Mountains and Valleys

By now, the majority of serious and not so serious indicators that map crypto's eerily regular cyclical behavior have entered zones that represented good long term buy opportunities in the past: RHODL, MVRVZ, Reserve Risk, Halvening Progress, the Bitcoin Rainbow Chart, Hash Ribbons, Puell Multiple etc. etc. At the same time, the market started showing glimmers of hope over the past two months.

While low and mid time frame deviations can sometimes make the most battle hardened crypto investor question his faith, the high time frame has never failed us so far.

No matter if the bulls make a quick return or if the bears keep hanging around a little longer, this is the best time to be excited about the future of crypto.

Regular rebalance to take profit on our $FXS position. Too early to celebrate the return of the bulls, but it's been a while since we've seen so much green.

Does this crypto bear feel different from previous bear markets? Was the FTX collapse in 2022 a more brutal experience for crypto people than the collapse of Mt. Gox in 2014? From a purely crypto perspective: not really! Past bears were just as savage and desperate as this one.

The dimensions did change indeed. Sam Bankman-Fried's fraud isn't just a funny aside in the annals of global finance. It's up there with Enron's and Maddoff's deeds. With the dimensions changed the enemies: bankers, regulators and monetary guardians the world over are now after crypto, the bad, and unfortunately also the good of crypto. Feels scary.

The context changed too, with a global recession looming (crypto's first!), and people as influential as the pope's doomposting in the news every day, the world now looks even scarier than it looked when the pandemic broke out back in 2020.

Shifted dimension and context lead to people asking: is this time truly different? Is this the end of crypto? Well, so far, there is nothing pointing in that direction. It's the same thing as in 2014 or 2018, with a different flavor. Unless that fundamentally changes, we will assume continuation: cycles will keep cycling, people, and the public opinion will shift from euphoria to doom and gloom and back again. One year we all die, and the next we stand on the verge of a new golden age. The pope probably reads the charts too.

The diehard survivors of this crazy market come up with the worst, but sometimes also with the healthiest recommendations: Touch grass (or snow), and if you can't get yourself to step away from the screen, take this quiet time to learn about the crazy innovations and inspiring characters that crypto still offers once we look beyond greed and the fraudsters.

In that sense: Happy holidays from MAV! See you in a hopefully more pleasant 2023.

Macro indicators are indicating a potential area for great r/r on a long time horizon.

Increasing $ETH allocation. ETH/BTC ratio is performing extremely well for a bear market.

$FXS is also halving the emissions and the project is keeping shipping new features.

https://twitter.com/ryanberckmans/status/1605359138183299073

Just when things started to look a bit better again, the unimaginable happened: FTX, the US based crypto exchange founded by Sam Bankman-Fried experienced a bank run and it quickly became apparent that FTX did not have the necessary funds available to satisfy their client's withdrawal requests.

It's currently hard to come up with an interpretation of the situation that doesn't involve malicious intent on the side of FTX and Sam Bankman-Fried's other big entity, Alameda. This situation has surprised even the most hard-boiled crypto enthusiasts and made many question their involvement in the space.

Seen from another perspective, it was again a highly centralized and known to be extremely predatory organization that blew up, not any of the technologies or protocols that we are actually here for. Let's hope that with time the original ideas of crypto prevail, the few remaining good actors in the space keep their faith and help rebuild what's been destroyed by the greed of others.

The crypto market remains in what looks like a bottoming phase. A lot of experienced crypto traders are confused by the fact that Ethereum rests around 60% above its June 2022 low, while Bitcoin, usually the leader of the market, briefly touched new lows yesterday.

This deviation quite likely has fundamental reasons in the upcoming switch of Ethereum from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake. "The Merge" will greatly reduce Ethereum inflation and thus is likely to act as a bullish catalyst on a longer time frame.

Will the market touch the lows again or even suffer another 50% breakdown like it did in previous bottoming phases? Nobody knows, but if history rhymes, it's quite plausible that the few remaining months between now and the end of the year will mark the bottom, and that a very slow recovery awaits us in 2023.

We are playing the long game, hodl, and look forward to the crypto crazyness that will certainly go down during The Merge. 🐼

Crypto experienced an impressive series of disasters in the past few months: the Luna collapse, followed by the insolvency of 3 Arrows Capital, Celsius and several others.

Amidst the fallout of these events, the market put in a temporary bottom in June and has since recovered quite a bit.

Bearish sentiment however remains dominant and we maintain our conservative structure. All in all, there's currently not much more to do than observe the situation.

We believe that price wise, the majors are closer to a bottom than to the last top, but time wise, the market could still take a while to digest the massive uncertainties that sprung from the above events and the precarious global macro situation.

Some signs of a relief bounce.

Deploying our last fiat, staying mostly in $ETH and $BTC with a small punt in $FXS , it dipped a lot because of $LUNA panic irrational contagion.

Dire straits. We are selling a bit more USD, keeping a conservative structure.

A brutal and likely historical day in crypto, with the UST algorithmic stablecoin on the verge of collapse. We put 1/4 of our USD back into the market, as this is definitely a "blood in the streets" moment.