Where Crypto Is Heading In The Next 6 Months and Why

If you think the crypto ride has been wild so far, you haven't seen anything yet. The team and I collective shift, continue to analyze the markets and today I want to share with you in a new video style on my YouTube channel where I think the market's going, where the opportunities are, when is altcoin season coming up? And some interesting predictions that I don't think some of you are thinking about where I think this market's going to be going. So if you like this style of video, I'd love for you to give me some feedback in the comments and make sure to leave me a subscribe if you want to see more videos like these. Now let's jump into it. I'm going to share my screen here in terms of where we are in the market right now and obviously we've had a pretty deep correction. Well, relatively speaking, not that deep. But for some people, you know, considering where we are, this may have felt quite deep. I was actually speaking with a friend recently who got in at crypto only in the last few months, basically bought the local top with some altcoins and was drawing down 45, 50% on some of the old coins, like Solana for example. And I think for some people new to crypto, and I remember when I got back into crypto, you know, seven, eight years ago though, that first cycle, that first bull market, when you get those deeper corrections, you panic. And this friend of mine actually lost $40,000 recently. I said, how on earth have you lost $40,000? We've literally been going up for seven months in a row on a monthly bitcoin chart. And he told me that he bought the basic, you know, a bunch of altcoins, they retraced 40 or 50%, he panicked and he sold. And I think this is so true for so many new investors and why we get these corrections that people panic. You don't get these blue chip stocks in the stock market world retracing 40, 50% in a market. You know, crypto is completely unique and for so many people, they think something fundamentally has changed or they think something's wrong with the asset or they think it's going to continue to go down. But you know, markets are driven by sentiment, narrative over leveraged traders, news. And there's been a lot of stuff going on at the moment in the world and, and why we're getting these corrections. But it's completely normal. I mean, in the last bull market we had 13, 10% plus corrections. And these are amazing buying opportunities. And I'll Share some of those opportunities that I think are good to take advantage of pretty soon. But you know, you know, one of the things that we use at Collective Shift to give us an indication of where we are in the market right now is on chain analysis. And on chain analysis basically just gives that really good understanding of those movements on the blockchain. Who are those holders, who's buying, who's selling. And one of my favorite favorite ratios and charts I like to look at is the market value to realize value ratio. Basically what this chart is showing us in the big in the black line is the bitcoin price. And the orange line is that that ratio. And it's basically describing the unrealized profit that bitcoin holders have. And when they start to take profits, that ratio comes down. So as you'll see back in 2018 on the left hand side and then also in 2021, I'm just gonna move my face here. You can see when these ratios got quite high, there was a lot of unrealized profits, meaning there was a lot of bitcoin holders in profit and they started to sell down once we reached these ratios of sort of 3.5, 4, even 4.8 in the 2018 run. Now, right now we're kind of sitting at about three bit over three. 3.1, which gives me an indication from an on chain perspective we're pro through this cycle. If history was to repeat in terms of when bitcoin holders start to take profits. Now, what happens when bitcoin holders start to take profits? Well, usually money rotates down from the larger caps bitcoin and eth into that sort of top 100 and then down into the sort of bottom section of altcoins. And what we traditionally see is altcoin season. Now I'll get back to that pretty soon. But you know, where we are in the cycle right now, we're coming up to that bubble phase. Now, historically speaking, this bitcoin halving is played out exactly like the 2020 Bitcoin halving cycle. Basically, we had a 2025% correction leading up to the 2020 Bitcoin halving. We consolidated through the halving and then we have this big bubble phase afterwards. And I'm expecting something pretty similar. I think we're going to chop around these levels that we are right now for probably the next few weeks until sort of those fundamentals of the halving really comes into into account. We get a lot more buyers and then just a fundamental growth of bitcoin will take off. I think what we saw why bitcoin price ran up so fast pre bitcoin halving was a lot of speculation obviously around the bitcoin halving, the etf which has been spoken about so much. But ultimately, what's going to push us past the bitcoin halving and what's going to be the driver to continuous pushing us into the growth, sorry, into the bubble phase is the fundamentals. You know, I think speculation has driven us up into the bitcoin halving, but if we look at the amount of bitcoin that's being bought at it, even an ETF level versus now, what's going to be available, you know, post bitcoin halving, from a supply perspective, to put it in perspective, pre bitcoin halving, about US$60 million of bitcoin was coming into new circulation per day. Post bitcoin halving, that's now 30 million. And we had one day where the ETF demand was over $1 billion of buying. There's a billion dollars of new Bitcoin, sorry, $1 billion of new capital coming in to buy bitcoin. And now post bitcoin halving, only $30 million of new bitcoin is coming into supply, which is a crazy ratio. Now obviously there's a lot of other market