond if retail fomo doesn't ruin that rally.
Very interesting, and you know, one of the things people were talking about why bitcoin doesn't lord of crypto market didn't keep up with gold and the S and P five hundred or stock market was there was that big liquidation event on October tenth, and that kind of set things back where liquidity was an issue. You know, there was some kind of a domino effect with the exchanges and much more so. You know, I'm obviously I'm just speculating, but that could be it.
Yeah.
I mean people don't talk about the stock market as much around that time, but it tanked a lot too. I mean, it was like a two and a half three percent drop in one day before it quickly recovered after Trump kind of rescinded his tariff threats on China. That was the whole reason there was a tank in
the first place. And all these liquidations happened. A lot of people just attribute it to some shadiness from exchanges, and yes, I'm sure part of that is true, but the news that came out about Trump kind of revisiting those tariffs was the reason this fell. But you're right, Bitcoin didn't really recover. It had a little bit of a bounce here and then fell off the face of
the earth. But I think early to mid November was what really crushed bitcoin more so than the October tenth liquidation event.
Yeah, for sure, there was a lot of talks of not only the liquidation event, but the Foyer cycle. Well is that it right? And it became maybe a self fulfilling prophecy because everybody thought, whoa, there's your crash. We hit a new all time high. There was the major liquidation event, maybe it is over, and then people kind of walked away.
Yeah, we've said it on a few shows before, Tony, or at least I have. The four year cycle has some merit, but I always caution people to look at a four year cycle for still a very young industry. Crypto has only been around since oaitish or so, and that means we've really only had five or so complete cycles, pretty small sample size to just say every third year does this, every first year does that?
Yeah? Absolutely, And that is I think something I think people have to update, you know, their mental models because they're so used to a small sample size of information. But you compare that to the other asset classes, there's no way that that's going to continue in thirty years, you know, or even starting now. Right, But just if it look bitcoin in thirty years from now, are we going to still be in four year? That doesn't make sense.
The S and P has been around for over one hundred years and we still don't have a concrete model for this month always goes up, this month always goes down.
So yeah, that should.
Be a good sign that timing plays aren't all they are cracked up to be, no matter how much your trusted kol on x might tell you otherwise.
Yeah, for sure. Okay, Brian, I'm very curious about the
¶ Bitcoin whale data
bigcin will data. Yeah, I've been monitoring that chart at Santiment.
Absolutely, let's visualize and actually look at what they're doing right now. Like I mentioned at the beginning of our video here, it's looking good. This was a great sign here on January eleventh.
Just in the last forty eight hours.
We've seen a jump of accumulation from the ten to ten k wallets. They've added about a little over point one four percent of the entire supply, and if we put that in terms of rock coins, it looks like it's about twenty eight seven hundred and sixty six bitcoin accumulated in just forty eight hours.
That's a lot.
We go back all the way to November thirtieth until now they've added about eighty six point five k bitcoin, bringing them back to their highest total since just about November.
First or so. It looks like October thirty first, right around there. So they are awake.
They being the whales, they seem to really be accumulating confidently now. And you combine that with the fact that retail is dumping significantly at the moment. They over the last three days have dumped I mean, it's it's very minor, but it was like point seven percent of the supply.
That's actually a lot for them. If we put that in terms of rock coins, they've dumped about one hundred and fifty three and a half coins, which does not sound like a lot, but when we're talking about the point oh one or lower tier, it actually is a lot, and it's a signal that retail has lost patience significantly.
Brian, we have been talking about this for a month, right, I remember you showing that charte and we're like, wait a minute, what retail keeps going up? You were saying it's not a good sign because the whales always due to opposite of retail, and now here it is.
Man on this.
I know I sound excited, but I'm excited about the data because the data is showing exactly what the thesis we've been talking about for a long time.
Yeah, and look, nothing we talk about here is a guarantee. Just because the signals look a lot more bullish than they have in a long time, it does not mean that we're suddenly just going to jump back to one twenty six k and make a new all time high. But when we deal in terms of probabilities, this is one of the most real rallies that we've seen in a long time. We've seen a lot of fake rallies
where it wasn't supported by these bullish signals. This time it is, and things can still change on a dime. Retail may fomo back in like crazy tomorrow as they anticipate one hundred k happening, and the news outlets start to perpetuate all of these bullish narratives that get them hyped.
But what we're seeing now this is legitimate.
And one thing I just pulled up here we just put out about an hour ago on our socials.
It's the fact that.
Supplying exchanges tony have really dropped off in the last couple days. To also support the fact that this rally is real. One point eighteen million bitcoin on exchanges is a seven month low, and you want it to be low.
