Did you hear the news?

Crypto is Easy will move to Milk Road. You can find the details in the special announcement.

Let’s dive into today’s update. It’s a doozy! Topics:

• TL;DW

• Bull market running out of time?

• Bitcoin treasury companies running out of ammo?

• HODLers running out of cash?

• Altcoins

Please watch the video and read the summary! You need both to get the full impact.

TL;DW

If you’re following The Easy Plan, you will buy when Bitcoin’s price goes below $75,000, with the option to start buying at $107,000. You’re constantly setting aside fresh cash for that opportunity.

If you also followed my deviations, you have a lot of cash generating 4-10% annual yield while you wait for the market to settle down.

If you haven’t sold any crypto, it’s not too late.

You may not need to, anyway. It’s more important to make sure you’re prepared for what comes after the hype dies down, especially if that happens sooner than people expect, or if the market peaks at a lower price than you expect.

If you took the long position from the July 3, 2025 update, play it tight in case we get that 2021 scenario (bull flag breakout → new slightly-higher all-time high → sustained downturn).

From April until July, we saw uncanny similarities with 2014’s rebound in the on-chain and technical indicators, price structure, and composition of market participants, as we discussed at length in previous updates. It’s possible that last month’s pump marked a detour before we return to that path.

Bottom line:

• We’re buying dot.com investments in 2000, playing for whatever is left of the tail end of a multi-year, parabolic bull run.

• It’s a race to see whether legacy entities can buy faster than smart money can sell.

• Treat every new all-time high as potentially the last.

• For altcoins, think “crypto casino,” not “retire your bloodline.”

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, catch up on recent updates. Start with last week’s update and work your way backward.

Bull market running out of time?

Do you feel stressed that you’re not rich after eight months in the banana zone?

This may reflect a mismatch of expectation and reality.

For months, we’ve seen signs, clues, and behaviors that only come at the end of bull markets and the start of bear markets. More recently, the market has struggled to grow beyond May’s high price of $112k.

(I know, I know. Bitcoin’s price briefly went to $124k last week. That’s only 10% higher—hardly an unusual move for an asset that can deliver similar gains in any given week.)

With Q4 fast approaching and the end of the four-year cycle seemingly near, you may feel a sense of urgency. Or, perhaps, fear and doubt.

Whether you're questioning the gurus or you’re convinced prosperity is just around the corner, it's a matter of perspective. With crypto, you will always get big upswings and downswings. They don’t necessarily suggest anything about what might happen next.

Let's not get psyched up or psyched out about what might happen in the coming weeks and months. Understand the situation and act accordingly. The market will do what it wants.

Milk Road will help you sort through the day-to-day noise that may cloud your perspective. I’ll continue to look at the bigger picture.

For more on this, skip to the 2-minute mark.

Bitcoin treasury companies running out of ammo?

When people talk about Bitcoin treasury companies, 75% of the conversation is Strategy฿ and rightfully so. It makes up 75% of the Bitcoin treasury market.

Outside of one outsized week—potentially a momentary deviation from the larger trend—Strategy฿ continues to see a decline in its purchase sizes.

Do you see the steep drop off on the far right side of the chart? Almost no purchases since the big, circled spike.

That’s not an illusion. The company has barely bought any Bitcoin this month.

Saylor seems none too pleased with his inability to raise more money for Bitcoin purchases. So much that he reneged on his promise to stop selling MSTR shares whenever the value of MSTR falls below 2.5x the value of its BTC, as it did this month.

When will the next big batch of buyers bail him out?

Bitcoin ETFs continue their downtrend.

Was July's pump a momentary deviation from the overall trend? Are the institutions running out of ammo? Is the mojo fading?

After a recent conversation with somebody more knowledgeable than I am about the operations of these treasury companies, I'm starting to wonder whether there was ever as much ammo and mojo as we thought.

This trusted source says many Bitcoin treasury companies buy their coins from whales and insiders with close connections to the company—or, in the case of miners, the people running the companies themselves. They move their Bitcoins from their personal wallets to their company's wallets and cash out the proceeds.

Investors fund this exit when they buy shares of the company. They create exit liquidity for whales and insiders. Whales and insiders can sell at a premium over spot because investors don’t care what price the company buys at.

It’s a huge scheme among insiders to cash out without looking like they’re cashing out. The cash shifts to insiders while the risks shift to investors. The investors don’t even get any Bitcoin!

We can add this scheme to the one I mentioned in the July 20, 2025 rundown.

It’s hard to say whether we need to worry about this because we don’t know how much money’s getting cashed out from this scheme.

The on-chain behaviors looks the medium-sized wallets or long-time HODLers sending Bitcoins to large wallets like brokers, exchanges, and custodians. This blends in with normal activity among OTC desks, funds, exchanges, and routine flows across the Bitcoin network.

