--- title: 'The Crypto Setup Is Quietly Changing' source: 'https://youtube.com/watch?v=F-SnGlK1OdQ' video_id: 'F-SnGlK1OdQ' date: 2026-07-31 duration_sec: 1049 --- # The Crypto Setup Is Quietly Changing > Source: [The Crypto Setup Is Quietly Changing](https://youtube.com/watch?v=F-SnGlK1OdQ) ## Summary This video analyzes whether the recent crypto death narrative is justified by examining macro factors such as AI's rise, Federal Reserve policy, oil prices, dollar strength, midterm elections, and the four-year cycle. The speaker concludes that contrary to widespread bearishness, the setup is quietly becoming more bullish, with multiple catalysts aligning for a strong year-end move. ### Key Points - **Crypto death narrative** [00:02] — Many claim crypto is dead as AI steals attention, Michael Saylor's Strategy sells Bitcoin, and bears predict $30K–$40K. - **Bear market playbook** [00:45] — Every bear market follows the same pattern: exhaustion, extreme bearishness, and 'this time is different' fear just before a turnaround. - **Bitcoin price action** [01:52] — Bitcoin dropped to ~$57K, then recovered to ~$64K, but has not set a higher high, leaving room for bearish scenarios. - **Saylor sells Bitcoin** [02:37] — Strategy sold 3,588 BTC for $216 million despite holding $2.5B cash, raising questions about confidence in Bitcoin's near-term outlook. - **Four-year cycle** [03:19] — Historical four-year cycles suggest a lower low may still occur between now and October before the next upswing. - **AI vs crypto attention** [03:45] — AI, rockets, and robotics are seen as genuinely exciting, making crypto look like an 'ugly old dog' and draining narrative oxygen. - **AI trade rotation** [05:57] — Like building a city, AI's winners rotate from GPUs to power, cooling, and networking, allowing the trade to persist for years. - **All-time highs are normal** [07:03] — Since 1950, the S&P 500 has hit record highs ~7% of trading days, and nearly a third of those highs were never revisited — not a crash signal. - **Oil and inflation** [08:25] — Plunging oil prices should bring inflation down, leading the Fed to abandon rate hikes; 'doing nothing' becomes a bullish shift in expectations. - **Dollar strength and liquidity** [09:07] — A rising dollar is bearish for global liquidity, though recent data shows a slight uptick; a TGA rebuild later this year adds modest pressure. - **Midterm politics** [10:03] — Trump will likely try to juice markets before midterms for favorable headlines; after midterms, certainty returns and markets historically rally. - **Year-end outlook** [11:42] — The analyst expects AI to keep running, inflation to cool, a Bitcoin bid from October, and post-midterm certainty — pointing to a strong finish to the year. ### Conclusion Despite widespread death talk, the setup is quietly turning bullish: cooling inflation, a four-year-cycle floor around October, and post-midterm certainty all point to a strong year-end for crypto. ## Transcript now, a lot of people are saying that crypto is finally actually dead. That in the past, crypto was this new mysterious technology, but now AI is sucking all the oxygen out of the room, and crypto has had its time to prove itself in never really did. In fact, even seemingly Saylor, who said he would sell his kidney before he sold any Bitcoin, is finally selling Bitcoin. He sold over $200 million of Bitcoin over this last week. And at the same time, you have this pretty loud group right now calling crypto dead. You have the bears on the other side who since February have been calling for a 30K or 40K Bitcoin price. isn't in yet, and we still have a massive amount of pain to go through before things turn around. And honestly, if you've been through a couple past crypto cycles, all of this should feel pretty familiar because this happens every single time we go into a bear market with crypto. Literally every single time this exact playbook plays out. The market gets exhausted. It gets way too bearish. Everyone is saying crypto's dead or heading way lower. This time is different. It's finally, you know, reached its end point right before things actually turn around, and we head into the next bull run. So, today I want to answer the question really looking deeply at the macro picture of is crypto actually dead this time? Is Is this the time where crypto finally breaks? And are we heading down to the 30K, 40K levels the bears have been calling for since February? And overall, just what should we expect for crypto going into the end of the year? And to answer all that, we need to look at stocks, AI, oil, the Fed, the dollar, and just overall what the market is positioned for going into the end of the year. Okay, so you have a lot of people scared right now because this chart really does look horrific. We started at 125, 126 on some charts K Bitcoin, and and stair-stepped our way down lower and lower over the course of between October and today. And most recently we had a pretty scary uh couple days where Bitcoin dropped down to about 57k. was it. This was the moment that we were finally going to break down uh to 50k, 40k, and then