Welcome to the Thinking Crypto podcast. You're home for cryptocurrency news and interviews.
We are continuing our series here with our partner Santiment. I've got Brian with
me today. We're going to go through the crypto market, talk about bigcoin,
all coins, and all the metrics surrounding what's happening in the market.
Brian, how are you doing? Happy Friday? Awesome to catch up with
you, Tony, Happy Friday to you. We've got some nice price growth,
so Santiment has a lot that we're researching at the moment and all is
good here. Excited for a fun weekend. Yeah, I'm excited to dive
into the details with you because I'm a big believer in looking at data and
metrics, man, because you want to be an educated investor, not doing
this on the fly, right, So we want to look at the data
and see what it's telling us. So maybe we can start with bitcoin,
because we're seeing a bounds today, a bitcoin back over sixty k I think
actually over sixty one right now. If you could share your screen go through
the metrics with us, please, Yeah, let's do it. I'll start
by just showing the past week here of price returns and social volume of reactions.
We see Bitcoin here down six percent still despite the rise from the low
fifty eight k's to mid sixty one k's just in the past twenty four hours.
It was down about nine percent in the past week, so this is
a nice rebound despite that Bitcoin is actually still being discussed less than it was
the prior week in this most recent seven day stretch, So you can see
a lot of red boxes here. This indicates less and less interest toward these
assets assets compared to the week prior, and really not much special happened to
the week prior other than a lot of market cap drops, So this is
really just indicating there's less people overall talking about crypto right now. And I
think that's a product of all of the food and people's beliefs that the rally
has kind of come and gone that all time high that happened in mid March.
People don't think there's going to be another opportunity, which in turn increases
the likelihood of there being another opportunity. So absolutely, I was just talking
about it on the podcast last night where I highlighted the Bigcoin Fear and Greed
Index, and I showed, hey, we went from super greedy, the
greedy to neutral to now fear. And that's a good sign when you're in
a bull market exactly. Yeah, you want to be in when everyone else
is writing it off. You want to kind of be a counter trader to
what the crowd is thinking. Now. A lot of times the crowd is
very mixed, and there's a little bit of bullishness, a little bit of
barishness, but those extreme kind of like in mid March, when everyone was
bullish, that was a great time to take some profit. When everyone started
to become verish and I say everyone kind of tongue in cheek because that's never
exclusively the case. But you had the vast majority over the past three to
five days really starting to spout a lot of bearish narrative, and that was
indicative that we were getting very close to a bottom. Perhaps it was a
temporary one, and we could still get below sixty k again after some of
the euphoria related to this Job's report dies down, But overall, it looked
to be pretty likely that we'd see a bounce like this even without this news
that came out today, because of the fact that there was just so much
negative sentiment and people writing off crypto. Yeah, and these pullbacks are healthy
and normal building support levels, right, you're retesting supports, and you just
zoom outing look at the history of the bull market or bitcoins chart. During
the bull markets, you've had sometimes near thirty percent drops and yet it finds
that bottom, it bounces up and goes to new highs. Now, eventually
there will be a blow off top. But this is where you know,
using data from like sentiment and looking at the charts, and you're looking at
it holistically, you can get an idea of what's to come next. And
to your point of like the Fed and the macro, I think it seems
like the Fed, you know, it seems like they're not cutting anytime soon.
It's kind of hard to gauge sometimes, but inflation is still high and
the markets have been running up, you know, with rates going up and
even being paused because a sense that the Fed can't cut because of inflation.
So we'll see how these things, how things unfold in the coming months.
Yeah, it's really quick on that point. It's interesting how the FOMC report
just came out and they left the interest rates the same, which was kind
of expected. In just a couple of days after that, there's this renewed
optimism that they will cut interest rates come June when they have that same decision
next month, all because the jobs report showed a lot of stagnancy and people
kind of attributing that to the necessity that cuts need to happen in order to
get things back on track in the US economy, which has such a big
impact on crypto. Absolutely. Now on this chart here to you're showing I
see Ethereum and XRP are in the black and they're non the red. This
is obviously looking over the past seven days. What does that mean. Is
it mean like it's more neutral, you know, as far as a performance
versus the previous week. Yeah. Just as a clarification, so this is
social volume up here. This is the amount of discussion related to ethereum being
four point six percent higher this past week than the week prior. So it's
good to see that they're getting a little bit more discussion. I'm pretty sure
for ethereum it was related to the ETF discussions that had been going on in
late April, the report that the SEC was likely going to reject it.
