As Bitcoin (BTC) continues to consolidate slightly below the $120,000 level, the dominance of new investors is steadily rising. However, on-chain data shows that BTC is still far from overheating, suggesting the premier cryptocurrency may have more room to run before a significant correction sets in. Bitcoin May Still Have Some Room To Run According to a CryptoQuant Quicktake post by contributor AxelAdlerJr, new investor dominance in Bitcoin is gradually increasing – currently hovering around 30%, which is only halfway to the historical “overheated” threshold. Related Reading: Bitcoin Overheating Signals Easing – Is A Second-Half Rally Ahead? The analyst shared the following chart, which highlights two past instances – marked in orange – when new investor dominance reached overheated levels and coincided with BTC local price tops. The first instance occurred in March 2024 when the metric hit 64%, and the second in December 2024 when it peaked at 72%. In both cases, BTC experienced a significant pullback, leading to the formation of local bottoms. Notably, as the influx of new liquidity dried up during these phases, long-term holders began actively taking profits. This added further pressure on BTC’s price. Currently, while new investor dominance is trending higher, it remains well below the euphoria zone – typically between 60% and 70% – suggesting more upside potential in BTC’s bullish momentum before exhaustion. Meanwhile, older holders continue to sell moderately. The chart indicates a coefficient of 0.3, showing that the supply of three-year-old BTC is still absorbing fresh demand without sharp disruptions. From a long-term perspective, the market remains balanced, and the risk of large-scale capitulation from veteran wallets appears low. AxelAdlerJr concluded: If the indicator’s growth accelerates and approaches the historical corridor of 0.6-0.7, one should expect intensified profit-taking and, consequently, a correction. For now, the supply/demand structure remains in a healthy late bull cycle phase, when new money is coming in but old players have not yet transitioned to mass selling. Is BTC Price About To Stall? While the data above suggests that Bitcoin still has room to grow, other indicators point to waning momentum. One such signal is the recent decline in the Bitcoin Coinbase Premium Gap, which has broken its long streak of positive values. Related Reading: Bitcoin’s Rally Might Be Running on Fumes, Analyst Warns of August Turning Point Fellow CryptoQuant analyst ArabChain confirmed this development in their analysis. They noted that US investor enthusiasm for BTC appears to be cooling at current price levels. That said, positive macroeconomic factors – such as BTC’s historical correlation with global M2 money supply expansion – could still lead the digital asset to new all-time highs in the near term. At press time, BTC trades at $118,371, up 0.6% in the past 24 hours. Featured image from Unsplash, charts from CryptoQuant and TradingView.com Source: newsbtc.com (Read Full Article)

The latest What Bitcoin Did episode, hosted by Danny Knowles, turns squarely to the question stalking one of the market’s hottest trades: can the boom in “Bitcoin treasury” companies withstand the next prolonged drawdown? Dylan LeClair, who helps lead the Bitcoin strategy at Tokyo-listed MetaPlanet, argues the answer rests less on ideology than on balance-sheet engineering, scale, and the willingness to endure volatility without blinking. “There’s sort of a ‘gradually then suddenly’ inflection point,” he said, describing how corporate exposure to Bitcoin has migrated from gimmick to boardroom agenda. The shift, in his view, is irreversible, but survival “is a constant fight with gravity” for firms that trade at premiums to their net asset value (NAV). Why Some Bitcoin Treasury Companies Won’t Survive The Bear Market LeClair’s thesis starts with market structure. Bitcoin is homogeneous collateral, but public equities are not. Liquidity, index inclusion, and the absolute size of a balance sheet produce a “winner-take-most dynamic,” he said. Even where two issuers have the same headline premium, the gravity of size changes the calculus: “Strategy is at a measly 1.8x premium, but the premium is like $50 billion of value,” he noted, contrasting that with the far smaller absolute premia attached to emerging players. Premiums compress mechanically as companies buy more Bitcoin or as the price rises, he added, which means maintaining a rich multiple demands ever-larger inflows of capital. Related Reading: Analyst Says Bitcoin’s Final Leg Is Near – Time To Be ‘Cautiously Optimistic’? Pressed on what a bear market would do to those premia, LeClair separated cycle folklore from funding reality. He does not buy the inevitability of a 70% “pack it