Experienced trader through 4 bull markets: Bitcoin is “goldenizing”, BTC main ascendant has not yet triggered

Written and hosted by Mr. Z (@168MrZ)

This round welcomes the long-term bull: the correlation between BTC/gold has risen to historical extremes, the main upward trend of BTC has not yet been triggered, and the copycats only focus on the main lines ZEC, HYPE, UNI, and NEAR that have already emerged.

Tuesday, September 29, 2026 at 2:00 pm. After a few months of hiatus, Benson returned to 168X. In the past few months, he has devoted a lot of time to his family, and his transactions have focused on lending and arbitrage. It was not until the market recently showed signs of a "bullish period" that he began to increase directional trading again.

In this issue 168X please return to CoinKarma (@coinkarma_) Founder Benson (@BensonTWN). This is the fourth round of the Crypto bull market that he has experienced, but this time his judgment is completely different from the past: Bitcoin is gradually turning from a "highly volatile technology stock beta" to a real Digital Gold; this bull market may not be a soaring cannon, but a longer large cycle with small cycles constantly nested within it. The ideal scenario for BTC is around $200,000, but the real main upward trend has not yet appeared; it is no longer suitable for copycats to mine "hidden alpha" everywhere, but should directly buy the main line that has been confirmed by the price.

1. Bitcoin is turning into gold: the BTC/gold correlation has reached a historical extreme

Mr. Z: This is your 4th Crypto bull market. If this is the early stage of a bull market, what is your core thesis for this round?

Benson: I wrote an article in early September (related reading: Bitcoin’s Golden Bloodline Awakens: This may be the starting point of the largest bull market in BTC history). The core is that this may be the beginning of Bitcoin’s goldenization. In every previous cycle from the end of a bear market to the beginning of a bull market, there was an interesting pattern: the correlation coefficient between BTC and gold would quickly move upward from a low level.

Benson: Historically, Bitcoin is not as correlated with gold as everyone thinks. The median 60-day rolling correlation coefficient is only about 0.2 to 0.3. Most of the time, Bitcoin is more like a highly volatile version of Nasdaq, which follows the liquidity of technology stocks and the US dollar. But at the end of a bear market and at the beginning of a bull market, the properties of gold will suddenly increase.

Benson: The most special thing about this round is the amplitude. The 60-day rolling correlation coefficient between BTC and gold once reached around 0.64 and 0.65. Bitcoin has only had 21 days in its history with a 60-day correlation above 0.6, 17 of which occurred in the last month and a half. In the past, every time the bull started to turn into gold, this time it lasted the longest and had the highest absolute value.

1. BTC is no longer just an enhanced version of Nasdaq: it is switching between gold and Equity

Mr. Z: So you don’t mean that BTC will completely turn into gold from now on, but that its original attributes are more equity and it has begun to rely more heavily on safe-haven assets?

Benson: Yes. In the past, if the market was risk-off, Bitcoin would basically fall more severely than technology stocks, because many people bought it as a high-volatility beta. But there is another group of people in the market who regard it as a long-term Store of Value. The trading methods of these two groups are completely different.

Benson: When the price drops from a high level, the group of people speculating on liquidity will run first. After the floating chips slowly settle down, people who really regard BTC as a Store of Value begin to come in, so every time in the late bear market, Bitcoin will suddenly become more and more like gold.

Benson: Now I often open the charts of Nasdaq, BTC and gold at the same time. At present, BTC certainly retains the attributes of Equity, but it is no longer almost completely linked to Nasdaq before. It now stands more like a middle ground between gold and the Nasdaq, and is moving more and more towards gold.

Benson: What’s more interesting is that when gold fell recently, BTC also fell, but it was relatively resilient; when gold rose, BTC often rose even more. This kind of price action was not so obvious in the past.

1. 82,000 to 83,000 is the key support: the big truck has just started and will not turn around immediately.

Mr. Z: Then if the price of more than 60,000 has increased by about 30% now, many people will not get on the bus at all. Now it’s 82,000 or 83,000, should I still buy it? Or wait for 75,000?

Benson: I think the market really starts to confirm the bull market when BTC breaks through 82,000 to around 82,500. After the weekly structure breaks through, some longer-term CTA funds will be stimulated to come in.