But you look at the price returns they're down three point four percent in the
past week, doing a little bit better than Bitcoin actually, and that XRP
is pretty much right at neutral, down point two percent. So let's talk
about the all coin market as a whole. What are you seeing there?
Obviously, the all coin market moves with Bitcoin right for the most part.
Bitcoin pumps liquidity flows down to the alt But what are you seeing overall for
the all coin market. Yeah, let's take a look at a few of
these. I'll open up some different watch list segments that we have. We
have Layer twos here, which is one of the few that's actually up over
the past week, largely due to optimism the asset. It's had a very
strong week. Meme coins are down significantly, real world assets down. We'll
just take a look at those three. Unless you can see any others here
that might be of interest. I think meme coins, layer twos and real
world assets are perfect. Yeah, and and there's been some timely news around
that too. I think yesterday black Rock their fund tokenized on I think ethereum
it surpassed Franklin Templeton. So we're seeing some move on interesting. Yeah,
that certainly could have an impact on things, but we look at layer twos.
We can see Optimism here up twenty two percent in the past week.
Keep in mind, this is a pretty small sample size of assets. We
only have twenty two that are officially labeled as layer twos, which is about
right. There aren't a ton of them. And then zk Bass here up
fifty six percent over the past week. These two alone, along with maybe
immutable x of ten percent and stark Net up thirteen and a half percent.
These are the four assets and Garment are gaming. Excuse me I should say
also up thirteen These five assets are really the reason that the layer two sector
has done pretty well. I'm especially interested to see how far zk base can
go because it's been on one heck of a ary lately. And Optimism,
if I'm not mistaken, I think I saw it in the sentiment developer data.
I think it was like at the number one spot right As far as
developer activity, yeah, let's take a quick detour and look at the top
ten list right now. Just to mention how our development activity metric works.
We look at the projects that are seeing the most notable daily activity in terms
of their githubs, so we automatically exclude some of the more mundane routine things
that happen in a GitHub, such as you know, slack updates or an
automated discord message that might sneak in there, And we only look at things
that are truly showing that there is innovation and improvement being conducted and effort going
into the project. But we actually have I can show it on our tab
here wildloads. This article is really awesome as it kind of shows how our
GitHub tracking works and really there are things we look for when it comes to
an asset seeing high development. If they are seeing high development, it means
that people behind the project believe the project will be successful. Sounds implied,
but that's a good thing, and not all people behind projects believe that.
Another thing is the project is shipping out more features, hence the innovation and
improvement they're attempting. And then most importantly for a lot of people, they
want to see in that high development that it's it's indicative of less probability the
project is going to end up being a rug pull or some kind of exit
scam. You don't see a team that's just actively working on improving if they're
planning to run for the hills and take your money with them, right.
That's an important fact that I think a lot of people overlook. So just
ten days ago we updated this countdown for our community and we showed that there
were several risers on this top ten list. You can see Optimism as you
mentioned at the number one spot, Aardna right behind it at number two.
Aadera has actually crossed the top three. A little less discussed than most,
but it has risen significantly in mark cap rank. As of late Polka Dot,
which actually shares its repository with Kusama, so these two will always be
paired. They're at the number four and five spot even know a year ago
they were actually the leaders, So they've fallen off just a tiny bit,
but certainly still plenty of activity on a daily basis. Chain Link, which
has a big community on x and Twitter, they're at number six status at
seven, Ethereum at eight, Internet Computer and Cosmos round out the top the
top ten here. So in essence, if you have these projects in your
portfolio, it doesn't necessarily mean they're going to be the best performers in crypto
for the indefinite future. It simply means these projects, notably have teams that
are making extra effort to improve their projects and make it a viable project to
be part of the crypto ecosystem and its future. So I certainly consider it
a viable strategy to mix in some assets that are among the top ten in
your portfolio because they're essentially safer bets than most to perform well. And you'll
notice by the market cap rank, it's not coincidental that most of these are
top forty, top fifty projects here because the Korean tends to rize the top.
And if you're a project that is actively working on keeping up with the
times and improving, you're going to see results long term most of the time.
