Crypto
Bitcoin Continues Months-Long Steep Decline In Value
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Bloomberg Intelligence analyst keeps prediction for bitcoin to fall to $10,000

Many disagree, saying bitcoin is “too big to fail” and that such a fall would require an “extreme systemic shock.”

Yaël Bizouati-Kennedy

In an interview with Ellio Trades, Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Mike McGlone reiterated his prediction that Bitcoin will crater to $10,000. McGlone said the correlation between bitcoin and all risk assets is much more significant than it was a few years ago. On Thursday morning, bitcoin was flat, still stuck in the $70,000 range. 

“My point is, if you’re buying any type of cryptos now, you have to hope the stock market goes up. And it’s been — cryptos have been trading horribly versus stocks for almost two years now. Good luck for that to change,” McGlone said in the interview.

However, several experts said his extremely bearish outlook is implausible.

Bitwise CIO Matt Hougan, a bitcoin bull who predicts bitcoin will hit $1 million in 10 years, unsurprisingly disagrees.

“Bitcoin has fat tails, meaning extreme events are possible. I like Mike and respect him as a data-driven analyst. That said, $10K strikes me as extremely unlikely. Maybe if governments stopped running deficits, or there is a catastrophic bear market for risk, but both of those strike me as extremely unlikely. Critics have been prophesizing bitcoin’s doom for 17 years. They’ve been wrong so far; I suspect they’ll be wrong again,” Hougan told Sherwood News.

Brian Huang, cofounder of Glider, told Sherwood that at this point, “BTC is too big to fail.”

Huang said that entire companies are built around mining bitcoin, and that’s only profitable if bitcoin stays above a certain price. At $10,000, it would make more sense for mining companies to buy bitcoin on the market to pump it up than go out of business.

“That’s why we will never get back to $10,000,” Huang said.

Ryan Lee, chief analyst at Bitget, also said that bitcoin dropping to that level is highly improbable, even amid macro uncertainty and geopolitical tensions.

“Many market participants argue such a collapse would require an extreme systemic shock such as a global liquidity crisis, nuclear conflict, or a breakdown of internet infrastructure, rather than typical market cycles,” Lee told Sherwood.

Lee added that the current market structure points in the opposite direction: bitcoin ETFs continue to record consistent inflows, even during periods of geopolitical escalation, reinforcing institutional recognition of BTC as a 24/7 geopolitical hedge rather than purely a speculative risk asset.

Bitcoin ETFs have registered $1.1 billion in inflows so far this month, according to SoSoValue.

“After enduring multiple de-leveraging cycles in recent years, the industry’s structure is significantly stronger. Extreme downside forecasts can serve as useful stress tests for risk management, but they should not distract investors from bitcoin’s improving fundamentals and its far more probable long-term upward trajectory,” Lee said.

Sherwood reached out to McGlone for comment but did not receive a response by the time of publication. 

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Hyperliquid reclaims all-time high

HYPE, the native token powering perpetuals exchange Hyperliquid and its underlying blockchain, rebounded to reclaim its all-time high previously set at the start of the month.

Treasury firms Hyperliquid Strategies and Hyperion DeFi have also rallied as the token increased double digits in the last 24 hours to trade as high as $76.70, rising past its record price set nearly two weeks ago, according to CoinGecko. In the interim between all-time highs, HYPE pulled back to around $53.

The token has several tailwinds, the first coming from ETF flows. Since their inception in May, HYPE ETFs have yet to record negative weekly outflows, posting a cumulative total net inflow of $171.8 million, per SoSoValue.

The second comes from Hyperliquid spending basically everything it earns in fees to buy HYPE, a mechanism embedded into the protocol’s codebase.

The venue’s buyback funding mechanism is set to add a new source of yield. Validators of the network activated “AQAv2,” which means stablecoin deployers will share about 90% of reserve yield revenue on their supply within the protocol.

Around $6.1 billion of Circle’s USDC resides in Hyperliquid, per DefiLlama. Accrual begins on August 26 and the first payment is made on October 3, the network announced in its Discord channel last week.

A substantial amount of capital is riding on different positions of HYPE. In total, a move down to under $53 would result in the liquidation nearly 1.8 million HYPE worth of leveraged long positions on the on-chain perps venue, or $131.7 million, data from CoinGlass shows. For the upside, a climb above $100 results in the liquidation of more than 3 million worth of leveraged HYPE short positions, or $221.5 million.

HYPE’s rebound to all-time high comes after Michael Selig, chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, defended his agency’s decision to approve regulated perpetuals, or futures contracts without expiration dates, CNBC reported on Monday.

Last month, the CFTC approved bitcoin perpetual futures trading in the US through regulated prediction markets firm Kalshi and an affiliate of centralized exchange Coinbase.

“Perps are highly likely to become lightly regulated and thus approved in the US,” said David Pakman, head of venture investments at CoinFund.

“We expect to see perps for many different types of assets, from commodities to equities,” Pakman told Sherwood News.

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Crypto market snaps back as sentiment lifts, with altcoins from ethereum to XRP soaring

The market capitalization of the crypto industry has jumped around $83.2 billion in the last 24 hours, with privacy-focused token Zcash and worldcoin, the native cryptocurrency of the network backed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, leading market gains, jumping over 22%.

But the last 24 hours have been good across the board:

Investors have been eager to see some positive signs around the Iranian conflict ending, coupled with hopeful outlooks around the CLARITY act, both breathing some life into assets, Kairos Research cofounder Ian Unsworth told Sherwood News.

Simon Shockey, a crypto strategist at crypto wallet infrastructure firm Privy, said the upswing stems from several things converging. He pointed to how alt markets broadly were very oversold following the bug found in Zcash that shook confidence.

Friday, Zcash founder Zooko Wilcox said Anthropic didn’t find any more serious bugs with the Zcash protocol after Shielded Labs requested the AI firm run a security audit of the network with Mythos.

Shockey added that the pool of willing sellers has dwindled. Even if structurally, AI is a much more compelling and asymmetric bet in the eyes of allocators, many of these crypto assets have simply run out of marginal sellers despite some shorter-term narrative-driven pumps. The only people left to sell at this point are the teams themselves and VCs.

Net-net: oversold conditions plus exhausted seller bases plus a macro backdrop thats stabilized equals a snapback, especially in names that have real usage or community conviction behind them,” Shockey told Sherwood.

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