Van Eck's 12 quantitative signals suggest the crypto bear market may be over
A solo analysis by the Digital Asset News host examining bear market indicators, tokenization trends, and live Q&A.
Summary
The Digital Asset News host reviews a 12-signal quantitative framework published by Matthew Sigel, Head of Digital Assets Research at VanEck, which he argues indicates the current bear market may be over. The host cross-references VanEck's signals — including price drawdowns, volatility collapse, MVRV Z-score, NUPL, mining difficulty, and long-term holder churn — against his own four-year cycle data, noting that this cycle's peak-to-trough drawdown of roughly 50% is significantly less severe than the 70% drawdown seen in the equivalent period of the previous cycle. He also covers the Jackson Hole Economic Symposium, the growth of real-world asset tokenization from $4.5 billion to $38 billion in two years, and dominant payment rail data showing Ethereum, Binance, and Solana/Tron as consistent leaders. The host closes with a live Q&A covering ETF flow patterns around a major short liquidation event, M2 money supply concerns, and his personal price prediction of $150,000–$170,000 as Bitcoin's next cycle top.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
VanEck's 12 Bear Market Signals and How Wrong the Predictions Were
Host: Well everybody, it looks like the signals are in and the bear market may actually be over. And the question I have to ask myself is: how wrong was I?
So today we're going to take a look at Matthew Sigel. He's head of digital assets research over at VanEck. VanEck, if you don't know, is a pretty large institutional company — roughly, I want to say, $678 billion in assets under management. You can correct me in the comments section.
Matt here was actually one of the people I used for the video where I talked about every price prediction being wrong. We took a look at 2021 and 2025. Matt made the list of 2025 as being wrong, but we're all wrong — it's just that some are wrong more than others. Anyhow, in December 2024, he said Bitcoin was going to be at $180K during 2025. And he was pretty close. I mean, let's be honest, it hit $126K. The thing I like about Matt is he wasn't one of those guys like Samson Mow saying "a million dollars tomorrow." He actually laid it out. He gave you reasons behind why it would work, and he would also talk about why it didn't. In August 2025, he said Bitcoin was going to $180K by end of year 2025. That didn't happen, but it was close. But he did get this right: in December 2025, he said Bitcoin would be a top performer in 2026. He was absolutely 100% correct. You can watch that video — there's a link in the description where we go over the biggest offenders that were out there.
So what he says here is there are a couple of interesting things he talks about as far as the bear market being over. But it's not just that — it was at the very end, what he talked about as far as the leverage being out there, who is collapsing and who is not this time. He really makes a good point that this is not a bear market that was excessively painful. Take a listen to this.
Matthew Sigel: "MicroStrategy — Saylor — finally selling Bitcoin at what looks like the bottom. Looks like it's going to be a great newspaper headline bottom, which goes along with our 12 out of 12 quantitative signals. News flash: a lot of the leverage in the system has been brought onto regulated rails. Whether it's MicroStrategy or CME futures, most of the leverage in the space is now visible. In the last cycle, when FTX and Celsius and Three Arrows all went bankrupt, that leverage was not visible. I think it's a lot better right now."
Comparing This Cycle's Drawdown to Previous Cycles
Host: And I think he's right. But there are two questions. First of all, my thing was: how much better is it compared to the last cycle?
If we go to Dante's Crypto — shameless plug, it is my website, but it's free, 100% free, always will be free — and we take a look at the four-year cycle, just how down are we compared to four years previously? Well, guess what? This is amazing. As of August 27, 2022, we were 70% down from the all-time high, at $20,341. August 27, 2026 — four years later. Remember, we're always talking about the four-year cycles. Four-year cycles are adding up. Well, we are 36% down from the 2026 all-time high. Imagine that. Only 36% down. I know it sounds weird, but in the realm of volatility — I've been in Bitcoin and crypto since 2017 — I can tell you that's almost a miracle.
