Ivan on Tech gives a Bitcoin trend update and warns against DeFi yields and leveraged dividend stocks
Ivan on Tech presents a Bitcoin market update from vacation, covering bearish trend signals, ETH sentiment, DeFi security risks, and a warning about investing mortgage money into high-yield stocks.
Summary
Ivan on Tech delivers a market update while on vacation, arguing that Bitcoin is on the verge of confirming a bearish daily trend flip and that this should not surprise viewers who have been following his macro-bearish stance since Q4 2025. He contends that the rally from mid-April to mid-May was merely a short-term bounce within a larger bear trend, and that a "buy zone" near the 200-week moving average remains a likely destination. He also highlights growing negativity around Ethereum, warns that DeFi protocols are fundamentally unsafe due to asymmetric security risks — citing the founder of OpenZeppelin — and cautions viewers against following advice to invest mortgage money into high-yield dividend stocks like STRK, arguing that retail investors will not receive advance warning if dividends are cut.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Bitcoin Approaching a Bearish Daily Trend Flip
Ivan on Tech: We're back, and we're on vacation as you can see. But things are happening fast in the crypto space and I want to keep you guys updated. As you can see, we're now entering a bearish trend on the daily time frame. We can still cancel this bear trend if we pump back above the flip here at around $76K. But the way it looks right now is that a new bear trend will start within the coming three days when this flip is fully confirmed.
This is very important because we have been in a bull trend on the daily for Bitcoin basically since mid-April — right here. Then we got rejected by the 200-day Moving Average and since then we've been struggling a lot. We went from around $83K all the way down to $75,800, and now is where we're facing this bear flip. It's very, very important. So even when on vacation, I wanted to keep you guys updated.
Why This Move Should Not Be a Surprise
The first thing I really want to confirm is that you're not surprised by this move for Bitcoin — that you're not surprised by this rejection. Because if you have been following this channel, this is not news for you. This is not a surprise for you. We've been speaking about the fact that on the macro time frame, on the macro weekly picture, we have been bearish since Q4 2025. We have a high here, a lower high, and a lower high. So it's just expected that within a bear macro trend, you will see all of the small bullish trends that we see on the daily time frame.
What we've seen here is just a small bullish trend from mid-April all the way to basically mid-May, and since then we've been struggling — potentially going to be like all of these trends on the daily. They're temporary. You can still trade them. You can still make a lot of money trading them, absolutely, because you know when to exit, you have a good entry, you have a good exit. But all in all, it's very important to see it for what it is, which is just a short-term pump within a macro bear trend.
I still believe that calling the bottom in February was premature for most people that called the bottom. We did not call the bottom. We said likely it's going to be a bounce, likely towards a lower high. And yes, it did — it seems to be that. We went risk-off on October 8th. Since then, we're bearish. Nothing really has changed materially for us to become bullish. For example, what would make us bullish is if we went to the bull trend on the money line, or if we went above the previous high and did a higher high — which we did not do. Another thing that would make us bullish is if we go into the buy zone, this green box right here. I think it's a very, very good price for BITCOIN. It's very close to the 200-week Moving Average. I do believe there's a very good chance we get there. It is what it is. It's always been what it is. If you've been watching this channel, we're coming to Papa. Likely coming to Papa. Let's see how this plays out.
Short-Term Trends Still Delivering Strong Returns
One important thing: when you look at the short-term trends, these daily trends can still be quite powerful. Look here — NEAR pumped 80%. This is without leverage, 80%, just normal spot since mid-April. When I look at our community, I see every day someone with a NEAR trade, someone trading Hyperliquid or Rocket Lab — which is a stock — or other things that have been in bullish trends even on the daily time frame, delivering fantastic outcomes even while BITCOIN is struggling.
BITCOIN is struggling a lot. On the weekly it's bearish. But every day something is bullish. Every day there is something pumping. So don't be a slave to this one bear trend.
The best thing with the daily time frame, or even lower time frames like the 12-hour or the 4-hour, is that trends come and go quite fast, so you can see results quickly. Two months ago, this one went bullish and is up 2,000%. Five months ago, Superfortune went bullish and is up 800%. Vencoin is up 300%. On the 12-hour time frame you see Superfortune up hundreds of percent.
Someone asked me the other day, "Ivan, how do you prepare for the next bull?" Well, to prepare for the next bull, you need to have capital. You need to have money to invest. That's the problem — most people don't have capital to invest in the market. When BITCOIN goes bullish on the weekly time frame, that's going to be the best signal for the bull, or to invest when BITCOIN goes into the buy zone. So what you have to ensure now, before the bull — which is likely going to be the biggest bull in history for crypto — is that you have money to put into the market. If you don't have money, you don't have chips to play. You're out. Grow your stack. Ensure you have capital.
