Bull or Bear? What the Charts Are Saying | Ledger from Up Only

hey bankless nation welcome to another episode of state of the nation this is the episode where we talk about something topical something top of mind i think this week the topical top of mind thing is the market specifically are we in yeah bear or bull market that's what people want to know and in order to figure that out of course like fundamentally look crypto is in a 10 20 multi-decade long secular bull cycle so if you ask someone like david or myself bear market bull market we'll be like ah

i mean krypto is always in a bull market right kind of and yet there are some uh you know local bear and types of seasons as well that we have to talk through so david who did we bring on and what are we going to cover in this episode yeah we are bringing on returning guest ledger his real name is brian but everyone calls him uh calls him ledger uh co-host of the up only podcast as well as the ledger cast podcast so a fellow podcaster and that's always a treat to bring on fellow content producers because they know how to make good content but ryan some a

skill that you and i both completely lack is the ability to look at a chart and actually interpret it like i can draw lines it's like oh well there's a line here and there's a line here but that's about as far as i can go uh and so when it comes time to actually zoom out and look at the state of the charts because charts do matter we need some extra help so we're bringing on ledger from ledger cast up only to help us walk through both the cryptocharts uh we'll start with bitcoin ether ethbtc some alt layer ones but then we'll also talk about macro because

macro markets and commodity markets are also interesting right now so looking at the state of the charts today on the state of the nation and we hopeful we're hopeful by the end of this episode you'll have a good sense of what kind of market we're in right now is this a bear market is this a bull market and what are the charts telling us the future is going to look like so that's the goal for this episode stay tuned for that david before we get in we got to talk about our friends at opolis so opolis is a dow that provides healthcare benefits

for the self-sovereign employee the self-sovereign employee is is someone who is kind of a contractor they're in the web three space they're not tied down to their existing employer but they're working for crypto projects and uh we think that this is going to be a new way the workforce is shaped into the future a lot of people before they dive into web 3 are faced with this issue maybe they're in their corporate job at least in the u.s how do you get health insurance if you're working for a group of dows or crypto projects like

how does that work if you're trying to be a self-sovereign employee and that's what opolis provides they provide you health insurance payroll benefits dental vision they can even pay you in crypto they can help take care of your taxes as well it's like you get all of those corporate benefits except except you get the the freedom you're no longer a wage slave and you can engage in the crypto economy as a self-sovereign employee so uh opolis is a fantastic service for all of

these things david there's also a special deal going on a bonus for members of the bankless nation if you are a um you know if you sign up before some certain date is it may 1st may 1st yeah may 1st to get a thousand work tokens which is the opolis dow token and a thousand bang tokens which is the bankless doubt token because opolis it actually serves a lot of the bankless dow members and they are using this this service themselves to work at bankless dow and all the other dows that they work at uh and so opolis is basically uh

collective the larger it grows the more leverage it has to get better rates with healthcare and other services so when you join the opolis dow the opus dow gets stronger uh so there's a link in the show notes where you can sign up with opolis to get your payroll your taxes your health care and all the other services that they offer so you can continue to be a self-sovereign worker all right david we're gonna get into the episode in just a minute but before we do i gotta ask you the question i start these episodes with every time which is what is the state of the nation today

ryan we are charting a path because the fog of war right now is thick not only is there actually a war going on which is making the markets confused uh but just the crypto markets seem to be coming to an inflection point the the three to four month bearish trend is seemingly colliding with the two to three year long bullish trend one of these things is gonna have to win uh and we need to chart a path into this chaotic future because the markets are chaotic right now and i'm looking forward to talking

with ledger the chartographer if you will will help us navigate through these murky times that's awesome and so when we get back we're going to hand ledger the reigns literally he's going to be driving some of the charts that we're about to explore while we look at bitcoin price where we look at eth charts and price and alternative layer ones as well as the the larger global macro markets and these commodity prices have been going crazy recently and we want to know uh what that means uh for the future as well so guys we will be

