# Crypto Payback Era: Capital Discipline Meets Demand

**Podcast:** The Milk Road Show
**Published:** 2026-10-22

## Transcript

I just think that there is greater opportunities now, legitimate opportunities with cash flow regeneration and capital discipline happening outside of Bitcoin.
New token supply has hit the lowest level on record.
At the same time, crypto protocols have paid out almost $2 billion to their token holders across this.
prior year.
Bitcoin is stalling out here in the 80s.
Are we about to break out into the biggest bull run in history or break down in another bear market rejection?
And what do investors need to know about all of this?
Hello and welcome to Milk Road Crypto, the show that wishes that we could buy back all the time we spent talking about the Clarity Act.
I'm your host, John Gillen.
Today is Wednesday, October 21st, and we are joined by Jamie Coutts.
Jamie is the chief crypto analyst at Real Vision and the founder of Helios Analytics.
He has just presented his payback era research at Token 2049 in Singapore.
We're going to get a deep dive.
on what all of that is.
Jamie is one of the best analysts in all of crypto.
So this is going to be a great episode.
If that sounds good to you, make sure you like and subscribe.
Share this episode with somebody who's going to enjoy it.
A reminder, our podcast today is free and that would not be possible without our wonderful partners at Alumni Ventures, giving accredited investors access to private market investment opportunities alongside leading VC firms.
So keep an ear out for more information on them later in the episode.
But for now, welcome back to Millcord Crypto, my old friend, Jamie Coots.
Sir, how are you?
I'm doing well, John.
Thanks for having me back.
You are very obviously fighting a cold.
You are a trooper for doing this.
I'm really glad to have you.
Thank you for sticking it out for all of us here.
Jamie, I wanted to start the conversation by going back to the last time we talked, which was in July.
And at the time, you were seeing bullish divergences beginning to form on the larger timeframes, and you were moving back into the markets in size.
That turned out to be the right play there.
Walk me through a little bit about what you were seeing around that bottom and the decision to go back into the market with confidence right before that big short squeeze.
Well, I mean, you go through a couple of these cycles and you start to look for things that you've seen in previous cycles to format major inflection points.
And so most of them lined up by the middle of the year.
Now, the macro front is the one that's sort of like it's still hanging over the markets right now.
I'll come back to that.
But it wasn't enough for me to sort of stop me from, as you said.
Wading back into the market, I had built up cash from Q4 of last year.
And really what I saw in February were the signs of capitulation.
Capitulation is extremes in realized losses, extremes in liquidations.
These are usually the signs that you get when you're forming a bottom.
Now, at the time, what I was saying, and I think I was on the show the week after we had seen that capitulation low, and I was talking about this, was that basically...
What you typically get, at least in the Bitcoin cycle, is a retest of that capitulation low.
We saw that in previous cycles.
And of course, we got that.
But it was a failed breakdown.
And importantly, what I was seeing by July was a couple of things.
Firstly, on the weekly timeframes, and I always talk about this when I'm on air with you guys, I was talking about the bearish divergence that formed September, October last year, which was giving me, quite frankly, the very negative vibes.
which I keep on saying over and over again, I called, I would say badly because I didn't de-risk enough.
I basically started taking profits and building up cash in Q3.
But I thought that that correction in Q4 and Q1 was just going to be a 30% correction.
It wasn't.
It was a big bear market.
Okay.
So that being that, what happened in July, we saw the inverse of that.
We saw a bullish divergence on the weekly chart between the momentum indicators and price.
As price was kept on pushing that lower bound of $58,000, $59,000, the weekly RSI was making higher lows.
That is always a very good sign when it happens in a higher timeframe for Bitcoin that actually the momentum to the downside is losing weight.
Now, importantly, at that same time, what I was starting to see was real divergence between the crypto ecosystem and Bitcoin.
Our performance coming from apps that were bottoming and having higher...
and also higher highs by the time Bitcoin was forming that bullish divergence.