perhaps even 30k. But since then, price has recovered a bit heading up to today $64,000, which is actually pretty impressive. But you can still see that it hasn't really set in a uh higher high. This could still be more of a bounce uh that typically happens and we've seen over and over again as bears some credit, this certainly, chart-wise, does look like it could play out in favor of the bears. Now, at the same time you have Michael Saylor, the like king of Bitcoin, the the literal face of Bitcoin. When people think of Bitcoin, they think of Michael Saylor. And he said back in the day, back at literally last year, uh he said, "Sell a kidney if you must, but keep the Bitcoin." Fast forward to yesterday, Michael Saylor posted that Strategy has sold 3,588 Bitcoin for $216 million. Despite the fact that they had $2.5 billion in cash covering 17 months of payments, which kind of is a almost a question of confidence when it comes to Michael Saylor. Does he, you know, feel like Bitcoin's about to head way lower? know, obviously he must not anticipate that Bitcoin's going to rally anytime soon cuz if he thought that, he wouldn't be selling. And then of course you have the 4-year cycle, which typically you see some sort of lower low between, you know, now and October. We should see a lower low than we have seen so far. All these things are kind of the current setup and kind of why people believe uh that crypto's heading a lot lower or maybe it's dead or or maybe that this is setup behind that. And it's combined with the fact that AI, as I said earlier, is sucking all the oxygen out this new, exciting technology like blockchains and it's going to change the there were all these promises and all this excitement around crypto. But also back then, we weren't really doing any There there was no like novel innovation happening, you know, really in the economy. It was like startups and SaaS products and and different things that didn't really matter. And finally, we've kind of advanced to a point where we're launching, you know, rockets into space. We're doing AI. We have robotics and all these things that are genuinely exciting, sci-fi, otherworldly, you know, concepts. And it kind of makes uh of stuff seem like the the ugly stepchild, like the the thing that people kind of forgot about. Not even a stepchild, like the ugly lost little puppy that's not a puppy. It grew. It's now it's an ugly, you know, old dog that genuinely how some people feel and genuinely why some people believe that higher again. That this is going to be like an extended eight-year, 10-year bear market for Bitcoin and crypto. Now, kind of a third leg to this stool is kind of a third leg to this stool is that a lot of people foresee AI causing uh some sort of stock market crash. Uh so so maybe if you don't believe, you term, maybe if you don't even believe in the four-year cycle, maybe you believe that because the stock market is about to crash, we're going to see crypto prices go way lower because the stock market is at all-time highs. That freaks people out. AI feels kind of frothy, kind of mania-like. It definitely has those, you know, similar conditions. And so a lot of people are saying the AI to kind of bring down crypto with it. And some of this has to do with the fact that uh right now we have really high inflation uh and it's been climbing hinting at hiking into the into the year. And so that's going to put a lot of pressure on stocks, the financial system, etc., causing prices to go anticipating that this is going to happen and this is causing a lot of fear and just the fact that almost perfection is priced in with a lot of these stocks where, you know, one missed earnings call and who knows what happens to the of this I want to dive into is this concept that AI is basically overvalued the fact that, you know, a lot of these AI companies like Nvidia, etc. have these really, really high uh valuations right now. And I think the piece that most people are missing when it comes to this is that the AI market, just like rotational. And you can kind of think of this is like a building a big city, okay? Uh first you need to lay down the cement. And when you lay down the companies become really expensive. But then, you need electricians, you need plumbers, you need the internet, the grocery stores, the restaurants. The city keeps growing and the winners keep changing. And AI, in my opinion, is likely to turn out like that. Today, it might be GPUs, it might be data centers progress, it's leaning into other things like power, cooling, networking. Basically, the AI trade can continue for a long time. It's just the winners will always be the GPUs companies that everyone's paying attention to. Tomorrow, it might be something else completely different. And that rotation can carry on for years and years and years as AI continues to build out. Now, people think because the market's at all-time highs, that means we're about to crash. But if you actually look back at the history of the stock market, we are continually at all-time highs. Like literally almost all the time, we are sitting at some sort of