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know him he's been on the show before he also is a co-host of up only and ledger podcast uh both fantastic podcasts in and of themselves he's also a chartographer as david said uh and he's a friend of the bankless show ledger it's great to have you on how are you doing i'm doing great thanks for having me i don't actually know what a chartographer is but i do stare at you most of the day that's what you are it's a word that i made up it's a combination of charter and cartographer as somebody it's just brilliant david it's just like

so i think okay so like i i want to ask you ledger so like you stare at charts a lot uh just a high level is this like an exciting time for you like like secretly or is this um is this not very exciting to see this kind of action in the charts no this is not not very exciting in terms of uh from a crypto sense like it's just like a liquidity drain is what it looks like mostly there some of the legacy stuff is exciting just because there's volatility

most traders want volatility in order to find uh profitable setups because they really need a trend one direction or the other and what we've been doing in crypto markets is just compressing so volatility has reduced even though at the same time interestingly we've been you know like options markets and stuff have been pricing for expected increased volatility so you feel like you're pushing this spring together that you know is going to rebound back out but it hadn't done it yet

so it's just this constant state of tension that's quite frustrating honestly whether you're an investor with some uncertainty about what you know whether you're going to make it or not or if you're a trader just looking for a setup and you know every time you you think hey this is the move then it ends up not being the move so it can it can be very frustrating um as a crypto trader when those markets are compressing like that you mentioned the liquidity drain and i've heard from a couple other people just how there seems to be less and less

active traders at the moment and more and more just a percentage of like algobots kind of indicating that there's like just less life in the charts that just let less action to trade on and things are just kind of settling out rather than actually take having like actionable things that the charts can you know lean into giving traders options to make trades so like how would you describe the trading environment over the last like three months or so yeah i mean reduced volatility is going to be a pretty natural or i'm sorry reduced volume is going to be a pretty

natural outcome with compression in the market so i know y'all were both around as we compressed through 2018 it became it was lower and lower volume so naturally more and more people just get kind of fed up with it or stop participating and you end up with you know your your market makers people institutional people that are always going to be there on both sides of the market waiting for the move to participate and and they're trying to eke out you know a little bit of profit here or there

um and it eventually sets up for this high volatility moment and back then we broke down from 6k and went to 3k and volume exploded um and and that can same thing happens to the uh to the upside too it was i think the big moment um that at least in my mind when we got true confirmation of the bull market that we spent over a year in um in october of 2020 we broke up from nine and 10k and that 10k to whatever on bitcoin you

know most people were like yeah there's no way we're stopping at 20k not after this many years like in pain you know like none of the people that would sell would sell there they're all everybody knows what's next and what's next is price exploration um so then you had you know months of increasing volume as the price marked up and then as you start compressing again the you know interest in the market gets less and less and then you wait for that next high volatility moment so that's a cyclical nature of pretty much any market

there are times especially in more mature markets where you can have longer periods where volume continues to decline and the price continues to go up it doesn't have to have like more and more retail people or more and more you know velocity to keep the market going there's more of a passive strong bid like if you think of the s p 500 you've got the top most profitable companies in the world you've got passive investments every month by everyone with a retirement account that's just kind of a perpetual not high volume not high

emotion activity that's putting dollars into that market um so those types of markets sometimes can be lower volume and and progressively maintain that trend emerging markets which all of crypto is basically an emerging market or smaller markets they're not going to be that way as much like they're going to be kind of nothing going on and then everything going on so that's just what you tend to run into and what we've run into in crypto is we had kind of two peaks right you know

like everybody got excited bitcoin and eth got pretty high um in spring of 2021 or so and then again late summer early fall of 2021 and those were the highs and it was a little different depending on what coin you were looking at and then you could find a bull market somewhere and whatever altcoin or layer one trade was moving uh but if you look at bitcoin and ethereum pretty much you had these two big moments in 2021 and other than that like a lot of people just didn't make very much money in 2021 if that's all