That was very strange to me in a sense that we hadn't seen that formation in previous market lows.
Now, we're in previous market cycles and we haven't had many, so, you know, small sample size and all that.
But generally, the way Bitcoin leads the sector or leads the asset class.
was very different this time around.
So I started to look at DeFi applications, DeFi protocols from a fundamental perspective, looking at how they traded through the last, let's call it nine months of the bear market.
And in many cases, the volatility in the earnings, in the fee generation was less this time around.
In fact, some of them were actually still growing.
their footprint now again this is kind of interesting this is what we have well i have personally been waiting for for being in this space for many years looking for durability of earnings or cash flows or revenue wherever we want to frame it and sort of more structural flows and that was obviously coming through from the first wave i would call of like this this tokenization secular theme that started sort of Q4 last year with Hyperliquid and into the start of this and into sort of the middle of this year with Robinhood Chain that launched and whatnot.
And that was boosting, you know, some of the DEXs and we had LIDAR and all the rest of it.
So there was clear signs that the secular case for being exposed to crypto was showing up in the fundamental data as well as the technicals were starting to break out.
So when I look at, you know, all my sector...
all my sector indices which I've created, looking at DeFi versus Bitcoin, smart contract platforms, layer ones versus Bitcoin, and then even DeFi versus smart contract platforms.
They were all showing that a massive bottom after four or five years of secular downtrend, secular bear markets in those ratios were at least showing bottoming signs.
And that was enough for me to deploy pretty much all the cash in early July.
And I just waited for that last impulse move where Bitcoin broke out to deploy the last remaining cash.
This pullback on Bitcoin is scaring a lot of people and I am not one of them.
So if you want to see what I'm not selling and why, what's on my watch list and when I'm going to be deploying more capital into these markets, you can join Milkrow Pro today.
It's just a dollar.
The link is in the description.
I answer questions day and night in Discord.
I'll see you there.
Okay, that's a really helpful perspective.
There have been a lot of lessons learned, both from the last bear market as well as the last October and the crash and all that.
So I appreciate you sharing that wisdom with us.
Now, where are we, right?
Like Bitcoin is now stalling out in the 80s.
We've seen a little pump today.
We touched, I think, 85,000 today at the time of recording.
We still haven't broken out.
We haven't broken down.
What are your updated thoughts on where we are on Bitcoin right now?
And how are you reading this ranging price action we've seen for Bitcoin here?
Well, it's interesting.
If you think about it from a relative standpoint, if you put Bitcoin up on a chart versus the NASDAQ, which is a really important cross, as well as Bitcoin versus gold, on a weekly chart, on a daily, it's clearly in an uptrend.
On a weekly, you know, using some of the trending indicators that I've got, it's very close to inflecting on the weekly timeframe, which is like, has traditionally been like the clear sign that the demand supply equation or the relative performance between Bitcoin and these other two sort of peer assets that I compare it to has inflected or changed.
So usually by now, actually based on sort of the momentum indicators.
what I'm seeing clearly on gold and I think on NASDAQ is a decent enough sign that actually that shift in momentum has happened.
So given that we've got some macro concerns, I mean, there's always a lot of talk about what's happening in the AI space.
And look, I think there are some concerns, there are definitely some legitimate concerns around financing in that space.
But I think without sort of wading into the argument about whether it's a bubble or whether it's not a bubble, what I see that I can comment on is really what's happening on the liquidity front.
And when you've got a situation where debt has been rising at the pace that it has and liquidity has not been keeping up, so the global liquidity index that I use, the momentum on that has been declining since Q1 of this year.
It's still positive, but it's basically losing momentum.
That's always been a sort of harbinger of...
you know, a weaker equity market.
When you look at margin debt, which is a note that is published on the Real Vision platform to the membership there about, if you look at margin debt, which is, you know, the borrowings that investors are allowed to access through their brokerage accounts, borrowing against stocks to buy more stocks usually, is that hit 127% on a three-month annualized basis.
in the second quarter of this year.