That means less risk of a major sell off occurring, and that's happening while there is a dip in the total amount of non empty bitcoin wallets, in other words, the amount of holders of bitcoin, and what is the vast majority of bitcoin wallets comprised of really teeny tiny retail wallets that might have thirteen dollars worth of bitcoin, maybe one hundred and seventy four dollars. These aren't whales that make up these numbers. It's very dramatically made up by small wallets.
Very interesting. And you mentioned the supply and exchanges is at its lowest level since last year, so that is also a great contributing factor. So yeah, to your point, this rally looks as of right now like it's legit.
Yeah, I mean again, we're talking about a small sample size, but the last couple times we've seen drops in bitcoin holders.
Similar to this.
We've seen immediate rallies right after here back in late September, right before the October sixth all time high, and that here in mid November when things were looking really grim, and then all of a sudden we get a nice, decent sized bounce for the next week or two.
So keep that in mind.
As far as ETFs. You know, I know if you
¶ ETF inflows outflows
wanted to show some other data points here before we look at that.
Yeah, so we just updated our ETF dashboard for those interested. It's completely free. Whether you've got a sentiment account or not. We can drop the link in the description so you have it. But this is the bitcoin ETF volume that is showing a bit of a decline.
Doesn't really matter that much.
It's it's still quite healthy and volume isn't really a bullish or bear signal anyways, But I just want to show volumes before we show inflows and outflows for ethereum. It's actually we just had a huge spike last week and it's still way above average as of late. So ETF volume and just trading in general for Ethereum has picked up significantly. For Solana, which is still very young.
Outside of this huge spike which correlated with that Morgan Stanley announcement that they're going to try to enter ETF space, it's been pretty run of the mill. Nothing special here, so Etherium and bitcoins still higher than usual, Solana about average. And then here's the good stuff with inflows and outflows. Yesterday was the largest spike in money moving in since the day of the all time high.
Take that for what it's Take that how you will.
I don't necessarily want to call it bullish war bearish. Usually anomaly spikes like this can actually signal a top. But the thing is, there isn't really enough of a rally here to really associate it with like a correction. Usually this just indicates like there's going to be a price reversal, But there hasn't been that much of a spike in the first place, like we saw back here when there was a correction, or back here when there
was a correction, or even this one. So all I really take from this is the fact that there's a lot of money suddenly enthusiastically moving into ETFs.
Again.
Yeah, it's and the ETFs, you know, they're kind of fickle where you know, if the price is going up, you not necessarily I don't know how to put it. It's I would rather trust other data points than this, because you know, the ETFs are this products being pushed to many different folks, and if they see the price going up, they could jump right in, but then also
they could jump right back out or right yeah. Yeah, I mean it used to be kind of comprised mostly of institutional money, but I think that's changed, especially for Bitcoin, which has been around over two years now.
In terms of their ETFs.
Ethereum is a little more fresh, and it looks like inflows and outflows are are pretty normal and stable at the moment.
Solana's is there.
There's actually quite a continued rally of inflow days without any outflow days, but they're small inflow days, So business as usual for Ethereum and Solana. But Bitcoin does seem to be showing something that's going on with that huge spike being as high as it is right now. Can we take a look at all coins, specifically Ethereum, Sentiment and MVRV. Actually, Brian, you know, there's one thing I forgot to ask you bitcoin.
¶ Bitcoin MVRV
MVRV, Yeah, good point.
So MVRV for those who don't know, is the mean value versus realize value of basically all of the wallets on the network. And the reason it's useful is because it's a good way to measure when to essentially buy low or sell high based on what your peers are doing. It's a zero sum game. Crypto trading is just like anything else, and when both the short term and long term lines are very negative like this, that indicates that your peers those other traders are down significantly and it's
a better than average time to buy. There's less risk in you doing so. When both lines are way up high, which we actually have not really seen in the past three months, but we did. If we go a little further back like here, this was a sign that we were getting way overheated because your average competing traders were way above the zero percent line, and that would be a sign that you're at a heavy risk if you're
buying or holding onto your coins. So as of right now, short term, because of this medium sized surge that we've seen the first half of January, it's up to about plus eight percent. Long term, it's still at about negative three, So slight, slight argument to still buy in here long term with less risk than usual, but short term, don't be surprised if there's a little bit of testing in this ninety ford to ninety eight K range until some
fomoers kind of get knocked out. Maybe we see MVRV get back here to zero to five five percent something like that, and then that's where we might finally see d the celebration of one hundred K getting breached again.
Hm.
Very interesting, Yeah, because I can see the short term it is approaching the levels that we saw in October with the high, but yet to your point of long term still under water a little bit or approaching neutral.
Yeah.
I mean we've seen far crazier, you know, surges than just a plus eight percent for thirty day MVRV. I've seen it above twenty five before. But it's the power of both of them being up at the same time that was why it was so dangerous back then. I don't consider this nearly as dangerous because only the short term is about as high as it was during the all time high, while the long term is actually still below water. That's a much better circumstance.