Benson: Think of BTC as a big truck. As soon as it starts to start and accelerate, you want it to apply the brakes immediately and turn around to return to the original bear market area. I think unless a big Macro Event occurs, it will be very difficult.

Benson: Technically, after an important pressure level breaks through, it usually comes back to test, and the original pressure becomes support. So the support I'm looking at now is probably $82,000 to $83,000.

Benson: There is a very annoying thing about Crypto. It may only be the real main promotion 10% of the time, and the other 90% is shaking and making you doubt your life. If you already think that this is the beginning of the bull market, then the pullback is meant to make you buy, not to make you doubt again whether the bull market has returned.

1. How to value BTC: The answer given by gold is US$150,000 to US$250,000

Mr. Z: The previous guests were all looking at 150,000 to 180,000 BTC this round. What do you think of your own goals?

Benson: If my core thesis is the goldization of BTC, then I think the most reasonable coordinate is not to simply draw a K-line, but to look at the BTC/Gold Ratio.

Benson: Right now, 1 BTC can buy about 18 to 20 ounces of gold. This ratio will continue to break through a higher level at the high points of the past few rounds of bull markets. The obvious high point in the last round was probably around 40.

Benson: If this round of anti-fiat devaluation and debasement narratives are really stronger, we assume that the BTC/Gold Ratio can reach 45 to 50, and gold is around $5,000, then BTC will fall in the range of $200,000 to $250,000.

Benson: If it can't break through the previous round, for example, it can only end up at 35 to 40, then it may be $150,000 to $180,000. So I would consider 150,000 to 180,000 as a more normal scenario, and 200,000 to 250,000 as a more ideal scenario.

1. ETF has changed the game: For the first time, institutions can truly operate BTC as a financial asset

Mr. Z: Why do you think this round of BTC gold will be more obvious than in the past?

Benson: I think a very important reason is ETFs. In the past, it was very troublesome for Pension Fund or more formal institutions to take BTC spot exposure. They may only be able to buy proxies such as Coinbase and MicroStrategy, and there is no way to directly participate in BTC.

Benson: And for institutions, there are requirements for liquidity, risk control, custody, and regulations. We can throw BTC to the exchange and sell it for USD, but it is impossible for the Pension Fund to manage assets in this way.

Benson: After ETFs securitize BTC, the whole thing will be completely different. Institutions can directly buy IBIT or other BTC ETFs, or they can do LTV, financing and asset allocation around these securitized products.

Benson: There used to be a group of people who wanted to buy BTC as gold, but they couldn’t actually get in. After the emergence of ETFs, this group of funds finally has an entrance that is consistent with the traditional financial system, which will make Digital Gold's path much smoother.

1. This round is not a shot in the sky: the Bitcoin bull market is changing from a single cycle to a long cycle

Mr. Z: So this round will not be like the last few months, but the explosive power will be less exaggerated, but it will last longer?

Benson: I think this change has actually happened for many years. The bull market in 2017 was very simple. It rose from the beginning of the year to the end of the year, and then ended directly. It was basically like a cannon shooting into the sky.

Benson: That’s not the case in 2020 to 2021, which has started to see two clear tops. In the next round, it turned into several stages, with a period of rising and fluctuating for half a year, and then a period of falling. In the middle, events such as tariffs and liquidity continued to appear, and then it reached a new high.

Benson: So the bull market structure of BTC has slowly changed from "one big market" to one big cycle with many small cycles nested inside it. I think this feature will be more obvious this round.

Benson: So the 150,000, 180,000, 200,000 or even 250,000 that I just talked about, I don’t necessarily think that is the final end of the entire cycle. No one knows how long this matter will eventually evolve with the goldization of Bitcoin and the repricing of U.S. debt credit.

Benson: You can even think about the problem in reverse: Everyone originally thought that the four-year cycle should end at a certain time, and also thought that the bear market should fall by 70% or 80%. As a result, it ended after falling by more than 50% this time. Is it possible that we are actually still in the same larger cycle, but we have experienced a few bulls and bears in the middle?

