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Our weekly show is hosted by Michael Nadeau (The DeFi Report) and Ryan Sean Adams (Bankless). Each week, we discuss how we approach managing our own portfolio and the data, research, and analytical frameworks that inform those decisions — for educational and informational purposes.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[0:09] Welcome to the DeFi Report. Today's report, why is Bitcoin underperforming gold? That's the one I want to figure out today, Mike. And what's the Bitcoin gold ratio telling us about where Bitcoin might bottom? You guys have to stick around for the end because Mike is going to give us, he's promised to make some price calls on where exactly Bitcoin might end up this cycle, where it might bottom against gold. And also, I think the conclusion might be that this gold setup is mega bullish for crypto. Mike, how you doing?
Michael Nadeau:
[0:44] I'm doing great. Good to see you, Ryan.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[0:46] You too, man. I'm really excited about this. I've been hoping you dig into the topic of gold. I want to set this up for us as we get into today's report. So it has been three and a half months from October 6th, that was around Bitcoin's peak. Gold and silver continue to outperform. And that might be putting it mildly. They are going parabolic. At least that's what it feels like to me. If we look at the one year on some of these prices, as I have done, we see gold is up about 90% on the one year. Silver, which is, I guess, silver to gold's gold, is up 270%. That is eye-watering. That is crypto levels. You compare that to Bitcoin. In Bitcoin, we are down 13%. I think the sentiment was captured quite aptly by Meltem here on Twitter, which is spot the differences between these two pictures. What I'm showing is the market cap of stores of value. You go to 2021 and crypto was $3 trillion, precious metals were $12 trillion. And it looked like crypto was gaining on precious metals. Now you fast forward to 2026, crypto is still $3 trillion at a time when precious metals are now $40 trillion.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[2:08] What happened? Can you make sense of this for us? How does this gold Bitcoin ratio compare to previous cycles?
Michael Nadeau:
[2:16] It's precious metal season out there. That's for sure. And it's been fascinating to watch. It almost looks like we have like an altcoin season happening now with the action we're seeing in silver. Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, when I initially kind of went back and was kind of putting together my thesis for Bitcoin, It's always been that Bitcoin should be able to capture gold's market cap.
Michael Nadeau:
[2:40] And as we've seen over the last few years, gold's market cap is expanding rapidly. And Bitcoin and the total crypto market cap is now kind of flat for the last four years or so. You know, I think there's a lot going on here. And I think people are trying to compare the two assets. Bitcoin, you know, is seen as digital gold. That's sort of, you know, the narrative for Bitcoin.
Michael Nadeau:
[3:03] However, it does not trade like gold. And I think we can kind of get into that in this episode and maybe bring a little clarity, you know, as to why Bitcoin is showing some weakness while gold outperforms. What we did, you know, this report that we're going to go through today, we're kind of zooming out a little bit and just trying to take a look specifically at, you know, gold versus BTC and understand kind of where we're at in terms of that ratio and where it's been in the past. And from my perspective, like what we're seeing is pretty standard and we can kind of get into that. But I think like what's broadly happening in the market is Bitcoin is actually performing relatively well at this stage of the market compared to the past cycle and a cycle before that. We're down about, you know, 30 percent or so about 110 days post the, you know, price peak at the same stage of 21. We were down about 41 percent and we were down about 55 percent at the same stage in 17. So kind of, you know, relatively speaking, Bitcoin's doing fairly well. I think the market feels a lot worse because gold is outperforming, silver is outperforming, stocks are doing well, and sort of there's maybe a little bit of like envy going on out there. So that's I think that's sort of the setup of kind of where we're in the market right now.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[4:28] I guess envy is one of the seven deadly sins for investors, certainly, right? Because it can cause you to chase things and it can cause FOMO. So maybe part of your message is like counter blessings. We're only down 30% in previous cycles, 2021, 2017 bear markets. It was definitely worse. But how about when we look at the Bitcoin versus gold ratio? That's not a ratio that I often look at, particularly on long time horizons. You've got a chart here comparing Bitcoin versus gold. Versus gold. Where are we in position to that?
