# Bitcoin Breakout Signals and Macro-Crypto Correlations

**Podcast:** The Milk Road Show
**Published:** 2026-05-11

## Transcript

Now, why haven't I loaded up on a lot more smaller cap altcoins?
I'm watching very closely Bitcoin at this moment in the market.
I've been saying this for a couple of weeks, but I think that the longer this goes on, the more likely it is we reach a decision point here.
And I do want to see confident decision making from Bitcoin in market action and market price action.
in order to know, okay, we're going one direction or another here.
What's up, everybody?
It's Zaljidou said here, and welcome to The Milk Road Show, the daily crypto show where the host has never done this show in a bull market, and now I have no idea what to do with myself.
Today is May 11th, 2026.
Is this finally it?
We've had a few people on the show in the last couple months tell us that Crypto Winter actually started way back in early 2025, like Matt Hogan and Matt Crosby, and that has now set the stage for what we're seeing today, a very potential...
bullish setup and a nice little pump.
But does that mean that we should go hard into Bitcoin and ETH, all our favorite majors?
Or is there kind of like a sneakier bit going on for L1s?
We'll dig into that on today's show with my wonderful co-host, John Gillen, and even talk about whether all those sweet little AI build-out stocks are due for a pullback this month.
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John, good morning, sir, or good afternoon, good night.
See you next time.
All of the above.
Welcome to the show, LG.
It's good to be here.
Welcome to the show.
Yeah, welcome to the show as well, sir.
Listen, I actually want to, I teased a lot of different stuff in the intro and we will talk just for people who are like sometimes say like, talk more about crypto.
We are going to spend a long time talking about crypto.
We're talking about Clarity Act.
There's a lot of different stuff that I want to cover.
But really, I do want to start with kind of the...
I mean, as crypto people, the narrative that we hear all the time, right, is that, and even I think Martin said this this morning in the creator huddle in our meeting or in the meeting, I wasn't there, but we may have said this, that the AI bull market might completely erase the potential of a crypto bull market.
And what I want to know from you, John, you know, as our macro expert as well, as you read our macro pro reports in our newsletters.
How are you looking at this current economy, right?
With the Iran war is no longer front page news, despite being still very relevant to what's going on and still very much not resolved.
And the market, the S&P at all time highs.
What is your kind of current overview on what's going on?
So I do want to just say that I think this morning there is a ton of crypto news.
There's a lot happening in the digital asset space.
And so that's a really exciting thing.
to your point like we we do talk about a lot of other things that are happening in macro but there is a lot of really exciting things happening in crypto right now which i've been spending all morning you know getting bug eyed over um but so what was being discussed over the weekend in the discord was just like what we're seeing with um some of the the bullishness around artificial intelligence and how that's playing out the particular path that the capital is taking and cascading through the market.
So to kind of like back up a little bit, I think from a macro perspective, the biggest things driving the market right now are scarcity.
So macroeconomics, economics is the allocation of scarce resources.
The two major scarce resources that the market is trying to figure out how to allocate right now are energy and computing power.
scarcity of these two things that are in such high demand is driving the prices for the much higher.
The increase in prices is driving valuations of businesses that are selling those things much higher.
So you're getting earnings outlooks and estimates from companies that are benefiting from this rising a lot and then capital chasing that in speculation about continued cash flows, continued growth, etc.
One of the places where we're seeing that is in the Korean stock market.
And there are a lot of memory stocks in the Korean market that are just parabolic right now um and so without going into a ton of detail on that historically speaking a trend that we have seen and this is to tie this all back to crypto right historically speaking a trend that we have seen and we'll see if this holds this time and that's actually something i'm curious to see it does this trend hold but The Korean stock market going up usually is an indication that there is going to be economic growth and acceleration and speculation in the business cycle because the things that drive the Taiwanese and the Korean markets are a lot of these semiconductors, are a lot of things tied to frontier technology.
That's a big part of what drives their economy.
So when their stock market goes up, you usually see an acceleration in the business cycle.
That leads to, and there's a lot of...
machinations that happen economically to lead to this, but it leads to an acceleration in the business cycle.
You usually see the ISM manufacturing PMI surveys tick up above 50 in that environment.
So what that means is that PMI, it's a production or yeah, procurement managers index or something like that.
Purchasing managers index, that's what it stands for.
Sorry.
There's a lot of things that are PMIs and some of them have different names, but purchasing managers index.
It means that New orders, purchase orders for manufacturing, for industrial activity, for economic activity are increasing and accelerating, which means that there's more investment in economic activity, more investment in business activities, and just a general acceleration of the business cycle.
That indicator, that survey, has been above 50 and is holding above 50.
The acceleration of the Korean markets implies that that ISM...
PMI survey is going to go higher from here directionally towards 60 is what some people are forecasting.
In that environment, to tie this back to crypto, you usually see speculation on risk assets.