movements, but I think what's really going to push us into this next stage is the fundamental side of bitcoin. Now the other thing to note what's pushed us higher in previous cycles as well has been the correlation with the central banks printing more money. We haven't seen that this cycle yet. If anything, we've had that sort of quantitative tightening and there's been less money circulating around which hasn't found its way into bitcoin. What's happening, you know, is terrible over in the Middle east at the moment with the war, that's also pushing pressure on the Fed to not cut rates. And we're having another the rate coming out in the first of a rate Update coming on the 1st of May. You know, we expect they, to them to hold where they are. You know, it's not until we start to see those rates come down and market and money becomes easier to access that it will find its way into bitcoin. So another thing just to note that I think we're still probably a few weeks, if not a couple of months away from really starting to see us, you know, head into that bubble phase. And ultimately I think one of the biggest things right now is that what's that next narrative going to be? You know, we've been pushing for that bitcoin halving narrative for so long. Post Bitcoin halving, what is that narrative? In previous cycles we had, you know, NFTs, we had ICOs, we've had AI, we have metaverse. There isn't really that new retail narrative to grab onto right now. What I think will happen is I think bitcoin will continue to grind higher over time through the fundamental economics of what's going on and the continued buy side pressure. And it won't be until really we get into, you know, that hundred thousand dollar level. When bitcoin goes over a hundred thousand USD, it gets back in the mainstream media, it gets back into social media and people start talking about crypto and bitcoin. Retail investors will come back, they'll get excited about it and then start to find out, you know, well, what's next? Because retail investors, we know think bitcoin's expensive and they'll start to try and figure out what's that next best thing. And then altcoin season will start to kick off in terms of sentiment as well. To understand where we are right now, like just a basic Google trends, you know, looking at this in terms of the last two or three years, we're still down quite considerably from the peak. Even looking at social trends and things like that. You know, we got a lot of euphoria leading up to the bitcoin halving with the meme coin mania and things like that. But ultimately it was a lot of bigger wallets, you know, it was a lot of, you know, folks that have been around for a little while trading crypto. And I was speaking to some exchanges that were partnered with at Collective Shift and now we're sort of repeating the same thing that we were seeing. There was not a lot of new retail money coming in in. It was a lot of existing capital that was floating around that was, you know, trading, trying to, you know, leverage their positions. Another thing as well that we can see here from a sentiment perspective is just the weekly new YouTube views of influencers videos. Now I'm not a big fan of crypto YouTube influences. I mean some of them are good, but ultimately, you know, a lot of them put out not that great information. But this is where retail investors go. And right now again we're down quite considerably from the 20, 20, 2021 peaks of, you know, YouTube view. So again another indication to show us that retail investors quite here yet now in terms of these drawdowns and these corrections, I think these are magical buying Opportunities. It's really hard to buy during these times. Like psychologically the idea of buying when something's down 20, 30, 50% is really difficult. But we need to zig while the market zags. You know, we need to be in that 10% that is doing the things that most people are not. We've got to remember that 90% of this market actually doesn't make money. We only hear the good stories. So we need to be doing what the opposite are, are doing. And that's ultimately, you know, the reverse psychology of what your brain's probably telling you. I want to show you a chart here of the last bitcoin bull market that we went through. From the COVID lows of 2020 through to the April 2021 all time highs when Bitcoin ran from 8,000, you know, to 65,013 times, Bitcoin went down 10% plus you know, some, some corrections. We had 20%, 28%, 26%. You know, these are pretty deep corrections that you know, are quite relative to where we are right now. I mean bitcoin pulled back just recently, you know, 18, 20%. This is very normal. And altcoins are leveraged positions guys. Altcoins will over, over correct on the downside and they're going to over, over push up on the, on the upside as well. In terms of when we get in those euphoric periods. I personally don't trade on the short term. If anything I, you know, I might put a trade swing on or something like that. But again I'm really only doing long only positions. So I like to add to my positions on these, on these down and I'll take profits when we get to the later part of this cycle. But ultimately I don't want to sell too early right now and I think we are still a long way to go now. One of the really interesting things about where we are in this cycle is that bitcoin is really starting to be seen as this risk off asset. So we're starting to. And this is something that you know, a lot of you probably believe in and I've believed for a long time that bitcoin will continue to be seen as, continue to grow to be seen as this risk off asset. Like where do you put your money when you. The US Dollar continues to lose its purchasing power when the stock market, yes, it's growing, grinding higher, but not even really outpacing inflation. Gold's not outpacing inflation over the last four or five years. Like where are you going to put your Money