Michael Nadeau:
[5:04] So right now, that ratio is at about 17 or so. We peaked at about 40 in this cycle, and we peaked at about 37 in the last cycle.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[5:17] And peaking means, for this type of a ratio, peaking, of course, means that Bitcoin is much higher than gold. So when it's high, Bitcoin is higher relative to gold. And when it's low, you know, gold is higher relative to Bitcoin.
Michael Nadeau:
[5:30] Yeah. And there's different ways you can get there. Like in the past cycles, it's looked more like, you know, just outperformance from Bitcoin, whereas gold's maybe just kind of like doing its thing, maybe gaining a couple percent a year or so and Bitcoin is wildly outperforming and then Bitcoin's coming off of that. And that's kind of what we've seen in the past few cycles. And what we've seen in this cycle that's different is, you know, Bitcoin had, I think, a pretty good cycle up, you know, through October.
Michael Nadeau:
[5:58] But we've also seen gold do well at actually outperforming Bitcoin at stages and certainly over the last six months or so. And that's that's kind of what's what's different right now in terms of kind of like zooming out and just kind of where are we at with the relationship between these two assets? Bitcoin is down about, you know, 53 percent. That's rising a little bit because gold is gold is just keeps keeps going up with dollar weakness right now. But Bitcoin is down roughly 53 percent versus gold from that peak that we established earlier in the cycle at 40. You know, how does that compare to where we sort of bottomed, you know, in the past cycles, we dropped 76%. So there was a 76% decline in the BTC to gold ratio in the last cycle. And the one before that was an 83% decline. So kind of zooming out, you know, you kind of look at that and you're like, okay, that actually looks sort of standard in terms of where we would expect that ratio to be. And what I'm trying to do is kind of look forward and say, like, where's a reasonable place where this ratio might bottom?
Michael Nadeau:
[7:08] And what might the price of each asset look like if we kind of get to those levels? So I'm sort of forecasting that we might go... To, you know, maybe a 70% decline or so in this ratio from peak to trow. And that would put us at about 12 or so. We can kind of get into what does that look like for, you know, potential, you know, price targets.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[7:31] Okay, so we're at about 17 now on the ratios that we said. And you think we could get as low as 12, which would be a little bit higher than the troughs of previous cycles. It's really interesting while Peter Schiff is doing victory laps. You could say, hey, look at this price chart and zoom out a little bit, Peter, and have some humility because we are up from about zero on the ratio 10 years ago. So in a decade, we went from zero to 40, now back to 17. But 17 is incredible when you're coming off such a low ratio point there. Let's talk about gold, though, for a minute, because this is part of the story. It's not just that Bitcoin is underperforming. It seems that there is something
Ryan Sean Adams:
[8:16] about gold that just like these markets love it. And I want to find out why from you. Why is gold outperforming in these market conditions?
Michael Nadeau:
[8:27] The way I think of this is I think of gold as sort of like a global, you know, risk off asset. So it's always kind of sniffing out uncertainty on the global stage, whether that's, you know, around monetary policy, whether that's around fiscal policy, whether it's around, you know, geopolitics. You know, if you kind of look back through periods in history where gold has outperformed, it's always sort of come before, you know, major sort of, you know, geopolitical events or major market inflection points. And so it's kind of like the alarm is ringing. It's the alarm bell for global markets. I think that's kind of, you know, what we've been seeing play out. We are in the middle of essentially a restructuring of global trade. There's, you know, a number of countries around the world doing lots of fiscal spending, ramping up military spending. You know, we're in one of these sort of like big inflection points globally. And so it makes sense to me that that gold is kind of sniffing this out. And it's really just uncertainty. Like it performs well during uncertainty. What we've been looking at, you know, using some work from Global Liquidity Index is sort of the participation that we're seeing from kind of the Asian markets, in particular China.