That usually results in the valuations of digital assets, crypto assets going higher.
The one that has, I think, the tightest correlation to this are Bitcoin and Ethereum.
But particularly once you see small caps like the Russell 2000, Russell 1000 start to move higher and accelerate, that's when Ethereum starts to go.
And this is what people in crypto refer to as alt season.
This is a long-winded way of saying that I was kind of talking in Discord about historically some of these cascading patterns that we've seen in markets.
And I'm not necessarily saying causality, but there's like correlation to some of these things that has resulted in speculation, overvaluation in digital assets.
That could be something that materializes here.
um but it also could be a situation where we're going to see a deviation from what we've seen behaviorally historically because now when capital is looking for speculation and outperformance now maybe instead of looking in crypto or in the altcoin space maybe it's going to continue seeking alpha in speculating on ai stocks and ai things um but My caveat on that is that I think that the intersection of crypto and AI is a huge area where a lot of speculation, a lot of capital is going to go.
And so it's, I think, a little bit too soon to call how all of this is going to play out.
But I think just generally speaking, we at Milk Road have remained very bullish on the business cycle on this.
bull run that a lot of people were calling dead or stagnant, which has really come back with full force.
And we do still anticipate that's going to lead to valuations in the digital asset space in the crypto markets that are elevated much more beyond where we are today, even though we still haven't seen that major breakout or breakthrough on altcoins or on Bitcoin yet.
But yeah, that's some of what we've been talking about as it pertains to the recent changes in the macro landscape.
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So do you think, so does that mean, so you're basically telling me that as these indicators like the Russell start to move, typically there's a correlation between that.
and crypto moving as well, specifically something like Ethereum.
But kind of further to get up, my original question is that we may not, it's really up to the market to decide if it's going to do that to maybe pivot into some crypto stuff or if crypto is going to catch a bid as a result versus continuing to pump a lot of these.
I guess they were smaller caps, maybe now mid caps, large caps, like build out stocks for memory and semiconductors and everything into like a whole other level, despite many of them being way beyond all time highs as well.
Right.
Like, and that's kind of my first question for you is that is that's basically what you're telling me.
So, yes, and I'll kind of explain how I think about this and sort of the pattern people have observed around this.
And, you know, whether or not this actually plays out is still to be seen.
But the theory goes, so the Russell 2000 is not an indicator.
It's an index of small caps.
And usually what happens is you're going to see some of the bigger things, the bigger market leaders, the blue chips, the larger market cap assets lead the market in overvaluation and speculation.
And, you know, to put this in crypto terms, usually Bitcoin moves first.
It moves really strong.
It goes up.
But then you get beta to Bitcoin.
In other words, the smaller cap plays in the space will then follow Bitcoin higher as capital that's already gotten strong returns from Bitcoin is seeking greater returns in the space, more risk.
So when you see that in the equities markets, you're going to see that from the large caps, the mag sevens, the semiconductors, you know, the things that are leading the rally, the big market caps and the big market movers.
But then as that, you know, gets into a later phase of that cycle.
you generally see capital looking for more speculative plays.
That's when you start to see the small cap indices like the Russell 2000 start to move.
And that usually corresponds with capital also seeking exposure in risk assets or like altcoins like Ethereum, et cetera.
So that's kind of the flow of capital as it goes through this kind of cycle pattern.
Whether or not that holds, whether or not that looks the same way, we'll see.
And then just like you said, the market has to decide where it wants to look for that speculation in that later phase.
If that's altcoins again, we'll see.
But that's kind of the theory there.
Right.
So every kind of major market cycle, and this is, you know, this is why I learned this in crypto in the last six years, is that the major assets, typically Bitcoin these days, especially, I think ETH used to be a little bit more coupled into that, but they will pump, kind of change where they are, either break through resistance or break down or something like that.
But let's just say, let's think in green candles today.
They'll pump to a new range, which is kind of where Bitcoin has gone into, right?
After kind of, you know, chopping in that.
65 to low 70s range for a couple months.
We've now broken into this 80.
And then as a result, sometimes you see, if that sticks, you'll see movement in the next asset, in the smaller cap assets.
But that, zooming out to the rest of the economy, and this is probably how a lot of cycles go for either specific narratives, like AI narratives, what do you call it?
Narratives, build out, whatever.
Or other things in the past.
We've seen the same thing on AI, where 2025, was the year to build bid on the mag seven, making up 35, 40% of the S and P.
Right.
And we even, you know, one of our favorite guests on the show on it, we told us this at the very start of the year.
He wrote this huge blog post about it as well.
He was like, listen, the 2026, we're going to see that rotation into mid caps, the big caps they've pumped like crazy.
We're still seeing it happen.
Google's still going up on deals and other things that they're doing, but now.
That thesis is playing out where you're having all the other kind of like lower companies that are part of the bigger picture, but are not the large players that aren't hyperscalers.
