 Everyone, and welcome back to Market Here on Cointelegraph with myself, CryptoJeb, where we discuss the latest in what's shaping the markets along with valuable insights from top industry leaders, traders, and influencers. Today's guest is Michael Vandypope. Michael is a full-time trader in cryptocurrencies based at the Amsterdam Stock Exchange and interested in everything related to blockchain in combination to the current financial system, and we are so very thankful to have him here. So let's roll the intro video. Michael, welcome to the show, my friend. Thank you, man. Thank you, man. Great intro. Absolutely. Well, thank you very much for being here and giving me something to intro. I think we're going to have a great show today. Well, I think so, too. It's a pleasure to be playing back on Cointelegraph after such a while. Absolutely. Yeah. Well, you used to work with Cointelegraph quite a bit, didn't you? Yeah, I actually used to write articles for Cointelegraph when I started into the crypto business like four, five years, four years ago or something. And now we're back onto YouTube again. So that's pretty cool, actually. Yeah, going back to your roots. Well, welcome to the show, Market Talks. We're excited to have you here. Can you just, for anybody who hasn't been in crypto for several years and read those articles that you wrote back in the day, can you just bring some people that are watching right now up to speed on who you are, what you do, and tell us a little bit about the growth that you've seen on Twitter because you are getting huge over there. Yeah, well, if there's a bull cycle, it helps a lot when you want to grow. But I started into crypto in 2017 and I started because I was studying economics. I wanted to live a free life, want to go for financial freedom as well. And then I found out crypto, which was quite suitable with the study that I did. And then I also investigated into trading more and more, going down the rabbit hole, in which I decided at the first of January of 2018 to go full-time crypto, which was rough in two years after, of course. It was also rough to be on the stock exchange during that period. All the stock traders making jokes about the crypto people. But going fast forward towards right now, right now we are having a company at the Stock Exchange with about 20 people working there, which is called 8Global. Myself, I've grown through my alias crypto, we held towards, well, pretty big Twitter and YouTube account. And now we're actually developing towards a more professional mindset as I think that the markets are moving towards a more complex strategy or more complex way too. So we want to go from just a crypto trader towards a more professional attitude. Awesome. Well, I think you guys are doing a wonderful job over there. Since you guys have so much insight into what's going on in crypto and even over with some of the stuff that we do, we've referenced your work many, many times. Can you tell us what your current overall perspective on the market is right now? Well, I mean, the markets have been destroyed heavily, right? So we've been seeing a big drop of the markets from 69K last year during this period to 20K that we are currently witnessing at this point in time. However, if we look at the market, macro have not been going great. So the stock markets and every risk on assets has been going down while commodities have been running up, while the yields have been running up, and the fact is also using quantitative tightening to actually lower the inflation that we're currently seeing. So the markets have been dropping. However, Bitcoin and crypto and Ethereum have been dropping more because of intrinsic shocks in the crypto markets which were called Celsius, 3AC and Luna. So if we look at the markets right now, we are in a downward trend. But if we look at the valuation of Bitcoin and crypto, I think it is into a phase where we could be classifying it as October 2018, November 2018, which the value is very low compared to what the fundamental growth is doing nowadays. So if you look at it from that perspective, it's actually a great opportunity right now. The markets are trending down, and we could be continuing that downward trend. But for all the people that wanted to buy Bitcoin last year and started following all those crypto accounts, they left, but they should be here now to actually start developing a strategy and start building their portfolio. I love what you talked about there with the fact that the price is so low compared to what's going on in space. That's something that I actually put a word on finally about six months ago. I've been talking about that exact concept for a long time. I call it the intrinsic value app. We don't know what the exact intrinsic value of Bitcoin is. It's not something that you can measure, certainly not in a way that you could with a PE ratio or something in the stock market. But what you can do is you can say, hey, look, based on an expert understanding of the growth of the fundamentals of Bitcoin and crypto, what is the sentiment of where crypto is right now compared to where it should be if the sentiment were in a more neutral position? And you look at that and you pay attention to that and you'll realize, look, Bitcoin is massively undervalued. Like you said, in the way that it was in November and December of 2018, moving on into the beginning of 2019. So that leads me to a question for you. Do you think that we're going to see some kind of relief rally in the next few months? Are we going to rally up to 25, 26, 27? Or are we still like halfway through that drop from 6,000 to 3,000 that we saw in November