Michael Nadeau:
[9:47] This chart that we're looking at here is the PBOC, Central Bank Liquidity in China and Gold Boyin. And you can see that that chart is, you know, pretty correlated. And it looks like China's playing like an outsized role here in the performance of gold over the last year or so. And, you know, this the big narrative, I think, is like this big, you know, debasement trade. Um, but it almost looks like it's more like a Chinese debasement trade, uh, when you, when you kind of dig into the data a little bit. And I think there's a number of reasons why gold is, is really attractive, um, in, in China right now. And a part of it is, you know, they've been strategically de-dollarizing, you know, they're essentially just not growing their dollar reserves. Um, I think a lot of this has to do with what we saw in 2022 with Russia being sanctioned. And they don't want sort of centralized risk with a large pool of their reserves. And so instead of investing in treasuries, they're buying more gold. Gold does not have an issuer. It doesn't have the same sanction risk, no counterparty risk, and no settlement rail risk. So I think that's driving a lot of the demand there from sort of the central bank.
Michael Nadeau:
[11:08] And then like the other kind of interesting factor, I think, is Real estate has historically kind of served as the like store of value in China markets. And they had a huge bubble in real estate, almost similar to what we saw in the U.S. in 2008. Their real estate bubble peaked in 2021.
Michael Nadeau:
[11:31] And what I think may be playing out here is like gold is becoming the thing that people are investing their excess savings in in China now. And that kind of serves like a few roles within the country. It allows them to kind of keep the capital. If people are investing in gold within China, it's kind of like sopping up a lot of the excess savings and liquidity out there. And it's kind of keeping that contained rather than, you know, capital fleeing the Chinese markets. And so I think they sort of prefer this setup. And it's a combination of the, you know, citizens and the people of China buying gold, but also the central bank as well. And so I think that combination is driving a lot of this so-and-so, you know, so-called debasement trade that's playing out right now.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[12:22] I think that's been the best explainer to me is basically China is primarily driving the gold prices. And I think you're absolutely right. Like what I didn't realize before I started digging into these various kind of monetary things is a nation state and a culture can absolutely bless a particular asset class. Right. So I think in the U.S. quite famously, the blessed asset class is U.S. equities. Right. The stock market shall not go down. Well, in China, previously it had been real estate, and then they had a bubble that popped, and there's no store of value assets. So where are Chinese citizens going to store their value? Well, it seems like the Chinese PBOC has now blessed gold.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[13:01] We're acquiring gold. We want gold. It's not Chinese equities. I mean, they've been pretty flat. They haven't performed very well.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[13:07] And so both the citizens and the Chinese Central Bank is saying gold is now the blessed asset. And they are just bidding on it like there's no tomorrow. Michael Howell actually goes further as I was reading some of his pieces this week. And he makes this point. And I'll summarize it by saying, when China prints money, gold goes up. When the U.S. prints money, Bitcoin goes up. And that's kind of his shorthand way of explaining it. And he's looking at a global liquidity regime where actually the U.S. Is printing, like liquidity is going down from the U.S. Side of things at a time when liquidity is going up on China's side of things. And so gold is going up with it. That could just be the simple explainer. But there's another here, which is like coming from the crypto perspective. You mentioned you rattled off a few things, no issuer, no sanction risk, no counterparty party, no settlement rail that can be blocked. That's why countries like China prefer gold and historically has been a store of value asset. Well, crypto has those attributes too. What about Bitcoin? Bitcoin has that attribute as well.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[14:16] And why aren't the central banks of the world purchasing Bitcoin as part of this trade?
Ryan Sean Adams:
[14:23] I think that's what, at least a little bit, you know, you could do 80-20, something like that. It doesn't seem to be happening right now. Why?
Michael Nadeau:
[14:31] Yeah, I think it's too early for this to happen for Bitcoin, just in the maturity of the asset itself. I mean, we do have the strategic reserve in the US now, and they're not necessarily buying Bitcoin. They're just sort of holding seized assets.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[14:49] They're just not selling what they have.