You're seeing them get that bid.
And you're telling me that even part of that speculation is that the next bid after that is something like the Russell, which is even smaller companies.
And that within that, to bring it all the way back to crypto, we may see bids on crypto as well as just the whole pie starts to pump.
That's all as the tide rises.
Yes, I think that's a pretty good way of summarizing that.
And I think, you know, tangentially to this, this is not really related to the exact same thing we're talking about, but we are seeing some really encouraging signs, in my opinion, in the altcoin space right now.
We've seen strong movement from the Venice project, which is a lot of speculation on the intersection of crypto and AI.
We've seen Onda move up 60% on a series of major partnership announcements and projects that are happening there and the tokenization of real world assets space.
Then you've seen SWE break out and pump.
pretty strongly, which is, you know, a retail darling in terms of just like being an L1 in the space that a lot of retail investors are very.
bullish on and very speculative on.
So that moving is an indication to me that we're seeing some positive sentiment come back to crypto.
And I'm not going to go down the whole list, but what I am seeing is that Bitcoin has held this rally off of the February lows much longer than a normal or typical bear market rally.
We would have expected a bear flag to break down by now.
And there are a lot of bullish catalysts on the horizon, a lot of VC capital coming back into the space, new projects being launched, a return of some ICO activity.
There's a lot of things we could talk about here, but we're starting.
to see some of this positive sentiment be reflected in performance and strength in digital assets outside of just Bitcoin while Bitcoin is continuing to hold its strength.
And that is the beginnings of green shoots that a lot of people are starting to think, okay, there may be a setup where some kind of an alt season starts to materialize here.
It's not going to look history never repeats, but it does rhyme.
So if you're looking for the exact same alt season we got in 2020, you're going to be disappointed.
However, there are a lot of, I've been saying this for a long time.
There are a lot of very strong, fundamentally sound businesses and projects in the digital digital asset space that the market has been super bearish on for sentimental reasons, not fundamental reasons.
And we're starting to see the first time the sentiment start to shift.
And I think that the result of that is going to be the market radically repricing a lot of these things based on their strengthening fundamentals.
We can talk about a lot of the other news in the crypto space right now, but I think it's a really interesting time and a lot of things to pay attention to right now.
Totally.
Yeah.
And I think, I think, you know, you're talking about Swinando and they're getting those types of.
that type of news that they've gotten those partnerships and all that kind of stuff i feel like we've seen a lot of those headlines the last six months john and it's done nothing you know like i think that that's that's how you know that we're back in good conditions is that when news and headlines and partnerships that are good for those companies for those tokens actually have actually catch a bid on the announcement versus, you know, I feel like went through six months where like, how is this super bullish announcement not doing anything for the price of that token or whatever?
You know what I mean?
Like, I think like that's, that's now how, you know, we're actually in a, in a much better tour territory.
And it could be a good time to, to, to revisit your favorite L1s or your alts or whatever you think you have confidence in that, that.
that good news moves moves the market finally because we haven't seen that in a long time Yes, I mentioned this and pointed this out to in our discord over the weekend or the end of last week as well, because I think that's a big signal.
If you're getting positive news announcements, and it's not moving the markets, the markets still dumping in the face of it.
Like we saw this with the BlackRock and Uniswap partnership, the Uni token pump and then immediately like I don't think it lasted 24 hours and immediately sold off.
Well, now you're getting positive announcements and positive news.
And that's acting as a bullish catalyst capital is coming in to speculate on that.
That's a huge signal of sentiment shift.
And I think, you know, Another thing I'll say too is we saw these DeFi hacks, but one of the results of this has been the community rallying around itself, bringing in capital through DeFi United, strengthening, becoming more robust, re-underwriting a lot of their security protocols.
One of the big beneficiaries of this has been Chainlink and the Link token.
There's been a lot of projects migrating to Link, using them as a security solution, leveraging a lot of the products and services that Chainlink offers, which are in some cases simple, but are industry standard, best in class globally.
necessary fundamental infrastructure that is indispensable to doing this really lucrative business.
So Chainlink has benefited a lot from this in terms of capital and partnerships coming back to Chainlink, coming into their ecosystem.
And you've seen the price respond to that strongly as well.
So that fundamental adoption, that vote of confidence from the market is also starting to translate into a breakout in the price of the link token.
So just like you say, I strongly agree that's a big signal and it's something that's been getting my attention a lot recently.
I'm pretty excited about it.
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And just to bring this back to AI stocks for a second, John, too, that's actually what we've seen this year, is that all these, you know, all these mid-cap, semiconductor, memory, data center...
bottleneck companies and stuff, they are seeing these 20, 30%, 80% candles on announcements, on partnerships.
You know, oh, this company has signed this deal with this company and boom, there goes the stock.
We knew, you know, and to the credit of our AI guys, especially Melvin, big shout out to Melvin.