they did you know like you had to really get down into the weeds to make a bunch of money most of the money was made really before they heard about it so the latest participants are the the last you know the last ones in and it's harder for them to be profitable we've all been there most of us buy crypto for the first time like pretty close to the top and have to earn our stripes for a few years before we make any money um and that's kind of the season we're in again is you know people are earning their stripes right now and you know some of us who have now been in it a while too like we're trying to

you know remind ourselves like it's not necessarily up only all the time even if it's a fun name for a podcast and mantra um so you got to be in it for the tech every now and then you know so so so leisure in it for the tech these words like compression these words like liquidity drain uh you know last time we had you on i think we're talking about charts was uh where there was kind of a dip in in like beginning of summer last year and we're kind of talking about hey you know divine the future for us we talked about

charts a little bit but i feel like you didn't use words like liquidity drain then and you didn't use words like compression then you're using those words now and you actually you know brought up another season that i think m maybe many people listening remember but certainly david and myself listened which is uh 2018. okay and that definitely uh felt like a liquidity drain to me it was just like the market would drop 50 percent and then before you could catch your breath and it's like it's over okay it's got

the pain has got to be it drops another 50 and this happened again and again and again and again are you thinking the setup right now does this feel similar to march or you know 2018 in general or uh are you a bit where you were like in the beginning of summer last year where you're like yeah it's uncertain could could go one direction or another i mean you weren't using these terms though is this more like 2018 to you or

is this is this something else can i depress you a little bit yeah um well for the record i'm the bearish one ryan's still bullish but i'm the bear i think it's fine to always be bullish with a long enough lens um and especially if you're taking stuff off at some points you know like taking profit pay yourself a little bit put a gigantic punk in your living room you know whatever fits for you um you know i i think those are important concepts that are going to enable you to

sustain the times where you're not just constantly getting this dopamine drip of new profits you know and then i think most of us want to maintain some degree of exposure to crypto markets it just doesn't necessarily mean you have to have 100 of your net worth in like maybe it's 10 or maybe it's 50 or whatever whatever you're comfortable with i think the same mantra should exist most of the time that like not you know once you've been in a long time not necessarily don't put in what you can't lose i think it maybe turns

into more of um don't don't forget to take out what you're unwilling to lose right like if you make your first million or your first ten thousand or hundred thousand whatever that number is you wanna pay off for credit card debt or your student loans or your house or you know enough for retirement and if you can secure those dreams and those goals you should secure those goals to the best of your ability and then maintain exposure so that you have continuous upside beyond that or at least maintain an attention span beyond

that and i think after you have a period where you went through the full upswing of the market right where you you get to watch ethereum go from a hundred dollars to forty eight hundred dollars like that's a big move you know um and maybe you're maybe your price cost average was 400 but still like 400 dollars to over 4 000 is a is a nice move it's a life-changing move if you have any skin in the game um the reality now is and i can share it

can i share a screen yet or yeah okay yeah this is the part that's depressing okay uh the reality is that relative to 2018 if you go to the absolute pico top in 2017 and you go out uh to the very bottom we spent almost exactly a year if you go like 50 to 52 weeks to the literal bottom if you do the same top at 2017 2018 the top took 52 weeks to go to bottom yes it took exactly a year to go to the

bottom and from a time perspective we've actually basically passed that from bitcoin i i know we made a higher high here i don't think that's quite fair in bitcoin terms um to me it really felt like the top of the cycle for bitcoin because even here it was underperforming a lot of altcoins you know and you know your primary exposure if it's in majors or whatever it's been 52 weeks since that high in april 2021 uh or it's been or we're almost we're

almost up to it next month roughly tax week that's fun um so we're actually really close to that same period of time which felt for me this felt like a very long time you know this time around i've actually been a little more entertained so i don't know if it's the same thing i don't know if that means we're going to have a longer cycle of sideways but what i do know is that after that euphoric blow off top it took a long time to repair you know bitcoin moved up quite a bit

but overall this move wasn't as impressive as you would have seen in other markets like if you look at like a solana or you know the layer one trade or um even ethereum if we go over to that chart the if we take it out a log the higher high after that that first top we went from 3 900 it was a little bit better of a of a high after that right 4 800 um and then the first move out in terms of multiples was better than bitcoins as well like ethereum this gets a little messy uh

