186. How High Can This Crypto Bull Run Really Go?

Welcome back to another episode of the Ben and Bergs podcast. I'm Ben, your favorite high school dropout and founder of Collective Shift. Alongside me as Bergs, your favorite MBA and CEO of Collective Shift. Join us as we bring you world class crypto research and strategies to help you dominate this crypto bull market as well as behind the scenes view of our scaling the best crypto research company here in Australia. And if you like the podcast, we'd love for you to leave us a follow on your favorite podcasting app or give us a subscribe if you are on YouTube and sorry for being a week between episodes. Bergs, I got absolutely knocked out in the Philippines. Hit for six, mate.

Mate, you landed almost instant food poisoning. Oh, it's bad.

So got in yesterday. We're here in Melbourne. Burgs has flown over. You know, I've had to see him in real life, which is, you know, unfortunate for me, but I'll deal with it. I'll deal with it.

This guy. Let's talk about how dramatic you were in the Philippines, mate. You sent us it. You sent us a little video. You're in your room in your little dressing gown. You got like a nurse and a doctor next to you, like, oh, no good, mate. You can't just ride out a bit of gastro like everyone else. You have to call in the big guns, mate.

It wasn't just gastro, mate.

It's such a sook.

There was fluids coming out of places you don't want fluids to come. It was bad.

Trust you to cop that, mate. As soon as you land, just cop it. And we've got a massive week in Melbourne and Ben's like, oh, there's a spare three days. I'm gonna go to the Philippines. Why not? I'm like, mate, you're not gonna make it back in time. It's ridiculous. Oh, no. I could do a Mac and do everything. I'll take my podcasting gear. It's gonna be amazing. Don't worry about it. Did. No meetings, no podcasts, Absolutely nothing. Classic Ben Simpson.

I did have a big day of work on Saturday. I was feeling a bit better from my, from my bedroom. It was actually good because I didn't have to meet with you. Just could just get some work done.

Yeah, because that'll make up for it, mate. Yeah, br.

And all I've heard about is how bitcoins at 71,500, mate.

And that is exactly what we're talking about. So today, folks, bitcoin has flown through 70,000. We're only at 67,000 yesterday and today at time recording, we're at 71,300. By the time this episode comes out, who knows what's going to happen? So we wanted to do an episode today on how high can this crypto bull market really go? And this is always a much fun episode to do when the market's going up. Burges, because you can talk about this when the market's going down, it doesn't really seem realistic, but when it's pumping like it is today, just gets a little pepper in the step.

It's actually happening, mate.

It's actually happening. I was here before the show literally hitting the refresh button, going, holy hell, we're on the way up. Bergs is trying to keep, keep the reins on, but as I reminded him, I am 100% exposed to this market. And this is a very exciting when it's, when it's paying out.

You did remind me how dialed in you are, Ben, how long you've been waiting for this? 17 years. Crypto.

I've been waiting 40 years for this.

Before I was even, even a thought, I was thinking about this moment.

Amazing. Now, I know this means a lot to you, mate.

The business, everything, all the clients, everything's everything. All your investments. So super excited. So we wanted to talk about what are some actual, you know, realistic price targets to help you with your sales strategy and actually understanding where this could go. So we're going to just focus on Bitcoin Ethan Soul today. Looking at some of the data to help you think about these projections is really important because it can kind of give you an understanding of, you know, where things are going. So I think the first thing to just remember, and this is a classic old, you know, retail thought Bergs is the classic unit bias. And all I think about, when I think about this is the. Is the XRP army, right, who have been holding onto their hopes and dreams for goodness knows how long and yet do they realize that this, this asset is not going anywhere and hasn't gone anywhere for four years. And that idea of, you know, when XRP hits $10 or when it hits $20 is just ludicrous because that's not how it works.

All it has to do, mate, is go from like whatever it is now 3 bucks to 20 bucks. That's all it has to do, Ben.

They've been saying it for seven years. It's just done absolutely nothing. So literally for XRP to hit $20, its market cap would have to literally get to about 1.1 trillion, which is nearly the current size of bitcoin, which is nuts, right? So just remember that unit bias, it doesn't matter how much the token is, it makes zero difference. It's about the market cap, right? So how high will the majors get? Well, if we look at the last three bull markets, let's just start at the market cap burg. So the first cycle back in 2012 we went from 44 million to 14 billion, 33,000% increase. Right. I think those days are quite, quite, quite over.

They're very behind us.