He's the one tracking all this.
You know, he's the one who's been able to be like, listen, this company is going to make a deal.
They're looking for this kind of partner.
They've got this kind of data available.
They've got all these chips for semiconductors or whatever.
He's been able to do that.
And again, just a kind of, I'm finally understanding as a market participant, the parallels in how markets move and what signals, because there will always be partnerships and deals.
But what, you know, even on that simple factor, what...
what signals to you that that particular market is in a healthy place at the time?
And that's, again, further to the AI build out and why there's probably still some legs left this year and very soon is that...
you're seeing you're still seeing those stocks move based on announcements uh and earnings as well that's another thing that that stocks have that crypto kind of has you know started to kind of shift to that last couple years is that earnings do matter and and obviously stocks have you know uh a regular regular scheduled date to show off their earnings um so that's kind of interesting and i'll just give a quick plug for anybody listening who wants to be part of that actually let's do you know let's do this we never really show what our portfolio we never showed the whole picture for our portfolios but i think we can do that today um because we really you know So getting a look at this for you guys is only a dollar.
I know we say this every week, but we've had a lot of new people join in the last couple of weeks.
And from what I've heard from the feedback we've gotten, they really enjoy this new approach to Milk Road Pro, which is just basically like all these different portfolios.
I'm showing you the whole holdings right now.
So this is a one time only.
You're going to get a look at it.
If you want to dig into it yourself, it's a dollar.
But what's funny, John, is that the biggest combined holding across all Milk Road people is still Bitcoin and ETH.
Those are still number one and two, despite all these gains and all these other AI things.
Everybody's up like crazy on AI stuff.
The number one through, I mean, Tesla's number three, but you still have Galaxy, Coinbase, Robinhood.
Those are still all the top holdings across all the Milk Road analyst portfolios.
Before then, you have a lot of other AI build-out stocks.
So I'll just read them off.
And this is, again, credit to Vincent and Melvin, who have just been...
absolute demons in calling these, especially Melvin lately, with Bloom Energy, which is up, I think, over 110% from Vincent, Nebius, and Corning from Vincent, but Micron, which is one of the biggest stories right now that I see, like, literally Normie's talking about it all the time, reaching unprecedented heights.
and AMD as well.
So there's a lot of great stuff in here.
If you guys want to get access to those calls, make sure you check out Milk Road Pro.
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So if you want to go and see the entirety of Melvin's portfolio here and how he's up 35% in the last like two, three months across all his holdings, you can go and check that out.
And of course, John.
What's in your portfolio?
That's the part we want to know.
Everybody's curious to know.
And that's the question I'm going to throw to you, John.
With these bullish conditions, are you tempted into any of these L1s?
You added one of the things you just mentioned to your watch list last week after our podcast, but you have not pulled the trigger on it yet.
But are we going to see some action in the John Gillen portfolio this week as a result of these conditions?
So I'll answer, I want to comment on a couple of things you brought up here.
Number one, you use the word healthy in terms of referencing some of these markets here.
I think that there are a lot of things that are pumping in the markets right now.
And you commented on how Bitcoin is still the most commonly held asset amongst Milk Road Pro analysts in our portfolios.
I think that is a reflection of this, right?
There are assets that are fundamentally sound that have market adoption.
network effects, they're kind of ingrained into the financial ecosystem and they're less speculative, they're more stable and they're a safer bet.
That's the bedrock of your portfolio.
And that's what I think is going to last from these things.
There are going to be things that outperform that, but that is going to be, you know, some of those are going to be very speculative.
So an example of this, I think I'll just go back to Chainlink, right?
Chainlink, I think, is one of the strongest examples in the digital asset space of a very fundamentally sound, long-lasting, robust business that straddles TradFi and digital assets.
I've been very bullish on Chainlink for a number of years.
Actually, I talk about it so much, my younger brother got annoyed with me once.
I think that is a very sound business.
It's not been wildly overvalued in terms of speculation.
I mean, you could make an argument that it is in certain ways, but it hasn't had one of these huge blow-off tops in recent days.
It's just been quietly building a very strong business that will last for a very long time with very stable cash flows and a moat around their business.
Allbirds pivoted from making shoes to AI and pumped 800% in a single day.
Now, I'm not saying that they don't have an opportunity to become a viable business, but I'm saying there's a difference in those as investments, right?
And so that is what you're seeing reflected in people's portfolios of voting for Bitcoin as a stable store of value, something that is going to grow and still give strong performance.
But it's less of a risky bet as opposed to some of these microcapital coins.
I would strongly encourage people as we go into this part of the market.
Things are going to get frothy.
There's going to be a lot of emotions.
You're going to want to chase green candles.
You're going to sell things to buy something that pumps and then find out what you sold is now what's pumping and try to go back.
Just don't get caught up in emotions and don't let these green candles make you dizzy.