up for three years” drawdown as a base case, arguing the market now tends to reprice and then chop for extended periods. But he is unequivocal that a risk-off phase would punish sloppy balance sheets. “There will be pressure on MNAVs… Are you levered? With what sort of debt? Do you have secured debt where your Bitcoin’s encumbered? Do you have debt due in one year?” By contrast, he pointed to perpetual preferred equity—dividends but “no debt maturity ever”—as a structure that removes the most dangerous cliff: “With the prefs it’s like, no, we’re not selling actually ever.” For MetaPlanet, he framed risk management in deliberately dull terms: “We’re focused on staying… pristine, maintaining maximal flexibility.” He cited a “BTC rating” of roughly 16.5x—“we have 16 bucks of Bitcoin for every dollar of debt”—as intentional dry powder rather than under-optimization. The stress test, to him, is behavioral as much as financial: can management “eat the 70% bear market” if it comes? He expects casualties. “It’s naive to say that every company that adopts Bitcoin will be a success… there will be failures. There will be a bankruptcy… it’s a brutal, competitive world.” Where, then, is the moat? Not merely in being public, he argued, but in graduating from equity capital to the far deeper fixed-income markets. Convertibles provided early leverage—but at a cost he described with traderly bluntness. Convertible desks “woo you,” then short aggressively to hedge, “dampening the volatility” that many treasury companies actually want in their common stock. The more durable solution, he said, is permanent capital in the form of preferred equity. Here he credits Michael Saylor’s Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy) with reaching “escape velocity,” pioneering a layered capital stack that now includes a new variable-rate preferred dubbed “Stretch” (ticker: STRC). Stretch is engineered to keep trading near $100 by adjusting its dividend and, if necessary, issuing new shares or calling them at $101—“a pretty genius feat of financial engineering,” in LeClair’s words, because it behaves like a cash-equivalent for investors without imposing maturity cliffs on the issuer. Strategy priced STRC in late July with an initial dividend framework and then closed a multi-billion-dollar offering, with the company describing the instrument as variable-rate, perpetual preferred stock designed to pay monthly and target trading near par. LeClair sees this as the practical realization of a long-standing ambition in crypto finance: a dollar-like instrument tied to Bitcoin collateral, without forcing asset sales in stress. Unlike algorithmic stablecoins that were vulnerable to redemptions spirals, Strategy’s preferreds are senior to common equity and massively over-collateralized by transparent Bitcoin holdings, he argued. External observers have reached similar high-level descriptions: Strategy’s own materials emphasize STRC’s variable dividend on a stated $100 amount, while coverage in financial media notes the offering’s explicit aim to hew to par and its place alongside earlier preferreds (Stride, Strike, Strife) in a capital stack backed by tens of billions in unencumbered Bitcoin. All of this feeds the consolidation logic LeClair expects in a downturn. Preferreds, he said, are both offensive and defensive. Offensively, they add dry powder to buy more BTC or even buy back common if MNAV compresses, reversing flow against short sellers “playing this spread game.” Defensively, they function as an “MNAV defense mechanism,” easing reliance on converts and the gamma-trading that “neuters volatility” in the common. If markets turn, he anticipates classic Wall Street behavior: opportunists will “clear off some debt, buy the Bitcoin at a discount.” MetaPlanet, he added, is not seeking to be a roll-up; the focus is “laser” on BTC itself. Related Reading: Bitcoin Heat Macro Phase Signals Market Sits Between Accumulation And Distribution Could Anyone Catch Strategy? LeClair is diplomatic on peers bringing large private Bitcoin pools public, calling it “overwhelmingly positive” for the asset. But his competitive assessment is stark: “I think Saylor’s reached escape velocity… a 600,000 Bitcoin lead is pretty insurmountable.” To contextualize that claim with public data, Strategy now reports roughly 629,000 BTC, giving it a commanding lead over other corporate holders. He adds that only a mega-cap with a decisive pivot—“if Mark Zuckerberg took the orange pill tomorrow”—could realistically challenge, which he deems unlikely given competing priorities like AI. LeClair is no maximalist about smooth sailing. Premiums will ebb. Funding windows will open and slam shut. Some firms, he warned, are “cosplaying as Bitcoiners” and may abandon discipline at the first whiff