In 2023 or 2024, you could dismiss a US recession and equity bear market as hypothetical chatter. 

Now, it’s the path the US is taking, with knock-on effects for the rest of the world. For details, read my January and February monthly posts.

• January: Crypto 2025: Aliens, Trump, and the Road Ahead

• February: Uncle Sam Wants to Pump Your Bags. What Could Go Wrong?

Why should we care?

Because crypto is more correlated to the US stock market than ever. Also, a larger share of crypto sits with US entities and their custodians than it has in years.

As such, if you care about crypto, you need to pay attention. The US economy matters more now than ever.

The question for crypto is not whether the US economy and stock market will suffer this year. The question is when, how much, for how long, and how will the Fed and foreign governments respond?

Without knowing the answers to those questions, you have a choice to make in 2025. Do you try to make money or get rich?

You can do one, but not the other. More on that below.

Some things are not debatable

Mark, don’t be so dramatic. The stock market correction is a transitory blip. Don’t fuss about the other stuff. Trump always stirs the pot, like he did the first time—the US economy is perfectly fine!

Trump’s team is very honest and open about their plans.

They want to undo the things that drove US economic growth over the past few years: immigration, trade, and government spending.

This will cause pain and hardship. They’ve admitted as much.

In their minds, if all goes well, the US will get an outcome like Reagan’s in 1981: a year of economic carnage, then a decade of phenomenal growth. 

You can debate whether this move heads off bigger problems down the road or unnecessarily destroys a strong economy, but you can't deny the headwinds that have gathered for years.

You’ve read about “macro” headwinds since at least November as they’ve gone from “something to look for” to “we’re seeing it now.” Here are a few more:

JPMorgan says distressed exchanges have accelerated. These agreements swap debt with alternatives that offer worse terms for everybody but prevent default and bankruptcy.

It’s unclear how much of this activity involves private creditors and hard lenders, neither of whom have access to Fed facilities in the event of a financial crisis or economic downturn.

US new home completions reached its highest level in 20 years. Who will buy these new houses? If people buy the new ones, who will buy the old ones?

Are we sure people can afford the houses they're already in? Last year, homeowners insurance rose 6% and property taxes rose 5% while wages rose 2% and social security rose 3%—a big squeeze for homeowners, with no sign it’s getting better.

The US always goes into recession within three years after reaching full employment. It reached full employment three years ago.  

Full employment is a more reliable predictor of recession than yield curve inversions. Yield curves can invert, uninvert, and re-invert between recessions.

Stark reality

In 2023 or 2024, you could dismiss these things because the US economy and stock market had plenty of room to go up.

Many so-called recession indicators reached levels you only see before growth and recovery.

This made sense because US GDP shrunk in the first half of 2022. The US government would have considered that a recession under the old definition, “two consecutive quarters of negative growth.” 

Fortunately for the US government, they changed the definition in 2020. Under the new definition, there are no fixed, objective criteria. The US government can call any downturn a recession (or not). 

If early 2022 was technically a recession, then 2023 and 2024 were technically recoveries.

Today, many indicators have reached levels you only see before decline and stagnation.

For example, equity markets are already overheated. Look at the Shiller P/E ratio and Buffett indicator. Insane.

In one ear, out the next

Mark, people have been calling for a recession for years, and it never comes!

Yes. As they say, “a broken clock is right twice a day.” Just because it's stuck at 12 pm doesn't mean the afternoon will never come.

Mark, if this is the start of a global recession and financial meltdown, crypto’s screwed!

Not necessarily. We don't know how things will play out. If history is our guide, markets will go UP in the coming weeks.

In 2000 and 2008, the market rallied for months before rolling over.

If you live outside the US, you may not suffer much. Even those who live in the US may not feel the full brunt of whatever comes.

Once the US economy starts to fall, the Fed will intervene. Congress will stimulate. With record household net worth, high corporate cash reserves, and other circumstances to cushion the blow, things may not get that bad.

The US has had many recessions. Some wouldn't even count under today's definition. Others did not last long or were quite mild.

I'm sure we all know somebody who sold everything right before a crash, then never deployed that capital back into financial markets when prices went lower. 