So I want to say that to begin with.
Now, why haven't I loaded up on a lot more smaller cap altcoins?
I'm watching very closely Bitcoin at this moment in the market.
I've been saying this for a couple of weeks, but I think that the longer this goes on, the more likely it is we reach a decision point here.
And I do want to see...
confident decision-making from Bitcoin in market action and market price action in order to know, okay, we're going one direction or another here.
Because I think this move we've seen has been very strong.
We've made it to 82,000.
We haven't seen a strong breakout candle.
So if you look at how we got to here, we saw these sort of capitulation candles.
There was the October 10th candle.
We just dropped many thousands of dollars.
The last time we dropped was the Clarity Act was postponed and a lot of speculation.
um about that passing was what was driving the markets up when that postponement was announced bitcoin dropped really drastically several thousand dollars really quickly what we've done to get to this point of age two thousand dollars is just climbing a wall of worry going a little bit forward a little bit back a little bit forward and just slowly going up and up but we haven't seen decisive action from the market If we see the market decisively break out past 85K or go to 90K or something like this, that to me is a vote of confidence from the market and clarity from the market that Bitcoin is rejoining the bull run and will continue higher.
And then I'll feel more comfortable committing more capital to altcoins.
I already have a pretty sizable allocation to Ethereum, though, because to me, Ethereum is not an altcoin.
Ethereum is an alternative part of the digital asset market.
Needs to be in a portfolio along with Bitcoin, but we'll leave that aside for the moment.
But that's kind of what's driving that for me, right?
I do have a lot of confidence in these alts.
I do think you'll see significant outperformance.
I'm encouraged by a lot of these breakouts, but I think that there's a lot of moves still to be made in the alt space.
And there's no reason to try to front run this.
If Bitcoin gets rejected from here, and this does turn out to be just another bear market rally, like say the Clarity Act doesn't make it through Congress, which it's still unclear if that's going to happen.
There could be some selling.
There could be a dip.
You could get a chance to see Bitcoin at or below 75k.
again, you could get better entries on some of these alts.
So I don't see any reason to force it.
I think I'm very comfortable with the allocations I have to digital assets and I'm watching closely on a lot of things, but I do want to see some confirmation here before I start committing even more capital to the crypto space, because I think you could, you could very easily see either better entries in the short term before we go higher, or, you know, we could, we could just kind of go to Valhalla, but either way, I think it's just a good time to pay attention, but that's sort of my thinking around this at the moment.
So you're just waiting for a big green candle before you've been on alts?
I'm waiting for a signal that we, I mean, effectively, that would be a clear signal, right?
But like a strong flip of resistance and holding it to support.
So Bitcoin goes up over 85K, lands on it, comes back, retests, holds it, stays there for a week, right?
Like I'm also looking at how long we can hold these levels because we've seen this in the past in bear market rallies and retests of resistance where Bitcoin has gone up, challenged some of these key resistance levels.
even gone through it in some cases, but then ultimately come down and made new lower lows.
And, you know, I bring him up often because he's an important analyst in my mind and in my education.
But Ben Cowan does a great job of reviewing some of these prior market cycles.
Obviously, things change every cycle.
It's not always the same.
But if you look at Bitcoin's history, there are times where it has gone through the bear market resistance ban, looked like it was going to break out, rejoin the bull run, and then ultimately collapse back down a week or two later.
So I don't think there's any reason to rush on this.
I think it's...
a good idea to wait for confirmation remember bitcoin like broke 100k and then just held above it for almost a whole year before it made its next decision right so i think you have to be patient and that's something that's really hard to do when the markets are ripping and moving so quickly like this but i would really encourage people to stay patient, stay fundamentals driven, stay data focused, and don't get carried away by optimism or euphoria or speculation because these markets have been and will continue to be volatile both to the up and downside.
And so you have to be kind of, I think, just prudent and circumspect about how you're allocating capital in this environment.
What is Ben Cowan saying right now?
What has he said lately in the last week or two?
I think he's still expecting this to materialize into a lower low and a continuation of the bear market.
And, you know, until we break these key levels, I think there's ample evidence to support the thesis.
That's why I'm not completely, you know, siding with the bulls here.
Although I have had a bullish bias for a long time.
And I've been very encouraged by the thing for me is not just like what price we've gotten to, but how long we've held it and how long we've been climbing this wall of worry.
This is not behaving like a typical dead cat bounce, like a bear market bear flag.
It does seem to be sentiment and structurally sentiment wise and structurally different than previous bear market rallies we've seen.
So there's a lot of things that have made me one aside with the bulls here.
But until they can win this battle, I'm not going to assume that they're going to win the war.
What we teased in the intro.
this idea that we've been in a bear market since early 2025, right?
And that's something that I really wanted to revisit with you because I know it's something that you tend to agree with, I believe.
