# Crypto Bear Market Strategy and Institutional Adoption

**Podcast:** The Milk Road Show
**Published:** 2026-02-17

## Transcript

To me, it's very clear that like the industry is going to be much larger than like much larger over the next three to five years than it is today.
It's just like that might not look exactly like people had envisioned it looking, you know, three, four years ago.
What's up, everybody?
It's LG D Set here, and welcome to the Milk Road Show, the daily crypto show that is starting to feel like Leonardo DiCaprio in that movie where the bear is relentlessly trying to tear him apart and secretly hoping there's an Academy Award at the end of all this.
Today is February 17th, 2026.
We are deep in that bear market.
There is no doubt.
But that doesn't mean we can just take off every day and touch grass waiting for the turnaround.
There's so much happening in the space.
Honestly, when you zoom out, and we do this every day on the show, there is so many different things happening and a lot of reasons to be bullish, maybe not on the price action, but on a lot of individual assets from uh hyperliquid to Zcash to a lot of new ways to kind of trade some of these narratives.
Today we're joined by Jason, the head of markets at Delphi Digital, to share his thoughts and a lot of their latest reports about some of those ideas, and also, of course, give us his thoughts on the market and how soon we can turn this all around.
Today's episode is brought to you by Warbucks, the easiest way to trade crypto, bridge send stable coin payments instantly.
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Jason, haven't seen you in a while, man.
Happy New Year.
Yeah, thanks, man.
It's uh it's been a rough uh happy indeed.
You know, it's been great.
It's been great.
Out outside of price action.
It's uh it's been great.
Good to be back.
Thanks for having me.
I'm glad you're feeling good, man.
What what's going on, man?
Because you we did a lot of podcasts with you guys uh over the holidays prior to the holidays.
You gave us your year-end reports.
Uh it was a mixed bag, obviously, because you know, December was it was not that different than now.
We're we're lower now, but I think fear and fear and greed was was relatively the same.
But what's been going on the last two months that that have really driven us down and even put that fear and greed index, man, down to five like last week or the week before?
Absolutely insane.
Give me your thoughts.
Yeah, I mean, soon we're gonna be at zero on fear and greed at this rate.
What are we right now?
What are we right now?
I I haven't looked more depressing than anything.
Um but uh, you know, maybe it's a a good capitulation signal at least in sentiment uh in the short term but yeah I mean it's tough right like obviously we opened the year I think around like 88K on Bitcoin and we're at like 67 now it's probably a bit worse for things like ETH and SOL and stuff.
So like you know clearly um clearly the pattern that we've seen since 1010 uh into year end has kind of persisted into the new year, right?
Just a ton of just like relentless crypto specific selling um especially relative to to traditional equity markets right you know I I guess you know equities are pulling back a little bit off all-time highs and it kind of looks like there's maybe some waning momentum in equity land.
Uh you know obviously software stocks getting absolutely mauled uh looking a lot like our altcoins but generally speaking um you know equities the indices are very close to all-time highs and crypto is you know minus 60% off all-time highs depending on what you're looking at maybe a little bit worse a little bit better but generally speaking you know we're much, much, much further off all-time high.
So very clear divergence.
And it's you know, maybe accelerated to an extent uh since the start of the year, at least on Bitcoin, right?
Like, I think when we met in December, we were probably around like you know, around that 88K, that range low, 88, 90K.
We had been kind of oscillating around there for a couple weeks after we had just that like that month or two of just straight just down every day, every day, every day, every day, uh, post 1010.
And then, you know, it looked like we could have been, you know, forming a local bottom was an interesting spot.
We had that like boogeyman sailor entry price at you know, mid-70s, just below that.
And then pretty much as soon as the year started, the selling came back.
Uh, and it's you know, it's it's Binance specific selling for the most part, right?
Like, and when I say that, I mean like the majority of the spot selling, at least on Bitcoin, is coming from Binance relative to the other exchanges.
So there was a good tweet a week or two back that kind of like looked at the amount of overall like spot volume that Binance does relative to the other exchanges versing versus the amount of spactive spots selling on Binance versus the other exchanges, and it was several times higher on Binance, even though the you know the volumes were relatively you know the same with why Binance compared to all of its you know competitors combined.
And so it clearly shows you there's some like price insensitive selling coming out of Binance.
It it's usually around the New York Open, which kind of makes sense, right?
That's the most liquid time of the day uh for for equities as well as for for crypto as people come in, you know, to buy ETFs, right?