1. Stop fantasizing that you are a genius: the simplest strategy in the bull market is to buy the main line that has already run out

Mr. Z: How to make a copycat? Is it necessary to spend a lot of time researching some coins that the market has not yet discovered in this round?

Benson: I am now in the 4th cycle. In every cycle, everyone will say that a certain copycat is going to change the world, but in the end, most of it is still empty.

So my strategy for this round is very simple. At the beginning of the bull market, whichever narrative has been confirmed by the price, whichever coin really has funds to take care of it, and can really run an independent market, I will buy it directly.

Benson: I'd rather be an IQ 100 person right now. Because since I subjectively believe that it is the early stage of the bull market, I will buy the main line that has already emerged from the market, and no longer spend a lot of effort to imagine that I can dig out something in advance that no one else has seen.

Benson: Now everyone has AI and can research it. If something is really obvious and its fundamentals are super good, but the price doesn’t respond at all, you have to ask yourself one thing first: Why are you the only one in the market who understands it? Is it possible that you actually saw it wrong?

You can't always be the smartest person in the market. Therefore, for ordinary people, instead of constantly changing stocks, it is better to find the confirmed main line, add a little when the callback occurs, and then sit back and let the waves push you.

1. 100 times is getting harder and harder: If the principal is small, the problem may not be the market, but the principal

Mr. Z: But younger people with smaller funds may find this unsatisfactory. ZEC, UNI, and HYPE are already so big that it will not be easy to increase by another 2 or 3 times. So where can we find high multiples?

Benson: It must be admitted that the opportunity structure of Crypto is completely different now than in 2021. It used to be that you could literally buy a few dollars of SOL on an exchange and get dozens or hundreds of dollars along the way. The opportunities for ordinary people to easily encounter 20 times, 50 times or even 100 times in exchanges are now very rare.

Benson: If your principal is really very small and you have to multiply it 100 times or 1,000 times to achieve your life goals, then in many cases it is not the market that is the problem, but your principal.

Benson: If you really want to pursue returns of this magnitude, I think the opportunity is most likely to be on the chain, not in mature copycats on exchanges. But this also means that your playing style is completely different. You must be very good at swings and risk control, and your failure rate will be much higher.

Benson: The big profit is big but the big profit is not small. The small profit is big but big profit is not big. After the market matures, this is a reality that is difficult to get around.

1. On-chain or exchange: First figure out your home field. Not all Alphas are worth catching.

Mr. Z: Then why are you not too involved in the chain? There are actually still high multiple opportunities on Robinhood and Solana.

Benson: Because I think you have to know where your home court is. The chain requires a very high degree of concentration. You may have to sit for a long time, waiting for those few real opportunities, and you will encounter countless failed projects in the middle.

Benson: At least I know people in the chain who have really made big results, and the gains are usually concentrated in a very small number of opportunities. You can think of it like a card dealer. Out of 10,000 decks of cards, only two or three hundred may be really good cards.

Benson: But I do the secondary market on my own exchange, and maybe there are two to three thousand of the 10,000 decks of cards that I can play. For me, I prefer exchange level two in terms of effort, time, and yield curve stability.

Benson: This does not mean that the chain is bad. If you are young, have time, have a very fresh liver, and are willing to wait for that rare opportunity, then of course you can do it. But now that I have a family and children, I will no longer regard this market as the main battlefield.

Benson: Not all Alphas should be caught. The most important thing is that you know what kind of opportunity best suits your own capital, time and ability circle.

1. Copycats only look at 4 main lines: ZEC, HYPE, UNI, NEAR

Mr. Z: So, which are the only copycats that you really know how to buy these days?

Benson: Yes, my main ones now are ZEC, HYPE, UNI, and NEAR. These four are the main lines for me.

Benson: I will still change positions in the middle. For example, when HYPE reaches an integer level of $100, if I see obvious selling pressure, I may jump out of the market temporarily and switch to SOL or other currencies with stronger performance. But this is tactical and does not represent a long-term main line change.

Benson: I am relatively familiar with this market, so sometimes I can change cars temporarily based on price performance. But if you don’t watch it every day and don’t have experience with several cycles, I don’t think it’s necessary.