How to do it? My best way of doing it now, and the way I see our community doing it currently, is to ride the trends — the short-term trends in specific crypto coins that are bullish on the daily or the 12-hour, or ride the long-term trends like in stocks like Intel. Intel has been fantastic. The same thing with AMD. So many different stocks have been fantastic. Even the NASDAQ itself has been delivering quite well. You have to use leverage if you are starting out from a smaller portfolio, because a move for the NASDAQ from the bottom up to here is just 30%, but with leverage it could be way more. Everything depends on your goals.
Ethereum Sentiment and the Bear Trend
Meanwhile, ETH is getting absolutely destroyed and hammered on social media. The Bankless guys, who have shilled ETH for many, many years — I love the Bankless guys, but they've been shilling a lot. They've been into all the L2s. They've been compensated by the L2 industrial complex, all of the grants. It's been a crazy story. But even they have sold ETH — at least one of the guys. There's such negativity now for ETH. It is quite insane.
The good thing is that people have humor about it. One guy said, "Man, the Bankless guy is going to look like a huge idiot when ETH runs to $2,300 next cycle." I love it. They have humor. But this amount of negativity on ETH — let's keep an eye on it, because if it goes bullish, we're going to be bullish. I love how people are negative, how people are taking shots at it. It's very, very good. It's potentially setting us up for a nice pump once it actually breaks to the bull trend.
Right now it's looking very weak on the chart. The chart is very ugly. So I'm not touching it right now. It needs to go to bull trend. If it doesn't go to bull trend, we're out. But overall, I find it interesting. You generally want assets with bad sentiment, but you don't want to buy them in the bear trend, because they can have bad sentiment and then go down another 90%. Many such examples — Avalanche is maybe one of the famous ones where you can have bad sentiment and still dump more. Same thing with ADA. You can have bad sentiment and then just keep dumping even more.
So all in all, bad sentiment is a good sign normally, but that alone is not enough for a pump. It's actually a very bad and not too smart idea to long stuff or buy stuff with bad sentiment only. You want bad sentiment and a new bull trend. That's the best. On the weekly for ETH, $2,600 is the new trend. On the daily it is $2,400. So it's going to be a bit faster. It's down 47% since the bear flip — that could have saved you a lot of money. Many people in our community got saved massively from this capital destruction in ETH.
Should it go bull, it would be monumental. Why? Because it would be the first time it's been bull since October 20th, 2025. So obviously if you have a new bull trend on the daily, it's a good shot to take. Even if it's a small bull trend, maybe it's a fake-out, maybe it gets rejected by the 200-day Moving Average — who knows? But from a risk-reward perspective it's quite good, because that would be the first bull trend since October 20th. And even if it's a fake-out, let's say it doesn't go too high, it just pumps a bit then reverses back down — no problem. It turns bear, we're out. We take risk-reward adjusted shots. Some of them will play out, some of them will not. But more will play out than not because it's risk-adjusted. This is a back-tested system and it's all probabilities. Probabilities means that even if you lose sometimes, you can still win massively at the end of the day. So monitor the ETH bull flip on the daily. It is at $2,400 currently.
Altcoin Trend Check
Meanwhile, Hyperliquid is consolidating around the all-time high price. Still in bull trend, up almost 100% since the bull flip in February. Zcash is very similar, but it's also quite close to the bear flip, so keep an eye there. NEAR — fantastic pump, up 80% since the bull flip back in April. All of these are daily bull flips. This one is also getting quite close to the bear flip, so keep an eye. Next you have Venice, up 300%, quite far away from the bear flip, looking quite strong.
OpenZeppelin Founder Warns on DeFi Security
Something else that's very important to discuss: the founder of OpenZeppelin — which is like a library that everyone is using in DeFi, basically pre-written code that many, many projects use when they want to create a coin or a DAO. Most DeFi features have an OpenZeppelin template. Everyone who is a DeFi developer knows OpenZeppelin. Anyway, the founder of OpenZeppelin has come out and said that he's very much concerned. He said that all DeFi is unsafe, that coding agents are superhuman at finding vulnerabilities, and that smart contract security is too asymmetric — defenders need to fix every bug while attackers just need one exploit to steal funds. He said he has been privately advising friends and family to exit all DeFi positions, including low-risk blue chips like Aave, MakerDAO, and Compound.
There's a lot of discussion here about this whole situation. I personally agree, because I don't have a lot of money in DeFi. Actually, I don't have anything in DeFi because the yields are very low. You can have higher yield in the treasury — literally lending to the US government. The risk there is that the US government collapses or goes bankrupt, which in comparison to Aave and DeFi getting hacked every day, that risk is quite low.
The one-year Treasury yield is around 4%, the two-year yield is around 4%. This is what you get from basically staking the dollar with the US government, where the risk is that the US government rug-pulls you. Can it happen? Theoretically it can happen, but this is what we call the risk-free yield. When you look at DeFi, you get such a low yield and then also everything can be stolen — you can have North Korea attacking. Even the blue-chip protocols, including on Solana — you had Drift, which was a perp exchange — a lot of this DeFi, whether it is lending, whether it is perps, whether it is other features, they get hacked a lot. The risk-reward for me does not make sense. What is the reward? Okay, it's self-custodial — that's a bit of a reward. But at the same time, there are other self-custodial things you could own that give you exposure to US Treasuries as well. BlackRock has a tokenized fund that gives you a yield based on US Treasuries.