all-time high in the stock market. This thing literally goes up into the right. And that's because over time, companies make more money, inflation makes revenues better, technology increases productivity, and grow and grow. So, a lot of people are freaking out about this all-time high right here, but we've been at that all-time high at multiple points throughout the entire life cycle of the stock market. It just keeps going higher and higher. In fact, since 1950, the S&P 500 has been at an all-time high on around about 7% of its trading days. And almost 1/3 of those all-time highs ended price never went back to that all-time high again. So, while a lot of people all-time highs, I personally don't think that's something that people should be worrying about, especially when it comes to AI, which is the single most have ever come up with. Maybe back here when we're doing things like DoorDash and Uber and Airbnb and like just silly stuff that doesn't change the world, you this is the single most transformative technology ever to exist. If anything, we have so much higher that we could go from here. Now, as far as the Fed and people pricing in inflation and a fear expectations about a rate hike, I've going to spend too much time on it. But as you can see, the oil price has absolutely fallen off a cliff since we've made some sort of peace with Iran. And with that, you should see falling inflation over the next couple months. And with that, you should see the Fed pricing out the rate hike and probably just doing nothing. In in this case, the Fed doing nothing is actually extremely bullish because that switches market expectations from a rate hike to no rate hike, which is a bullish switch in expectations. Now, another thing that's markets and especially crypto, which is super sensitive to liquidity, is dollar strength. Dollar strength going up is super bearish for liquidity. Dollar liquidity. And what we've seen is basically since the start of the Iran climbing higher. And this has been really bearish in terms of global liquidity. And you can really see that here when you zoom in on global chart I like to use when it comes to measuring the impact of liquidity on the peaks, one in December 2025, one in January 2026, and one in February 2026. heading lower in terms of liquidity. But if you zoom in really close, you can't see we have started to climb back up a little bit higher since then. And add into that, we do have an upcoming TGA rebuild into the end of the year. If you something similar starting in late August through September. It was actually really brutal for the market. This one's going to be a lot smaller of a TGA rebuild, but it just adds into that kind of like messy setup. On top of all this, we're heading into midterm season. And you got to imagine if you're Trump, it's October and you're thinking about midterms next month. You don't want people thinking about high gas prices or you don't want to see the stock market crashing or inflation getting worse. You want headlines like inflation is cooling, the stock market's at all-time highs, gas prices are really good. Those headlines help you win. And obviously Trump can't control the economy. He only has so much power. But of the power he does have, you can bet on him trying to use that power to try to push things in the direction he based on how much time we have left is a lot of the things that Trump is likely going to be a confidence game. He's going to try to instill confidence into the markets via a lot of announcements and just any lever that he can pull to try to juice the markets. And the markets love confidence. That should be year. And the biggest thing that markets hate is uncertainty. Markets like deplore uncertainty. And one of the worst things about election cycles is it creates a ton of uncertainty. Not as much as maybe the presidential election, create uncertainty, which is maybe a little bit of a negative factor heading offset you know some of that bullish behavior from Trump. But the cool part or the interesting part about this is after midterms, no matter who wins, it in terms of midterms. After midterms, the markets get certainty, and the markets love certainty. They now know the outcome. They They now know what that markets do really well after elections. And bringing all of that together, I see the picture like this. Right now, the market is positioned for it's going to break down. They're positioned for rate hikes into the end of the year. They're positioned for high inflation going into the end of the year, and they will soon be positioned for more market uncertainty as we head into midterms. But I think it's very likely the AI trade keeps chugging along literally no reason for it to stop today. This is just kind of a constant decade, where anytime the markets are new all-time highs, people are expecting does. It's kind of the same thing where over the last couple years, everyone's year, and it's never happened. I think with the falling oil prices, we see energy prices go down, we see inflation go down, and we see the odds of a rate hike go away and just kind of uh surface into basically