Now, that is the highest rate of change of margin debt since 2007.
Whenever we've gotten over 100%, it's usually been unsustainable.
The moment when margin debt expansion goes negative in terms of the rate of change, using the measure that I just talked about, it's usually been also, again, a very close proximity to equity market pullbacks.
So I'm extremely bullish on where we are in crypto.
I can see the relative momentum moving back into the asset class.
I'm almost fully deployed.
I took some profits about a week or, sorry, about a month ago on some of my positions when I saw all the leverage build up in perpetuals on altcoins, which was...
another indicator I can talk about.
But it's very, very small.
I am maintaining an extremely bullish posture towards this asset class for the secular themes.
But I'm looking at sort of some of these things on the equity markets and thinking, well, if we get a pullback in equity markets, what's going to happen?
Without being sort of too blasé about it, the response is the inevitable, right?
The US government is in a position where economic growth is paramount.
regardless of what the midterms are saying, they need the AI CapEx build out to drive growth and they need the productivity gains from AI to show up.
And so there are a lot of too big to fail companies, not all, but some.
And I think the response will be the inevitable liquidity impulse that will have to come.
Now, that liquidity impulse usually requires some sort of problem.
markets falling given how important the tax receipts are to the US government.
So, you know, being that as it may, I'm still extremely bullish on the asset class, but these are the sort of things that I'm, I am concerned about.
There's a lot of wisdom in that.
Thank you for sharing that.
I got to get into some of the research that you've been writing because every time I do one of these episodes with you, I get a lot smarter.
I have to read like five or six of your research notes, and there's always more to get to than we have time to cover.
But one of the big things you've been talking about, and you did a presentation at Token 2049 on this, is crypto's payback era.
And the thesis, as I understand it, is… Capital discipline meets demand inflection.
I thought it was the simplest way to capture this.
Could you talk to us through a little bit about this thesis and what crypto's payback era actually looks like?
Yeah, so I've been in this space for like five years and I came into it because I really wanted to sort of unlock.
or understand what are the main drivers for token prices.
Firstly, starting with Bitcoin and then starting with everything that's happening in sort of the crypto ecosystem.
So smart contract platforms and DeFi applications.
And the most frustrating thing, John, has been for really the first several years being in this space that fundamentals have not really mattered.
Narratives and the supply equation has overruled a lot of the demand.
factors that should matter.
I did a lot of backtesting and building up some new screens and tools for the Real Vision community, which kind of drill into this.
And the end result is like a quality screen that I've built on my platform, which I'll get to in a second.
But essentially, what we've seen is in the last 12 months, let's say, that if you start screening assets by attributes that sort of define quality and anyone who's an equity investor will be familiar with factor investing.
So whether it's your value investor or momentum investor, quality is another big one, which looks at sort of the quality of the profitability of the earnings of the company.
You can sort of, you can bring that into crypto and translate those definitions into crypto.
It's very subjective, but I've got mine which looks at the durability of fees, like how volatile are the fees, supply discipline, like how much is being emitted and what is the net payback to the token holder after emissions.
So that includes the buybacks and burns and things like this.
And essentially what you start to see now is that really if you're investing in the few assets over the last couple of years that actually had pretty strong capital discipline and high quality, it didn't really outperform those that didn't.
And it certainly didn't outperform the large cap universe of Bitcoin, ETH, SOL.
Since the start of the year, the outperformance of this subset of the market, which are DeFi protocols that are paying back either deflationary or have reduced their inflation rates because of capital discipline and new tokenomic policies, which are reigning in supply, while also showing strong fee growth, it's actually started to outperform.
Now, that shouldn't be shocking.
What's shocking is that it's taken this long.
And it's the result of the fact that we had very few protocols who were willing to actually create policies around for token value accrual because of the previous administration, the previous SEC.
