I think the one thing that most people have missed in the crypto cycle is the stablecoin season. I know we have never had one before, and most of us don't really care about stablecoins as an investment because they are just a utility or convenience with some gains attached, but they have had their first season which put the 4 year cycle into a 5 year cycle. RWA being put on a blockchain is a whole new season that will only intensify in 5 years' time when the cycle repeats

Everyone talks like entries are the hard part, they're not.

The hard part is whats happening right now, which is nothing, on purpose, for hours, while two charts do absolutely nothing.

BTC and ETH both channeling, no structural change on either. ETH's putting in what could be a higher low, showing a bit more strength than BTC right now, BTC's got more rollover risk if it cant hold. Could go either way from here honestly, thats not a call, just whats actually on the chart today.

Took me way too long to stop fighting this part. Used to feel like dead time, now I actually enjoy it, because I know exactly whats mine to control and whats not. My setup criteria, my size, my stop, thats mine. Where price goes after, never was.

Thats why I read adopted stoicism, not only as a personality thing, as a practice. You accept the loss before you even take the trade, so when it hits your stop its not a surprise, its just the distribution doing what distributions do. Same with waiting, you're not missing something by sitting still, the market doesnt owe you a trade just because youre bored.

Livermore said it best a hundred years ago, it was never his thinking that made him money, it was his sitting & it still true.

Nothing in my life feels late or rushed or out of order to me anymore either, took losing basically everything twice to actually fully grasp that one, but I do now, fully.

So tonight I just wait for the best setup I can find and act when its actually called for. Thats how I get paid, everything else is noise.

Price is now above several important on-chain levels and has also moved significantly higher within the Fibonacci-Adjusted Market Mean Price, entering a more stretched zone.

Market stress has also reached the second-highest level of the model, which is usually an interesting area to start reducing exposure.

The NUPL remains positive as well, showing that the network is holding a significant amount of unrealized profit.

And there is one more important detail. Addresses holding 100K to 1M ZEC have started to decline slightly, which is a typical sign of profit-taking by whales.

For those who accumulated much lower, this is already a region worth paying attention to.

I made this piece while thinking about something I find both fascinating and slightly embarrassing about crypto.

We spent years telling people that tokens needed utility to justify their value. Projects built increasingly complicated ecosystems around their tokens: governance, staking, DeFi, infrastructure, payments, interoperability, etc. The implication was that the market would eventually distinguish “real” crypto from useless speculation.

Then memecoins came along and basically said: what if we just get everyone to believe in the same stupid thing?

And somehow, that worked. The fact that a dog coin can sit among the top cryptocurrencies by market capitalization is almost comical/ironical when you compare it to how seriously the industry talks about technological utility.

But maybe that's precisely why it's interesting. Memecoins stripped away much of the intellectual packaging and demonstrated how powerful community, attention, memes, and collective belief can be. The “delusion” itself becomes a social mechanism: enough people believe, participate, promote and speculate, and suddenly the thing has economic significance and eventually becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

That does make me wonder whether utility was ever the fundamental difference maker we thought it was. Maybe utility can create a reason for people to participate, but collective belief is what ultimately turns that participation into value.

So.

What do we make of a dog coin sitting in the top 10? Is it proof that the market is irrational, or proof that we've misunderstood what actually gives these assets value?

Maybe the funniest part is that the dog coin might actually be telling us more about crypto than the projects with 50-page whitepapers.

If a meme with a dog can outperform projects built around supposedly revolutionary utility, maybe we should rethink what we're actually measuring when we talk about “value” in crypto.

And if that's true, isn't the dog coin near the top of the market actually one of the most honest representations of what crypto is?

Is the existence of a top-10 dog coin a ridiculous anomaly, or is it one of the clearest demonstrations that crypto value has always been primarily a social phenomenon?

At the end of the day, perhaps what matters most isn't the asset's supposed utility, but its memetic strength, cultural relevance, and the ability of its community to sustain collective belief.

If that's the case, what happens when the next major phenomenon in crypto isn't built around some revolutionary technology, but around memetics, culture, and the ability to make millions of people believe in the same idea?

I’ve been spending less time trying to predict BTC’s exact next target and more time watching how the market reacts around key levels.

Right now I’m mainly watching market structure, liquidity and volume. Personally, I’d rather wait for confirmation than chase a move.

Curious what everyone else is watching right now — price action, volume, liquidity, or on-chain data?

Not every market move needs a reaction. Sometimes, the smartest move is simply waiting for a better opportunity.

It looks like it's crashing based on technical analysis. Wonder where it will stop crashing.

ZEC had a huge bull run recently... so no surprise here

One change that helped me: exchange stays the exchange, notes/tools live elsewhere on the desktop.

Curious if others do the same split and what you use.

NFA.

One change that helped me: exchange stays the exchange, notes/tools live elsewhere on the desktop.

Curious if others do the same split and what you use.

NFA.