It's just like the New York Open, it's the most liquid part of the trading session.
So it makes sense that you know, that's when a lot of the selling would occur.
Um, but it's just like pretty pretty consistent, and it's just persisted for for months and months and months at this point.
And so it kind of begs the question like, why?
Nobody has a great answer for this.
Like you could point to, okay, all the dates are are no longer buying anymore, and they were a pretty big buyer from that, you know, that rally in April to to through the fall, right?
Uh after the tariffs uh were lifted, and you got the like the Trump taco on the tariffs, right?
That big rally, you had a lot of dat buying, you had a lot of ETF buying, and just like, you know, just general good euphoria and sentiment.
And then since then, right, we clearly don't have any dats buying.
Almost all of them are all of them are underwater, even sailor at this point, right?
All of them are underwater.
Uh, you know, Tom Lee's evaporated six billion dollars, seven billion dollars of of of value buying ETH, right?
So, like on paper on paper, not realizing until you sell.
Um, so you have you have all of this stuff going on.
All these, you know, big buyers are no longer buyers.
Um, the ETFs aren't buying as much as they used to, uh, etc.
etc.
So now, you know, clearly we're seeing the the inverse of that, you know, reflexive upside move.
And then we had 1010 happen, and we still don't know what happened on 1010.
Everybody got wrecked.
People that don't usually get wrecked get wrecked, right?
Like, you know, the delta neutral type people who are, you know, short, short some leg on one exchange, long on another exchange to offset.
But if you get ADL'd on one of those positions and then the other one gets closed out, you're you're you're you're screwed.
So like lots of people got got liquidated and and removed from the industry forcibly, uh, who otherwise normally wouldn't in those scenarios, on top of just like retail getting absolutely decimated from it because you had the whole perp Dex exchange wars before that, which kind of lured a bunch of on-chain people to perp Dexes to farm perps, perp dex points, and then they're all taking perps positions, not knowing how to trade perps well, and then you get 1010 and it nukes everybody.
So, like we still don't really know what happened on 1010.
We don't know which bodies you know got taken out.
We we haven't really seen what's happened there, but it's clear that something happened, and crypto is kind of very much decoupled from that moment on, and it's kind of bled into the new year, unfortunately, uh, for most crypto assets.
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Let's talk a bit of gossip, man, while you're talking about all that stuff.
And this is this is this is this is this is old news at this point.
But I think like while we're kind of recapping, you know, I think it's I think it's really important to zoom out and realize like how significant what you just described was that period from the tariffs uh up until 1010, where a lot of people got sucked back in.
All these dats were like, we are deploying everything, every penny we can find.
Come on in.
We're this it's time for this thing to rip.
All the analysts, everybody was like, Q4 is gonna be it, man.
Like, here's I thought Q4 was gonna be it.
Uh, Clarity Act's gonna come along.
Don't forget, we used to think Clarity Act was gonna come then before, and you had the longest government shutdown ever, right?
That all all kind of happened at the same time.
Let's talk a little bit of gossip about Binance.
And I want to know your opinion because I don't know if we've ever talked about this on the show, but I've seen in the conspiracy theory or the um, I don't even know it's a conspiracy, but just strategically, that there's this idea that CZ, you know, got banned from the US, got charged, and then was pardoned uh by Trump, and then he came back and jumped onto this perp trade idea, right?
Because hyperliquid had been basically the best token to hold through 2025, the best airdrop ever, if you held it from the airdrop, right?
And everybody's like, perps are the freaking best.
And everybody's into it.
He comes along, he's like, I'm building a perp competitor, it's called Aster.
Billions and billions and billions of dollars start to flow through that.
Be like, just farm the points, it's gonna be the same as highlight piper liquid.
We're gonna compete with that.
And then magically, as everybody's doing that, there is this insane liquidation event.
Is that all coincidence?
I just I've never asked anybody this question.
This is a very degen question, but I just want to ask you.
Uh, you know, once bear market, man, we got we gotta talk, we gotta talk about something.
Yeah.
Um, well, is there something there, or is that just or is that just you know, you're reading it, you're reading too much into it.
No, I mean, you know, I think there's all right.
Well, what's true?
Very clearly, CZ came back and launched Aster as uh you know a way to try to vampire attack hyperliquid and the success going on in hyperliquid.
And you know, CZ has you know, clearly I mean, he has a history of of you know, uh generally uh attacking competitors with the whole FTX thing.
