What The Market Is Waiting For

In August 1979, BusinessWeek published a magazine cover they probably regret.

It was this one:

Source: Bloomberg

The “Death of Equities” magazine cover became infamous for one reason. It almost perfectly coincided with the end of the stagflationary 1970s and the start of a multi-decade bull run for stocks.

Hold that thought. We’ll come back to it.

A few times a month, I get a question: Will there be another crypto bull market?

Every time, it stops me in my tracks.

The question isn’t when there will be a new bull run or which assets will outperform. Some people genuinely wonder if it will ever happen again.

For crypto, sentiment is that bad.

Since October 2025, Bitcoin Magazine’s Fear & Greed Index has given an “Extreme Fear” or “Fear” reading almost every day.

The price of Bitcoin is down 40% from the $125,000 high, reached in October. It’s firmly below the 200-day and 100-day moving averages. And smaller cap tokens are down even more.

Prices are depressed—no doubt.

But just like the “Death of Equities” magazine cover, the stage is already set for a rebound in prices…perhaps a big one.

That’s because, at the same time, there is so much activity within the underlying protocols each day.

Look at the chart below. It shows the daily transactions on Ethereum. We are hovering around 2.5 million transactions per day. That’s up 2x from the euphoric days of 2020 and 2021 when the price of ETH touched its all-time high of approximately $4,700.

Source: Etherscan

This level of growth has happened only one other time. It was the first six months of 2017.

Source: Etherscan

Activity onchain began to bubble up as more assets were issued. These assets are known as ERC-20 or altcoins. And their issuance allowed for new types of fundraising to begin. It kicked off a frenzy for investors to get in early on new tokens.

One ETH went for about $10 in January of that year. One year later, it was $1,158. Bitcoin went from approximately $1,000 to $20,000 over the same period. Many were surprised by that rapid price action. But the signs—the activity—were there for anybody willing to look.

Something similar is underway today.

Traditional Markets Want In

The movement of assets onchain is accelerating. And it’s a phenomenon being led by the very entities at the heart of trading.

The New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) sees more than 10 billion shares traded per day with daily dollar volumes over $350 billion. It’s the largest stock exchange in the world, helping exchange $44 trillion in market capitalization.

Its sheer size might lead you to think it’d be the last to adopt new technology like public blockchains.

But in late March, the NYSE teamed up with Securitize to develop 24/7 trading. Securitize is like the bridge where traditional assets become tokenized and tradable on blockchains. Their solution ensures the assets represent what buyers expect them to represent while remaining compliant in the U.S. financial markets.

Securitize has more than just proofs of concept. They already have nearly $4 billion in tokenized assets moving onchain. These assets originate from players like BlackRock, Hamilton Lane, VanEck, Apollo Global Management, and BNY Mellon, among others.

NYSE is pairing with the leader in tokenization to move solutions into production.

Meanwhile, the second-largest exchange by market capitalization, the Nasdaq, is winning approval from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to trade tokenized stocks and ETFs on its exchange.

The exchange originally filed in September 2025 and was recently given the green light to integrate tokenized shares on the same order book. There’s more. Nasdaq has partnered with Kraken thanks to their infrastructure layer behind the xStocks product.

xStocks delivers tokenized stocks and ETFs onchain so they can trade 24/7 and be used throughout decentralized finance (DeFi).

The two look to enable issuers and investors to move seamlessly between permissioned and permissionless environments.

On their own, these two stories speak to the trend of public stocks and ETFs making their way onchain. If you’re watching the corporate press, you might assume tokenized stocks could happen…one day.

But here’s the reality…

NYSE and Nasdaq are in catch-up mode.

The Activity Bubbling Up

Ondo Finance is a project that tokenizes stocks and ETFs. It is the leader in this domain, being responsible for roughly 70% of the $1 billion market.

And since the end of last year, the amount of transfer activity for these assets has gone from $50 million per week to well over $500 million.

Source: Ondo Finance

Tokenized stocks and ETFs are coming onchain quickly. It’s arguably a new asset class for public blockchains.

The activity is picking up.

In fact, over on the decentralized exchange marketplace Hyperliquid, volumes for tokenized stocks, ETFs, and even commodities are exploding.

Here’s a snapshot of the popular contracts trading over there. WTIOIL and BRENTOIL are doing more than $1 billion in volume per day with $850 million in open contracts. These are tokenized representations of WTI and Brent, the world’s two most important oil benchmarks.

That’s more volume than Coinbase’s Bitcoin spot market sees on a 24-hour basis.

Meanwhile, the S&P 500 and QQQ-like instrument (XYZ100) are realizing more than $400 million in volume.

Source: Hyperliquid

These numbers might seem small when compared to volumes seen at the Nasdaq and NYSE. But that’s the point. Every flood begins with a trickle.

Assets are making their way onchain. Activity is beginning to trend higher. With this in mind, asset prices feel ready to bust at the seams.

But what will it take?

Simple Averages

Let’s go back to the question at the top—Will there be another crypto bull?

The answer is ‘yes,’ and here’s why.

The fundamentals are improving drastically. Activity is picking up. Assets that were once exclusively the domain of TradFi (traditional finance) are trading on decentralized exchanges with volumes in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

But there’s often a disconnect between progress and market prices. Crypto is no exception.

We have more assets making their way onchain, transaction counts hitting all-time highs, and the race to tokenize existing stock exchange products luring the biggest players into the arena.

There is no question of whether we will see new all-time highs. It’s a question of when.

And the answer to that question will depend on two things.

First, we want to see global uncertainty settle down. Bitcoin and the rest of the digital asset ecosystem are viewed as a speculative asset class. When fear is on the rise, we rarely see money flowing into Bitcoin, Ether, or other tokens.

That’s why I watch traditional credit spreads. When the market is fearful, we often see high-yielding credit rise the most. When it falls, that’s a gauge of the market’s risk appetite.

It’s coming down off its recent spike. This is a great development. And if it continues to fall, it will create ideal conditions for assets like Bitcoin and others in crypto to gain momentum.

Source: TradingView

The second item is related to momentum.

Bitcoin recently cleared its 50-day moving average. It’s a simple benchmark gauging whether an asset is trending higher or lower. Consider that the first hurdle cleared. The second is the 100-day moving average, which it hasn’t had a close above since October 10, 2025.

We’re currently a few thousand dollars away from this second hurdle. And if we can rise above it, then momentum will be easier to sustain.

All of this is to say that we are getting very close to the point where we won’t be asking if another bull run will happen. We’ll wonder how long this next run will go.

Until next time…

Your Pulse on Crypto,

Ben Lilly
Editor, Chain of Thought