And a lot of people kind of view it as chicken or the egg,
like they become successful projects and then suddenly they have a bunch of work
done. It's usually the other way around. They have teams that are comprehensively
working from the get go and then they see the results over time. Yeah,
that's a great insight. And as an investor, I'm looking at this
data from sentiment and like I hold Hbar, I have some Cardano Polkadat in
my portfolio as well as Chainlink. You know, I may want to look
at optimism, right, it seems like their team is doing a lot of
work here, and to your point, it shows that this is not some
rug pull fly by night project. They're actually trying to build things. There's
a lot of activity, So it's one of the validation metrics that you can
use exactly. Validation is a great word for it. You can do your
own research on projects you like, but one thing that will help give you
an extra boat of confidence is seeing that they've got notably high development activity like
these ten here. Awesome. Yeah, we could jump back into those those
alf coin segments too while we're at it, So we touched on layer twos.
Taking a look at meme coins. They have been pretty hammered as of
late. Obviously the past twenty four hours everything is looking pretty good. But
if I go to the past week, we can see that there's more projects
that have really dropped than projects that have actually done well. You can say,
see Pepe is still done okay, but dosee coin down six percent in
the past week. Sheiba down five percent. The actual meme coin meme is
notably down as one of the biggest losers. Milady meme coin. There's some
goofy names in here. But yeah, I mean there's a few sessions.
There always are SPX sixty nine hundred up significantly real smurf cat. I have
a tough time saying these names seriously, but no, they have real investors,
so I don't want to discount them. You can see very clearly that
it's kind of a dropping sector at the moment, with very little discussion.
You can see even Pepe that's up this past week has eighteen percent less social
volume to it than the week prior. Yeah, it's passing because uh,
you know, obviously we talked about the correlation with bitcoin. As bitcoin moves,
you know, it's the rising tide, the lips all boats. But
when it starts to drain, you know, liquidities flowing out also going to
bleed as well. So I think meme coins are bleed bleeding off of that.
But you know, it's it's all liquidity, so once it starts coming
back in, these memes can run again. But I would rather see that
the list of all coins that we just looked at on the developer lists actually
move versus meme coins. But hey, that's just my opinion. I don't
control market. We'll notice there is not a lot of development activity among meme
coins, almost all have none or very slim amounts. So that's the nature
of meme coins. They're they're there to be speculative assets that are kind of
crowd driven and kind of like the the game Stop and AMC's of the world
in equities. These are the kinds of coins that move most notably when the
crowd wants them to move and when they get a large contingency of people who
come together and either dump or accumulate these coins, kind of like we saw
with Dog with Hat over the past six months, it just went on an
incredible rise due to a ton of support from you know, niche communities that
decided they wanted to pump it up for sure. And you know, I
guess the one meme coin I saw there on that chart was like Dose had
like one point one percent developer activity. At least it has something exactly.
And I do want to say there there are probably a few githubs here that
aren't fully connected, so there could be some other ones that are trickling in.
But if we did connect them their GitHub repositories, assuming they're not here
yet, they would be pretty slim. So keep that in mind. That
dose coin probably is not the only one that has more than zero. They're
just not priorities for us because we know they're not going to have numbers on
a daily basis that look much different than this one for doschcoin. Sure,
awesome, Maybe you could take a look at RWAs Yeah. Perfect. Yeah,
the real world assets, we have forty seven or so on this list,
which is a pretty good sample size, and they give us an idea
of how the sector is doing on a daily basis. We have a few
standouts like Cleima Dow of thirty six percent in the past week, Goldfinch up
fifteen percent. The highest cap that's notable as Ribbon Finance up a little over
seven percent. But you can see again it's mostly just bleeding from this sector,
even though it had been doing quite well during March especially, and then
everything has kind of taken a They took a big flush in April, and
overall the market cap is down four percent at this time, while volume is
actually up compared to the previous week. So it's doing a little worse than
the average ald coin sector. But I know that real world assets still have
a heavy amount of interest, and this could be more than like just a
regression to the mean because of the strong early part of the year that a
lot of these assets had. Yeah, agreed, And look, I've often
remind my listeners, like nothing goes up in a straight line. That markets
can just go up like a rocket ship forever. It has to be pullbacks,
building support levels and then you know, testing resistance levels and so forth.
So normal. You know, when you align this data with the charts,
it just shows you see a clearer picture. Yeah, so ald coin
wise, you know, there could be this is a good segue. Actually,
there could be an argument that we see a bit of a rise here.
You can see on this chart there's a ton of underbought signals firing off
because they took such a hit over the past five six weeks or so.