I wouldn't know.
I was gonna say man consider that like an attack or you know, whatever, but like slight, or he got somebody's clearly like a competitive guy, and he wants to be the king of crypto exchanges, very clearly, right?
Uh you know, he's the incumbent, he wants to protect his position, makes sense that he would see the success that hyperliquid is having and try to you know take some of that market share back, right?
That that's viable.
It's probably what I would do if I was in that position as well.
Now, obviously, everything else the timing is is you know suspect.
I I don't like it doesn't seem to me like I I mean did he did they engineer 1010?
I don't know.
I think something generally just broke on Binance uh at the time, and then it just led to a uh a huge wave of of you know second second order knock-on effects of that.
Um would I be surprised if there was some intentional thing that came out years down the line with some you know Epstein file emails, you know, going through looking at this.
If something gets leaked, like I wouldn't be super surprised because it's crypto and you know lots of you know things have happened in the past, like it wouldn't be that surprising to me.
Uh, but like I there's not enough like obvious evidence right now, but it's it's like the timing is just very it's just for lack of a better word, just sucks, right?
Because you had hyperliquid, lots of people getting on perps.
Then you had Aster, farming, you know, airdrop promises, right?
And then you had all the other ones, lighter, paradex, right?
Everybody else is coming to market trying to get part of this you know narrative wave of users on their platform and then once everybody's there you get 1010 and just nukes everybody like timing sucks suspect could be a word um I don't know why you would want to liquidate so many people like clearly you make more money if there's more people trading but like it's a good point yeah it's the worst like I can't think of a worse outcome right now because like the like people clearly don't don't hold Binance in as high as a high regard anymore or like as they once used to right people like a couple years ago even before the FTX thing people have always like looked at Binance like oh like they generally like Binance for you know whatever reason good exchange lots of products maybe teams that get you know listing there don't like it as much because of you know they have you know high listing costs and stuff like that but like generally speaking I would I would say Binance has had a generally decent reputation and has generally been seen as you know generally favorable on crypto Twitter for for a while.
And I think that tide has shifted post 1010.
I think you're seeing a lot of people express uh you know just downright um you know concerns with what happened, the fact that you don't really have any you know transparency after the fact, and then obviously you have CZ doing his like anti-FUD campaign, which is like you know, if there's smoke, there's fire a little bit generally there.
Like he usually goes on these tirades when people are like accusing Binance of something.
So I don't know, it's just like a whole situation that sucks, and the industry is certainly certainly worse off for 1010 happening.
There's no no question about it.
And in the reverse could be true as well.
Obviously, I'm just throwing out silly ideas, but I think the reverse could be true as well that somebody was mad that CZ was eating into the perps market and making a big comeback with Binance, and they were like, okay, well, let's go and let's go and mess up the market to kind of stop that because since then nobody talks about Aster anymore, you know?
Nobody I do think like I I think the postmortem is like most of the the issues like originated on Binance, right?
Like Binance tried to kind of say, Oh, it was like USDE, even though the USDE DPEG occurred like 30 minutes after the huge liquidation cascade, right?
So, like it's clearly like something happened, nobody's being truthful about it from the people that actually, you know, have inside knowledge of what went on on the exchange that day.
Like, there clearly isn't full, full truth being shared, in my opinion.
And maybe one day, one maybe one day we'll know, and maybe one day we won't, man.
We don't know.
It won't be clearly clearly whatever happened is not in as as disorganized a uh uh uh company or a disorganized a consortium as uh FTX was where they couldn't really, you know, it was this tight-nid group.
They're not run on immature people.
Yeah, exactly.
Playing video games at the same time, uh a little bit more sophisticated, likely than that.
Uh let's talk about another narrative that I'm I've been curious to get your opinion on as well.
And and and maybe you can share opinions from around Delphi as well.
Um, one of our recurring guests, Matt Hogan from Bitwise, um, he's one of the latest to you know capitulate to this bear market narrative.
And he wrote a nice piece on Twitter last week or two weeks ago, um, saying we've been in a bear market for a year.
And this is something that we heard as well uh from Matt Crosby from Bitcoin Magazine Pro, who's who's come on and shared a lot of Bitcoin analysis with us for a while.
And even back in November or December, Matt Crosby had told us when he finally capitulated as well as a very technical analyst guy, he capitulated and he was like, listen, like here's what I actually think.
I actually think we've been in a bear market.