nothing happening when it I think because of the four-year cycle, we see a bid for Bitcoin starting around October. Right as Trump is trying his hardest to juice the midterms, which these should sort of roll into each other and kind of play on each other. Especially then once we pass the midterms, we get that sort of second bid think all these things coming together paints a pretty clear picture that we behavior when it comes to Bitcoin and crypto going into the end of the year, starting around October, and then kind of flowing into the start of next year. very possible we see some pretty major pullbacks when it comes to the stock market. Uh like I mentioned earlier, any bad earnings call could cause a pretty major and substantial dip, and there's definitely a high risk of that because the market is at a fragile state where, depending on who the market leader is, there's really high expectations on those earnings calls. But, I don't think those things will end up triggering a full-on mass stock market collapse. In people are vastly underestimating how powerful AI is and how transformative it ultimately will become, especially going into the next couple years. We're we're a lot of these models. And in terms of Bitcoin, I do think that the bottom is likely in, but I don't like the way that this chart currently looks. And I think this chart does actually lend some credibility to the fact that, you know, the chart almost wants to go lower. My belief that the bottom is in is based on the fact that so far this zone has sort of held up really strongly, uh fud, especially with Michael Saylor actually selling, all the fud from the thrown at the market. That the fact that this has held so strongly uh just makes me ask myself, like, if that can't break it, what would break that floor? But, I matter. If we do end up going lower and I'm wrong about that, or if we don't, I think the end of the year catalyst is going to be so powerful for uh what that I don't think it's going to matter. I don't think a year from now I'm going to care that I bought at, you know, 60k versus 50k or or whatever if that ends up happening. And really, we don't have that much time left. It's July right now, so we have August, September, October. A couple months left until we really see this catalyst coming to play. Once this Once we pass this line, the four-year cycle power dissipates and becomes a power on the opposite end, sending us higher. Right as we hit a lot of these other positive macro catalysts of the year. And remember, for all of my failures last year when it came to predicting what happened with crypto and Bitcoin, I was spot-on with how the into the end of the year. I said it would go higher. I said it would be extremely bullish. It said all-time highs. We saw all those things for every asset on planet Earth basically besides crypto. My mistake was assuming that because macro was going to do what it was going to do, that crypto would go along with it. I vastly underestimated the power of the four-year cycle. But in this case, the four-year cycle is working in my favor and also saying it's things coming together for a really powerful and really strong move when it comes to crypto heading into the end of the year. And I think all of this all you know people saying Bitcoin's dead. This is really familiar and really really normal. It almost wouldn't feel right if we didn't have it in the bear market. It happens every bear market. There's a reason nobody buys the bottom. Everyone is too afraid to buy the bottom. Even the bears do not buy the they're going to buy the bottom because by the time we get there, you know, say they're going to be calling for 30k or 20k or or whatever. That's just kind of how it works. People get afraid and so they don't buy the bottom. There's don't buy the bottom. It feels like a lot of people have moved on from crypto. I'm one of the few that hasn't moved on from crypto because I genuinely believe we have a lot of room to run and I think this next leg of the cycle this next phase of the market is going to be one of the most insane we've ever seen mix and it's going to massively inflate people's imaginations and you're going to see some crazy stuff go down in terms of some of these tokens and what happens ride. And if you're curious about seeing my entire portfolio or you want to see every time I buy and sell various tokens as well as different weekly video market currently closed to new members and I know a lot of you guys have been asking when I'm going to open it back up. I opened it back up midway through last since. Currently I have no plans to open it back up anytime soon. But if you want back up, you can join the waitlist by clicking the link in the description of this video and I'll send out an email when I decide to open it back up again. advice and this is me telling you to do anything with your money. I'm obviously this video is helpful, make sure you hit the like button. And if you want to see that subscribe button and the little bell next to it to be notified each time I release a new video. Thanks for watching, and I'll see you next week.