Summary

Willy Woo’s core call: liquidity is flowing back in and the structure reads late-stage bull market — “that’s when things rally the hardest… things can run really wild.” Bitcoin is “the most sensitive to liquidity” of all global macro assets, and on his read this is not a rug: “I don’t have too much in the way of fears of this being a cycle top just yet.”
Swissblock’s rotation model flipped from Bitcoin to Ethereum around July 10, and a positive impulse is now firing across the top 100 alts. The bull-run signature is a cascade — ETH, then big caps, midcaps, low caps, “bang bang bang bang” — and while it’s “highly suggestive” of a full-bore alt season rather than confirmed, the risk-reward is skewed: “your reward is looking good and your risk is not that high.”
The timing signature is the tension of the episode: Woo’s macro risk model flashed high-risk in January 2025, and in 2017 and 2021 the top came four-to-six months after the flash — which would mean Bitcoin peaked at $118k. Woo’s rebuttal: in 2021 paper demand stretched it to 11 months, and the risk indicator is now collapsing as liquidity returns — “you’re okay to buy again.”
The cycle’s end is a macro question. Swissblock’s chief economist Henrik sees a business-cycle downturn Bitcoin has never traded through — “Titanic’s hit the iceberg… it hasn’t sunk yet” — arriving September–October at the earliest. If it’s early, Woo would “start to think about taking money off the table in the $140–160k” range; if it stretches to the middle of next year, “the targets go a lot higher.”
Jonah’s counter-thesis: no politician has “the mandate or the balls” to let markets crash, so banking or financial crises get buoyed by stimulus money — no downturn until voters elect “proper socialist redistributionist” leaders (AOC, Bernie, Mélenchon-types). Barring that or something truly exogenous, he rules the crash out and bets on Bitcoin “doubling or so before year end… or rallying another 50%.”
Woo’s flow telemetry: the current average is $1.28B/day on a one-year backward-facing tally, versus roughly $1.2–1.25B/day over the last 30 days and prior pump-peaks of $2.5–2.8B. His danger line is ~$3B/day — “that’s when it might pivot” — and the media has the causality backwards: price is “like the skydiver in a wind tunnel,” so flows peaking and then declining are risk-off conditions, while rising flows are the best setup. Near term: “short-term down a little bit, medium-term up a lot.”
The 80,000 BTC (~$9B) transfer conjectured to be Roger Ver’s was moving into Galaxy Digital, but only 6,000 coins have hit exchanges and order books show no urgent selling. Avi’s OTC-desk read: a public Galaxy chasing an AI multiple isn’t warehousing “eight yards of Bitcoin on the highs” — it’s custody (possibly for the US Marshals) or “some missing piece we don’t know.” If it hits the market, bad; if it’s seized into the strategic reserve, bullish.

Deep dive

1. The core read: late-stage bull, and late stage is when it rips

Woo’s framing sets the whole episode: liquidity is coming back into the market and the structure is “late stage of a bull market. So that’s when things rally the hardest” — the market gets very volatile, and “when there’s a little injection of additional liquidity, things can run really wild.” Since Bitcoin is “the most sensitive to liquidity” of all global macro assets, measuring capital entering the network is the whole game — and on that basis, “I don’t have too much in the way of fears of this being a rug and a cycle top just yet.”
Who “we” is: Woo has partnered with Swissblock — “the most secret crypto trading firm within the industry” — the founders of Glassnode (spun out around 2019) with a prop desk behind it that traded on-chain data in the 2017 cycle by tracking exchange flows: “that was the bees knees… they could basically front-run the selling.” The institutional product, Hawkeye, has only 10 seats; a retail-light version, Bitcoin Vector, ships on Substack.

2. Liquidity means capital sloshing between buckets — and it’s measurable

Pressed by Jonah to define the word, Woo splits it: order-book thickness is the classical sense, but what he tracks is macro capital flow — global M2 as the source, and each market “just a bucket that’s storing capital”: Bitcoin, tethers, real estate, Ethereum, meme coins. Jonah’s corroboration from the hosts’ own work: Bitcoin trades as “basically just a lagged version of M2.”
The measurement differs by asset. For the top 200 coins, Woo says the model uses pricing rather than on-chain data because on-chain data is “very very noisy… one whale can just impact everything.” The model reads volatility structure across hundreds of coins as a cohort. Woo concedes the secret sauce is Swissblock’s, which draws Jonah’s flag — worth keeping: “I’ve always been very skeptical of using models that I don’t understand.”