Even though bitcoins, you know, staying afloat up at sixty one to sixty
two K at the time of this recording, all coins took a pretty big
beating during this time, and that's why you see these underbot signals. This
is a measurement of mid term returns for the average traders. So we combine
thirty day, ninety day, and one hundred and eighty day returns of the
average wallet for each of these assets, and the further up it is in
grain here, that's how underbought the asset is. If it goes below the
zero, which there are very few of them, that means that they are
overbought because there have been major positive returns toward those specific assets, so you
know, eyeballing it. Ninety ninety five percent of these assets clearly are showing
underbot signals right now. And assuming Bitcoin can kind of stabilize and range a
little bit, I wouldn't be surprised to see at least a little bit of
an ald coin relief rally coming up here in May. Oh yeah, like
they certainly see that as well. Many of these coins hard to bounce,
so uh, that's a lot of coins that are, yeah, under bought.
Specific one europe network looks notably underbought. Very few people are discussing these.
You'll notice the ones that are getting the least attention are some of the
ones that are most underbought because they've been underperformers for so long that they've just
kind of been left in the dust. But FRAC shares up there bela protocol.
We've got audious clover and Chromia ethernity chain These are a lot of assets
way outside the top one hundred, but they're they're not like you know,
one thousand and lower assets either. There's some that I guarantee a lot of
people watching this have heard of and they've gone, oh yeah, what about
that asset. Well, they've been getting crushed, which is why they are
showing such severe underbought signals right now, indicating that mathematically there's an argument that
they could be goodbyes if the markets kind of stabilize out from here. This
is great data. This is something I need to pay more attention to see.
What are some of these opportunities that could jump into Definitely, Yeah,
we can go over this kind of chart anytime. It's one of my favorite
models on sentiment, and everyone on our pro membership roster has access to it.
I know, one of the other big things, and I know we
didn't have it on our list. But like AI tokens, those are bleeding
too, right, I mean along with the rest of the all coins.
Yeah, yeah, not as badly as they were in April. They're saying
a little bit of a recovery, and I still think there's a lot of
argument that they can outperform most of the sectors as we head into the summer
of the last couple of months. But yeah, AI, they were obviously
the biggest story of the first quarter of the year and then finally saw a
bit of a retrace, expectedly because all markets dropped. But yeah, over
the past thirty days we see that the vast majority have been crushed. There
are a few exceptions. Arc Block has almost doubled in the past thirty days,
and it has really risen up the rankings of AI and big data assets.
T Fuel has actually done quite well. We have fourt Olive and Robonomics,
just as a few others. But you can see for the most part,
you know, some of the big stories of the early part of the
year. Renders down fifteen percent, Tense the graft down twenty percent. Interesting
that NEAR has held up pretty well. They're about break even. I didn't
even know Near was AI theme. I think it's more on the big data
side. Maybe your commenters and specify more specifically. We've got too many assets
where I can be, you know, an expert on every one of them,
but I know that NEAR is in the basket of AI and a big
data ah. Interesting, Yeah, so any any other data items you want
to highlight it looks like you got a big coin chart here. Yeah,
I wanted to highlight how the whales are doing, because we've talked about the
the bearer sentiment a little bit and how the crowd has really started to turn
on crypto and how that can often be a bottom signal. You want to
kind of do the opposite of what the regular normies and the small traders are
are thinking at any given time, while actually following what the sharks and the
whales are doing at any given time. And you can see they started to
take profit in this final week of March here, and prices really started to
plummet as they did. I do think there's a bit of an overreaction in
the price, and it maybe shouldn't be dropping quite as much as it has,
because you can see by the lines I've drawn here there was clear accumulation
that started the last couple of days of January and during let's just say since
January twenty eighth until now. Whilets that hold between ten to ten thousand BTC
have accumulated one hundred and eighty two thousand or so more bitcoin during that time,
and even with the profit taking that they've done since April third. Over
the past five weeks or so, they've only dumped about forty thousand of those,
so we're still in a pretty good long term time frame here in terms
of whale behavior, where they're accumulating more than dumping. It's just a matter
of perspective. Do you want to look at the past three or so months
or just the past five weeks, because the former looks pretty good right now
still in my opinion, Yeah, for sure, it's great to zoom out
and get the context of the macro because in the short term, you know,
data can not tell the whole story. And to your point here,
even though there's a bit of a selloff, the majority of still holding.
And I wonder if you know some of the selling is the ETF's rebalancing.
Look, that's a normal thing with ETFs, and maybe some some of these
folks there was some outflows I think reported by the issuers, so maybe you
know it's a bit of that. Yeah. I had the ETF dashboard,
which is also available on Sentiment Prepared, and we don't have full inflow and
outflow data for everything yet, but we do have it for some This top
chart here just shows the overall amount of volume per day for the top seven
bitcoin ETFs, and notably, we saw a big drop yesterday. This could
have been a good sign of capitulation and traders on the etup side deciding they've
had enough because markets had been bleeding and went down fifty eight k on the
bitcoin side, So we saw easily the lowest amount of volume of the ETF's
existence, at least accounting for these top seven. Yesterday was that day.