Breaking Down VanEck's 12 Quantitative Signals
Host: So when we're talking about VanEck and seeing what these 12 indicators are, there were a few that caught my eye and I think they're actually 100% correct.
First of all, as far as whether the bear market is over: price drawdowns. This signal triggers automatically when Bitcoin drops 35% or more, which we had already been down. It says 49% drawdown, but I'm pretty sure depending on the exchange it was about 50–51%. That was in August of 2026. Interesting. I believe we actually went down to 50% somewhere around April or May. Again, correct me in the comments section, but it was relatively brutal for that time frame.
Volatility collapse. This tracks the cooling off of aggressive price swings. VanEck noted 30-day realized volatility dropping to only 27.2% annualized — well below its 80% historical average. Remember, from the high to the low in 2017–2018, that was 86%. The high to the low from 2021 to 2022 was roughly 77%. And the high to the low so far from 2025 to 2026 has only been 50%. So the return on investment is diminished, but so is the volatility — greatly.
Then we have the MVRV Z-score — the realized value versus the market value. The Z-score pretty much eliminates all the noise and measures the deviation of Bitcoin's market value from its realized value to highlight when the asset is historically undervalued. We know right now it's undervalued. We can take a look at the 200-day moving average, which we've been talking about ad nauseam. We know it's undervalued. The question is how much.
And that would bring us to the NUPL — net unrealized profit and loss — the paper wealth of the network, used to determine when the market has entered an extreme state of financial pain. That would have been recently. So those are all adding up.
Then this is the one I think is bigger and that people don't really talk about too much: Bitcoin mining. When Bitcoin miners drop off — and they should, because some of these miners are making a boatload of money because of AI. They're saying, "Hey, we've got space, we've got electricity. You want to use that? We'll shut down some miners. No big deal." They do that and people say that's awful. It's not awful for the Bitcoin miners. This is actually really great, because the difficulty level drops and there doesn't have to be so much hash power and so much electricity. That means everybody can participate. This is the great awakening. So it looks like the network difficulty is definitely dropping as Bitcoin miners turn off and switch to AI.
And then lastly, derivatives markets. I think we just saw a pretty massive liquidation event. Long-term holder churn tracks liquidations from veteran investors. Supply held for over a year fell by over 356,000 Bitcoin, signaling older wallets shifting capital and distributing coins.
There are some other signals in there, but I didn't find them as intriguing. Those are the ones I look at. So Matt could be right. We could be seeing the Renaissance as the bear market starts to fade away.
Now, me personally, I thought we would have another go into October and we'd see some pretty big lows, but maybe I'm wrong. This is why I dollar-cost average. I just dynamically DCA. If I'm wrong, I'm wrong, but I keep buying Bitcoin. And if I'm right, well, I get some better buys. We'll see how it all breaks.
Jackson Hole Symposium and the Payments Theme
Host: Let me know what you think about that in the comments section. And then lastly, because I want to make this quick before we get into the Q&A — Jackson Hole. This is the symposium: Jackson Hole Economic Policy, August 27th through 29th. The head of the Federal Reserve is going to be speaking on Friday, and people are wondering what he's going to talk about. Well, from the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, this year's theme is "Financial Innovation: Implications for Payments and Policy." That's what it's all about.
And I've got to tell you, it looks like there's an article from the Aspirations Group talking about how when Powell goes out there and gives his speech — on top of the fact that it's really about the technology and moving forward as far as payments — maybe we will start to see more talk about stablecoins. And it looks like this could potentially also touch on the tokenization of real-world assets.
Real-World Asset Tokenization and Altcoin Opportunities
Host: I know Bitcoin's great and everybody loves it. I love it. It's the lion's share of my entire crypto portfolio. But I think sometimes we miss sight of things when people are focusing on one simple thing, which is Bitcoin — and if you want to be safe, that's it. But I'm always looking for a little bit of a way to outperform. And I think there are going to be some winners coming in, and those are in altcoins. I know — put your pitchforks away. I think there are going to be some outsized gains for specific alts.