And we first heard this, and if you listen to the last, literally the last podcast in this feed from last Friday with Matt Crosby, he was the first person to tell us about this way back, I think in like November, December, when he finally kind of capitulated on this bear market happening for Bitcoin.
He focuses solely on Bitcoin, just so people know.
Although in that podcast from last Friday, he takes a shot at ETH.
And then I take a couple shots back at him a couple minutes later, just to kind of even the score.
But he had presented this idea that, just to circle, just to re-explain it for people who maybe are only listening to this show, that...
Basically, crypto and Bitcoin have been in a bear market since early 2025, and that that was a little bit muddled.
Those indicators were muddled by the bid from digital asset treasuries, right?
From DATS, from Michael Saylor, from Tom Lee, from everybody else had kind of muddled that a little bit.
But really, if you remove that, that the price action would have gone lower much sooner.
And that was also something that was presented by Matt Hogan from Bitwise, one of our favorite guests as well.
He wrote a blog post about it on X.
He came on the show and discussed that as well, I think back in February.
And again, this is when Matt Hogan's theory on this came at a very convenient time because it was mid-February there.
That was after we had another big liquidation day.
And it was like even...
eternal optimists like him and like you at that point we're like listen something is something clearly clearly there's an issue here right now uh and and we gotta you know think outside the box a little bit as to why this is happening so John, at this current point in time, that would put this bear market that started not in October, but let's say way back in January, would put it at a 16-month long bear market.
Although maybe we saw, if you count the bottom being in February, that would put the bear market at closer to being a year, which is also what a lot of analysts point to typically being a bear market in crypto is roughly a year.
Again, that's just male astrology math, the saying that, and there's no, it'd be nice if it worked like that.
John, are you still kind of holding?
this theory based on everything you just told me.
I think that this is going to continue to be a kind of conversation that people are going to have because you're going to get differing opinions on, you know, whether or not we ever actually had a crypto bull market.
So look, there's a difference between Bitcoin and crypto here.
And I think that's the fundamental distinction to be made.
If you are looking at the crypto industry and the crypto asset class overall.
I think that you can make a sound argument that we have not seen a crypto bull run, a crypto bull run since 2022.
However, we did see a Bitcoin bull market.
This was fundamentally driven, I think, by strategy buying and by ETFs bringing a lot of new capital into the market.
But we never really saw the same kind of like, you know, blow off top over speculation like Bitcoin to exit its previous all time high.
There was a bull market in Bitcoin, but Ethereum barely made a new all time high and only held it for days, week, maybe something like that.
Right.
So.
That's that's the distinction here.
And so how you look at this and how you're analyzing that, you can get different interpretations of the market.
what the market's telling us.
And I think that's what Matt is calling out in his analysis there.
And I really admired him and respected him for saying that because it's showed to me that somebody who is managing institutional capital understands the distinctions of these things, right?
Because a Bitcoin bull market and a crypto bull market are slightly different things.
We haven't seen these things exactly play out the same way.
So, you know, I'll go back to the 2021 cycle.
If you look at a lot of fundamental on-chain indicators, you can make a very strong case that the actual top of that Bitcoin bull run And that crypto bull run was in April at around like, I think it was like $64,000, 62,000, 64,000, somewhere around there.
I have to look at the charts.
Ben does a better job of this than me.
But then we saw the bull market continue and we saw what was effectively a dead cat bounce that.
produced a new all-time high at $69,000, but then quickly sold off again, right?
So those fundamental on-chain indicators never got to the same levels that they were before, even though we saw a new all-time high in price.
So that's another example where you can make an argument, okay, well, on certain metrics and indicators, we top in April, certain other ones like price, which is a big one, we topped in November of that 2021 bull run.
Looking at this time, I think that whether you want to say that we are having the shortest crypto winter ever, or we've had a 16-month crypto winter, However you want to measure this, there are a lot of things circumstantially in the market that make it appear as though this bearish period for crypto seems to be ending, or at least the market is kind of at this decision point of...
Maybe it ends, maybe it doesn't.
And we'll see.
And the other thing I will say I respect a lot about Matt is that as you get more information from the market, it changes your backwards looking appreciation for the trend that you've been in.
Because what the market tells you is information.
You've taken that new information and fit it into the story that's been told so far and the history of price action we have so far and reappraise that.
Matt is not dogmatically pounding the table on that, but he is saying like, hey, this is another way to look at this market here.
And that changes the outlook.
There are a lot of, and this is the thing that's really important for me.
And this is the big thing that I think is different from prior bear markets.
After the collapse of Luna, BlockFi, Celsius, Voyager, FTX, all of these things, there were a lot of just like devastation in digital assets.
And there weren't a lot of strengthening fundamentals or bullish things to be looking at.
Right now, we have the strongest fundamental adoption and bullish support for the fundamentals of the digital asset space ever combined with just apathy and disinterest and poor sentiment in the investor mindset.