and December of 2018? Are we still in the middle of that or has the bottom been found? Well, I think if you're going to ask this on social media, probably the majority will be expecting further downwards movements to be happening. If you hear the number 14K, that's the common sense, or like everyone is expecting it to drop to 14K. But if you look at it from the effects that the markets have been seeing in the past months, Luna is the big trigger here. And then the aftermath was 3AC and Celsius and BlockFi. And that shock took place. So it's done most likely right now. Which means that if we look at the markets right now and we look at the inflation or the macro perspectives too, we could be seeing peak inflation right now, which means that the Fed might slow down the hikes that they want to do because of the impact that it has on jobs. We already see that in the yields. They are not at the terminal rates that we wanted to be at if we want to go to a 3.5 to 4% at the end of the year. We see them fall down. So investors are already expecting the Fed to not continue this policy. That's why risk on assets are running up right now. And we also know that crypto has been crashing more than what it should be because of those shocks internally. And in that case, if we start to have some momentum here and the risk on assets are going to do well, I think we can start running up quite fast. In the moment, it is going to break above 22K or 22.5, which is the 200-week MA. That's just going to be a fast run all the way towards 28K. There's literally nothing in between. Like it's just being careful. You think we're going to break above 22.5 up to 28K relatively soon then? It's all depending on how the CPI data comes out next week and how the Fed is going to react on it or at least how the investors are going to think that the Fed will respond on to the CPI data. If that is going to be showing a slowdown, they are going to be a little bit more dovish, which means that the yields will drop a little bit more and then the risk on assets will just continue. And then because of the fast drop the Bitcoin has been having from 30K all the way towards 20K, there's nothing in between. So the moment it breaks through 22K or 22.5, which is the 200-week MA, which is a psychological barrier to crack, it is probably going to accelerate because people are seeing that as an important indicator to buy on. So when it breaks through, it's just going to shoot up towards 28 to 30K. That's so interesting to me because everything that you're saying is right. I mean, we're seeing CPI data come out on, I think it's the 13th, which is a week from yesterday. So we're going to see CPI was 8.6% last month. They're projecting it to be 0.1% higher, but it jumped half a percent last time. So like you said, we might be seeing the peak of that. Federal reserve might be getting that under control with all of the interest rate hikes, but those do take time. If we did see them come out more dovish, then that would obviously be good for Bitcoin. But I'm still wondering if what's going on as you were talking about with 3AC, BlockFi, we just saw a Genesis trading came out. They were exposed to 3AC. All of these different companies are all caught up in the terra contagion that started a couple months ago. And there's so much bearish pressure right now that with the sideways trading we're seeing at 22 or 20 to 22, I'm really wondering if there's any bullish strength right now at all that could catapult us up to 28 in the first place or is the sideways movement that we're seeing right now just a result of the bears kind of taking a breath and a breather because we just dropped 33% I'm just wondering where we would find the bullish sentiment to push us to 28. Is just there not being enough bad news strong enough to push us up there? Well, you could also ask yourself why did we drop so fast or we started falling down even more? Like if you go back in time, we had a crash three weeks ago with Bitcoin and Ether. I thought it was during the weekend that we actually started to see the fall of Celsius or 3AC or the rumors about that one. And then we also knew which liquidation price was going to liquidate the position of Celsius. At least there was a big Ether will that had a position around 900 bucks. And then the first crash happened towards 24K or so. Altcoins were falling with Bitcoin and Ethereum at that point in time, but since then, Alt's are flat. And we saw Ethereum and Bitcoin just cascading down even more and I thought like Ethereum was dropping from 1200 to 900 within a few days because people were hunting towards that position. So the conclusion that you can make out of that is that in 2018 we had panic and right now we have forced selling out of liquidations or people or companies that have to sell the collateral to actually pay back their loans. Right now today some information came out of Celsius that they have been repaying their loan. But that's forced selling which is different as the Altcoins are not crashing down at all. Which means that from 12 to 900 there was just a hunt on the Celsius position which also means or reflect that if we start to reverse a little bit and given the sentiment that everyone has everyone wants to shorten the market. So it doesn't really have to show any strength at all the moment that we crack a few levels based on the fact that the effect is going to be a little bit dovish or a little bit more dovish. It will be accelerating because of the positions that the markets have at this point in time. So the moment that we crack for instance 21.2 it is going to accelerate all the way towards 22.3 because of all the short