When you take a look at rwa.xyz — links in the description — the tokenization of real-world assets has everything from treasury debt, commodities, stocks, corporate credit, private equity, real estate. You name it, it's there. If we take a look back at August 2024, that was $4.5 billion. Go one more year and you're at $18 billion. That was just a year ago. It doubled in 2024. And now look what you've got — you doubled again. You went from $4.5 billion to $18 billion to $38 billion. What do you think is going to keep happening? It's looking pretty good.
As we move down and take a look at the league table, this is how it breaks down. If you're "distributed," these are tokens using blockchain as a distribution layer. "Represented" tokens use the blockchain as a recordkeeping layer. I don't think that's as big a thing as people are making it out to be. But the distribution layer — Ethereum is the winner at $17 billion. The next one is Binance at almost $6 billion. The next one is Solana at $4 billion, and then Stellar and some others underneath there.
What do I always talk about? Ethereum, Binance, Solana, Tron. Why do I say that? Because it also has to do with payments — it's not just about tokenization of real-world assets. It's going to be payments. The big payment rails are Tether and USDC. You take a look at Visa stablecoin volume data and it's the same thing every time: Binance, Ethereum, Solana, Tron. Although Base is making a case — Base from Coinbase is actually moving up. Looking at 12 months, six months, three months, and the last month — Base is number one in the most recent period with $359 billion in USD volume. But still, the consistent leaders are Binance, Ethereum, Solana, Tron. I can't make it up. There are the winners.
And as a reminder — I was talking to my friend Jerry about this a couple of days ago and he said, "I'm getting really depressed about all these banks coming out and making their own rails. They're going to kind of screw it all up for us because we can't invest in that stuff. You can't invest in a private centralized chain." I said, "Jerry, how many different banks out there have made a payment app that did a damn thing?" And he said, "Well, Zelle." And that's actually true. The big consortium of banks came out with Zelle — if you're not from America, Zelle is a thing we use for peer-to-peer payment transfers. But I said, "You know what? It's all privatized."
Besides, if you take out Zelle, what do you got? You've got Swift — roughly $150 trillion in volume, and that's been around since the '60s. But take a look at what private companies did: Visa at $14 trillion, Mastercard $12 trillion, Apple Pay $7 trillion, Stripe, PayPal, Zelle, Venmo, Cash App, Wise. You're looking at a pretty big chunk. Yeah, the banks are going to get theirs, but we're going to get ours.
And I think moving forward — you see that thing right there at the very top, Visa? That's where my brother made all his money when he was in college. He invested in Visa and rode that train all the way and retired early. Why? Because he was earlier than everybody else and he understood payments. I think this will be the next big thing.
Live Q&A
Host: Now let's get to the Q&A. What do we got?
The bear market was supposed to last until October. Exactly — it was supposed to. The four-year cycle, every time we try to fade it, it comes back and bites us. So we'll say Q4. I still think October, November, December could be a pretty big bump. Who knows? We're only one tweet away on Truth Social from Trump about Iran or something like that. But if not, we all did what we were supposed to do, which was dollar-cost average and just accumulate and see where things go. I couldn't sell my other kidney — I need one of them at least. So I'm feeling okay.
If you're waiting for October to dump everything in and do that lump sum, God bless you. Maybe it's going to work out. I personally am hoping I see a couple of days where it goes lower, but maybe we missed it. Maybe we didn't. Nobody knows.
American-based crypto will be the big winners. I'm hoping. I personally love this country. I want to see it flourish. I think it's very possible to give some of this pump back before a prolonged uptrend, but I'm looking higher. Probably higher lows and higher highs from here.
The question is: is the US Treasury doing quantitative easing or quantitative tightening, and how much will this affect crypto? Well, Scott Bessent came out and said, "Look, I'm going to help everybody out. We're going to make that $4 billion and we are going to use the Treasury General Account and prop that up." We can't use a trillion — we need some of that in the bank. However, unfortunately, the Treasury yields did drop for a while, which is good if you want to refinance that debt. You're like, "I don't want to pay five, six, seven, eight, nine percent — I want that down." Then it did go down. Then it went right back up. So Scott Bessent, I think, is a very smart guy, and we'll see if this actually works out.