Trading charts don’t pick this up at all. Technical metrics can’t adjust for it. No country (AFAIK) has any regulatory requirement for anybody to share this information.

Why does it matter?

Because if this practice is widespread, those Bitcoin treasury company inflows are massively inflated—and may explain why a colossal deluge of “institutional capital” can’t push prices up very much. The new capital gets immediately cashed out. You don’t see the shenanigans in the background.

When trustworthy people tell me it’s happening at a level they’re not comfortable with, I pass this information to you. Purely anecdotal, no proof, and I won’t reveal sources.

Take it for what it’s worth.

For more on this, skip to the 5-minute mark.

HODLers running out of cash?

After spending more than nine months selling constantly, you’d think longtime HODLers would have run out of Bitcoins by now.

No such luck. If anything, they’re running out of cash—and selling Bitcoin to make up for it.

We still see a drop in HODLing among wallets that haven’t sold in more than 2 years, as you can see in the realized cap HODL waves, a metric that weighs HODLing bands by how much the value of their Bitcoins have changed over that holding period.

Because realized cap HODL waves impute price, you can use them to express this behavior in terms of overall market cap and the influence they may have on the market.

Since April, they’ve gone from 19% to 15% which doesn't sound like much, but it's the equivalent of $90 billion in selling pressure across four months.

These so-called diamond hands can't stop selling. They’re mostly smart money and true believers who sat through massive upswings and horrendous crashes for years. Why are they giving up now, so close to the Q4 explosion that gurus keep hyping?

These people will not buy more when Bitcoin’s price goes up. They’ll buy when its price goes down, but not as much as before. They've already sent a portion to their government (taxes), given another portion to exchanges (fees), and spent some of the rest.

We will look at the short-term HODLers next week. Those short-term metrics are messy because the ETFs account for 15 to 25% of the activity, but we may be able to make some meaningful inferences.

For more on this, skip to the 13-minute mark.

Altcoins

The altcoin market remains as it was last week. Play it tight.

Any altcoin can pump hard in circumstances like these. You want to conserve capital and raise cash, not ride moonshots. You can always come back at lower prices.

If that sounds bad, don’t sell a lot. Just enough to protect your downside. Or, hold back some cash rather than jump on a trend.

Bonus—if you have losses, you can deduct them from your taxes to offset your profits from earlier this year.

But Mark, my altcoins always go down!

That’s not true. SMT dropped 19% today but it’s up 92% this month with a 400% upswing from July’s low to this week’s high. CTSI is off 30% from its most recent high but remains up more than 60% over the past two months. Others altcoins saw pumps at one time or other.

While those are not big moves for altcoins, they ain’t nothing.

Some altcoins are down lower than during the tariff drop in April, for sure. That’s not necessarily the case across the board.

The problem is, with so many altcoins being created each day, capital gets diluted across the market. In other words, the number of altcoins outpaces the growth of inflows. Each altcoin competes for a smaller slice of the pie.

There’s not enough money to pump everything all the time.

Altcoins remain in the ideal zone relative to Bitcoin on my altcoin dominance chart, which strips out ETH and the big stablecoins.

When this chart’s in the ideal zone, you’ll get more upside when BTC rises than you’ll lose when BTC goes down. You can think about an across-the-board sale when it gets to the inflection zone. We’re not there yet.

Remember: this is a strategic chart that covers the entire non-ETH altcoin market. It doesn’t tell you anything about your altcoins or my altcoins.

I treat every altcoin as its own investment. Some will go to zero, some will go to Valhalla, and there’s no point stressing about the swings that come between those extremes. The easy plan doesn’t apply to altcoins and I make decisions on a case-by-case basis.

I share my charts to help you (and me) think strategically about when to bring new money into the market or take it out, and where to focus my attention (BTC or altcoins).

Buy some DOGE below $0.25 so you have a token that always pumps when the market pumps (sell at $0.40). I just heard one of Trump’s businesses got into DOGE mining, so you might get a tweet or something that hypes people up.

As always, nothing wrong with buying an altcoin after a 90% drop, though the token’s price can always go lower. I’ll buy when this chart of non-ETH altcoins hits any of these three zones:

You don’t need to wait for that. Start with my Top 10 List and Altcoin Reports. Have fun, win some money if you can, and make sure you don’t get too carried away.

Once Bitcoin’s price goes back to $50k-$70k, altcoins will get demolished. You will have your pick of the litter—an opportunity to retire your bloodline.

We’re a long way from that.

For more on this, skip to the 15-minute mark.

An AI-written haiku based on this post:

Relax and enjoy the ride!