Every time, you know, Uniswap didn't put on their turn on the fee switch because they were worried about, you know, enforcement action from the SEC.
Some of the protocols, quite frankly, it wasn't the SEC only that kept them back from value accrual.
It was essentially a really bad or misalignment.
between the token, which had no value accrual, and the equity holders, which captured all the revenue from the protocol.
And if you look at, you know, there's plenty of examples of realignment starting to happen.
Athena is a great example of this.
Athena went out and said, right, all the IP sits under the foundation for the token now, or revenues accrue to the token.
We're going to institute buybacks, smartly based on, you know, whether we can grow the stablecoin supply.
And they bought out, or they offered all insiders who were due to vest the opportunity to be bought out and brought forward the vesting schedule to one sort of massive unlock.
All of these things are starting to show up in the data.
They're starting to show up when I look at tokens, the number of tokens that are initiating positive tokenomic policies from 1 in 15.
Back in 2022, and I think I've got a chart here, John, where I might be able to show this.
If you look at this back in 2021, net positive tokenomic changes were about 1 in 15 of the top 100.
Now it's about 20%.
So what this means is, the bottom line is that in crypto, if you have an application, you have to obviously reinvest revenues into growth.
But you are not only competing now on product market fit of the product or the service that you're offering in crypto, but you're also starting to compete on tokenomics and how disciplined you are with your capital.
And that is very positive for an asset class that, quite frankly, for most institutional investors, has been uninvestable because of regulations and because of the lack of capital discipline.
So this doesn't mean that every token or the whole asset class is clean.
There are certainly cases where it's clearly not, but the trend is clear.
And this is what is making me bullish after being in this space for several years, that we're starting to see responsible diligence from the protocols and the applications, the blockchains in the space.
Gotcha.
Okay, so this is a pretty comprehensive analysis of all of this here.
But what I'm hearing you saying is just that initial thesis I said, like capital discipline, in other words, the new issuance of tokens is getting less than more disciplined.
And then there's a demand inflection that's combined with all of this.
You called out in your research that...
Protocols paid holders almost $2 billion over the last year, but the fees and revenues are actually down from last year's peak.
Is that just because of the bear market that we've been in?
And do you expect this to turn around rapidly if the bull market does start to come back?
Yeah.
So, I mean, I ran these numbers in a report published yesterday on Real Vision.
So application fees are down on last year, but it's still...
on a year-to-date basis, they're likely to get very close to last year, which I think was around a number of around $14 billion for application fees.
So essentially what I call the GDP of the crypto ecosystem, the crypto economy.
It's now about 11 or 12 last numbers.
So year-to-date, we're tracking to be close to last year.
And what was last year?
Last year was the peak of the bull market.
This has been a pretty torrid bear market.
I think what's more interesting is what you just mentioned.
It's not just the fees are more resilient from 25 to 26.
It's that the percentage that's reaching the token holder through these mechanisms, through these token value accrual mechanisms is actually increasing.
So that share of the fees that is supporting either burns, buybacks, or validating staking rewards has increased.
And this is a positive sign.
I wouldn't argue that this is like equity-like attributes, but the protocols are starting to exhibit greater capital discipline in the ways that you would want to see if you're investing in this asset class.
All right.
And something I wanted to ask you about is what is the biggest change in terms of drivers of value here?
Because over this three-year period that you looked at here, tokenized real world assets have gone up, you said 16X and stable coins have doubled.
Which one of these two, it matters more for the token prices for the overall crypto economy.
Is it bringing in more of these tokenized real world assets, these high quality assets on chain, or is it bringing in more stable coin dollars or do you need both?
Like, how do you view that?
Yeah, that's a good question.
So like I would try to nerd out with an answer that says, oh, look, I need to regress both of these and find out which one has the most.
most relevance and which I probably will do just because I'm like that.
But like, I think it's the real answer is that it's both.