Benson: The most common mistake that most people make is not buying the wrong main line, but constantly changing cars in the main line. It might actually be better to hold it.

1. One set of indicators eats up the entire market: buy low, sell high, and don’t reinvent strategies for each currency.

Mr. Z: Since you mainly look at the price now, how do you decide when to increase your position and when to decrease your position?

Benson: We at CoinKarma have a 0 to 100 Market Pulse Index that looks at the market position. The closer it is to 0, the closer the market is to a relative low; the higher the value, the hotter it is.

Benson: From May to August this year, for a long time, it was in the teens or twenties. For me, it was a casual purchase. When BTC returned to about 75,000 on September 16, I directly made a very simple quantitative rule. If the indicator was lower than 25, I would invest $10,000 every hour in the main stocks I just talked about.

Benson: I’m not going to invent one strategy for ZEC, another for HYPE, and another for UNI. Because most of the time, the correlation between these copycats and the BTC market is still very high.

Benson: So my approach is simple: treat the market indicators as water levels. Buy when it is below a certain water level, sell when it is above a certain water level, and then take the big swing.

Benson: I think the more mature the trading system is, the simpler it should be in many cases. You don’t have to prove that you are smarter than the market every day, but you have a framework and then execute it repeatedly.

1. Why replace all ETH with UNI: The US stock market may be the main theme of this round

Mr. Z: In the last round, you mainly took BTC, ETH, and SOL, but you seem to say that this round, all ETH has been replaced by UNI?

Benson: Yes, I switched all my ETH positions to Uniswap this round. Because I think the main theme of this round of copycats is the rise of US stocks.

Benson: If Tokenized Stock truly enters DeFi in the future, DEX and AMM will be very core infrastructure. Uniswap itself already has the largest decentralized trading network effect, so for me, instead of taking ETH, I would rather take the more direct Beta in this direction.

Benson: Another change is regulation. Many Crypto narratives in the past were essentially doing Regulatory Arbitrage. Because regulation has not yet been implemented, this product can survive. But if supervision begins to formally put AMM, Liquidity Pool, and Tokenized Securities into an operational framework, the meaning will be completely different.

Benson: In the past, it was "because the regulations can't control it, so I can do it." In the future, it may become "the regulations clearly tell you what to do, so traditional funds can finally come in." These are two completely different markets.

Supplement: The SEC officially issued a temporary, conditional Innovation Exemption on September 17, 2026, allowing qualified Tokenized Securities Venues to trade some Tokenized NMS Stocks with permissioned AMM and Liquidity Pool under a specific framework.

1. The old indicator cannot see the top: what we should really pay attention to is whether the institutional liquidity has kept up.

Mr. Z: CoinKarma recently launched the Institutional Liquidity Index. Why do you want to do this?

Benson: Because the top indicators that everyone was used to looking at in the past are becoming increasingly difficult to use.

Benson: The 2017 top is easy to spot. Retail investors are extremely fanatical, the Funding Rate explodes, and all on-chain indicators are overheated. You can tell at a glance that the market has gone crazy. But at the subsequent high points of 69,000 and 126,000, the market did not show that kind of comprehensive enthusiasm.

Benson: The reason is that the marginal buying has changed. In the past, when BTC was at a high level, retail investors were buying like crazy and large investors were starting to sell. Now, when BTC is at a high level, what really determines whether it can continue to rise is whether institutional funds continue to flow in.

Benson: So our Institutional Liquidity Index mainly looks at three things: the first is the overall liquidity of the US dollar, including some data on the fiscal side; the second is MicroStrategy’s mNAV; the third is the net flow of the BTC ETF in the past 30 days.

Benson: When BTC prices continue to hit new highs, but institutional liquidity doesn’t keep up, we flag Divergence. The lighter ones are yellow, and the more serious ones are red.

Benson: We backtested several cases that appeared in the past, and the red Divergence happened to be marked at about 123,000 in the previous round, and around 67,000 in the previous round. Yellow Divergence also mostly corresponds to important Local Top.

Benson: In the future, the top of the bull market may no longer look like "everyone is going crazy", but will look like "prices are still reaching new highs, but the money behind them can no longer keep up." This change is very important.