3. The model flipped to ETH on July 10 — and the alt cascade is loading

Asked point-blank whether we’re in an ETH cycle, Woo answers yes: the readout switched from Bitcoin to Ethereum around July 10. The signature he wants is a cascade — “ETH, then big caps, midcaps, and low caps… it goes bang bang bang bang all the way up to the higher-risk coins” — “That’s a classic signature of a bull run.”
The alt impulse is now firing: top 100 coins with positive impulse, “an expectation of an exponential… run.” Woo is careful with the hedge — it’s “highly suggestive of an alt season that’s going to go full bore,” but “it doesn’t necessarily confirm it until it happens”; probabilistically, “your reward is looking good and your risk is not that high right now to try this trade.”
On the question of whether ETH/BTC’s 50–60% pop off the lows is already over: the model reads it as the beginning of a longer-term move — ETH has moved but large caps haven’t popped below it yet, and that’s the expectation.

4. Old top signals have limits

Jonah offers his own cycle-top metric — MVRV Z-score above 5 or 6 means lighten up — then undercuts it himself: if Coinbase shuffles $10B between cold wallets, those transactions print at market prices and artificially deflate the metric. Woo goes further: it’s an observation of “one, two, three cycles going back… not statistics” — a robust model can’t be curve-fit onto three incidences.
The deeper structural break is paper. 2017 had no derivatives (Woo said he thinks the CME launch came at the very top), so tops went exponential: with a rare asset, “no one’s selling it to you… and it goes exponential until there’s no more buyers at that high price and then it blows off.” Once perps and futures arrived, “anyone with fiat can quench the demand for Bitcoin” — and 2021’s top “was actually formed by paper,” producing “rounded tops much more like traditional markets.”

5. Big gains can come in 14 days

Avi imports his commodities rule — 80% of the move in the final 20% of the run — and Woo says Bitcoin is more extreme: the majority of a cycle’s gains “happen over like two weeks, I think 14 days.” Miss those and you’ve wasted the four-year cycle; hence hodling — trade small around a core stack if you must, but trading in and out in fiat terms “you might miss the move,” or catch only the first couple of days and feel too late to buy back.

6. The timing signature: risk flashed January 2025 — history says 4–6 months, paper made it 11

Woo’s macro cycle risk model went into the high-risk zone around January 2025 (the pump from ~$70k through $100k — “all the laser eyes rejoiced”). Precedent: in 2017 the flash came mid-year at ~$2,500 and price ran to $20,000 — nearly a 10x, six months to the December top. In 2021 it flashed January 17 with price around $35–36k, doubled to ~$70k, and topped four-to-five months later.
Avi runs the simplistic math: six months in, so has Bitcoin already peaked at $118k? Woo’s rebuttal — “that would be a very simplistic conclusion” — is that last cycle the first top was the spot top and the second run “was actually driven by demand on paper,” taking a full 11 months to the November price top. And crucially, the indicator is collapsing right now as liquidity returns: “you’re okay to buy again.”
His humility on targets is earned: “no one’s going to get that right unless it’s a fluke” — tops are “very highly unstable” while bear-market bottoms are stable — and he owns last cycle’s error: “I’ve certainly made mistakes in the last cycle by actually revealing models… they don’t hold any credence.”

