If market cycles still matter, this current one will be remembered as a disappointment by many crypto traders. With Bitcoin Dominance up-only, this has been the cycle of institutional traders who accumulate Bitcoin. For years, crypto traders hoped that institutions would ‘buy our bags’. But for now, only ‘King BTC’ has benefitted. From its low point at less than 40%, Bitcoin market cap dominance versus the rest of the crypto markets is now sitting at 65%. The times when crypto traders would ‘hunt gems’ and hold Altcoins that would go up 10-100x are over. Between the ‘crypto trenches’ of memecoin traders hunting very low cap memes that can go up multiples and then go back to 0 even quicker and ‘King BTC’, not much of the rest of the market has caught a bid.
The picture is completely different on the institutional side. For many funds, Bitcoin is now part of a core treasury strategy. Pensions and endowments dip in through ETF exposure. Especially in the US, the regulatory and legal outlook are improving rapidly under a pro-crypto US administration. Asset managers like BlackRock are promoting BTC as a long-term store of value with lower correlation to equities than previously assumed.
In fact, institutional Bitcoin FOMO is accelerating rapidly. Michael Saylor’s MicroStrategy famously leveraged its balance sheet to borrow funds, buy Bitcoin for its treasury and then rinse and repeat. The strong performance of MicroStrategy has unsurprisingly led to copy-cats. This week, GameStop became the latest one, confirming that it had bought 4,710 BTC worth about $513 million. In a sign that the buck might not stop here, SharpLink, a performance-based marketing company serving the U.S. sports betting and global iGaming industries, launched a $425million private placement to accumulate Ethereum into its treasury.
Leaving aside the question of who would lend so much money to a sports marketing company, other burning questions remain. Will Bitcoin FOMO lead to another parabolic rally? Will Ethereum treasury-buys finally lead to new all-time-highs for the 2nd largest Crypto Coin by market cap? And will that lead to a ‘more traditional’ Altcoin rally? Maybe most importantly: how sustainable is the MicroStrategy Treasury accumulation?
As always in Crypto markets, reflexivity is strong on the way up, but critical on the way down. If the BTC price ever drops below the average purchase price of its Bitcoin and debt-rollover deadlines are approaching, will MicroStrategy end up having to sell Bitcoin in a fire sale? Past market history tends to agree with Murphy’s Law: usually, whatever can go wrong in crypto, eventually does go wrong. Maybe the day will come when the rise of Bitcoin dominance will stop ‘the hard way’.