Tokenized assets increase trading activity.
It also changes the nature of trading on chain from away from crypto native assets to obviously real world assets.
And so there is less cyclicality.
there are more fundamental sort of drivers of real world assets.
And that ultimately leads to improvement in token prices.
So DEX volumes has been one of the biggest, one of the strongest correlated return drivers for crypto prices, like for Solana and Ethereum and the blockchains.
The problem is that it's been very cyclical.
So if you just look at like when it accelerates, typically you're at the end of a cycle.
What this will do is that it will moderate the peaks and troughs in DEX volumes, which will moderate the peaks and troughs in the underlying assets that generate the fees, which is the applications and then the blockchains that it settle on as well.
And then you've got stablecoins.
It's all going to be one messy mix of everything that's going to drive value because stablecoins are the fuel for...
at Gen Z Commerce, which open up new use cases, which will drive DEX volumes and mix with RWAs and new forms of collateral that will be available on chain with the unlocks that will happen in personal finance trading.
It's all very, you know, they're all sort of the one thing.
Right.
Okay.
I'm glad you brought up agentic finance because I had Raul Powell on the channel not too long ago, and he and I spent a long time talking about this intersection of AI and crypto.
This is something we've been focused on here at Milk Road, and I know you think about this a lot too.
But so far, it seems like agentic finance is still very early stages just in prototypes, and there's not a huge amount of AI agents using crypto yet.
What is your outlook on that?
Do you think that this is going to take a few more years before it really takes off?
Is this going to be a big thing in 2027?
in your mind.
And just what are you seeing at that intersection as part of this whole mix that you're describing of stable coins, on-chain finance and tokenization?
Yeah, I can't see how this isn't going to be a massive 2027 story.
So, you know, I've been tracking the X402 protocol activity and it's like, it's been disappointing.
There was a huge surge at the end of last year, which everyone got excited about, but a lot of that was incentive.
based and also beta testing by the major players in the space like base.
And it's been really disappointing since.
Now, in the last couple of months, you've seen some major announcements like Cloudflare, which represents about 20% of web traffic, have enabled X402.
So certainly we're in a world where if you've got a website, you can actually gate it and charge for API calls or for scraping of your data.
Now that's...
quite liberating and one of the positive developments that we've seen in the last couple of years for, you know, realisation of value.
And that obviously is going to be conducted through sort of agentic means.
I think that where X402 protocol transactions are right now is probably the low that we'll see, the lowest it will ever be.
How meaningful that is in terms of like overall transaction volumes, I think it'll be fairly small because this is a micro transaction.
It's going to take a couple of years for this to ramp up.
If you think about it in terms of just like the percentage of overall on-chain transaction fees, it's like tiny, minuscule.
today and even if it ramps up a hundred thousand times it will still be relatively small versus all the other fee generation that takes place because of tokenization and the new financial sort of channels that are starting to appear on chain as well but in time it will it will dwarf everything else but um i think you don't need it you don't need it to be like 50 of overall volumes by 2027 for it to have a huge impact on on the ecosystem In crypto, you can get into a project long before it lists on Coinbase.
In tech, the early window mostly belongs to VCs and companies now stay private for a decade or more.
Alumni Ventures, a partner of the Milk Road Show, gives accredited investors a way in.
Time and CB Insights both rank them as a top 20 US venture firm.
You can sign up for free to see the weekly deal flow or write one check into their foundation fund for about 25 private deals.
Venture is high risk and long term though, so read the details first.
Go to av.vc.milkroad.
All right, Jamie, we're getting pretty deep into the episode here.
I got to ask you a little bit about what's in the portfolio here because I said at the top of the show, you're one of the best analysts in crypto.
People always want to know what's in the bag, what's out of the bag.
And we talked about some of the fundamentals that drive some of your thesis.
You made huge calls on names like Zcash, Derive, Near, several others.
And you said you're still mostly long on the markets.
You took a little bit of profits.