Michael Nadeau:
[14:50] Not selling. They're just not selling, exactly. And so that's a step in the right direction. And We've seen some, you know, sovereign wealth funds, you know, we've seen things, you know, some countries like El Salvador, right, using Bitcoin, but not like on a large scale. And, you know, Bitcoin is more of a risk off assets, a gold, sorry, risk on asset. Gold is risk off, Bitcoin's more risk on, and it's just trading, you know, through adoption cycles, it's trading through liquidity flows. I agree with what you're saying there from Michael Howitz. It kind of responds more to U.S. Liquidity, which has been rolling over. You know, on-chain reflexivity, just sort of the growth and adoption of technology and the internet generally. I think those are kind of the primary drivers of Bitcoin.
Michael Nadeau:
[15:39] And so, you know, it's just not going to trade the same way that gold does. And for Bitcoin to become, you know, the risk off asset that I think a lot of us have a thesis for, including myself, I just think it takes time and it just needs to continue to prove itself and mature as an asset. And it's also like a big demographic, a lot of demographics at play here because crypto, Bitcoin are generally more supported by younger generations as these generations, you know, move into leadership positions within governments, within, you know, large, large corporations. I think this is this is eventually going to play out where it becomes more a more preferred asset for, you know, as a risk off asset.
Michael Nadeau:
[16:22] I think that's what's necessary to kind of get on that same stage with gold.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[16:28] So we're just not there in the adoption cycle. I actually adapted this graph for ETH, but I basically stole it from Bitcoiners, which is, you know, macro assets have to go through an adoption cycle. And right before they get to central banks, it's the large institutions, it's the pension funds. For Bitcoin, we're somewhere there, right? And you think it's going to take maybe millennials, maybe a generational change to actually propel this for central banks to start acquiring Bitcoin. I mean, it's still not two decades old, right? I mean, it's a pretty young asset in the scheme of things. Let's talk about where this Bitcoin gold ratio might bottom because all price starts, you know, they bottom at some point. And it doesn't look like the energy is going away from gold anytime soon. And you got to tell me if it's going to come back to Bitcoin. But what are the numbers? What do the numbers look like if we get that kind of 70% decline in the Bitcoin gold ratio? Throw something at us.
Michael Nadeau:
[17:32] Yeah, that would get us down to about 12. And like, you know, my base case is that we do establish, you know, a higher low, you know, I would start to become concerned if we dropped, you know, below sort of where we established that low, you know, in the last cycle. That's, that's not the base case.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[17:49] And where was that low? That low was like.
Michael Nadeau:
[17:50] What, like 10 or something? It was down to nine. Yeah, we're down to nine. We're at like 17, you know, roughly right now. So I'm thinking we may go down to 12. That would be a 70% decline. It was a 76% decline in the last cycle. And then just trying to figure out like, what does that look like, you know, in terms of the price of these assets? My sort of biased view here is I think Bitcoin, you know, still has some more weakness to come here. And so I'm sort of thinking, okay, if gold, Gold could potentially keep moving. It looks like that's going to be the case, at least right now. So if you had gold go up to 70K and Bitcoin drops- 70K?
Ryan Sean Adams:
[18:26] Do you mean- Sorry, 6K.
Michael Nadeau:
[18:28] Okay. 6K for gold.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[18:29] I was like, wait a second here.
Michael Nadeau:
[18:32] 6K for gold. And then, you know, maybe you get a 20% drop for Bitcoin. You know, that gets you to 12, you know, that ratio of 12. That'd be one way you could get there.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[18:41] That would be a $6,000 gold price and $70,000 Bitcoin price. $6,000, of course, per ounce. Right now, it's what? I saw it hit $5,200.
Michael Nadeau:
[18:49] Per ounce, which is like an all-time amount. Yeah, congrats to the gold bugs out there. You've been waiting a while. Exactly.