triggers getting activated. And that is giving more arguments for people to jump into the markets because we flip some certain levels just like flipping the 200 week MA for instance is going to activate more loan bias and deactivate more short sellers as they just get stopped out. So it's just reactions towards each other which is going to push the prices up or down. It doesn't really mean if there is strength or no. Right. So then would you be saying that the reason that we dropped down here in the first place was because of all of the turmoil that was going on as a result of Terra and as a result of these companies and different individuals getting liquidated. Did we basically see a massive long squeeze if you will that dropped us down here and we should have never even gone to these levels in the first place. So that would be how we would correct back up to 28K so quickly as well as the fact that there's not much resistance there like you said. Well like I can't deny that we were going downhill in the first place. So the macroeconomic perspective wasn't great during the past years. The youths were running up. The Fed had to use the monetary policy has to use quantitative tightening and stuff. So the correction was there but the fact that we started to drop from 30K to 17K was not really entirely because of that policy. These stocks were not dropping at all. They are still flat since that crash. So the actual reason why we were dropping down from 30K to 17K was because of all the intrinsic or the internal shocks that we were having due to Celsius and Luna or the aftermath from Luna. So then if you start thinking about that then you can conclude that if we were not having those internal shocks we will probably not be losing the 200 week MA at all. It was just a black swan in which some parties were actually... Yeah, normally we would. So there were some internal parties fighting with the other one like Celsius and FTX or whoever was hunting that position was pushing down the markets to get that position to get enough liquidity to actually reverse the markets. And that fight is a little bit over which means that if we go back towards equilibrium it is reasonable to expect Bitcoin to go up towards 28 to 30K. Interesting. So we could see a big relief rally pushing us all the way to 30K but then that begs the question is that the beginning of a new bull market are we on our way back to all time high with that or is that like I said just a relief rally and then would you expect us to be going back down to these current levels or even lower from there? Well that's the ultimate million dollar question I guess. Exactly. I mean if we correct the 200 week MA and get all the way towards 28 to 30K this sentiment is going to flip but we probably are going to hold the 22K level too. I think we will not be dropping beneath the 200 week MA at all. The ultimate question then will be the ultimate question right now is actually are we into a crisis which is the macroeconomic perspective are we in a crisis or are we just in a temporary recession and why are we going to get QE quite fast again because if we end the actual quantity of tightening and the hikes within a few months which is already expected to happen in 2023 it could just keep the Titanic going as in one time at one point in time we will be having a crash and we will be having the big depression like 1929 but it could still take a few years and right now the common conclusion is that we are already into one of those recessions or crisis at this point in time which means that the common conclusion is also that we are having a multi-year bear market for Bitcoin however fundamentally we are just growing quite fast there is also regulations kicking in which is going to suit the markets even more so we could also be seeing an accumulation period in which we just bounce upwards again like we did from March 2020 to the end of next year or 2024 and then the crisis starts because the real estate damage takes time before it gets kicked into the market so the ultimate question is are we into the crisis already which could be saying multi-year bear markets for crypto or are we into a temporary recession and the fat is going to be dovish and the yields are going to drop down so QE has to open up again if that is going to be the case maybe into one of the biggest traps and could be seeing continuation upwards on the stocks which would also be suiting crypto for the coming years and that's the question right because after the black swan that was you know the pandemic back in March of 2020 we saw a massive amount of QE trillions of dollars of quantitative easing the US government brought in I think like three and a half to four trillion dollars and spent eight it was ridiculous the amount of a deficit that we ran and the amount of inflation that went on and I think 8.6% is a completely fabricated number if you're looking at the cost of goods inflation is more like 30% a year as far as I'm concerned I interviewed Michael Saylor on our channel another Michael, another very smart Michael and he said that it's probably 30% I tend to agree with the Michaels of the world when they say that inflation is 30% and so what they did is they printed all of this money and so now we're trying to do quantitative we're doing quantitative tightening but we're also raising interest rates to fight the inflation because we got inflation from trying to fight off the complete and total collapse of the economy because we shut down the economy and then we're going through a recession right now because of all of the quantitative because of the effects of that the shutting down of the economy