They're very behind us. But you know, it was, it was a lot, right? The 2016 cycle we went from 8 billion to 800 billion. So nearly a 10,000% increase. But more, more recently, the last cycle, the 2020 cycle where we went from 200 billion to 3.1 trillion, a 1400% increase, right. So based on the current bottom market cap hitting around that 800 billion this cycle, when the FTX bottom, if we account for the total 500% growth, well then the market cap of this cycle hit around 5 trillion. So using this as like a just a basic moderate base case, we think that a 500% increase is moderate which will get us about that 4.8 trillion optimistic being 700% get us to 6.4 trillion or a conservative 300%. Now if we, we overlay that as one just previous, you know, factor and we also look at things like the market cap dominance at the peak which was previous cycles. We look at the previous all time high growth to all time high growth and we look at the average expert projection based on our team and sort of collate these. If we look at bitcoin based on the four different projection types, we are sitting somewhere around that potential market cap target of bitcoin of somewhere between that 2.5 trillion to 3.4 trillion, which would sit us at somewhere between 140,000 US and 180,000 US which I think is pretty, pretty likely. Now we're not going through all the sort of details of how we come up with that. But you know, the most basic projection would be just bitcoin hits the 60% dominance at that 5 trillion market cap and we look at those sort of previous all time high to all time high growth, which is probably one of the most realistic ones. So if we look back at 2020 at the market cap peak of 1.3 trillion, we had about a 310% growth. I think this cycle we're probably optimistically are going to have around that 150% growth from, from bitcoin. So from a bitcoin perspective, I think moderately, as I said, we're looking at about, I'm thinking around that 150,000 US dollar level. I think that's probably what most people are thinking. I'm definitely going to be taking profits leading up to that point. Bergs. I'm not going to be waiting for that because I think a lot of people are going to be waiting for that number. But yeah, I think that's, that's just a simple projection based on four different projection types that sort of spat out that number. Are you thinking the same?

Definitely, man. I'm, I've said for a While around that 150k mark, that's a target for me. I think we will reach that. I actually think we'll exceed that now just based on everything that's happened and we're already halfway there to that target. So, you know, you double your money if you invest now.

I think so. I've been in Melbourne, I've been here a few days, talked to our analysts and yeah, it's kind of a meme where it's like we're still early but we really, really are. These things are going to stay. I've been talking to a lot of people recently and I think we're going a lot higher than that. But I will start offloading around the 150k mark for sure.

Yeah, I think, I think for those that haven't been in a bull market or it's been a while, like it's, it's important to remember these things in a bull market. It happens quickly, doesn't it? It just all of a sudden, you know, we're at 67 yesterday and now it's 71 and a half today and all of a sudden we're at 83. And then it' you know, it happens that quick.

It does. It's phenomenal. You're going up like, you know, 1, 2, 3, $4,000 a day. And just back to the unit cost bias we talked about previously. Do you want to own XRP or bitcoin? You want to own bitcoin, you don't have to buy a whole bitcoin if you knew you can buy a dollar's worth of it, you can buy $2, $10, you can keep adding to it over time. And the thing we're looking at through all of this is market cap, which is price times quantity, you know, market supply. Bitcoin is definitely the one that you want to own. All eyes on Bitcoin at the moment it's absolutely running and even though we're only talking about the majors now, Ben, just to simplify this episode, mate, what's altcoin season going to be like?

That's another episode because things get pretty interesting there. You know, I think one of the biggest things we need to see for altcoin season really run is obviously Ethereum to really start to perform like the ETH BTC chart has been pretty bleak. I don't really think it's going to start to turn around until after the election. And you know, bitcoin dominance is nearly at 60% at the moment, which is a three and a half year high, which is pretty nuts. Right.

So isn't this interesting? We're not that far off all time highs on bitcoin.

And the elections went next Tuesday. Yeah, Tuesday. So a week away. We're recording on Tuesday. Yeah, mate, yeah, yeah, it's all going to happen.

We're praying for a Trump election from, from a crypto perspective. I don't know about the rest of the world, but for crypto it's going to be super bullish.

I think even just the clarity of having a win, the market can stop focusing on it and we can move on.

Yeah, if you look at the last three elections leading up to it's always been choppy but then post election things have really opened up. So let's look at Ethereum. So a couple of less cycles under its belt, so a little bit less historical data to look at. But I think a lot of people are looking at that $10,000 level as the level where people are going to try and take profits or start to sell. But a lot must go right to get there. We'd essentially need, based on the market caps that we were projecting, Ethereum's dominance would need to hit 25% in an optimistic case and you know, roughly pro most probably around that 15 to 20% market share. So if Ethereum was to get to 10,000 plus, we would essentially need to see ETH dominance at 20%.

And the market cap to hit around.

1.53 trillion. So you know, it is a, it is a long way from where we are now. You know, where we were in the previous cycle of 2020, Ethereum did a 3100% increase. So 31x it went from 150 to 4800 at the bottom. Now where we were at the cycle start of 2024 was at 1750. We would essentially need, you know, to see around that 300% growth to get to 7,000.

This, this cycle. So following the same trajectory as previous cycles, we think a realistic base case for ETH is around that 7,000 US dollar level which would be about a 300% growth from, from where we were at the, at the cycle bottom being 1750 in 2024. So that's where we're thinking again. Ethereum is really underperformed so that's obviously not a given. I'm still very bullish on Ethereum and I think we'll start to see the momentum shift. You know, sentiment has been pre, but yeah, I do think that Ethereum will start to outperform if not this quarter, next quarter.