and Fidelity, one of the largest asset managers in the US now actually have Bitcoin in their conservative and balanced ETF funds. Right. Which is absolutely wild to think that that's actually happening right now. I think that's coming to Australia soon and I think over time the consistent demand of Bitcoin is going to continue to grind the price up for bitcoin. I think the level that we'll get to from the foundation of the next bear market will be a lot higher than where we are now. So people are thinking about these cycles and getting in out at certain times. Yes, I believe that. But for me, you know, I want to continue building my bitcoin stack over a long period of time. I think bitcoin's going to outperform everything. And I think bitcoin will be coming to superannuation funds. I think more retirement funds will be getting involved. And if you think about, if people are thinking about Bitcoin as a conservative or balanced investment with a limited supply, like for me that's just an absolute no brainer. You get these volatile movements in the short term, but the long term, in my opinion is only going one way, which is super exciting. Now from an ETF perspective as well, we've obviously seen a little bit of, not a correction but a slowdown of those funds coming in. We've got to think too, guys, a lot of these bigger funds, institutions, sovereign wealth funds, they can't just go and buy something, you know, overnight, for example, they need to go through board approvals, there's a lot of paperwork, a lot of meetings can take months and months for sometimes these investments to be approved. The ETFs only been up for three or four months now. Four months. I think over time as this market evolves and more and more people start to look at alternative investments, that these ETF inflows will continue to be consistent and to see, you know, as I said, when you're getting a billion dollar days with only $30 million of new Bitcoin being issued, like it's a, it's a recipe for, you know, for growth. And this is that chart on the left hand side here. Sorry. Yeah, on the left hand side you can see this was pre Bitcoin halving. In terms of the new daily issuance and post bitcoin halving, we're down to 30 million, which is, which is super crazy. Again, this was just a bit of sentiment. So in terms of altcoin season, a big question that I get constantly is like, when is altcoin season? Coming. Ben, when can we start to see our altcoins start to grow again? Altcoins are driven by retail investors and narratives and money flowing from top to bottom. I really don't think we're going to start to see big movements in altcoin season and still until we start to see money rotating and people starting to sell down their bitcoin positions. The bitcoin dominance is a chart that I like to look at quite often. And at the moment we're about 53, 54%. In previous bull markets before we kicked off in the altcoin season, bitcoin dominance got as high as 68%. So I think we're going to continue to see bitcoin. What I believe will happen will be, will be bitcoin continue to grow, more investment coming in, more money and we hit, you know, grind towards that sort of hundred thousand dollar level. And as I said, I think that's going to be the narrative that's going to draw retail investors back and that money start to rotate down into altcoins. Now a few things I want you to remember when looking at these altcoins and figuring out the ones that you're going to invest in and the ones that you're going to stay away from in terms of just a big common problem. And I hope you guys aren't doing this as more sophisticated investors, but like, do not look at the token price. The token price does not matter. The token price is just an indication of the market cap, you know, divided by the amount of tokens in supply. And one of the examples I like to use here, if I can bring this up, this will work great, is Alluvium. So you know, the reason why we need to look at market cap and the circulating supply, which a lot of people don't, is the amount of new issuance of these projects that are pushing new supply into the market. So if we look at over the course of alluvium's history, like, you know, this got as high as $700, nearly the all time high. It's currently down 94% right from its all time highs. Now arguably you'd be saying, okay, well like maybe this whole coin can get back to all time highs, like what does that look like? But if we look at the market cap of this project, market cap wise, we were actually 25% from the peak only about a month ago from a market cap perspective. And that's because the amount of circulating supply and total supply has increased so much that the token actually needs to, you know, 10x 15x the market cap. Just to get back to previous all time highs, which a lot of people don't think about. Okay, so that's one thing we need to look at when investing altcoins. Another one that I like to look at is, you know, especially in corrections, how is that altcoin performing against Bitcoin in those corrections? Because usually if an altcoin is performing well against bitcoin in a correction, it's usually showcasing good fundamentals. Okay, so if you look at something like xrp, which personally I'm not a huge fan of it and I don't own, we look at something like XRP, this is down 51 against Bitcoin over the last year. So if you were to hold Bitcoin versus holding maker, sorry, holding Bitcoin versus holding XRP, you are down 50% against Bitcoin. Like you're taking all this risk to hold an altcoin. What like. But it's down 50 against Bitcoin. Like it just makes no sense to me. And again, this is another reason I'm not a big fan of xrp. The circulating supply that continued to push more tokens into the ecosystem. And it's just not a great project for me that I want to invest in. Now if we look at one of my favorites that we've invested in at collective shift, MakerDAO. MakerDAO is.