Oh, absolutely how about etherorem MVRV.
¶ Ethereum MVRV & Sentiment
Yeah, while we're here, we'll just do Ethereum's MVRV as well, and then look at some of its sentiment as well. Yeah, so so not as good of a circumstance. Ethereum's short term is up to plus nine percent, while long term is at plus three percent instead of negative three. So both the short and long term are above water right now. The last time that happened was December tenth, and that
was a top where we fell back down. Obviously, Ethereum is still going to be slightly correlated with Bitcoin, not as much as some other oflf coins these days, but you know, if Bitcoin is still rallying, don't expect this to be a top, just because the MVRV is looking a little bit overheated now. But nevertheless, if you're choosing between Bitcoin and Ethereum for maybe just a week's time, the math says there might be a little more advantage to sticking with Bitcoin this time around.
That definitely makes sense. Yeah, because at some point alts do pick up steam and they outperform Bitcoin. This is a pattern rousine over and over. But yeah, I had esca point there eth getting a little bit dangerous there.
Yeah, and we can see how sentiment might be factoring into that as well. It looks like there's a little more bullishness toward ethereum.
Interesting.
Yeah, it kind of happened right before all of crypto took off, about twenty four hours ago, but you can see the pattern here. Like just since late November until now, the average sentiment has picked up quite a bit. I wouldn't call this like super fomo and greedy. Yesterday was that was the third highest fomo day we've had in the past three months, but it's at least just slightly above average, with this line being about average for the past three months.
So I'm a little.
Concerned about sentiments starting to get a little hot for ethereum, but it's not out a point where I'd be like terrified of a correction like we saw with this huge spike, and it proved to be a very good signal to take profit while everyone else was filmoing in in early November.
Yeah, for sure. How about XRP sentiment and then we
¶ XRP Sentiment & MVRV
can do MVRV for that.
So XRP, which had a nice rally in early January but has cooled off since it's saw its biggest spike in sentiment just yesterday. And yeah, three and a half Polish posts for every one Bearish post.
That's pretty significant.
So that that tells me that there might be a few too many overly eager XRP retailers right now. It doesn't mean XRP isn't a legitimate long term investment, but be careful with swing trading XRP while the hype is this high. You can see right here things corrected right after. This was a really you know, cautionary cell signal right here.
And so is this.
I mean pretty much every big fomo spike of the past three months was followed by a bit of a correction. Bitcoin of course, can still pull XRP up if it rallies, but XRP has a tough time going on like a huge decoupling while fomo is this high.
H Yeah, good point. So this is where folks, you got to follow the data, right The sentiment is pretty high there, and it's something to be cautious about, Okay, And then how's the MVRV look.
So MVRV for XRP, I wouldn't be surprised if short term is still quite high because of that early January rally.
But let's take a look.
Yeah, so you can see this was like the huge warning sign.
It got above twenty percent.
If you look at that top left bubble where I'm looking, and that was a sign that it was going to be hard to continue a rally, while so many average wallets were already well above.
That zero percent line. And then it came back down.
We had a little bit of a correction, and even just this little bounce was enough to push it back up. It's at about plus eight percent now, same as Bitcoin. But it's long term. Even with this like early January rally, like the long term trend for XRP still has left a lot of meat on the bone, so to speak, because of the fact that it's down. Yeah, the price is down forty percent if you go back to July
twenty second or so when it had that top. So the six month decline in price means that the long term average returns are at minus twelve percent, Meaning if you were to jump into XRP and your plan is to hang on for like a year or more, the metrics justify that the risk of that is pretty low. Though not a bad setup for XRP. Here after this cool down from last week and the big cool down from the past six seven months or so.
Very interesting. Okay, so how about we look at Solana sentiment.
¶ Solana sentiment analysis
Solana sentiment has stayed pretty low. It's kind of the opposite of XRP. Actually, it looks like it's been more FUDD than FOMO the last week or so. There was one big spike and I'm yeah, this is January sixth, so that was the day Morgan Stanley had that big exciting announcement about their.
You know, intention to have an EAT.
I think they filed that day and people got very excited with one of the largest American financial institutions thrown their hat into the ring. But that of course created a top, as sentiment often will predict. Then we see a big FUD spike here on January eleventh, and it's been rallying a little bit ever since. Price is it looks like, yeah, it got up to about one forty six earlier today and that's the highest we've seen going
all the way back to November thirteenth. So it's at a two month high, just like Bitcoin just hit a two month high. But sentiment is staying pretty low, just like bitcoin. So I like Solana's sentiments set up here for a further climb if Bitcoin can carry all coins out along with it.