That doesn't mean that there's nothing fundamentally strong here.
And I'll just give you a couple examples of this because we're not going to have time to cover all of this today.
But there was an announcement today.
Circle did an initial coin offering for their ARK layer one, their settlement layer that they're building.
And the participants on that, it's a $3 billion valuation.
I think they raised $222 million.
It's ARK, it's A16Z, who we had on the channel last week to talk about their their recent fundraise.
It's BlackRock.
It's so many different people.
There's a lot of capital going into that space.
Canton Network also announced a deal recently.
They're raising to launch more and expand their operations.
And there's a partnership between Galaxy and Sharplink to bring more capital from Wall Street into DeFi.
So the angle that BM&R is going for right now, at least they could obviously pivot this later, but it seems to be they're trying to provide the market a DAT solution that offers institutional grade staking.
and they're doing their own proprietary staking solution on that Sharplink.
That's got Joe Lubin, who is one of the co-founders of Ethereum.
He comes from ConsenSys, one of the founders and leaders of the Ethereum ecosystem from a technology point of view.
The co-CEO is Joe Shalom, and he comes from Wall Street background and BlackRock.
We worked together at BlackRock for a while.
And he's really close in with institutional investors.
They're trying to pitch Sharplink SBET as a play to have investors into their debt get exposure to DeFi at preferred rates and with preferred outcomes and also combining with that institutional grade security as well.
There's so many things going on right now.
I can't get them all out, but I'm going to kind of get lost if I keep going here.
But just the fundamentals have never been stronger.
The strength of the market has never been stronger.
And this week we're seeing the Clarity Act go forward with markup.
On Thursday, I'm having Alex Thorne on the crypto channel tomorrow from Galaxy Digital to talk to him, not only about this partnership with SBET, but what his views are there.
Does the Clarity Act actually pass?
And what does that unlock for the digital asset space?
So there's just a lot of things that are going on right now.
that the fundamentals are so strong that I think whether or not you want to look at this as a 16 month bear market or four and a half month bear market is a little bit immaterial to me.
The strengthening fundamentals are resulting in a price appreciation and that, you know, there's a setup there for a bull market to come back, but whether it does now or later, it's going to come back and it's going to be very strong and it's going to have a lot of fundamentals to support it when it does.
So I'm just like very bullish on all of this and I'm a little bit.
like not concerned with the timelines.
That's why in my portfolio, I'm still so heavily allocated to Bitcoin and Ethereum because four and a half months of everybody getting, you know, apocalyptically bearish is just an opportunity to accumulate, in my opinion, when you see all this fundamentals getting stronger all the time.
So sorry for the rant.
I tend to do that sometimes on these episodes, but there's just so much happening.
It's hard to cover it all.
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These aren't rants.
This is a podcast, man.
That is the podcast content.
You know what I mean?
I'm interviewing you and trying to steal airtime with a few of my random anecdotes.
But otherwise, this is a podcast where you share your thoughts.
You can look at it that way that every other podcast where we interview people, they're just on a rant.
They're a 40-minute rant every single time.
Can we talk about Clarity Act really quick?
Because this is, again, I'm actually keen for this just to be over one way or another because I feel like the whole time I've been doing the podcast, we're like, Clarity Act, Clarity Act, Clarity Act, which is very important, of course.
But there was a lot of optimism through the week last week.
Polymarket, 80% chance as of this morning, now dipped down to 60.
And I think that there's one dude who's kind of causing that.
Yeah.
So there's this guy, I think his name is Rob Nichols.
He's the head of the American Banking Association.
Not the head.
He's the CEO of the American Banking Association.
It was leaked this morning that he sent out an email to the American Banking Association basically saying we need immediate urgent engagement.
This is what I like to hear.
We believe the current proposal would unnecessarily incentivize the flight of bank deposits into payment stable coins.
And my response to that is...
Good, Rob.
That is what will happen.
Yes.
Yeah.
So I want to say this.
I want to say this.
So the head, the president's executive director of digital assets for the president's council on this is a guy named Patrick Witt, who I've met, who's a really nice guy.
He took over for Bo Hines, who'd love to go to Tether.
But he.
Patrick personally invited Rob to the White House for the negotiations on this to try to find this compromise and work out this compromise on stablecoin yield.
Rob declined to attend.
And Patrick's guess for why was that nobody wants to have to argue what Rob is arguing for in public because it's like pretty openly like, hey, you should.
create a moat around our business and allow us to continue to extract value away from the American public just because we want to.
And, you know, obviously I'm being a little bit hostile and I don't want to like speak out of turn or like color these people as, you know, outright pirates.
But, you know, there's a reason why we in crypto want to go bankless.
And this is one of them.
This guy doesn't trust you to not steal the pen that he keeps chained to the desk there.
So he doesn't trust you to manage your own money.
And that means I don't trust him.