Basically a central bank for the crypto world issuing stablecoins and it's been around for a long time, it's got a lot of token upgrades, it's doing a lot of great things. Up 73% against Bitcoin. Right. So this is showcasing to me that it's actually quite strong and relatively performing relatively well against bitcoin even in the last seven days and 14 days. I'd argue that this is actually pretty good, you know, versus Bitcoin. Altcoins are always going to be again going to be pushing leverage to the downside and leverage to the upside. So in corrections they're going to go down more than bitcoin. But you want to see the ones that are correcting, you know, less than, less than others. And you know, that traditionally gives you a good indication of some of the fundamentals that you're looking at now. Diluted market cap. I just spoke about looking at that versus just the market cap in terms of the new supply that's going to come in. And the last one is narratives. Like narratives drives markets. And I think that's something that we all should know by now. Whether or not Something has value, like, let's say meme coins, for example. Meme coins fundamentally don't have a lot of utility or value, but it's the narratives that drive it. In saying that on the downside, when you're looking at something for longevity, if narrative is the only thing that's driving at the price of a token and it doesn't have fundamental value, it's going to perform poorly over time. And that's why personally I don't invest into meme coins is because yes, you can make a lot of money in the short term, but when the tide goes out, you know, who's left holding the bag? What are the things that are driving fundamental value? It's not meme coins. And that's why, you know, a lot of these projects decline so much in bear markets is because once the community goes away, once the, the speculation goes away, there's nothing else there for it to drive value. And it's something that we focus on. A collective shift is looking at risk versus reward and fundamental value and actual genuine utility of tokens that are going to last them through 2, 3, 4, 5 years time. Like, what are the projects going to last through a bear market? They're the ones I want to be investing in. Okay, so getting involved in narratives, you know, when, when I invested really heavily in the Metaverse Back in 2018, I believe Metaverse was going to be big. I didn't know, but it was a, it was a bet I was willing to take and that paid off massively. Where am I looking at the moment? Like, yes, AI is there, gaming's there. You know, I, I actually think where I'm putting more attention at the moment is the layer 3 space on Ethereum. And there's a project that we recently invested in that I'm excited about in the layer three space. Again, why do we need layer threes? That's, you know, still to be seen in terms of do we need those actual dapps to be, you know, running on it on a high leverage position on eth. We'll wait and see. But again, narratives drives markets. And I think layer three is an interesting space that will be starting to pick up a bit more narrative that the project we're looking at is dmt. It's a, basically a project that is building like a decentralized YouTube basically where the token is the token that derives value from creators creating content, but also the audience consuming that content can get reward in those tokens. They've got some great economics tokenomics, bootstrap, good team and again, if the layer three narrative picks up, I think that's going to be an interesting one to look at. You know, another one that we were looking at, this was back in our membership back in February of last year. You know, Pendle was an interesting one. This is up more than 40x I think from when we invest was about 5 cents when we, when we spoke about it and hit about $6 recently. Like this was a narrative play that, that also has the fundamentals and this is what's driven it so much like narrative can only get you so far and then the sort of fundamentals kick in and Pendle has been a great that we've looked at and also recently, like getting into things like, you know, when Solana really took off in the meme Coin mania. Jupiter is basically the metamask of Solana. So that was a great play. Make a dao. Again, strong fundamentals, good, you know, user adoption, good tokenomics. Looking at things that not only have narrative but also have the good fundamentals is that is the, is the combo that you need. DMT was the one that we spoke about just before that gaming project in the layer 3 space. But you know, in terms of the short term, I think like retail interest is growing, but certainly nowhere near where, where we were in previous cycles. And I expect us probably to be about 50% of the way through the bull market right now. I think altcoin season is still to come. I'll be looking at sectors like, you know, I'm really bullish on Defi. There's a couple of plays in there which I'm bullish on. Unfortunately the SEC at the moment have got Uni swap in their sites, but if you have the kahunas to back Defi, I think that's a great play. Like Maple is one of my favorites. Layer 3 DMT, which I'm looking at. MakerDAO, which I'm super bullish on. Also, you know, Jupiter on Solana and Solana I'm excited on again, Ethereum. I think Ethereum's a great risk to reward. Play at the moment has underperformed, I guess with Bitcoin being the spotlight, but I think that's going to come back later this year. And yeah, there's a few other sectors we're looking at, but I think they're the main ones in terms of, you know, positioning your portfolio to really make the most of this year, but also ensure that having a large percentage of your portfolio in Bitcoin and eth, because I think if you don't have that right now. You've seen the downside and the drawdowns that you get in corrections, right? Altcoins bleed a lot more than bitcoin and eth, so hopefully that's been helpful. It's an exciting time. I think we're going to consolidate here and sort of push through it. Pretty choppy for the next few weeks, but again, still later this year. I think it's having an exciting time to be in crypto. Hopefully you enjoyed this video, this little presentation. If you like this sort of style content, I'd love for you to give me a feedback. Please leave me a subscribe if you enjoyed this video. Leave a comment if there's any feedback or any ideas you want me to create content on, but I'll see you on the next episode. Thanks guys.