And the large case here, Jason, is that if you remove um all of the institutional buying, like the dats and the ETFs, that it's like and you if you remove all of that demand that we have been in a bear market since then.
What's your take on that?
I mean, yeah, I think number one, all alts broadly have been in a bear market for a year plus, right?
Um just look at you know, a a breadth, like a basket or a breadth of altcoins, and like you'll clearly see that.
Um Bitcoin, um, you know, uh I think that that's like interesting.
I think it's like very like, yeah, I guess I guess if you say, okay, like if ETFs didn't get approved in January of 2024, would Bitcoin have run up to a hundred or like a hundred K or whatever, right?
Like, or whatever, right?
Would they have run up to 80K and then gone sideways and then it's next leg up?
I mean, it's a he it's a you know, it's a hard question that you can't really have an answer to.
I do generally think that say, like, say, say ETFs were approved at the end of 2024 rather than the start of 2024.
They were approved January 2024.
Say they were approved at the end.
I generally think that probably would have been better for price appreciation because it gives you a much longer time frame to speculate and think about, imagine all of the future scenarios for this.
It's kind of like it's kind of like just any catalyst that you're looking forward to, right?
You generally see a run-up as people get hyped or position before it, people are anticipating what the catalyst will bring to the company or the stock or whatever it is, and then the catalyst comes and you get like a buy the room or sell the news type of thing.
Um, and you did kind of get that with Bitcoin in January.
We got we uh got a nice run up until ETFs were approved.
We went sideways and down for like a couple weeks, and then once we started to see what the flows were like for Bitcoin, like I guess you could say what the fundamental demand for Bitcoin was, that's when we ripped again.
And so I think like it's hard to say if we didn't get ETF approval, we didn't get flows, which then led to DATs buying and all this stuff.
Would we be at the price we are today?
I think you could kind of spin it and be like, if we had more time to speculate and hype around what Bitcoin's ETF flows looked like, because again, I think BlackRock filed for it at the middle of 2023, maybe end of the summer.
So you only had like a quarter and a half, you know, five months of time to really speculate or position into like what you thought ETF demand would actually materialize in.
If you had a year to do that, perhaps Bitcoin grinds higher and it goes live and ETFs go live when Bitcoin's at 80 or 90k.
And then you start to see the demand, billions and billions and billions of dollars of buying, and then maybe you get a higher mid-cycle top or whatever than we did this time.
I it's very hard to know.
All I know is that Bitcoin and crypto are very, you know, speculative friendly assets and generally do well when you have really good catalysts to look forward to.
And that's kind of like what is the catalyst right now to look forward to for Bitcoin?
ETFs are approved, dads have bought and now we're out of money, right?
Like, what are you looking forward to?
Whereas if you were to push those catalysts out maybe another year, year and a half, maybe you get more uh more demand pent up for it or or more hype around what it looks like.
It's it's really hard to know.
Um, but I think we were always going in this direction anyway, right?
If if the thesis for Bitcoin is just like a you know, like a digital store of value type of gold, um, like you were, I think like this was always going to happen.
And what I mean by that is like ETF's approval, right?
Because like most investors in the world, pensions, whatever, right?
If if it is a true store of value, sleeve asset like gold that you have as like part of your portfolio that's like uncorrelated or whatever.
They're not all of them are gonna buy and self-custody Bitcoin.
So we're always going to go this route of ETFs, and then the demand and flows from ETFs are always going to uh just generally dwarf individual demand from high net worth buyers like we've seen in the past or whatever.
It's just a bigger faucet for funnel or a bigger or bigger faucet for capital to funnel into Bitcoin through ETFs than it is through any other means.
So, like, yeah, I it's like kind of a non-answer.
Like, you don't really know what the world would have looked like without these things.
But I think you could make the argument that we may have, you know, pumped higher initially or moved higher initially on the bigger runway of speculation than we had, but yeah.
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How significant and if you don't have a deep analysis on this or a deep opinion on it, that's fine.
But one thing that we've seen happen in the last couple in the last couple days, even business days, um, you're seeing again more massive institutional adoption headlines.
One that really caught my eye, and and we were talking about this with John Gillen, our our other host, our other host on on the show, is BlackRock buying a bunch of uniswap, right?
Which is something, and again, you're bringing up BlackRock right now as one of the first movers in these ETF flows, right?
Years ago, and now they're they're coming in and they're buying certain alts, right?
And they're there, they have a lot of different reasons for that.