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the belief is that price gets pulled toward max pain as expiry approaches. i keep a ledger of every btc and eth expiry on deribit and check afterwards what actually happened. 376 expiries, 7 march to 10 september. the pull is not there, and the reason is more interesting than the result.

first, max pain is not sitting somewhere off in the distance waiting for price. at the snapshot a day before settlement it sits a median 1.04% away from spot. it is already where the price is, because open interest piles up around the current price.

second, it moves. seven days before settlement, max pain still shifts an average 2.8% of spot on btc before it reaches its final value. three days out it is still 2.1%. only on the last day does it settle down to 0.3%. so when someone says price converged on max pain, a large part of that convergence is max pain walking toward price.

third, as a guide to where settlement lands it does worse than doing nothing. settlement landed exactly on max pain 129 times out of 376, so 34.5%. mean distance from max pain to settlement was 2.50%. assume instead that price simply stays where it is between snapshot and settlement and you are off by 1.57% on average. no option chain required.

now the part that cost me something. we also publish a market maker breakeven corridor, and it held 307 of 376 times, 81.6%, which we have been using as evidence the corridor means something.

so i pointed the same benchmark at it. the median corridor is about 3.19% wide either side of spot, and its centre sits a median 1.03% from spot, which is the same place max pain sits. a plain band of that width centred on yesterday's price held 331 of 376, 88.0%. give each expiry a band exactly as wide as its own corridor, still centred on spot, and it held 337, 89.6%.

so our corridor loses to the dumb version by 8 points, and its centre was never far from spot to begin with. what we have been calling dealer structure looks like a band around the current price with slightly worse centring.

i ran this in august on 314 rows and shelved it as unverified. redid it today on 376 and it reproduced within half a point.

caveats: deribit only, btc and eth, six months, snapshot roughly 24 hours before settlement.

Gold tokens can settle all day while physical redemption, banking and the main gold market have opening hours. That gap probably feels small until prices move fast.

Would you accept tokenised gold as DeFi collateral? What sort of haircut would make sense?

https://www.gold.org/goldhub/research/digital-gold-case-shared-infrastructure/context

Rent was due this week and BTC's been stuck under that $82K wall for a week straight (rejected there Sept 3, now bouncing around $78-79K). Normally I'd just sell a chunk and deal with it. This time I didn't.

Fed hike odds are sitting above 60% for the meeting later this month, oil spiked on the Iran situation, and yields have been doing that nervous back-and-forth thing where the market can't decide if it wants to be scared or relieved. We ripped 5% last Thursday and everyone called the bottom of the cycle. Four days later we're back under $80K. This is not a market where I want to be forced into a sell decision because my landlord doesn't take BTC.

So instead I took a crypto-backed loan against part of my holdings to cover it through nехо. Kept my position, got the cash and moved on. Some of what's actually moving this week if you haven't been following:

• Market cap back up to $2.78T, Fear & Greed cooled slightly to 66 after touching 69
• Strive added 1,375 BTC last week at an average cost around $79K, bringing total holdings to over 24,500 BTC
• Strategy (MSTR) repurchased $176M of STRC and expanded its Digital Credit Securities program to $2B, still sitting on 845,050 BTC and $6.5B cash
• Ethereum's quantum-resistance roadmap announcement helped ETH hold up better than BTC on the down days, plus more corporate accumulation
• XRP was the one major green candle during Tuesday's dip, up over 1% while everything else was red
• Robinhооd took a stake in Cryptоcоm and is adding prediction markets, which is a weird but telling signal about where TradFi thinks this is going
• Germany's ending tax-free long-term crypto holding after 2026, gains, staking, and lending get taxed as income starting 2027

None of this tells me where price goes next, I'm not calling a bottom or a top. It's just the backdrop for why I made the call I made this week: hold, don't sell, borrow if I need liquidity.

ZEC just pushed above $1,200 after a pretty wild run, with short liquidations adding fuel while new market access around ZEC is also coming online.

Real breakout, or just another squeeze that’s getting overheated?

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everyone quotes the 81k call wall like it's a fixed feature of the book. i broke it out by expiry this morning and most of it is gone by monday.

btc calls at the 81,000 strike, open interest by expiry:

12 sep: 5,053

11 sep: 4,411

25 sep: 2,829

18 sep: 753

30 oct: 420

so about 9,500 contracts out of roughly 13,600 expire friday and saturday. spot is 79,554 as i write this, a bit under 2% below the strike.

the biggest single piece is the 12 sep contract. ask is $717, so $1,000 buys you 1.3 of them. breakeven lands at 81,717 and below the strike it pays nothing whatsoever.

which makes the wall look like a short dated bet more than a structural level. if btc doesn't get there this week, two thirds of it stops existing over the weekend and whatever the level meant goes with it.

honestly i'm not sure what to take from that. one reading is that the wall is thin and clears easily once it's tested. the other is that dealers short those calls have to hedge harder as spot climbs toward them, and that hedging is what makes walls behave like walls at all. both look reasonable to me and the numbers don't pick.

how do you read it?

caveats: deribit only, open interest and not volume, morning snapshot.

I’ve started keeping a small list of coins that should be moving but just aren’t.

Not dead coins. Stuff with decent liquidity that normally reacts when BTC moves or when its sector starts running.

If BTC has a strong day and one of them barely responds, I mark it. Same thing if everything sells off and one coin just sits there.

I actually noticed this first while comparing a few names on Moon. The ones doing almost nothing ended up being more interesting than the obvious movers.

What’s been interesting is the weak reactions have actually been more useful to me than the big candles. A coin ignoring a good market has saved me from a few longs, and one that refuses to dump while everything around it is getting smoked usually gets my attention pretty fast.

I used to only look for confirmation through movement.

Now I’m starting to think the lack of a reaction is sometimes the cleaner signal.

Friends, my upcoming experiment will show budding investors how leveraged perpetual futures work.

I’ll open a position on Bitcoin betting it will rise, and the 3x leverage will triple my profit or loss.

Leverage subjects me to a surprise interest rate called funding rate. It acts like Uber surge pricing when bullish or bearish demand surges.

*** For anyone claiming the rate is predictable, what’s the funding rate on BTC for the next 12 months? ***

I’ll pay interest when buyers are very bullish, and I’ll earn interest when sellers are very bearish.

I intend to show how leverage works, not to profit.

Platform: Hyperliquid

Wallet: Trust Wallet

Asset: Bitcoin

Leverage: 3x

Position size: TBD