1. CoinKarma wants to build Crypto Trading OS: from looking at data directly to automatic execution

Mr. Z: So what does CoinKarma really want to do next? Is it still a data dashboard?

Benson: No, what we want to do is the Operating System of Cryptocurrency Trading.

Benson: Most data products today are still just “for you to see”. After you see an indicator, you have to connect to the Data API, exchange API, run backtests, write strategies, and deploy it yourself. This whole process is very lengthy.

Benson: Our direction is that you can directly use CoinKarma's Data and write conditions with an expression that is very close to human language, such as entering the market if an indicator is greater than 3 and exiting if it is less than 1, and then throw it directly into the backtesting engine.

Benson: If you think this strategy makes sense, we can help you host it directly. You throw the funds in and it automatically executes according to the rules. You can also adjust the parameters at any time later.

Benson: There are currently more than 700 Bots in the real market, about 1,000 users, and a total AUM of about 14 million US dollars. Each Bot is like an independent position, separated from the user's other exchange assets.

Mr. Z: This sounds easier to implement than “letting the AI ​​Agent decide how to trade”.

Benson: I think the biggest problem with AI Agent is not whether the model is strong enough, but what data you give it. If you only give it K-line, volume and price, which are things that everyone can see, it will be difficult for the most powerful model to generate Alpha out of thin air.

Benson: The facts themselves may be cheap, but their interpretation is expensive. Either you see data that others cannot see, or everyone can see the same data, but your interpretation is better than others.

Benson: Without unique data and insights, no matter how smart the AI ​​Agent is, it can only cook with ordinary ingredients.

1. How to confirm the main rising stage: 60,000 BTCs flow into the ETF in 30 days, which is when the market will really explode.

Mr. Z: Finally, be direct. Everyone says it's the beginning of Niu, so when will the real "main promotion" come?

Benson: I have a very simple way to judge: look at the rolling 30-day net inflows of the BTC ETF.

Benson: If the total net inflows in the past 30 days exceed 60,000 BTC, I will think that the market is beginning to meet the conditions for a major upward trend. Similar situations have occurred in the past several obvious main rise periods, and in truly extreme cases, the net inflow in 30 days can even reach 100,000 BTC.

Benson: The logic is simple. With the size of BTC today, if it were to rise by 20% or 30% in a month, it would be almost impossible for institutional funds such as ETFs to not participate at all. So 60,000 is a good threshold.

Benson: At the time of the interview, the number was only about 30,000 to 40,000, so my judgment is: the real main upgrade stage has not yet come.

Benson: I would, in turn, view this signal as a counterweight indicator. For example, my copycats originally accounted for 25% of the portfolio. After the first real major promotion, I may reduce it to 12.5%; if it happens again, I may almost not use copycats.

Benson: Because the most dangerous thing about bull markets is that people usually do the exact opposite. At the beginning of the bullish period, I didn't dare to buy and only put 10% or 20%. After I made money after several consecutive corrections, I started to develop inertia. When I reached the final top, I opened my position and leverage to the maximum.

Benson: When the music starts, you have to dare to go in and dance; when everyone is drunk, you go to the bar and ask for a glass of ice water to sober yourself up.

Mr. Z: So this round you need to be prepared to grow, and you also need to know when to leave at any time. Once you drink, you will get drunk, and once you get drunk, you will recede.

Benson: Yes, there is no conflict between these two things. Just leave when it's time to leave the venue with dignity. Don't wait for the security to carry you out at the end.

Mr. Z: So this episode can actually be condensed into a few very simple judgments at the end: First, BTC is moving from the beta of high-volatility technology stocks to Digital Gold; second, this round may not be a sky-high cannon of a few months, but a longer cycle; third, copycats should not go around fantasizing that they can dig up alpha that no one has discovered, and directly do the main line that has been confirmed by the price; fourth, the real main rise depends on ETF funds, and the real top depends on whether institutional liquidity can keep up. The most important thing in the bull market is not to always predict correctly, but to dare to bet at the beginning of the bull market, to sit still in the main promotion stage, and to remember that when everyone is most excited, they still have to get off the bus. Thanks Benson for coming to 168X again!