Michael Nadeau:
[18:57] So, you know, that's one scenario. If gold starts to kind of lose steam here and it gets to $5,500, then to get to that 12 ratio, you're looking at a $65,000 Bitcoin or so, which is kind of, you know, these are sort of, you know, where we think Bitcoin might be heading, if gold just kind of stagnates and you might get to like a 60K BTC, if gold were to show weakness, that would potentially be more weakness for Bitcoin, I think. And that's where you get those lower targets on Bitcoin. If we kind of extrapolate this out a little more and we say, okay, well, that's the base case. What if it actually comes all the way down to where we went to last cycle and it does that on gold strength, so gold gets up to 6.5K or so, then you're looking at like a 65K BTC We ran a few different scenarios here, but trying to get an idea of where we could potentially bottom. The other thing is both assets could potentially at some point roll over together. We could see a blow off top in gold and silver and they start to roll over together. You get a 20% decline in Bitcoin, maybe gold drops 10%. That's another possibility here. So we'll see. We'll see. I mean, it's interesting to watch this play out.
Michael Nadeau:
[20:23] And it's all leading to like an interesting setup.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[20:26] Well, let's talk about that setup because there are two ways to kind of interpret this, right? With the meme I was showing earlier, the market cap, you know, $3 trillion in crypto for store value assets versus $12 trillion in 2021. And now we're still, crypto is still at $3 trillion and gold is at $40 trillion. And there's a bearish way to interpret this and I'll give you that and allow you to respond and then you tell me how you interpret it. The bearish case is, Mike, this is our moment, okay? And so institutions and ETFs and we've got a new crop of buyers from last cycle and we are supposed to be, Bitcoin is in particular, the risk-off asset, right? The asset that goes up and follows gold on the way up And what's happening now when gold and silver are far outperforming crypto. And by the way, silver is an interesting story here because I don't recall silver being at play in previous down market cycles. That seems somewhat new and it's absorbing some of the energy, right? It's like.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[21:29] If gold is gold and like, you know, Bitcoin is silver to gold's gold, right? Well, no, actually, it looks like silver is taking that place. Silver is actually, you know, the silver to gold in this case. And so what if the meme breaks here? What if the narrative does not follow in, you know, is not reflected in price? And investors look at this and they say, why am I holding this digital gold asset when it's underperforming actual gold? It must not be real. And when you're dealing with a mimetic asset like a Bitcoin and all crypto assets, there's a reflexive loop here, right? And so if that narrative gets broken, we could be in somewhat of a downward spiral. That's maybe the bear case. What's your take on this? What's this setup look like to you?
Michael Nadeau:
[22:20] I think, you know, I think that all makes sense to me as like, the longer this goes on, the longer gold shows strength, and silver in particular, and I think there's actually probably a decent amount of like speculative crypto traders that are now, you know, participating in the silver markets. And so I think the setup, like to me, the longer this goes on and the longer Bitcoin shows weakness in these conditions where people are getting really frustrated that this is supposed to be Bitcoin's moment and it's not really happening, especially, you know, we're seeing more dollar weakness here. You know, I think it kind of creates that setup that I'm looking for, for sort of like the market getting a little bit off sides. Because I think this is like kind of what I'm looking for is sort of sentiment to get so sour that there's sort of like a capitulation where people, because you're right, Bitcoin's a very mimetic asset. That the narrative can really start to take over. And if people are really starting to sour on it and the price is kind of coming down and gold's holding its ground or doing well,
Michael Nadeau:
[23:31] We could start to see some interesting narratives start to form. We've seen this, right? We've seen what happens at the bottoms of markets. It tends to get pretty ugly. So if you saw Bitcoin's price starting to converge towards MicroStrategy's cost basis, which is around $75K, as this is playing out, you can imagine the FUD that's going to be in the market. We've already seen this, I'm not going to call it FUD, I think it's legitimate concern around quantum computing.
Michael Nadeau:
[24:01] And, you know, there's sort of like a, to me, this is more of a perception risk than like actual risk right now. But there is a little bit of perception risk here, especially with the way that the Bitcoin core developer community has sort of kind of hand waving at this concern when we're seeing investors show some concern around that. So that's something that's sort of building under the surface a little bit. You know, we mentioned the dollar, you know, weakening here. Gold is responding really well to that. If Bitcoin keeps stagnating,
Michael Nadeau:
[24:33] You know, this just sort of adds to this angst, I think, in the market. And we know that the Clarity Act and, you know, regulatory progress is already kind of stalling here and getting pushed out. So we need that to get done. And that's a potential big catalyst for crypto.