7. The end-date is a macro question: downturn September–October earliest, trim $140–160k if it’s early

The ultimate target “depends on how much time we’ve got left,” which is an M2 question. Henrik, Swissblock’s chief economist, says the business-cycle indicators point to a downturn “for sure” — “Titanic’s hit the iceberg. It hasn’t sunk yet” — with time for a blow-off top first. Bitcoin has never traded through a proper one: COVID was “very flash in the pan,” and the last real downturn was 2008. Earliest arrival: September–October; if early, Woo would “start to think about taking money off the table in the $140–160k” range; if it stretches to the middle of next year, “the targets go a lot higher.”
Jonah’s counter-thesis — worth keeping in full: no politician has “the mandate or the balls” to take all the accumulated medicine at once and send markets back to 2008 lows, so banking or financial crises get buoyed by stimulus money — as in 2008, again in 2020, again in 2022, and again in 2020; he then says, “I guess this year,” when describing wartime levels of deficit spending. That holds, he argues, until the US and other major economies elect “proper socialist redistributionist” leaders (AOC, Bernie Sanders, a Mélenchon-type). Barring an Ebola-deadly pandemic, “a volcano out of the ground in New York City,” or Kim Jong-un “going ham with his nukes,” he rules out the downturn — which isolates the crypto variable.

8. Flows telemetry: the skydiver in the wind tunnel — worry at $3B/day

Jonah’s favorite short-horizon gauge: network flows, the daily change in realized cap — purely on-chain via UTXO cost bases, “you’re creating a box around the whole system,” with miner selling captured in the net. The run rate: $1.28B/day averaged over the past year, ~$1.2–1.25B over the last 30 days, spiking to a distorted $1.83B on the $9B whale event.
Woo’s signature fallacy-correction: the media sees “a billion dollars got bought by this treasury company… how could price stay down” — but price is “a little bit like the skydiver in a wind tunnel,” held up by the flow itself. High flows create “the risk of it being lower the next day”; when flows peak and come back down, those are risk-off times, while rising flows are the best setup. Prior pump-peaks were ~$2.5B then $2.8B: “I’d be a bit worried if the flows get to around $3 billion a day… that’s when it might pivot.”
Positioning now sits at “peak levels of paper FOMO” in long-biased open interest — “it would do to purge some of that,” likely via downside liquidation. Woo’s net call: “short-term down a little bit, medium-term up a lot.” Jonah’s translation: he won’t sell $118k Bitcoin hoping to buy it $5–10k lower, but the flows argue for waiting for a breather before rotating into alts.

9. Galaxy’s role remains unclear

Woo’s read on the coins distorting everyone’s indicators: conjecture is Roger Ver — Woo said Ver was detained in “I think Spain” over an unpaid US exit tax and was under some sort of house arrest — with ~$9B moving into Galaxy Digital; only 6,000 of the 80,000 coins have moved on to Binance and Bybit, and “the order books aren’t showing any kind of frenzied selling.” The $9B is less than a week of inflows, so its relative impact depends on how long the bull market lasts.
Avi’s OTC mechanics lesson, from ten years on desks: they don’t work agency orders — they show a firm price and take the risk on balance sheet (at Cumberland post-FTX they’d “routinely bid tens of billions” in bankruptcy fire sales). A publicly traded Galaxy chasing an AI-expansion multiple isn’t “yoloing eight yards of Bitcoin on the highs,” and there isn’t enough capital floating around for an $8B basis trade — so it’s either custody (Woo floats the US Marshals theory: seized coins headed for the sovereign treasury) or “some missing piece that we don’t know.”
The stakes are binary: if the 80k hits the market, bad; if it’s seized into the strategic Bitcoin reserve, bullish. Jonah’s resolution is to defer to the cycle read: hang on — “bet on this thing doubling or so before year end… or rallying another 50%. I think that’s the most likely one, frankly.”

10. Can you trust a trading firm’s published indicators?

Jonah’s closing not-a-gotcha, post-FTX: why follow proprietary signals from an entity with risk on — is the retail subscriber “just somebody else’s exit liquidity,” a day late on trades the fund already has on? Woo’s answer: Swissblock is in the process of being fully regulated as a hedge fund, the money is made in the funds rather than the letter, and he’d consider publishing an independent operational due-diligence report — “I’d have to talk to Swissblock.”
The stated mission both agree on: TradFi is coming, and the industry — with “a decade of on-chain data” — should lead its own metrics before Bloomberg-style “squawking boxes” with “very very shallow” data define them and become self-fulfilling prophecies. Woo’s framing: “represent the data with the original Bitcoin ethos… let’s have a shot.”

Market Overview July 22, 2025 Pushing compute to the limits of physics