Just talk to me a little bit about what are some of the assets you're most focused on right now?
Are you still holding?
Are you thinking about taking more profits?
What's the outlook for your portfolio from here?
So for me, this year has been about positioning for this next phase of the asset class, which I sort of alluded to at the start, which was really about the changing structure of the asset class, tilting more towards applications, but also smart contract platforms, for lack of a better term, at the expense of Bitcoin.
Bitcoin's still my largest position.
But I was running a portfolio for four years in, you know, at Real Vision when I came over, which was 80, 85% Bitcoin, which was the right call.
Like if you just look at the relative charts, nothing had really broken out against Bitcoin over the last couple of years in a sustained fashion.
That's starting to change.
I mean, Ethereum was threatening it.
I know that you're a big Ethereum bull and Ethereum's in the portfolio.
It's one of the largest positions.
It was virtually, it was not, I didn't hold it before this year.
It still looks like it's forming a base to break out later.
And I could say that about the DeFi applications in general as well, but it's just the change in the nature of the market where the relative performance in.
applications, DeFi applications, and also smart contract platforms versus Bitcoin, the benchmark asset, the anchor asset has started to change.
So that has been really the focus for me.
It's been reorientating the portfolio into the base or the infrastructure layer for the new financial economy, which is L1s.
I've not looked at any of the L2s as an investment.
I know that...
I know that like Sancharted have come out with some really big calls on Arbitrum, but I'm looking at the L1s at this point and taking the allocation up from roughly around about 10%, 20% up to about 30%, 35% and gone from 0% in DeFi to about 20% in DeFi probably needs to go a little bit higher.
So the allocations have been towards the major DEXs that I think are positioned to win in the tokenization.
wave.
I've been a big bull on derive from March of this year, and that's been a fantastic outperformer.
And the other sectors that I'm quite interested in is lending as well.
So I've got exposure there through Aave and a couple of the other protocols.
So it's really a retilt towards DeFi applications at this stage.
And of course, I bought Zcash back in April.
And I continue to hold that.
I just think that there is greater opportunities now, legitimate opportunities with cash flow regeneration and capital discipline happening outside of Bitcoin.
It's really great, and I appreciate the transparency on that.
And I'm also glad that I'm getting a reputation for being bullish on Ethereum.
I don't know how you got that idea.
I want to ask you about something else, too.
You've heard you describe your investing style in crypto as high conviction, low turnover.
And that resonates a lot with me because that's kind of how I approach this as well.
But Athena is one that I've heard you say, correct me if I'm wrong on this, but I've heard you say that this for you is a trade and not necessarily in the same bucket as some of these longer term holds for you.
Could you walk me through the thing?
thinking on that and how you decide is something a trade versus a long-term hold and what that process is like for you.
Yeah.
So Athena mentioned earlier, it was one of these protocols, which I think recognized, like read the room really well this year and said, we have to change how we're conducting ourselves because we were one of these sort of, I'm sure they would never say it, but like they were one of these VC coins that came out and just chronically underperformed because of the structure of the TGE.
And so they don't have a buyback, but they've changed the policy to initiate a buyback based on the growth of the stablecoin supply from where it is now at about 4.8.
It needs to get up to 7.5 before the buybacks are kicking in, which I think is actually smart.
You shouldn't buy back a token.
irrespective of what the market is doing or how well you are tracking as a protocol.
Like it should be based on KPI.
So I think that was very, very smart.
So as a very high beta play, given the reversals that I was seeing back in August, it was just a good asset to own at the time.
Look, it could be an asset that I hold for a lot longer.
It performed extremely well.
It's pulled back now.
So I think I'm really happy with the position.
There are other assets that I'm starting to view a little bit more favorably that are in the sort of real world asset tokenization space within the DeFi sector that I'm using my quality screen on the Helios Analytics portal to identify.
And that could be something that I switch into.
If we've got time, we can show that.