two years ago but also because of all of the inflate all of the interest rates going on right now so money's getting more expensive and so are the cost of goods so now we're going through a double whammy recession so now the question like you said is are they going to back off and become more dovish and then print more money well if they do then that just makes the problem even worse that's the reason that we're in such a bad situation right now the Fed's trying to clean up the mistake of a year and a half two years ago but they're going to have to put a pause on fixing two years ago's mistake to fix right now's concerns so we spiral in the boom and bust cycle of that people have seen for the last 200 years especially in the last 100 years of a Keynesian economic model so the question is how does Bitcoin play into that if we're seeing that the price of lumber is up 200% vehicles are up 20, 30, 40% the price of corn and grain that's fed to cows is up four times in the last two years in the United States that means the price of beef and secondary products like meat is about to explode let's not even get started on gas I think $4.40 a gallon is a lot here you live in Amsterdam equivalent $11, $12 a gallon over there I know you guys measure by leader but the point I'm making here is first of all I want to paint a picture of what's going on in the world for our viewers but also I want to lead it into a question with all of these concerns geopolitically there's a food shortage coming for 100 million people in the latter part of this year because of all of the grain that's locked up in Odessa and Ukraine with the conflict over there with all of these things constraining people so that they have less disposable income where is the money going to come from that would lead to a new bull market right now are the institutions going to drive all of it because it seems like retail doesn't have the money to drive a massive bull market right now what do you think about that well retail is never really pushing the markets forward at all they are just the response on how the markets are behaving they jump in at the last stage of the cycle so if you go back in time in 1829 we had very similar signals in which money was just free we had real estate prices going through the roof and everyone all of a sudden wanted to jump on real estate because it was just going up if you look at that perspective we can also see that last year we had the exact same with crypto everyone wanted to invest into crypto again because it was just going up so I don't believe that retail is going to push the markets forward but it is going to be the institutions which get a gateway to invest or allocate into crypto and bitcoin which is going to open up in Europe in the coming years and we can already see potential ETFs kicking in but we can also see more countries jumping into bitcoin at the stage as well so the big parties will move the markets and if we look at the value of crypto at all it is just 700, 800 billion compared to the rest so there is not much that you need to actually push the markets and in that case if we look at history the Fed is just dealing with the consequences of that policy from the past 60 years so we are just trying to solve an issue that they can't solve anymore so the crisis will come or happen at some point in time and then you get towards the question are we in it already or are we going to see it in a few years from now and I think the crisis usually happens when nobody expects it and right now it's a common well let's say everyone is discussing it on the streets that we are having a recession and crisis at this point so it doesn't really make sense that it's going to happen at this point in time and if you look about at the money that we had of course corona came around or Covid 19 we have to call it but did that actually suit such a massive bull market that we have seen on crypto or did we actually see a bull cycle that got pushed by the people or by the companies that got liquidated right now because of some big parties just over leveraging their own investments through anchor or through loans or through just having leverage in their positions which suits the actual bull market even more so could we get towards the conclusion that Bitcoin if we didn't have leverage shouldn't even be hitting 96K last year and should be going towards like 20-30K and we just had a normal correction afterwards that is also a debate that you could be having overall instead of the run that we had last year it looks like the run from last year got a little bit out of hand because of those leverage positions by big players who got liquidated right now as we are just all the way back towards the level before absolutely yeah well let's talk about some of those big players because right now as you've talked about quite a bit we're seeing this contagion where Terra went down they had $44 billion in valuation in Luna and then there was what $18 billion in dry powder sitting in UST a lot of these players 3AC that just got ordered to liquidate by the British Virgin Islands last week had a lot of investment we don't know this but we believe that they had some investment in Terra Luna they defaulted on a $15,250 Bitcoin loan $380 million to Voyager now Voyager is filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and then now we're also seeing 3AC they're paying down loans to get back a $22,000 Bitcoin collateral that they have but they're under a lot of concern that they're insolvent we don't know that they're insolvent but there's a lot of concerns that they are JP Morgan actually I think it was Goldman Sachs said that they were