Michael Nadeau:
[24:49] The other thing I'm looking at is just the Bitcoin hash rate right now. So it's already kind of come off a little bit from the highs. It started declining back in October, November area. It's down about 15%. So that's signaling to me that the miners are starting to come under some stress. They have to shut off their machines when the cost to mine Bitcoin rises above the price. They've got operational costs. They've got debt that they need to service. And so that can lead to potential, not only shutting off of their machines, but potentially selling Bitcoin to cover that and stay alive. So to me, it's like, you know, that's not a setup that if you're bullish right now, you want to hear, but it's a potential that there's a potential for this kind of like building under the hood. I think right now we would need a catalyst, I think, to kind of get to this direction that I think we're going. But if this does start to play out, I think like these fair value targets that that we've been eyeing and some of the metrics that we're looking at in terms of tracking how we get there, we could start to see us start to kind of converge into those areas. That's kind of like the fat pitch that, you know, we like to see. So there's no guarantee, but this is kind of like a setup that I'm thinking is there's potential for this right now.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[26:08] By the way, I can't wait for the DeFi report article entitled The Fat Pitch. When it's finally here, I'll be very excited for that. So I guess maybe your way of seeing this, this graphic is now that that precious metals is $40 trillion, that's all total available market cap for crypto to expand to.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[26:28] And I guess from that lens, if you get the timing right, this is very bullish for our crypto assets. You just think not yet, because there's a part of me that looks at like what silver's doing and what gold's doing And it's just like, all right, well, the fat pitch is here because we have just expanded from like, you know, 12 to 20 trillion to 40 trillion. And now quite obviously, crypto is a store of value asset, digital store of value asset is going to catch up there. So it's time, it's time to deploy. But you think that's not going to happen overnight. Can you talk a little bit about some of the on-chain metrics that we review every once in a while on the DeFi report? So things like net inflows that you're looking at, spot volume, any signs of life in those metrics?
Michael Nadeau:
[27:14] Yeah. You know, we're kind of in no man's land, I would say, right now. We're sitting above very, you know, key support levels around 80K or so. So that's a critical support zone at 80K. And then there's some support around 93K or so. So we're kind of like in a no man's land right now. Interesting to see which direction we move. But we're looking to try to see if there's any shift occurring, you know, within on-chain data. And a lot of the data we look at, what we're seeing is like, you know, there was some demand for the ETFs to start the year. But it's reversed. And so those have turned into net outflows on the ETF side. So that's something we're looking at in terms of just institutional interest. And we're looking to see net inflows there. Just looking at volumes on chain, volumes are weak right now. It's just signaling not a ton of interest in crypto. And then long-term holders are still exiting. So that has not flipped positive just yet. And then just zooming out a little bit on the charts, So that's not a pretty chart if you're a technical analyst right there where we've kind of broken that key bull market support.
Michael Nadeau:
[28:30] It doesn't mean we have to drop down like we did in the last cycle. But I think that's kind of like the base case would be weakness and Bitcoin has to prove itself for me to kind of like come out of this stance that we could be heading lower. So I think that's kind of like what I'm seeing with the data and stuff. And then you have the narratives that are sort of like brewing under the surface and like just more and more attention going towards gold and precious metals and just less interest in crypto.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[29:03] When it comes to that fat pitch Bitcoin price, I mean, talked about, that's the asset that you rotate into once you see the fat pitch. Chris Berninski, who's been kind of right on in previous cycles, and I know, similar to you, quite honestly, Mike, in terms of the price calls and the timing of it, he gave these numbers. So he says, I'm not a buyer yet, but if I were a buyer, the areas to watch for Bitcoin are 80K, That was the November 25 low. That was the local low of the bear. 74K is another key. That was April 2025. That was the tantrum tariff. We hit another number. He thinks his key is 70K. That would be the top of the 50 to 70K range, which would be near the 2021 high. 58K, which is, I know, a metric that you like, the current 200-week simple moving average. and on-chain cost basis. And then 50K and below, that's the bottom of the weekly range. Psychological pain before that, that's where you really get the death of Bitcoin calls once again. You know, Michael Saylor, he's an idiot. The economist is calling him out. All of these things happen when you get to those types of numbers. What do you think of these numbers? Chris says he's not making a move until he sees something in this range of 50 to 80K. What do you think of this?