But this is sort of the product of a lot of work that I've been doing on looking at the fundamentals.
It's such a hard, like crypto should be a lot easier because effectively, like we are talking about open software, open source software and transparent, you know, transparent technology.
But the data transparency is appalling in crypto and the data providers do their best, but it's very hard to sort of put together a lot of the.
sort of the data points that I need to look at.
So I've started to work on building out my own database.
I use great services like Token Terminal to build this sort of stuff.
But this is something that's a little bit more customized where I've created essentially a screen that looks at what I would define as quality.
And so...
durability value capture and what I call payback, which is like the net emissions from the token.
And if you look at the applications in the space, then you can start to see how well they score on these different pillars.
And so Athena is not very high on that.
And that's well known.
That doesn't mean it can't perform well because it just doesn't have, it still has an inflation rate, which is higher than a lot of protocols.
So there's a lot of opportunities in the space.
And if, And the reason why I'm leaning more into looking at using this as a lens to invest in the space is because I understand that this is exactly the way institutional investors will start approaching it as well.
This is the reason why I got into crypto back in 2022.
Now, I think, you know, and this is just a quadrant which shows you where all the assets lie based on.
how much they pay back after dilution and their quality score.
But what I really want to show here, John, is just the track record because you have to be sort of honest about what this has meant.
And I mentioned it at the start.
If we go back to, let me just turn off some of these other time series, but look at the chart here from sort of 2022 when I started looking.
The back test goes back to 2022 because that's when really I think there's enough data to sort of do this kind of analysis.
But the orange line here is Bitcoin.
And the purple line here is the top 200 market cap weighted index, which is obviously Bitcoin, Ethereum heavy.
That accounts for about 80%.
Now they have actually, since 2022, in the case of the top 200, eked out a marginal net gain.
But Bitcoin is up 82%.
Clearly it's been the outperformer of the space.
It has not paid over that time, at least if...
from holding from 2022 to today, been a good trade to be in altcoins.
And if I look at the top 200 universe ranked by their quality, the top third is down 50% and the bottom third is down actually 73%.
Okay.
So, okay.
It's been, it didn't matter.
Investing in high quality names didn't matter based on my definition of quality.
What's interesting is that year to date is that that has completely flipped.
So the top third is up 49%.
The Bitcoin is down about 6%.
And the top 200 market cap weighted index is down about 7-8%.
So one year of data is not enough to go on.
This is not statistically significant.
I'm not saying that this is some sort of new alpha strategy.
What I am saying is that I think it's as we move forward, if the thesis plays out, it just becomes more important to actually screen for these attributes.
That's how I'm sort of thinking about looking at some of the DeFi protocols and using, I guess, a more fundamental approach.
That's really helpful, Jamie, and great analysis as always.
I think that this is how you've made your reputation, right?
You're the guy who gets down into the details and into the weeds in the data and finds the alpha and the story that's hiding in plain sight, so to speak.
And for those who are listening and didn't get to see some of the things that Jamie presented, I recommend checking it out on YouTube.
But PumpFun and JST, which I think is JustLend from the Tron ecosystem, were the two high scores from Jamie's system there, which...
It may surprise some people, but we'll let that be what it is.
Jamie, we're coming close to time.
Just do your own research because this is an empirical way to look at the market, but you really have to dig into the underlying protocols to find out what's driving the ratings of that.
And look, the Helios Analytics portal will be available to all of Real Vision Pro subscribers very, very soon.
but it also could be available to non-subscribers at some point in the future as well.
Awesome.
Well, keep building great tools, Jamie.
I appreciate you showing us that, though.
That preview is helpful.
OK, we're close to time here.
I got to wrap up with some kind of a question about the outlook for you here.
And I think a lot of people are just wondering, is Bitcoin going to break out or break down?
It seems like we've tested 81K a few times.
The bulls keep defending it.
Everybody keeps saying we're going to pull back to the 70s.