But look, I think at the end of the day.
There's a lot of capital and attention going into this.
There's a lot of people on the Senate Banking Committee that their votes are still a little bit undecided here.
Christian Gillibrand of New York said a consensus that unless there's some sort of ethics provision put into this bill, it's basically a nonstarter for her and the Democrats, which is a way of saying it's specifically targeted at Trump and his family and wanting to get them out of a lot of the digital asset projects they're working on because they view this as abusing public office for self-improvement and financial gain.
To whatever extent that's true or not, that's a big political sticking point that is going to be difficult to get the president to sign on to if they put that kind of a bill on his desk.
So the compromise here is still far from certain.
The stablecoin yield question was a big sticking point.
Like we just discussed, there was an agreement reached on that, but it seems like the banks are still pushing back even on the agreement that was reached.
So it's still uncertain.
I think that, like I said, I'm interviewing Alex Thorne about this tomorrow.
We're going to try to pay attention to this because it's like really coming to a head here.
If they don't get this through, though, at this point, I do think that the bill kind of does die because they've kind of broken their spear on trying to get a compromise here.
And it seems like it's just going to have to wait to another Congress, which could be many years from now.
So that's sort of where we are at the moment.
I really am hoping to get this through because I think codifying a lot of these things would be really good for the country and for a lot of other parts of our economy.
But if they can't get that deal done, we're just going to have to rely on the SEC and the CFTC and the guidance that they've given the markets to provide a foundation for going forward with digital assets in the United States.
John, with all that in mind, what to you is most relevant this week?
And this could be across crypto or macro or anything else.
But like, what are you actively watching this week?
Like, what's the biggest question for you?
I don't know if it's a question.
I'm really curious to see what happens with this trip to China.
Donald Trump is going to China on Wednesday.
He's taking, apparently this morning it was announced Elon Musk is going with him.
I think he's invited the CEOs of...
a dozen or more major American companies and they're going physically to China to meet with President Xi.
I think that Trump has also invited President Xi to come to America for a meeting later this year as well.
So the thing that this is a signal to me of is that somewhere behind the scenes, deals have been made, compromises have been reached, announcements are going to be made.
This is going to be a huge media attention moment for both of these presidents in both of these countries.
They're going to use this as an announcement of a lot of things that they've already worked out behind the scenes.
what that is, who benefits from that, and how the market digests and reacts to that.
Is it buy the rumor, sell the news?
Is it something that's going to unlock even more speculation and investment of capital?
We'll see.
But to me, that's the kind of the big thing that's happening.
I believe tomorrow, from a macro perspective, we're going to get inflation print.
We're going to see how much this oil shock has impacted inflation in the United States.
That's something to watch, I think, because eventually if inflation gets to a certain point, it makes rate hikes something on the table for the Fed.
Not an immediate concern, I don't think, but I do want to see where that inflation print comes.
And then Thursday is when the Senate Banking Committee moves into the discussions and markup on the Clarity Act.
This is, I think, obviously a big deal for a lot of people.
But then, yeah, there's just so much capital moving, deals being made, ICOs coming back.
There's just a lot happening in the digital asset space right now.
And I really encourage people, I say this every time, but stay safe, stay educated, stay bullish.
Lock in, pay attention.
There's a lot going on that's going to lay out a lot of what gives us direction.
clarity about the markets for the rest of this year, it's a really great time to pay attention.
Trump has suspended tariffs on beef.
He's talking about suspending the federal tax on gasoline.
A lot of these things are trying to goose his numbers for the midterm elections and make Americans feel richer, put more dollars back into people's pockets.
So there's just a lot happening right now really quickly.
And yeah, it's a great time to be in crypto.
You know, I was going to make a joke about how I keep seeing tweets lately about how like random food commodities are outperforming your beef tariff thing.
Maybe think of that, that I've seen a lot of chatter.
It's a completely different topic, but it's like potatoes.
Yeah, that's it.
We're getting outperformed potatoes and tomatoes and beef and like corn and like all these.
Thanks.
Which is a result of a lot of the stuff that you've been telling us on the show, right?
That with like fertilizer prices going off or like the major supply shock there.
That's something to see.
And personally for us, it's going to hit our wallets pretty soon, if not already.
So definitely something to watch.
John, thank you as always for all your thoughts.
I know we haven't seen those big green candles yet, but it seems like we are at a more likely scenario where that may happen now than we have been for the last couple of months.
Put it that way.
Yes, I agree with that.
It's a great time to watch closely because things could move really fast and they usually do.
Excellent.
Well, we'll be tracking it right here on Milk Road.
We'll be back Thursday.
We have another research meeting podcast with the rest of the crypto crew here and we'll be back here Monday as well every week on Milk Road.
So thank you guys for listening.
Thank you, John, for all the great insights and we'll see you next time.
Thank you, LG.
Great to be here.
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