Mm, yeah, good stuff. I'm trying to think of there's any other data points that we usually look at. I think that might be it. It looks like you got some trending words here.
¶ Trending crypto topics
Yeah.
I was just gonna check out briefly what some of the big stories and narratives have been from the last couple of days, and just looking at this without getting into the details.
We've got some bullish hype narratives that are kind of forming right now.
Bullish momentum rising, BTC nears one hundred k, momentum driven snipers little. We'd have to look into what that really means. BSc Wallace purchase, Monaro, Privacy surch We didn't talk about Monaro, but it hid an all time high near seven hundred dollars, and privacy coins in general continue to be big standouts outside of z cash, which has been demolished due to a lot of the news about the development team getting
shaken up and a lot of them leaving. I know they do still have development, but the uncertainty surrounding that particular coin is still you know, very shaky, and I think Manaro has benefited because of that. There's also the larger privacy coin narrative that's floating around.
I don't know if you've heard that. And so it started with z cash, where z cash had the big run up, and now it's like Monaro's turn. So I wouldn't be surprised if like Dash and the other ones start rallying eventually.
Yeah, no, I mean Dash has Dash actually just had a huge run itself. I'm just looking at the word privacy coin. Maybe I can include the word coin in it, and we can see how much the social narratives have been going up over the topic in general.
Not that much.
I expected more, but yeah, if we looked at just XMR,
¶ Monero analysis & Privacy Coins
look at that, I mean, just a huge run in the last four days.
That's a lot more than I thought. Actually, it's up up.
To about seven seventy now, so it's been making new all time highs consistently the last few days. And then here's Dash doing something very similar.
Again.
I think this is kind of like a regardless of just like the regular cycles of different privacy coins.
I think z Cash's a lot of its profits from traders have been moved into.
Manaro and dash as a result of the development news.
So can we take a look at this sentiment from Minaro.
Yeah, it's getting up there.
This is the second largest bullish day we've had in the last month. I would expect that a lot of this is almost all of it is going to be directly due to the price, right yeah, performance. You know, people are going to care maybe secondarily about the actual news and what manual is working on, but the average trader is mostly just paying attention to price, and social dominance isn't really showing anything too special right now. But for those people who are talking about Monaro, bullishness has
started to take over. So there's a little bit of a fomo risk there. And then dash ash is getting a lot more attention relative to its normal rate of talk. Not quite to the level of fomo that you might expect, but don't be surprised. You know, if it gets toward one hundred dollars in the next day or two, both social dominance and bullishness will really start to get to like way up here.
Wow, very very interesting, Brian. I am looking forward to our next meeting because you know, we're looking at the data and what the whales are doing and how the market's moving. And I'm really curious, you know where that takes us because so far to data showing this is a legit rally, So it's going to be an exciting month, it seems like. But no guarantees, of course.
Yeah, based on probably our last three months of calls, this is by far the best news I've been able to report based on what the data is showing. So again, no guarantees of anything happening. But as in terms of like which rallies are legit and which ones are kind of like fake bull traps, this one's veering more toward the former.
Right now, Oh for sure. And folks, if you want to learn more about this data and run through it yourself, check out the link to Sentiment's website in the description go sign up, Brian, you can sign up and get a free version right and get some of the data.
Yeah, you got two free weeks to just explore all of the real time data that we showed here today. And after those two weeks you can decide whether you want to be a member or you stick to just browsing the free stuff on our site.
Yeah, for sure, And like I said, I almost refreshed that whale data sentiment accumulation chart every day, and I of course look at the MVRV for a bitcoin, so it's really helpful and to get an idea what's happening in the market. And you know, sometimes you look at crypto Twitter or different social platforms and there's a lot of noise, and the data really helps to filter through
is this legit? All these people getting excited about something they shouldn't be And it's really a great like reflective. I don't know how to articulate it, but it just allows me to reflect on what's happening and bring it back to the data.
Great point.
And one thing I wanted to mention about crypto Twitter and slash x that's been going on. I'm sure you've seen Tony all the talk about the algos and how things are less visible, and I want to encourage everyone watching, whether it's Santaman's channel, Thinking Crypto's channel, or anyone else that you really trust and enjoy absorbing content on the notification bell appears to make a huge difference and whether people actually see the content that we're putting out there.
And I used to kind of think of the bell as kind of novelty, like you're going to see it in the algorithm anyways.
But it's actually made a difference for.
Us too with some of the trusted people that we get information from and get inspiration for doing research. So hit those bells on any of our channels or others that you just trust, and it seems to make a huge difference during this time of uncertainty and not knowing what the hell is going to happen next.
Yeah, for sure, great point. All right, Brian, thank you so much, And like I said, I'm looking forward to our next one. So let's see how the price moves, how the market reacts, and much more.
I'm excited. Talk soon, Tony.