They're geniuses for a few months, but you beat them in the long run, simply holding what you had and buying more when prices dropped.

Market conditions change all the time. Focus on situational awareness, preparation, and planning.

How do you position your crypto portfolio for that? What will you do if the pump’s weaker or shorter than you expect? Once the market begins to rise, when do you stop buying or start selling? Once the market begins to fall, when do you stop selling or start buying?

Plan 

Instead of trying to time the market or trade your way to a fortune, try my plan.

With my plan, you get Buy/Sell/HODL alerts with instructions and considerations to inform your decisions. Had you followed those alerts, you would have taken these actions:

If you follow my plan, you're down 8% at worst, up 1,500% at best, and up 150% on average.

Where you fall depends on when you started and whether you bought last summer’s drop with new money or money you recycled from selling Bitcoin in March and altcoins at the beginning of April last year.

You beat most traders and everybody who follows the dollar-cost averaging strategy, without trading or timing the market. 

More recently, you set aside cash from the end of October until the end of February and sold a chunk of Bitcoin at the end of January. 

Today, you’re buying more.

Tomorrow?

Nobody knows. We have to see where the market takes us.

Chasing after the wind

The gurus still say you can get rich with crypto. Effortless wealth. Huge windfalls.

The time to get rich with crypto has passed. It will come again, but not for a while.

That doesn't mean you can't make money! As long as you adjust your expectations, you can do quite well.

Would you be upset about doubling your investment every 2-3 years with little effort? 

No other asset class gives you that kind of opportunity, but those results seem lackluster, maybe disappointing, compared to the obscene returns the gurus promise. 

You won’t turn $1,000 into $100,000 overnight. You won’t put $5,000 into five altcoins and make $5 million. You won’t trade your way to a fortune.

Those are hard things to do in any environment. They’re especially hard today when the market has a lot of room to go down but not a lot of room to go up.

Easy market, if you want it to be

All you need to do is buy when the opportunities present themselves.

How will you know when those opportunities come?

Follow Bitcoin. Wherever Bitcoin goes, altcoins will follow.

Thanks to Bitcoin’s transparency, you can see the changes in HODLing behaviors, money entering and leaving exchanges, gains and losses among Bitcoin wallets, and other information about the movements of tokens across the network.

You can quantify stacking, selling, HODLing, and relationships among prices and behaviors.

Most recently, we used this data to figure out that the newest, most enthusiastic buyers and the oldest, most dedicated buyers have bailed out over the past month. We saw this happen in real-time in my market updates, like the one from March 5, 2025.

We also saw stress within the mining community, key trading patterns, and the absence of healthy churn, all of which helped us figure out what to do and what to look for.

The gurus thrive on intuition and extrapolation. We look at behaviors and study the facts.

They told you 2025 will be easy mode. “Up only.” 

In the January 23, 2025 update, we saw the fear and greed index match the same patterns from February to May 2024, along with other behaviors that we don't see when the market is about to go “up only.”

Combined with on-chain data and “macro” analysis, we realized it made sense to sell, for the reasons I described in my Buy/Sell/HODL alert from January 29, 2025.

We use the same approach to navigate the shorter-term volatility, make the best of the good times, and use the bad times to our advantage.

Hakuna matada

You're probably worried about selling.

I would worry more about buying. 

Whenever you sell any Bitcoin, you’re taking wealth from your future self. You need to make sure it's worth the risk.

Sometimes, it is. 

You know Bitcoin‘s price will go up, but not straight up and not all at once. Some altcoins will do amazing things, but that will take time.  

If you have to sell, do it when the market is overheated and due for a pullback, rather than at the bottom of a dip, after a dump, or because you need to take profits. 

Mind on your money or money on your mind?

We are trained to measure our success in terms of our government's money. Dollars, euros, pounds, rupees, etc.

But we don't just invest money. We invest time, energy, and emotions.

How much are those worth? Do you chase after a 1,000% investment opportunity at the cost of your mental and emotional well-being?

There are many ways to do well with crypto. What does that mean to you? It's different for everybody.

Let's say your goal is a $1 million portfolio. Once you hit $1 million, you plan to cash out, buy your dream home, retire your bloodline, and buy a Lambo.