Yeah, I think his time is coming, man. It still looks really tasty to buy. But all eyes are definitely on Bitcoin and just on Bitcoin mate. The gold Market cap is 18.5 trillion and within this we've said to get to $180,000. It's only 3.4 trillion.

Market cap still tiny compared to gold.

Yeah, still like 15. So we'd like to have to 5x from there. It's about 900k bitcoin to reach the market cap of gold. 900k per bitcoin which is insane.

That's US dollars as well team. So that's.

A pretty bullish levels. Now if we look at Solana again, Solana has even less than Ethereum and Bitcoin but based on a dominance level of 7.5%.

Looking at the prices from high to low and also compared to ETH in the second cycle in the ETH market cap we are saying that somewhere between that sort of $450 to let's say $690. I know that's quite an open range but it's quite hard, a little bit harder to sort of analyze based on previous cycles. So you know the analysis some analysis show is showing Solana hit levels between 800 and 1000. That would, you know, that would essentially have to require Solana to attain nearly 10% dominance of the market and the market cap of crypto to hit that upper bound of 5 to 7 trillion. So that would mean Solana will be roughly 400 billion in market cap, which is very, very high. And it's going to be, if it's there, I don't think it's going to be there for long. So understanding Solana as well, it has a much higher inflation rate when it comes to, to the other, the other assets. So at the moment Solana is actually issuing new coins at 4.6% annually compared to Bitcoin Ethereum, which is under a percent. So Solana is issuing a lot more supply into the circulating sort of supply of this token. So yeah, understanding that is super important because I think that once the price.

Starts to go, it's going to need to maintain a lot more demand for the price to stay up as it's issuing more tokens. But, you know, stupid things have been.

Done and this is the thing like things can get as you go further out in the risk curve. So we've gone from bitcoin slightly more risky E slightly more risky Sol as you go further out in the risk curve, there's potential for insane gains and insanity to happen.

And because they're not as stable, they don't have as much money behind them. And those insanity points, they can be very, very quick. So you can reach those targets, but it'll be quite quick. So you have to be, the further out you go, the more you have to be on it, the more you have to be monitoring.

Yeah. And if you need help with your sell strategy or just even looking at some research around the sell strategy, make sure you check out our episode we did two or three episodes ago which was like, what selling the top actually looks like. We looked at some data there to help you sort of analyze that. But the last thing we really want to leave you all with is just understanding the price targets aren't everything. Like, you know, none of us have a crystal ball. We're just looking on historical data and you know, evidently there's not a lot of historical data for a lot of these assets. So understanding, you know, other things around those token unlocks, you know, demand drivers, adoption and also just like, you know, you know, things outside of the price in terms of sentiment and other things is super important. Remembering where we are now in terms of the cycle as well, we're compared to previous two cycles. We're about 100 to 300 days away from the typical cycle peak. So we've potentially got three to nine months still of bullish action and that the, the top doesn't last for long. So ensuring you have that sort of dialed in, you know, sell strategy and have some, some research and obviously we're here to help on Ben and Bergs, but know that we're giving you our listeners as much as we can. But ultimately all that best stuff is in the platform. So if you need some help and you really have a decent amount of money in crypto, I would recommend jumping on checking out some of our content on the platform. And I think that's really where it's going to make a big difference.

Definitely. And even just looking at Solana, so people that have been in crypto a while or even for a year or two, if you were buying Solana like a year ago, you'd be buying that at $30. Yeah. It's now $180.

Yeah.

Well, that's a 6x600%.

Where in the world are you going to get that kind of return? And we're talking like hefty numbers, like up to 800 bucks. It's going to be insane. And even if you've got that 6x, if you've achieved some of your goals, consider taking profits on that. You know, nothing is a given, nothing is a guarantee. And if you've got significant gains, capture those gains, take some chips off the table, live a good life, leave something there to play along with and capitalize on this bull run. But even those numbers, I'm going to be very keen when this really kicks off, to revisit this episode when things are really frothing and see where we actually get to.

Yeah. Because we've only talked about the top three here and we're actually just talking before the. The podcast that so Maple, that I know a lot of you know that I'm bullish on. So I shared this as an investment to the members. July last year at $5.50. Hit $24 today. So up 333%. And the ETH BTC chart is the worst it's been in three years. And Bitcoin dominance is 60%. Like, I think some of these assets, when it comes time to party, that these are going to really rip and it's in, you know, ensuring you've got that sell strategy to take profits going to be important.

I wish we were recording. Mate, you were so happy. You were so chuffed. You're like, I was so bucks, mate.

I'm still bullish.

That's it. Look, I'm not selling anything.

Hopefully that's helpful, team. There's some good insights. Again, if you need some help, jump on our website. You can book in a call with one of our team and see where you're at. We can show you some of the research. We can get you a bit of a look in to see if it's going to be a good fit for you. And yeah, absolutely crush this cycle.

Definitely get some help with selling the top, get your portfolio sorted and capitalize on this and don't wait another four years. Don't make that mistake.

Let's make some money. Thanks, guys. See you on the next episode.

Thanks, champions.