Some people are calling for even lower lows.
But I think that there's also a risk that we might break 87K and break out higher here.
What is your expectation between now and the end of the year for Bitcoin?
And do you think?
we break up or break down from here?
This is one of the toughest questions and it shouldn't be, right?
Because it's like the question you get asked the most, but it's just like where we are right now with Bitcoin and sort of the macro outlook is, I guess, causing a little bit of indecision.
It doesn't really matter, I guess, the short term.
I think the low for Bitcoin is in.
And I think dips on the back of macro uncertainty and volatility are for buying.
I think if you look at the distribution of Bitcoin, you know, relative to where it's been in its secular trend, this is still not cheap, not extremely cheap, but in the zone where if you get dips back down to 70,000 or whatever.
I think they are great buying opportunities and that goes for a lot of the high quality assets in crypto.
Expect volatility.
We are four years into a liquidity cycle, which is roughly when you would expect higher volatility and problems to start to permeate.
In saying that, we've got an administration that understands this pretty well and is trying to manage a liquidity cycle.
I think Besant...
understands this better than or does understand this better than anyone.
And so I think with the secular tailwinds that are behind the asset class and the cleansing that we had over the last 12 months puts the asset class in a pretty good position.
So where it goes from here, like obviously if it breaks 86, and I was talking about this in the last time I showed.
The low 80s was this cluster of major resistance.
It came from on-chain data.
It came from spot positioning data.
It came from where the high from the May counter trend rally was formed.
All these things said, we break 85,000, then we go like it goes to 100 pretty quickly because it just clears all this overhang.
So, yeah, we're very close to that now.
If we break there, I think it's great.
We'll see.
We'll see most of crypto do sort of one and a half X of what Bitcoin does on that breakout of Bitcoin.
But look, I mean, I'm just trying to hedge my bets.
Not hedge my bets, but I'm so long that I'm trying to make sure that people are not over leveraged right now because of the volatility that's coming.
But in terms of like, is this still a good time to invest in crypto?
provided that you're not leveraged, provided that your position size relative or your allocation relative to other things is sensible and you can sleep at night.
I think the next 12 months are going to be extremely good for the asset class.
The phrase that I used on our Monday episode was hold on to your butts.
And I think we agree on this one, Jamie.
So thank you so much.
Jamie Coutts, crypto analyst at Real Vision and Helios Analytics.
Thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing so much insight and wisdom and alpha and research with us today.
Thank you for doing this while sick.
I really appreciate you fighting through that.
And thank you so much for being on Milko Crypto.
Where can we send people to find more of you and your work online?
Realvision.com.
It's free to join.
There's a trading competition going on at the moment with $100,000 in prizes that is just about to start.
So check that out.
There's great content there.
There's dashboards, there's portfolios.
The analytics that I'm building is going to be available there.
But then otherwise, it's just on Twitter.
It's Jamie1Cootz.
Well, thank you so much, Jamie.
Everybody here at Milk Road is a big fan of everybody at Real Vision.
And so I'm always happy to talk to anybody from the team over there.
So keep up the good work and I'll see you later on in the bull run, my friend.
Thanks, John.
Nice to see you again, mate.
And thank you all for joining us.
I hope you all learned something today.
So until next time, stay safe, stay educated, stay bullish, and we will see you on the next episode of Milk Road Crypto.
Thanks for being here, everybody.
Bye.
Thanks for listening to Milk Road.
If you enjoyed the show, make sure you like and subscribe.
And if you're struggling to find winners in the market, that's exactly what Milk Road Pro is built for.
Our analysts have called some of the biggest winners early and Pro lets you see what they're buying next, every trade they make, and the research behind every position.
Check out Milk Road Pro at the link below.
Everything you hear on Milk Road is for informational purposes only.
These are our personal opinions, not financial advice.
And we may own some of the investments we talk about.
Always do your own research and make the decisions that are right for you.
See you next time.