What's your take on that?
Like, is that are they is the I there's so many different ways to kind of break that down.
And I'd love to get somebody from BlackRock or Uniswap on to discuss this if anybody's listening.
Um, but Jason, from your seat, like, is this is like what does that mean when that's happening?
Because obviously the market doesn't give a shit.
Like, honestly, like it's just like market, like, ah, we suck.
Uni does like a little and then just retraces it the next day, and nobody cares.
But um, obviously that's that's pretty big.
Yeah, I mean, it's it's kind of like what you were what you were alluding to in your intro.
Kind of there are there are a lot of things going on in the industry that app like if you can separate price action from actual developments and and things going on in the industry, like you see kind of two different pictures, right?
Like price action, everything's going to zero, industry sucks, it's all a scam.
And then when you look at like the actual developments, you know, like black BlackRock's, you know, they're they're signaling at the very least with the investment in Uniswap, but you know, their tokenization, their bill fund, right?
All of these things, um, Franklin Templeton, all these other people have moved into crypto as as institutions.
And and it's very clearly that crypto and blockchain are you know better solutions for a lot of things that traditional finance companies are interested in or currently do, right?
So there's just a very clear, like I guess, like, you know, dichotomy in like the sentiment of crypto given prices over the last four months, and like the clear institutional acceptance, maturation of the industry, and then the very obvious integration of crypto into into finance, um both you know, into traditional finance, and then you have things that are probably gonna live like crypto natively and be separate and be that own its own like you know, crypto economy vision type thing.
But like, I mean it it's it's very to me, it's very clear that like the industry is going to be much larger than like much larger over the next three to five years than it is today.
It's just like that might not look exactly like people had envisioned it looking, you know, three, four years ago, right?
You have all these companies coming in, building their own chains, you know, you have Stripe, you have Robin Hood, you have, you know, you have tempo, right?
All of these things that are like ink, Kraken, right?
Um, base chain with with their new token, right?
Like all these institutions are coming in and and things are just going to look different than I think a lot of us were probably, you know, hypothesizing a couple years ago.
And it just recover or it just like requires you to just kind of like revisit the thesis of like what what is this gonna look like?
What are what's most useful for these institutions?
Like what will they do on their own versus what will they, you know, look at look at the market for solutions?
It's just like it's clear that that the that the industry is is here to stay and it's gonna grow.
It's just again, like I said, it looks different than what I expected it to when I initially came into crypto.
Um whether you know, for better or for worse, but uh it's just different.
What did you expect it to look like?
What did you think it was gonna look like?
If not, I mean when I got into crypto in 2017 and 2016, like it was all about like separating money from state, uh, you know, like the whole original like you know, decentralization really matters.
And like when you're in crypto for a long time, like, yeah, it clearly does matter.
It's clearly like a principle that's worth you know fighting for, but at the end of the day, the majority of consumers don't give a shit about it.
What they care is that their things work and that they do what they want them to do and whatever, right?
Like at the end of the day, it's kind of like the sense of like most people don't care about privacy either.
Like when you ask like a normal person, like, oh, do you like what do you think about like all these, you know, like privacy surveillance things?
And like, oh, if you don't have anything to hide, it doesn't matter.
I'm like, well, that's like not really first principles thinking now, is it?
So like it's clear that like uh that like when I came in, all of these ideals were more forefront, and um maybe the industry's been co-opted a bit.
Like that's kind of like the case for case for for Zcash, right?
It's it's compliment to Bitcoin.
It's like Bitcoin's kind of been captured in a sense, right?
Like a huge amount of supply is on.
This isn't the Zcash report that we put together, but like a huge percentage of of Bitcoin supply is now owned by ETFs and governments and and institutions.
You know, it's clearly not like separated, you know, in the in the way that it was when I joined, or like what the what the goal was when I joined.
Um yeah, it's just different, it's a different landscape.
I've asked a few people that, man.
We even had um Eric Voorhees on uh a while back, right?
And he's one of the OGs, biggest voices.
Yeah, uh, he's connected to all the OGs, all the billionaire people with other Bitcoin, some of them have been sellers.
And I asked him too, I was like, is this what you guys wanted?
You know, is this what you wanted?
That did the banks to come and buy everything and and and for them to come over to it, or is it just a maturation of TradFi where it's like, well, now you have just a turnover of more young people coming into it who maybe liked Bitcoin 15 years ago and now they work at those places, right?