All in all, to me the equation has not made too much sense. But now that the big players are coming out, I think it's becoming consensus. People ask me all the time, "Ivan, what do you think about this DeFi yield?" For years I've been saying I'm not interested in DeFi yield. Why? Because of the asymmetric risk-reward where it simply does not make sense. If you want to make money in crypto, it's way better to be trading trends. I make money in crypto this way, or in stocks — the same thing actually applies to stocks also. I love just following the trends. This is how I make money in financial markets — trend following, not really looking too much at what's happening with the DeFi yield, because you are picking up pennies in front of a freight train. Be very, very careful.
Money Scanner Tool and 4-Hour Trend Flips
The best thing with the money scanner, by the way, is that you can see what flipped bullish in the last one week, two weeks, one month. Let's say we look at the 4-hour time frame — you can see here that this thing turned bullish on the 4-hour two weeks ago, this thing was four days ago. Then you can of course see what flipped, say, a week ago, if you want to see more in real time what's happening. You can see what flipped bullish on the 4-hour time frame a week ago and you have all of these different coins, and you can scroll down and see which ones have not pumped too much yet. Some of them actually went down — when you have a bull flip you may have a bit of a pullback initially before continuing to the upside, which could be an opportunity in itself. And again, this is on 4-hours, so it's a very short time frame. These things come and go quite fast. Don't underestimate the use of this filtering. You can in real time see when things flip bullish.
Hyperliquid Expanding Into Off-Chain Prediction Markets
Looking at the overall news, Hyperliquid is expanding with prediction markets. Prediction markets are coming to Hyperliquid. This is a technical explanation of how it works with HIP-4, and it basically extends HIP-4 beyond on-chain price-based markets into a broader category of event contracts where outcomes depend on external information.
Currently, Hyperliquid has been able to facilitate prediction markets if it's verifiable on-chain, where it's super simple — you just look at on-chain information, it's already there, and mainly it is based on price. For example, will BITCOIN go above $100K in the next week or the next six months? You have an on-chain price for BITCOIN, you can check it, it's super simple. That's how Hyperliquid has been able to work up until now. Now they're expanding the functionality so you could have off-chain events as well — let's say who wins some basketball game or football game. This is obviously not on-chain, but with this new update it's going to be possible to facilitate on Hyperliquid as well, because the validators will be able to provide that information.
NEAR Tokenomics Update from Arthur Hayes
There's a lot of talk about NEAR. Arthur Hayes — the founder of BitMEX — discussed the fact that NEAR is fully diluted, there's no more inflation or unlocks with VCs, everyone who wanted to sell has sold, and from a tokenomics perspective this makes it interesting. No more VC, no more insider VC that wants to dump or can dump on you. That's important. Let's see how the price will evolve. Again, we're not marrying it — should it go bear, we're out. For now it's still bull. Fantastic.
Warning: Do Not Put Mortgage Money Into High-Yield Dividend Stocks
Oh yeah, this one. There's a clip going around — a big shout-out to MicroStrategy — where someone says:
Clip subject: "I just last week bought $250,000 of STRK. The reason I did it — one was just to go through the experience, which I enjoy doing. But the second is I have monthly obligations. I said, well, I have a 1.75%, 30-year mortgage. And if I can, instead of paying down that mortgage, put it into an instrument that pays me 11.5% — that's 10x my mortgage rate — I'm essentially making money by taking the money and putting it into STRK."
Guys, don't do it. Don't do it. This can go to zero very, very quickly because STRK is a stock. A stock can go to zero very fast. If they don't keep offering dividends, or they start changing dividends, or something else happens to the stock, your money will go down very, very fast. Again, you're picking up pennies in front of a freight train. Do not put your mortgage into STRK. Do not do that.
He's promoting it, but also covering himself by saying "I did it, I did it." But basically what he's saying is that you should do it — that's what he means, that's what he wants you to do. He himself obviously has insider information. For him to put his mortgage money in probably makes sense. Why? Because he knows that if it goes to zero, he's going to know in advance and he can pull money out. You will not know. He will not tell you, "Hey, we will not be able to pay dividends anymore." If they don't pay dividends, STRK is going to fall very fast, because the reason why it's at around $100 is because people expect dividends. Should dividends not come anymore, it's no longer going to be $100. I don't know if it's going to be $20 or $30 — there's obviously going to be some correlation to the common stock. It will basically become a common stock, more or less, maybe a bit more expensive than common stock because in case of liquidation they do have preference. So there should be a bit higher price than common stock. But all in all, you see the problem. The reason why it's at $100 is because of those sweet, sweet dividends. Should dividends stop — some announcement, change of strategy — be careful. Don't do it. He can do it because he can pull the money out in case something happens on the horizon. You will not. They will not tell you in advance.