What will you do when your portfolio reaches $900,000, altseason’s in full swing, the gurus tell you the market will go up forever, and I tell you to sell in case they’re wrong? Do you risk missing your life-long goal to catch that extra 11% upside?

What will you do when Bitcoin’s price drops to $66,000, altcoins are getting crushed, the gurus tell you to wait for lower prices, and I tell you you’re getting a good deal, so you might as well take it? Do you risk missing the generational bottom to catch that last drop to $48,000?

What about all the other decisions you'll have to make between those extremes?

Think about that now if you haven't already. This YouTube short puts things in perspective for me.

I’ll give you a clear, realistic perspective on market conditions, opportunities, risks, and expectations. Make sure you know what you want to get out of the market and what you’re willing to risk to achieve it.

Nostalgia reels you in

Crypto wasn't always so hard.

When I started putting real money into the market in 2018, you could trade for fast cash and invest in long-term growth. You could grab airdrops, farm yield, and scoop up generous staking rewards.

Everybody wanted to make money, but they fell into distinct groups:

1. Builders and their backers

2. Traders and grifters

With less than 10,000 tokens, the market had enough inflows to satisfy both groups. 

If you wanted to build and experiment, you had money for that. If you wanted to farm yield, flip NFTs, and hunt for airdrops, you had money for that, too. 

Speculative capital flowed to good projects and earnest communities. Retail gamblers put their money into altcoins and “shiny new things,” with sometimes spectacular successes.

Today, we have so many NFTs, memecoins, governance tokens, DePIN tokens, and L1s that it's hard for one project to capture mindshare and inflows.

All these projects look the same to people outside the cryptosphere (and many inside it). Anyway, what's the difference if tokens with “fundamental value” go to zero just as quickly as the shitcoins and scams?

In today's market, you can’t build something durable and sustainable that generates real economic value AND ALSO trade those tokens for more of your government‘s money as soon as the price goes up. 

You can do one or the other: grow long-term wealth OR cash out.

After several bull markets, builders and their backers have made a lot of money—enough that they don't have to care anymore.

You saw this in the massive outflow from long-time holders and the persistent dumping of unlocked tokens and staking rewards earlier this year.

Traders and grifters remain, but even they can barely make money anymore.

Mark, what’s the point if we can’t make money?

I didn't say we can't make money. I said they can't. You can!

The gurus have it all wrong. Crypto no longer offers the key to outrageous wealth. It's a hedge and escape from the legacy financial system. It's an alternative way to grow and secure your wealth.

That wealth needs to come first. 

Now is a great time to focus on that part of the equation. Crypto isn't going anywhere. We may get a rally before things get really bad. That rally could be substantial. Conditions are rife for that outcome.

The biggest gains will come some other time.

We won't know when that time will come until it’s staring us in the face.

The real juice won’t come from squeezing altcoins for 100x moonshots. Crypto has too many tokens. Speculative capital has dried up.

Once US regulations take hold, insiders and institutions will front-run you on every new project and capture the lion's share of the rewards. They will have the information advantage and won’t have to compete with scammers and pump-and-dumps.

While this is another reason to hold plenty of cash for the next bear market, it will also force you to focus on crypto’s use cases. There are only a few:

• Decentralized finance

• Digital exchange of real-world assets (RWAs)

• Remittances and payments, including AI-to-AI transactions.

• Fundraising

• Incentivizing human and AI behavior across distributed networks and systems.

That’s it. 

Global supercomputers are great, but AI and databases can do that better than any smart contract platform, likely with an AI agent token as the medium of exchange.

NFTs will play a key role in many apps and platforms, but you won’t buy an NFT to make money. You will buy RWAs, rights, privileges, and benefits secured by NFTs (though NFT collections and artwork will always have their fans).

Politicians, celebrities, and businesses will use memecoins to raise money, build communities, and reward contributors and fans.

The most valuable parts of crypto will get abstracted away, tucked behind better interfaces and hidden from the user. Immense value will flow to the tokens that power these products and services.

If you find those tokens, you will never have to worry about timing the market, finding the peak, or catching the bottom.

First, we need to make it through whatever is left of this bull market (if anything).

Relax and enjoy the ride!