Like maybe that's just what happens.
But um, I definitely find that that's a really interesting story.
Is that you know, is this really what crypto is supposed to be?
Because now all we do this cycle, man, all we've talked about is how crypto is related to macro, right?
And it's like, oh, I mean, crypto.
Before I joined crypto, I was I was uh I was at JP Morgan, and when I found like Bitcoin and and all the other altcoins on like Poloniax at the time, I like went up to our you know, our compliance guy on our floor, and I was like, Hey, can I like buy these things?
Um and he's like, No, like absolutely not.
And like, you know, the the view of of everybody at JP Morgan was like this the shit is a scam.
And like, you know, I don't think they were fully wrong on a lot of those coins, but um, like the they were clearly not, I mean, they weren't seeing it from like the the clear need for something like this in terms of you know technology and money, right?
Um, especially, you know, given everything going on at the time and like before 2008 and obviously you know, post 2020.
But I think back then it was probably like more institutions, like number one, there wasn't a clear framework for them to touch it.
So, like the like, and it wasn't clear how they could make money on it, and the amount of money they could probably make servicing crypto was probably negligible relative to the compliance costs or downside reputation risk they had.
So, like I view from two lenses.
One, like they actually don't see the need for it back then, or more, it's a combination of like they don't really care as well as they can't really make money easily on it, so it's just very easy for them to not care and have a negative opinion of it.
But like as an industry has matured, it's very easy for these people to make money on crypto now, and it's no no shocker that a lot of them are now very open to crypto because they they have a framework they can kind of operate around and they figured out ways they can make money off of it.
So they're very clearly, you know, on team crypto now.
Like it's is that why the OG is sold?
Or is that just a regular OG rotation of sellers at their tops and then buy at these lower because there's evidence of that as well, right?
That people they a lot of these OGs, like, well, they buy it, they they they're pretty good at selling near these tops, and and they often them selling is what precipitates it to be.
I was gonna say they come back in at these bottoms, and again, I mean I'm excited to have Matt Crosby back on because he that's usually what he points out to us.
Um, but that's something where you know clearly they they they are a little bit in control there, too.
Yeah, I think I think there's some validity validity to that.
Like, yeah, I think a lot of people who got into Bitcoin in the early, early days, you know, 13, 14 and stuff, um, got into it for a philosophical reason more than anything.
Um, you know, a technological philosophical angle, and then a lot of that is to your point degraded over the last several years.
And so it calls into question like your your thesis a little bit on that.
So that could definitely be a reason why, you know, long-term holders that are up billions and billions of dollars are selling.
It's also the fact that if you're up billions and billions of dollars, like I don't know, I might want to take some profits too, right?
Like, uh, there's the like an old finance professor always used to tell me, like, um, when you look at like insiders buying and selling, right?
There's there's many reasons why an insider might want to sell their stock, right?
They think the company's overvalued, they want to buy a Ferrari, they have to send their kid to college, private, whatever, right?
Like, there's a lot of reasons why somebody might want to sell.
There's only one reason why somebody buys, right?
So I I I put more emphasis on those buy signals than those sell signals.
But again, you get these huge multi-billion dollar Bitcoin sales into a market that's already a bit shaky, and then the result is what we've seen.
And I think you know, the the quantum angle probably has some validity to it too.
You know, people concerned about Bitcoin's quantum resistance or lack of, I guess, quantum resistance, um, and what that would look like, and what the timeline is to get all of that stuff sorted and get everybody's ducks in a row is not a quick one.
And you know, there's a lot of friction from you know the core Bitcoin core group versus you know making change quickly.
So, like, there's a lot of reasons why I think uh a long-term holder that's up multiple billions of dollars might want to sell, and I can't really fault them for it.
I love that.
That's a that's a really good quote.
It's very you really kind of dumb it down and simplify it, but I never really thought about that in that way.
That there are many reasons to sell, not just not just trading the market, but you're selling to buy something else, or or maybe, or maybe there's something else to rotate into that you want to go and get.
Um, but there are there's only one reason to buy, and it's because you think the number's gonna go up, right?
So um I like that.
I think that that's that's that's that's very insightful to see and it's very simple, but it's all it is it is a really good takeaway.
Yeah, this guy was also really good at markets for what it's worth.
Oh, there you go.
Yeah, there you go.
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Um, Jason, I want to save a bit of time to talk about alts.