ethereum gained quite a lot of strength relative to bitcoin throughout the cycle but there's no questioning that this is now uh perilous you know like this is not this is not what you want to see like you have a breakout but then you only spend three weeks or whatever in price exploration and then you just bleed out and then when you do consolidate you do it kind of below all the same important levels so it leads you to this position where um you could have a move up but like where

do you actually say now i'm bullish for more price expiration and basically you have to go quite a ways up to have that confidence you know and when you start to see like okay well where do i think this can move down and putting into the linear puts this in perspective sometimes because that's the percentage right when you that you lose you know unfortunately a lot of us know what our net worth is at the all-time high or whatever so if you go peak to trough it's 55 a 55 correction

in ethereum from that high to the to the low and uh this has to repair itself quite a bit i think it's just going to take time i guess is my point there and so to get back to that that timing angle the 52 weeks that i had highlighted of the prior chart to where we're almost at now yet it feels like we're more in this range you know what i mean it doesn't feel like we've had this like truly painful type of consolidation that could take even longer and i think what

no one wants to hear and my friend uh crypto don alt if y'all know him he's a excellent kind of patient traitor is what i would call him he legitimately thinks um this could take a really long time like two years of that um and as crypto matures and takes longer to kind of work its way through things it would be very painful i think for many participants in the market if we spent multiple years essentially letting everything catch up

and letting it breathe and i don't think it's that surprising because despite the price having corrected this is going to bring some fundamental components to my personal not fundamental it's going to bring some personal experience components to it people that are doing contracting work with me or people that are like you know they're very uber driver or you know they work at a restaurant i was walking past the coffee shop the other day and like i just heard the word bitcoin out of like five feet away from

me everybody's talking about crypto and honestly i feel like there's a little bit too much attention on the market at the moment um despite price not being there alongside it and that that worries me from from that perspective and i think when you have those scenarios it just sometimes it takes a long time to repair itself and get back to a place where there's like a value trade if you will and it's not if a trade is really really crowded it's probably not

going to work very well because the as people start jumping off the bus they're going to be jumping off the bus too soon you need people to be jumping on the bus while it's already moving and i don't think we're in that place i think too many people are essentially bag holding crypto because they got involved that's great from an adoption perspective but it's not necessarily great from a price acceleration perspective because who's your who's your marginal buyer right like who's the person that's bringing money in the institutions are here the retail folks are here um really the only

thing we're missing is like nation states buying in size or people automatically being able to buy in their retirement accounts for certain those are big changes that would would change this a lot but in the meantime i think it's got to get a lot more boring first before you can get enough people kind of out of the market or under exposed or whatever to kind of catch that next wave of big upside there's a there's a couple of dynamics that i want to ask about um and so i'll kind of start start from the beginning you mentioned how in 2018 it took 52

weeks to go from the top of 2018 to the bottom uh like basically at the end of that year and you said that we'll we're almost there we're almost at 52 weeks from the first high that bitcoin set but i'm very cognizant that like a significant amount of the downside happened in the last four weeks of 2018 and like that's kind of how many weeks that we have ahead of us now of course history never repeats itself but it does rhyme but if it did repeat itself it would be bad starting like almost this or next week and the other

thing i'm cognizant about is how far away we are from what i believe that is the 200 week moving average in the green line um yeah and so like there's a lot of distance between where we are right now in the 200 week moving average and in the last four weeks of 2018 is when crypto prices went from meaningfully above the 200 movie week moving average to touching the 200 week moving average this is where bitcoin i think went from like six seven thousand to six thousand dollars and then it got cut in half to like three thousand dollars inside of

inside of four weeks uh how fearful are you that we uh rapidly approach the the 200 week moving average that's that's the first question and then the second question about like retail and people talking about bitcoin on the street and uh just like all of that excitement around crypto how do you square that with just like general mainstream adoption because that is the goal of crypto like we want everyone to be talking about crypto regardless of what the prices are so so two questions for you like how relevant

