Over the last few weeks, I’ve seen the timeline littered with various people sounding the alarm on ‘top signals’ and signs of ‘market froth’. And truthfully, there may be some validity to these claims. Many of the things we are seeing today have indeed been signs of cyclical tops and market froth in the past. The most obvious being the memecoin craze that we have seen proliferate over the last several weeks.
But as BTC sits just above its prior all time highs, most majors well below their respective highs, I personally cannot yet come around to this overall stance. Is this cycle different? All cycles are somewhat different. Crypto in 2014 looked nothing like in crypto in 2017 and 2020, and crypto today is beginning to look much different still. This is true from the participants in the market, to the products available within the market, all the way to the major market venues. That said, crypto cycles from 2014 to present have shared many similarities as well- you need only look as far as the aforementioned memes.
One of the obvious major differences in crypto today is the BTC ETF products, but it is hard to overstate how important of a difference this is. We have seen constructive ETF flows consistently, demonstrating real organic demand for these assets.
On-top of this, the landscape in which the public and institutions alike view crypto has changed dramatically. Additionally, for the last decade discussions around the debt/deficit problem in the United States were met with the consensus answer ‘they don’t really matter’. This consensus view is beginning to be challenged.
We will be publishing a short market memo in the coming week that seeks to explore these dynamics in greater detail, and ultimately what it means and how things may play out for the current crypto cycle. Stay tuned for that memo!