And I think one of the big questions right now, and we cover this, we're gonna cover this uh tomorrow on the show with with Martin, our pro researcher as well, and talk about Coinbase and a few other um assets there.
But I think at this point, you know, alts like you said, alts have had their own bear market.
There have been very few winners, even in the last bull cycle of alts.
Um, alts are very broad field now.
There are thousands of tokens with good cases and thousands of tokens that haven't made any money uh that were supposed to be super hyped, um, that make you know 10 bucks a day now on their chains or whatever they do.
Um, and I think there's definitely an emerging feeling that I see that's like, yes, like you're gonna wait for the Bitcoins and the eThs and the Solanas to bounce back like they do as the majors, but now is the time to where you would get the enormous returns buying the right alts, right?
Is that in these bear market times, if you can nail the right, there's a couple of them out there that you know maybe we'll do some pretty big multiples back from these bottoms.
Um maybe I don't know, you're kind of shaking your head like I'm totally wrong there, but uh but and I'm not and and the assets we're gonna talk about are not necessarily those things.
That is not Jason's opinion.
I'm just gonna, I'm just kind of giving my uh oversight of the market.
Um let's talk about some of those.
Like give me, give me kind of like your your summary of like what alts that you guys are are feel are worth watching.
You guys just put out a massive report about Zcash, about privacy.
Um that's obviously one of the biggest narratives that we've seen during this bear market even for the last couple months.
Um let's give me give me kind of like your your basket of alts that you guys you guys really care about that you think are important going forward.
Yeah.
So I mean, I can I can obviously only speak for myself here on this, right?
Um, but so yeah, I guess like like I said, uh like I said, I think in you know, mid-December when we had our our year-end uh podcast, I was treating the la you know, Q4 pretty much as a wash.
Like I'm not really interested in buying anything as we head into your end.
There's a lot of reasons why people might be selling tax loss harvesting, just whatever, all liquid liquid funds down, window dressing, getting out of shitty exposure and buying something that looks better on your you know, year end books, whatever it is.
Um, a lot of reasons to sell into year end with you know market uncertainty, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And I would reassess at the start of the year.
And so when I look at kind of what my thesis, theses and things I was excited about were back then, they're kind of the same now.
And I've I've generally seen some things that you know kind of give me more conviction in that.
So like we could start with hyperliquid, right?
I mentioned hyperliquid as one of the names that like one of the only names generally in crypto outside of Bitcoin that I'm interested in buying during this you know, bear market, right?
And the reason is even over the you know, the last couple months, uh, even though prices and and trading activity and all of this stuff has generally been decreasing, uh, all of hyperliquid's fundamentals, underlying, you know, metrics have been resilient and growing, generally speaking, from the start of the year until now.
You're starting to see tons of activity with their HIP3 markets, right?
So people trading tokenized equity per or just equity perps like you know, the NASDAQ or the SP, people trading commodities like gold and silver, right?
They're doing over a billion dollars a day in volume on a lot of these markets, which is extraordinary given that they're you know a couple weeks old, right?
So they're clearly executing extremely well on on you know their goal of becoming that global everything kind of housing all of finance on this one exchange type deal.
Um, you know, they still are generating, I think, you know, their their annualized revenue is 700 to a billion dollars, 700 million to a billion dollars a year with with 11 employees is it's like the most profitable company that exists, I think, in the world per employee.
Maybe, maybe not.
It's definitely top three for sure.
Um I don't know, man.
I know a guy who started a startup 90 days ago and he just sold it to OpenAI for a billion dollars.
So I feel like that's terms of success stories that's maybe, maybe uh maybe we need to pick a new career here.
But um so yeah, like uh up until you know, pretty much up until now, they're executing extremely well.
And I think like the big uh the big thing that I was concerned about, or definitely the market was concerned about when we were talking last was like the whole unlocks, right?
Because um for the first year there's no no unlocks after TGE, and then a year after TGE, you start to see a massive amount of token unlocks going to you know the core contributors and the team, uh to the tune of almost 10 million tokens a month, which is depending on price, could be anywhere from you know 150 to 300 million dollars of unlocks.
And obviously, given shitty market conditions and tons of overhang uh coming to the market, the market would kind of be jittery around like what's gonna happen.
Like if they sell any anything close to this, the price is gonna get nuked, which is true.
Uh so like my my like thesis that I wrote in that report we talked about a couple months ago, as well as I think I shared it on on the stream, was that like I think there's a huge like gap in what the market is expecting token unlock sell pressure to look like versus what the team is actually going to sell.