is the 200 week moving average right now and also how relevant is just the fact that some of the conversations that people are having about crypto are just a symptom of adoption yeah so let's start with the 200 week moving average i love it because it's basically been the only thing that has perfectly on a weekly closing candle basis um predicted the end of bear markets so you ask if i would be fearful that we go there oh i'd be freaking excited like if if i managed to like maintain buying power and we're

at the 200 week like that's the one place on the chart where if i bought if i go all in at that point and then i'm wrong and i lose then oh well you know what you know like i that's that was the most high conviction bet that i could possibly make in crypto and there's zero chance i'm the only person looking at that which is the benefit of most ta in the first place right like you want to look at the other things that other people are looking at because those are the metrics that we've decided that's this kind of mimetic element of any market

you know that we look at price to earnings or price to sales in legacy markets we look at these fundamentals say well why do we look at those things well in ta you look at the 200 week moving average that's your that's your like true 200 day 200 week uh that's that's the biggest kind of trend following uh component that everybody is just going to look at just accept it you don't have to know exactly why any everybody cares just it only matters that everybody cares um so if we went to twenty thousand dollars on bitcoin next week i'd be ecstatic right

because hopefully i will manage my risk well enough have buying power and i buy the crap out of that level the more painful area is hovering where a 50 drop is what it takes to actually hit it and you're just like waiting for it to catch up you know and i think that's that's where this like pain trade of this constant chop and you know i i like to just uh you know draw on charts sometimes um so if you're just like drawing would it

surprise you if you did something like that you know uh and i don't think most people would be too surprised but that's what gets you into your two-year kind of re-accumulation but the the beautiful thing about something like that is these 200-day or 200-week moving averages are going to just work their way up right because the price is still above them therefore as you knock off these old weeks and add these new weeks that 200 week moving average keeps going up even though the price stays flat and it's essentially giving you a time

weighted value um that it's okay to buy bitcoin with some support um this is this is your like launch pad into multi-six figure bitcoin right is you have a two or three year accumulation like where you're tapping into that ceiling price you know you're you're making some kind of higher low and then you're you're tapping 50 or 60k on on the top side until the people that are just like whoa i got out at breakeven or i got out and made my life changing money i didn't lose at all i didn't bail it 30k i'm

good like you re-accumulate to newer newer people newer stakeholders who are willing to you know absorb bitcoin in the 30ks then later in the 40ks and then it's pressing the 50ks and then you boom you look for that that breakout to the top side and that's what we did here right this was kind of the opposite or this was kind of the same thing with a coveted panic in the middle right right but like this was the um you know over exaggerated short squeeze but you know then it was kind of the

synthetic 9-10 k resistance that when we broke above it no way i'm selling at 20k and we could do the same thing from highs and have this compression into 50 or 60k who's selling who's selling above 60k after a two or three year consolidation in crypto markets it will still be uh an area of investment and technology that's exciting and then you get price expiration in it no way man everybody's gonna want a double or a triple or whatever out of that and that's when you

get your 100k 150k 200k bitcoin move uh but you know it's unfortunate that it might take until 20 20 23 or or longer to actually realize that so ledger for people who can't see that the two the 200 week for for bitcoin is around 20k what is the um 200 week for eth right now um let's see i don't know off the top of my head lower it's about a thousand oh god not a thousand yeah and then that's where you'd be excited for eve too you'd be like i

don't think by the century yeah yeah that'd be the buy of the century so i think you know in markets that are newer now back here i was very excited right because this was this was any new market march 2020 was when the uh at least on in terms of being listed on coinbase that was the 200 week anniversary for ethereum being on coinbase so the the number didn't did not even exist then like in reality it existed on some market back here but it was on it was on coinbase pretty early as a token

um so when it broke above that i was very excited um and yeah any of these faster moving markets it's it's gonna show the potential downside uh just to freak you out um you know if you imagined where might it be i don't know which uh what's the closest moving average on a weekly basis for solana but um here's the hundred week because there is no 200 week yet at least from uh solano on ftx point of view and it's at