As far as quantitative easing — that train won't stop. Why don't we take a look at M2 money supply and see. Maybe they stopped. I'm just kidding. Of course they didn't stop. Is this a memecoin? Oh, it's the US dollar. So yeah, roughly we're looking at $23 trillion. Good news — we are only $40 trillion in debt. Silver lining. My god, that is so awful.
Who's short the market today? I was going to talk about this on the show itself. We can take a look at macro because you can't be in a depression and have an all-time high in Bitcoin. Kind of difficult. So we like to look at the macro, see what's going on, look at different indicators to make sure things are going in the right direction — MVRV Z-score, NUPL, Bitcoin mining difficulty, see if it drops or not. All those things are pretty good to watch.
But unfortunately, this is not going to be a very popular opinion: I do think it's just a bunch of whales in the background moving the market in the way they deem fit. Here's an example. We all know there was a pretty big short squeeze — a bunch of shorts were liquidated. That was roughly on the 18th of August. A lot of shorts were liquidated. And we take a look at this and say, "How big is that?" Well, if we take a look at all-time shorts being liquidated, you can see that on the 9th of October 2025, that was the biggest as far as longs went, and somebody made a bunch of money, and that is what brought us into the bear market.
Anyhow, if we take a look at the Bitcoin ETF flows — look at the 17th of August. That was just one day. Nothing but red over here on BlackRock and Fidelity and Bitwise. 17th of August — just red, red, red. But the day before: $297 million of inflows. Then the next day $189 million, then $517 million, then $606 million. These were the late ones. These were the ones that knew. And it just kind of lines up that you have a massive amount of liquidations on one side, and a lot of people going in on the other, which wasn't very normal or regular. But maybe it's just me looking into something that really isn't there. It was just interesting to me.
Bitcoin just went green on the weekly. Well, well, well. If this is true, then the only indicator we need to know — and this is the one that has never failed us — is if David Allen is in the chat. And since David is here, and he is never here until it's a bull run, I think that's it everybody. I think we just hit it.
Patience beats everything. And if you can just stick around and you're not just at the right place at the right time, but in the right product, the right asset, then you'll be pretty good. Here's an example: if you invested into Luna in 2019 or 2020 and just held on, you'd be a genius in 2021. A lot of people made a lot of money off that. But if you held on in 2022, you'd have zero. So it really does come down to — people say time in the market is better than timing the market. Unfortunately, in the crypto digital asset space, you really do have to do a better job of taking profits. We all do. I think nobody here hit the all-time high, but maybe we can get it right this time.
I think the big institutions are firing at the bottom of the bear market. Look, it's not what you know, it's who you know. And I know those guys all run around the same circles. It's like me here in Puerto Rico — I run around this tight circle of whales and they always have good information. Usually it's when we're drinking. That's pretty much when I get the good information.
I sold some. There was an opportunity and I couldn't pass it up, so I had to sell a little bit. The service where I call the wrong time and take profits — it's very simple. It's YouTube right here, and me just every so often saying, "Hey, don't forget to take profits." This cycle I'm going to get better at that. I'm going to get better at saying I took profits the day of, as opposed to a couple of days later.
Price predictions are worthless, and here's the thing — the problem with price predictions is they get so crazy high. If they would just be conservative, I think it'd be better for everybody. I'm just going to put it out there: I think Bitcoin is going to top out at $150,000 to $170,000 next cycle. That's it. I need to do the video where I talk about why that is, but it really does come down to the four-year cycles, fractals, and the return on investment and the volatility. That's really all it comes down to. I think that's where we're at — $150,000 to $170,000. That's great. That's why it's always in my head to think about altcoins, because there are some winners out there. We just have to find them.