Because everything I had seen up until that point, following them for two years, going way back into testnet, um, is that they're a very long-term oriented team.
They've at no point in the journey have they made the short-term, you know, extraction type of decision.
And they've always opted for the longer-term alignment type of decision.
And I didn't think that would change now.
And that's clearly what's happened.
So, like, based on, I have some notes here really quick.
So, based on like the 10 million tokens that are unlocking monthly, we can see how much of those are being sold and how much of those are essentially being you know transferred and restaked.
And the vast majority of the tokens up until this point are being transferred and restaked.
We're seeing very minimal token sell pressure coming from the team.
Uh, so for example, the January 2026 unlock, right?
10 million were unlocked roughly.
It's 9.9, but just round up to 10.
Only 1.2 million of those tokens were actually distributed um to the team.
And a lot of those were restaked.
If you look at the February one on February 6th, the actual distributed amount was slashed again by 90%.
So only 140,000 tokens were distributed, most of them being staked, right?
So there's been some of these tokens, you know, sent to OTC desks, probably to, you know, sell out to give some cash to team members outside of the open market.
But clearly, like, clearly, what the team is doing and what you can probably extrapolate going forward is the actual sell pressure from these unlocks is going to be very minimal relative to what they could have been and what the market was expecting.
And then I was like, that's a pretty big delta that will probably reprice at the start of the year when we get one or two months worth of unlocks that allows the market to kind of underwrite that risk going forward.
And that's kind of what we've seen, right?
Combined with that, plus like their, you know, their HIP3 markets doing really well, builder codes doing really well, all of these things doing really well.
It's one of the only tokens that's actually up on the year, right?
Um, obviously, the last couple of days we've had, you know, market down and it's kind of dragged tokens down, but it's still up, I think like 20% on the year relative to Bitcoin, which is down, you know, from 88K to 67 today.
ETH, I think is down from you know 3K to under two, uh, right, like lighter as a as a good like comp and the perp deck space, right?
Lighter, I think the year opened around like 2.5 and it's trading around 1.5 today.
So very clearly we're seeing like a story of relative strength in the market, in the market of in crypto's market right now, where clearly people are are buying this story more than any everything else.
And so my thesis is generally when Bitcoin decides to stop getting nuked every New York open, and we start, you know, at least going sideways and building out a foundation again.
Like it seems to me that this is probably going to be one of the fastest horses because the story underneath and behind the scenes is just very strong, and it's it's very hard to ignore that, especially in a universe where most assets are just to your point, awful, right?
Most don't make money, right?
It's very clear that, like, hey, if I'm investing in crypto, and I believe in you know, the use case, the main use case of crypto right now, which is outside of like stables and stuff, is clearly trading speculation exchanges.
Like it's clearly one of the one of the best things to own.
And then you look at like uh, you know, a market cap value eight with seven billion.
Um, market cap obviously FDVs higher, but like they make a you know, 700 to a billion dollars a year in annualized revenue.
A lot of that is funneled to token buybacks.
You could do the math on how much you know the assistance fund will buy hype, how much hype the assistance fund will buy and take off you know the market over the next year given this run rate.
So like it's a compelling story from all angles for me, and it's getting more compelling given how resilient all of these things have been with the underlying you know market conditions.
So, like that's like the one that like I you know highlighted at the end of the year, and I continue to highlight now as as one that like I I clearly like, I clearly own, and I you know gonna buy more, assuming I don't run out of money before things run around.
You're gonna make people run through a wall for hyperliquid, man.
I love how you gotta okay.
Listen, Jason, we got to wrap up there, but I can't believe how good of a spiel you just gave us about hyperliquid.
Like, can we get you back on really soon to just break down other tokens that you like?
Because that was awesome.
I didn't expect that.
Yeah, I didn't know you were gonna do that.
So we're we're at the limit of how long we want these episodes to go, but dude, let's get you back on, man.
I want to, I want I need your basket of alts because clearly, if you have that much thought into each one, that's awesome.
We need more it's easy when there aren't that many.
That's very oh, they well, there are a lot of alts, but clearly there aren't that many.
When there aren't that many you're interested in, yeah.
Yeah, that's yeah, uh Jason.
Good good to chat with you, man.
As always, thanks for coming on the show.
And I I mean it.
We're gonna see you again soon.
I need you back for that analysis.
Yeah, absolutely.
Looking forward to it.
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