I'm very curious to see how it shows at the end of today, once
we get the Friday data going into the weekend, We're going to see if
it stays low or if it rebounded. I would guess it rebounded back to
a normal level of like two to three billion dollars because of the fact that
markets have bounced pretty considerably. But we'll have to wait and see. But
I do think that this yesterday's low volume is a pretty damning sign that there's
some disinterested traders who are bowing out. Now. Yeah, it goes back
to like that sentiment, right, you know, you're the people who really
understand the market cycles and everything are not going to be bothered, right,
and but those who are kind of moving with the prices and and you know
the emotions of it are going to be bothered. So you know, could
that be like the retail or some of the investment advisors I don't know who
are like, oh oh no, I better dump some of this or whatever
because for my clients or whatever it may be. And it could be related
to the the f OMC. There's just a couple of days ago too that
kind of showed that interest rates we're not going to be cut and we'd have
to at least wait until June. Maybe that impacted the traders who were exposed
to the ETFs as well, and they decided to, you know, take
it easy. This is really great stuff, Brian, I love it.
I actually need to grab this ETF to the chart because I didn't know you
guys had this. So I want to book with this because this is really
insightful. Anything else you want to share before we wrap it up. As
a final point, we can just mention what's happening on the social side of
things more granularly, and we do see that trending words. You know,
we have Coinbase here at number three, notably because they had a really great
Q one earnings report that came out overall. I think this is a pretty
nice sign for crypto. Obviously, the US is the most impactful economy for
crypto, and when they have a trusted company that is putting out positive profits
like this, it at least adds to their confidence that we aren't going to
see one of or the leading exchange in the US not having any sort of
FTX type of collapse. You never know for sure, but we at least
when we see this kind of report come out showing that they're doing very well,
it decreases our concerns of big collapse happening, and I think that's good
for crypto. So that's a notable trending word. On number three there,
PayPal integrading with moon pay, I think is an interesting topic. You can
see that being mentioned at number six and number eight. And just as a
reminder, these top ten words are measured by the highest percentage increase in discussion
across social platforms compared to their normal level of discussion. So when you see
Coinbase, which is already talked about a lot, showing up in our trending
words, that means it's being talked about a lot, a lot all of
a sudden mm hmm, yeah, I love I love this data because it
gives me insight maybe as to what you know, maybe happening, whether it's
like coinbase stock price or coinbase doing something major in the market, or a
certain coins doing certain things, whether it be price movement or partnership or some
something like along those lines exactly. It's a great way just to get in
tune with what's driving the market it's and what topics you should be paying attention
to. M HM. And like on the trending coins dashboard here you see
Tether actually at number one. It does look like there was a reported five
billion dollar profit reported, and that's got something to do with why it's being
talked about a lot. And then during any sort of bear cycle like we
had been seeing the last five or six weeks, you tend to see more
interest in whether Tether is holding the amount of funds that they say they are,
and people question its viability as the top stable coin. USD coin often
gets thrown in here as well, so I'm not surprised to see it at
the number one spot. Notably, we have XRP at five and bitcoin at
six, meaning they're getting more discussion even compared to usual and then Etherorium at
number ten here, So all three of those ultra big assets are are in
the top ten at the moment, so there is a lot of focus on
the large caps at this time. M Brian always great stuff. I love
this data. I wish I had more time, and then maybe I need
to make time to just be going through this and to you know, make
better decisions on some of my investments. But you know, some of the
things that I took away from here very helpful, and I'll need to look
into optimism a bit more. Yeah, I'm very interested too, and we
might put out a report about the project, especially considering it's been pumping and
getting a lot of increased crowd interest. But no, I love catching up
with you here, Tony, and I'm looking forward to doing another one in
a couple of weeks. And in the meantime, you know, we just
recommend not overreacting to any sort of big price wings happening, because we've seen
a lot of chopping lately. That's kind of based on anytime people get to
you for it, it just goes back down, and anytime people get too
fearful, it goes back up. So you know, obviously the best moves
are usually in small increments, rather than you know, putting in money or
taking out money that you can't afford. And it would cause you to feel
a lot of remorse if you make the wrong moves, for sure. Good
stuff man, Thank you so much for joining me. Thank you Tony.
Until next time, take care guys,