going to buy all of their assets that they got the opportunity to which they wouldn't be doing that if Celsius was solvent so there's a lot going on here with these companies going under first of all do you think that we're done with the knock on effects from this because it seems like one company goes down then they knock down another company because the companies are all tied together are we going to see a BlockFi go under and go bankrupt are we going to see even bigger lenders go under because I mean technically Coinbase is a lender I don't think Coinbase is going to go anywhere but are we going to see big impacts on them to the point where they start having to lay off a bunch of people how far does this contagion go well actually quite far and I think it's just we have witnessed Lehman Brothers in 2008 which is Loona is kind of the Lehman Brothers for crypto and the FTX FTX is just acting like the government in which they bail out every company to justify so it's just the same but then in crypto and it's not out of the goodness of Sam's heart either I guarantee that but I don't know how far this goes I think that the longer we stay in this down watch trend or the longer we stay into accumulation the heavier it will get towards all those companies because most of them are underwater like crazy so if we stay into a band market for one to two years at this point in time it's going to be very hard for them to stay alive so the faster we bounce back up it's going to suit all those companies so they can just keep on moving and then second we also have a party like FTX so the other one is to just bill everyone out but I think the longer the band market is going to be lasting the heavier it will be for all of those parties involved to actually be sustainable and all the funds as well all the lenders as well they are all down underwater at this point in time so I'm not sure whether we have seen the worst the heavier shock impact because it was just the black swan taking place like Luna going down such a big one the impact of that has been taking place already and the shock is out of the markets at this point Yeah absolutely well let's talk a little bit about FTX there because like I said Sam Bankman Freed I don't believe for a second is doing this out of the goodness of his heart Anderson Gotardi said what do you think about FTX's action by bailing out the lending companies why do you think he's doing that that's the question I have why is Sam Bankman Freed trying to do this is he trying to position FTX or is he trying to just make sure that crypto doesn't get too bad of a wrap because he is a company involved here Well he tries to become a sort of Jesus for crypto and bailing out all those companies but as a matter of fact he has been at least that's the rumor right now he has been trying to go after the position so it's hard to believe what he is saying and I think that right now he is trying to become the largest party involved into crypto and that's why he's also trying to get into Robin Hood and all those other companies so I think FTX is just positioning themselves to fight Binance at this point in time and through dropping down the price or attacking the position of Celsius they get into a position that they can take over other companies because those other companies are getting into weak paths and then they just get cheaper which means that he can get them for a cheap price if he is interested into them so it's just playing chess on a high level and all the retail traders are involved are just collateral damage and in the end he just wants to be the biggest party I guess Well is that something that you should be watching out for in crypto then that you compared Luna to Lehman Brothers I couldn't agree more that's what we're seeing here catastrophe happened and then it hit everything and now we're seeing a very similar situation in crypto that we saw in 2008 do you think it's important that we allow these crypto companies that were in terrible positions and not ready for a drop like this to go under and fail so that they can build better next time because these lending companies have been saying 15 20, 25, 30, 35, 40% APY and that's the number that they've been advertising on but not advertising on the size of their insurance fund or how much collateral they have or that their ability to withstand a drop down to 17,000 is important that we allow these companies to go under or should they be looking for some kind of bail out like what we saw in 2008 Yeah that's a tough one I think it's just I'm not a huge fan of baiting out companies because if you bill out every company the system will just continue going and it will be even a bigger impact if it starts to fail that's why we are currently living in a world that is just on the edge of tipping over because we didn't solve the actual problems in 2008 as well so I think we should not be doing it but there are exceptions and like for instance if you as a company have been taking excessive risk and you have been taking bad decisions to actually improve the let's say revenue of your company I think you deserve to just go out of the market because you have been making wrong decisions but if you get impacted by that company going down you invested in it or just the market dropping down without your company have taking any risk at all then a bill out makes sense so if we were not going to bill out anything at all if Celsius goes down, if BlockFi goes down if data goes down the entire crypto market will just be completely destroyed but in the end I think the best way to improve or to go forward is to not bill out at all and that's why we should also