Michael Nadeau:
[30:30] Yeah, I think Chris is a fantastic analyst and I'm pretty aligned with him on these key support zones right now. So to me, the main thing that I'm looking at is like the 80K line. You know, it's possible we've sort of seen, you know, a big retracement, which is what I would expect, you know, as we sort of break the cycle. We came down to roughly 80K, low 80s, and that was sort of we sort of were oversold at that point. And we've since seen a little bit of a counter trend rally that got us close to 100K. We didn't quite get there. And now we're back into sort of the no man's land below that sort of 93K support above 80. So the next big sort of move here, I think, is going to be to see whether or not we break down from 80K. We already had the sort of retracement that I would be looking for to get back to 100. And we failed there. It's possible that, you know, we're just taking a break and we're going to try to go back up there. So that's another, that's certainly a possibility where we try, failed, and maybe make another run at that. That's possible. The other scenario is potentially, you know, weakness, and we'll see if ADK like really gets bid up and that's kind of like the barrier there. So that's something I'm definitely watching for.
Michael Nadeau:
[31:52] And, you know, we've seen some other assets that we've been tracking pretty closely performing quite well over the last week or so. Hype is up quite a bit. We covered them last week. You know, maybe we should have been buying Hype last week. It's up, I think, almost 50%. The way I think of that is like, again, that to me, that looks like sort of, you know, a local oversold levels that it was at. It's now kind of rallying off those. And it'll be interesting to see if it kind of starts to establish a higher support zone there and if it can hold up if there's more weakness from BTC. So something I'm watching for, but it's a positive sign for me for an asset that I like to be showing, you know, a lot of strength like this and kind of a risk off environment.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[32:41] I was going to ask you about this maybe as we bring this to a close. So, you know, hype is up. It's up, you know, 50% or something on the week. And you wrote about this, but your entire thesis for how you're deploying capital is you got to wait for the cycle, right? And you rotate into Bitcoin first. So you're being patient with something like hype. But there is the possibility here, Mike, that some of these assets, maybe a hype, for instance, could trade counter cyclically. And the reason could be quite simple, which is hype isn't just crypto assets. It's also assets. You could have perps on gold or real world assets. And so if there's a bull market somewhere, perps and fees could be generated and this could feed into hype. So it might trade counter-cyclically to something like a Bitcoin. And if you wait too long for that, you might miss it, an asset that I know you like. Are you worried about this? Or is this where the DeFi report,
Ryan Sean Adams:
[33:38] your patience has to kick in and do some legwork?
Michael Nadeau:
[33:41] Always worried. Always got to be paranoid, you know, investing in the market. So, yeah. So I think it's fair. And it's something we highlighted in our report that we published, that real world assets are like the number three, you know, volume traded thing now on hype. And this is this became a narrative last week. And there's some pretty good data on it. So I think this is driving, you know, more speculation from crypto natives right now. Is this going to sustain if we're in a risk-off environment with not a ton of interest in crypto and Bitcoin in particular? My base case is probably not. However, I'm open-minded to this idea that we could see dispersion. As crypto markets mature, we should see assets that have strong token economics, that have strong fundamentals, potentially just sort of separate from Bitcoin at periods. We have seen this previously as well. Something I'm keeping an eye on, I tend to think it will show weakness if we do get more weakness in Bitcoin itself and just liquidity conditions within crypto continue to dry up. But definitely something, you know, to keep an eye on.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[35:00] If you guys want to follow these reports, we do these on a weekly basis, of course. That's at the defireport.io. If you're not subscribed, make sure you subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. We'll be talking about more of this as things continue. And of course, got to let you know, none of this has been financial advice, but thanks for following the defireport. Stay curious. We'll see you next week.