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🐄 A load of bull

How can you tell when a bull run is over?

After all, bitcoin is seemingly on the verge of breaking its price record from March. If it keeps going, then at some point it’ll reach another obvious local peak, and we’ll soon start to wonder whether that was it.

All we can do is look backward, and even then, it’s more entertainment than meaningful prediction. The crypto market is just astrology for dudes and so on. 

Who cares, let’s lean into it.

We know that ETH has lagged behind bitcoin so far this year. Great fodder for think-y threads on X about the demise of Ethereum in favor of Solana, but ETH has always lagged behind BTC when it comes to setting new price records.

ETH capped off the 2017-2018 bull run with an all-time high on January 13, 2018 — 27 days after bitcoin had peaked at almost $20,000. 

It took BTC 1,080 days to blow past those levels in early December 2020 while ETH was still 60% below its own price record. 

ETH would go on to more than double over the next 56 days, hitting an all-time high toward the end of January 2021.

This time is different. It’s been 238 days since bitcoin broke its previous high from November 2021, and ETH hasn’t been within 20% of beating its peak. Currently, it's 45% below.

Although, SOL is doing just about as well as ETH over the same period. 

ETH and SOL have even been tightly correlated since bitcoin’s peak in March, with SOL still 31% below its November 2021 record high.

Whether ETH and SOL will catch upon confirmation of a bitcoin bull run is a question for your paid group leader. 

I will give you this instead: BTC, ETH, SOL (and dozens of other tokens) may be out of sync right now. And that’s bullish, going by the palmistry of the prior four-year cycle.

How you tell the end of a bull run is when the major assets converge at all-time highs.

BTC and ETH were not in lockstep during their drawdown recoveries between cycle tops. Returning to those highs was a staggered process.

But they were almost exactly aligned when they reached new peaks nearly a year later: BTC and ETH hit all-time highs on the same day, while SOL topped out a few days earlier.

— David Canellis

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• BTC stopped $175 short of setting a new price record on Tuesday evening. Current price: $71,950 or 2.5% below all-time high.

• DOGE is the best performing top-100 coin of the past week with 23% gains, followed by POPCAT (21%) and RUNE (17%).

• TIA is down 16% over the same period ahead of its $879 million unlock later today, which will see its circulating supply increase by 80%.

• Polymarket open interest in the US election outcome is at a new high of $165.8 million.

• $69.4 billion in BTC was transferred onchain yesterday – the most since at least July, per Blockworks Research data.

🫨 Shake ups

Both dYdX and Consensys announced hefty layoffs yesterday.

dYdX CEO Antonio Juliano said 35% of the core team was let go, while Consensys CEO Joseph Lubin said his firm had cut 20% of staff.

For Consensys, that’s 162 positions. According to dYdX’s site, the company had around 50 employees and is still hiring new positions. 

The two have very different stories about how they got to this point. Lubin was quick to cast some of the blame on the SEC. Consensys, a powerhouse in the Ethereum space, has notably been locked in multiple legal battles with the regulator and — if we’re going off the timelines we’re seeing for Ripple, Coinbase and Binance — then this might be a multi-year court case. 

“Such attacks from the US government will end up costing many companies that have been investigated, sued, or sent Wells Notices, many millions of dollars,” Consensys said in a blog post. 

But the blame isn’t all on the SEC, and that’s where the similarities between the dYdX layoffs and what happened with Consensys come into play. 

“Looking ahead, I see a next generation economy not dominated by large monolithic companies; instead, smaller, agile, AI-supercharged companies with web3-based coordination tools will operate more efficiently. To stay competitive in this fast-growing space, we need to reshape ourselves and be more agile, more effective, and even higher-performing,” Lubin said.

For Juliano, the decision was made after he rejoined the perps DEX firm earlier this month — he previously stepped down months ago after seven years at the helm — and realized that “the company we’ve built is different from the company dYdX must be.”

This wasn’t, Juliano clarified on X, a financial decision for the company. He also teased an “explanation” sometime today. 

Lubin said the decision at Consensys focuses the organization on the “core revenue drivers,” while Juliano told Empire just last week that he planned to go full “founder mode.”

Consensys and dYdX aren’t the first crypto companies to cut jobs this cycle — Helium Mobile’s parent company cut 40% of its staff, while Matter Labs cut 16% — it shows that some firms are starting to get lean as we head into what many think will be a bull run at the beginning of next year.

— Katherine Ross

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• President Joe Biden thanked Nigerian President Bola Tinubu for releasing Binance executive Tigran Gambaryan after he was detained and imprisoned in the country for eight months, the White House said.

• DWF Labs fired a partner after he allegedly spiked a woman’s drink at a bar in Hong Kong. In social media posts, the woman claims to have video evidence of the spiking and said she filed a police report. DWF Labs said the allegations were “deeply concerning.”

• Around 175 million of TIA is being released Wednesday, which could lead to a potential rally, analysts told CoinDesk.

• Circle is increasing fees on USDC redemptions for the second time this year, though traders can still redeem USDC for free.

• VanEck is offering regulated access to SOL staking through a partnership with Kiln, Blockworks reporter and Lightspeed host Jack Kubinec reported.

Q: What do the layoffs say about the bull run?

Unless you have a crystal ball in your closet, it’s not necessarily worth it to parse the tea leaves here. Companies obviously have to go through layoffs for a number of reasons. It’s always sad to see folks lose their jobs, and cyclical layoffs have unfortunately become part of tech and finance.

Here’s what I will say: When I was reporting on the stock market, we did look a lot into layoff announcements. Layoffs sometimes bump the stock price up given that — again this depends on the situation — these types of announcements can show the company reacting to the overall environment. 

I’m not seeing, at least from dYdX and Consensys, red flags in the communications about the cuts. We may just see some leaner crypto companies going into the bull run.

— Katherine Ross

That having the biggest, most global team isn’t the biggest priority.

Tech and finance are indeed cyclical with their layoffs. Goldman Sachs famously cuts its lowest-performing employees every year, sometimes running in the thousands.

That’s not to say that the people who recently lost their crypto jobs were low performers. But it could be that crypto is starting to mimic that cadence, especially considering the hiring-layoff cycles are so tied to the actual market. 

Gordon Gekko said “greed is good” when it comes to the stock market. Perhaps leaner is better in crypto.

— David Canellis