Reason to trust
How Our News is Made
Strict editorial policy that focuses on accuracy, relevance, and impartiality
Ad discliamer
Morbi pretium leo et nisl aliquam mollis. Quisque arcu lorem, ultricies quis pellentesque nec, ullamcorper eu odio.
Macro analyst Alex Krüger says the weekend’s sell-off has likely marked a tradable low for the crypto market, arguing that the move closely mirrors the 2024 “August crash” that bottomed on a Monday. “I see the current move as a smaller scale replay of last year’s August crash (which bottomed on Monday),” Krüger wrote on late-Friday in a post on X, adding that he would “be looking to add to longs on Monday, ideally before the US cash open,” if the overnight session remained panicky. He framed the decline as a classic shakeout rather than the start of a new downtrend.
Krüger’s read hinges on macro first, crypto second. He notes that 2024’s August break came in a sequence—BoJ tightening, a hawkish FOMC, then weak payrolls—and he sees the present sequence as “similar.” There was no carry-trade impulse this time, he said, but markets digested a modestly hawkish Fed, mixed Big Tech earnings, a hotter-than-expected PCE inflation print, and finally a “horrid” US payrolls report—after which risk assets slid in tandem and crypto tracked equities lower. The latest PCE data, released July 31, showed headline inflation accelerating to 2.6% year over year and core PCE at 2.8%, a notch above forecasts—what Krüger summarized as “slightly hot.”
Earnings tape-bombs reinforced the risk-off mood. Microsoft and Meta beat estimates and initially rallied, while Apple’s reception was cooler and Amazon’s results were “very poorly received,” with AMZN sliding about 7–8% as investors questioned AWS’s momentum. Coinbase’s report landed at the other extreme for crypto beta: revenue missed expectations and the stock fell, a backdrop Krüger called “dreadful” for sentiment. “Even though the aforementioned concerns emboldened bears, this week’s move has been mainly a macro story, given how crypto traded mostly in line with equity indices,” he wrote.
He also flagged an unusual political and geopolitical coda to this weekend’s rout. After the weak jobs report—plus an unusually stark revision by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, May and June were revised down by a combined 258,000 jobs—markets lurched, and the White House’s subsequent decision to reposition two US nuclear submarines amid heated exchanges with Moscow added to stress, he said. Kremlin officials later tried to downplay escalation risk, calling the submarine moves “routine.” Krüger called the nuclear rhetoric and presidential barbs at the Fed “noise” for markets, but said the combination likely helped flush leveraged positions into the close.
On crypto-specific drivers, Krüger listed a cluster of narratives that, in his view, amplified bearish conviction without changing the macro center of gravity: disappointing Coinbase results; debate around whether MicroStrategy could curtail its at-the-market equity issuance, limiting incremental BTC buys; questions about the sustainability of “DATs” (digital-asset treasury companies) tied to ETH; and, on the other side of the ledger, the SEC’s new “Project Crypto,” a policy push to modernize securities rules and move more market infrastructure on-chain—“an extremely bullish development that should drive inflows later in the year,” as he put it. The SEC’s chair outlined “American Leadership in the Digital Finance Revolution” last week, framing tokenization and on-chain market plumbing as a regulatory priority.
Krüger’s base case is timing-driven: either crypto “bottomed after today’s close, given the sheer violence of that final dump, or will be bottoming together with equities on Monday.” In his plan, the trigger to add risk was early Monday—assuming the overnight remained disorderly—on the view that the analog to August 2024 would rhyme at the turn of the week. “A violent shakeout,” he wrote, not a regime change. He remains constructive into the fourth quarter, citing three pillars: a still-solid US economy, the start of Fed rate cuts, and a steadily improving regulatory climate that should broaden institutional and retail participation.
Policy churn could amplify that path. Krüger pointed to Fed Governor Adriana Kugler’s resignation—effective this month—as a potentially market-relevant shift because it hands the White House an earlier-than-expected Board vacancy, and to former Fed Governor Kevin Warsh’s call for a new “Treasury–Fed accord” as a signpost for constraints on central-bank independence. On Monday he added, “This will prove to be very important later on,” citing Warsh’s argument about “limits on the Fed’s independence to help the govt with its finances.” Whether those institutional dynamics translate into earlier or deeper rate cuts remains open, but markets have already moved to price odds to 85% for a September cut following the payrolls miss.
Krüger’s longer arc is unabashedly bullish but explicitly conditional on the macro. “I remain bullish on crypto into Q4,” he wrote, while warning that ETH-linked treasury plays could “lose momentum dramatically” later in the year if goods inflation re-accelerates as corporates pass tariffs through. He set a one-year Bitcoin target for mid-2026 at $200,000–$250,000—“extreme, but possible”—on the premise that a more dovish Fed in 2026 would coincide with ongoing adoption. For now, he is treating last week’s cascade as an echo of 2024’s Monday bottom. As he put it: “Now let’s see how this ages.”
At press time, BTC recovered to $