be doing the exact same two years ago when the COVID-19 pandemic started we were giving companies money which were just going bankrupt either way which makes no sense at all and I think that bailing out in the purest form is also not making any sense at all You just end up rewarding the companies that are operating in such a way that led to the destruction of the market in the first place and you don't allow for natural selection of the companies and free market capitalism to do what it does best which is allow for competition to create the best system that is the most robust and provides the most value to the end user but one system that is definitely taking value from the end user would be the US dollar so where do we hide from the inflation of the US dollar and other currencies like the great British pound or the euro what would you tell anybody in this stream right now who's watching where do they hide from inflation Well it's like inflation is one word which is usually getting explained in a wrong way so inflation isn't bad and it also doesn't go well by just having bitcoin alone just having cash alone just having stocks alone because stocks can do well if inflation does well too bitcoin can do well bitcoin can also do bad at this point in time when inflation is too high so it's not an end game not a complete solution to have one asset at all so if you want to combat inflation or position yourself well I think it's just having a basket of several assets at this point which means you should be having stocks or indices you should be having crypto you should be having cash you should be having gold or commodities and you should be having real estate if you have that chance and if you have those 5 and you have them balanced in a proper way if one of the baskets or one of the parts of that basket goes downhill and the other one goes up the balances are not in balance anymore so the percentages are not in balance anymore and that is when you start to readjust the portfolio so when gold does well but cash does not go well you are able to actually swap your gold for cash or gold for stocks whatever you want to do at some point in time and through that you combat every market that you want to be in or at least you are able to adjust towards any market condition that you have and not specifically inflation because right now I think people are just focused on inflation and don't really understand what it is and why it's also a good thing or a bad thing and they are confused right now because they were saying or people were saying hey bitcoin is an inflation hedge which as a matter of fact is actually true it's a risk on asset so it does well through inflation either way but when shit hits the storm bitcoin goes down too so it's confusing and that's why traders and investors should make it simple for themselves and for the future of the market absolutely well Michael we are going to have to wrap it out here in just a minute but I want to ask you for any fun thoughts any itching statements that you want to make here to the audience anything that is really heavy on your heart about the crypto currency space, what would you tell people if you could only tell them one thing if you are into the markets right now congratulations you are a winner and you should be continuing to build maybe your rewards will not be given during the coming months but it will be in the coming few years because crypto is going to stay and the returns will come so just keep on building and if you are watching right now if you are into the crypto markets still then you are in a good spot here he is talking from Michael's position because he has been in crypto since 2017 I got in July 31st 2017 so I have been in almost 5 years now I launched my YouTube channel November 16th 2017 and a month later bitcoin started a gigantic bear market through that time I was able to build and eventually it ended up growing into something but the first year it was like ok well what are we doing here didn't do a whole lot at the beginning but like you said the rewards might not come in the next couple of months but they are on their way and I just love what you said there about if you are in the space right now you are already a winner even if your portfolio is down couldn't agree more Michael where can we find you and follow all the great content that you put out it's all the same man Twitter, YouTube, Instagram you can find me through crypto or just my name or you can find my company which is 8global and then you can find me as well so that's the easy way of checking my content good deal well Michael thank you so very much for coming on Market Talks we appreciate you being a guest on the show and we look forward to hopefully having you back at some point in the future my friend thank you very much man it's been a pleasure absolutely guys if you enjoyed this stream then you need to make sure to hit that like button you need to make sure to subscribe to coin telegraph make sure to go and follow Michael everywhere you can find links down below and you saw his lower third here on the stream and make sure to tune in at noon every single week every single Thursday during the week so that you can be introduced to more guests here on Market Talks we love bringing on a ton of amazing guests from the cryptocurrency space and you're not going to want to miss some of the guests that we have coming in the next month or two so make sure you stay tuned hit that post notification bell guys all we got time for today before we go I do just first want to thank each and every single last one of you for watching as always and I will see you guys in the next video peace