Called $BTC bullish on Apr 10, 2025: $BTC rose 55% in 6 months.
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I help busy people cut through the noise in DeFi. Systems driven research without the hype or bs.
accuracy score 56.1 on BTC over 49 BTC calls · 853 days of data · rank 94 of 141 BTC analysts (top 66.7% of the pool) · top 6.27% of an estimated 1,500 BTC analysts worldwide · v20r-multi-sparsepen-strong-ss12m-20261012, computed Nov 11, 2026 · Methodology →
Cite asCryptoQuant has tracked 49 directional calls on BTC by @thedefiedge on X since Jan 2022: ranked #94 of 141 analysts scored on BTC by accuracy — in the Top 10% of an estimated 1,500 BTC analysts worldwide (as of Nov 11, 2026).
Other assets covered (16)
Relative view by default: The DeFi Edge leans one way on 87% of days, so a softer or opposite tone stands out against their usual stance.
Sentiment timeline shows relative sentiment within this analyst's history. A perma-bull showing 8 bullish : 2 bearish in a bear market sets that as their baseline. If you notice any errors, claim @thedefiedge to submit corrections.
Called $BTC bullish on Apr 10, 2025: $BTC rose 55% in 6 months.
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Everyone's scared right now. That's usually when the next cycle's biggest winners are sitting there cheap. By the time ppl start shilling again, most of the move is already gone. Here are the 5 narratives I'm watching before the markets pump: 1. AI Inference Every time someone uses Claude or an AI agent, somebody pays for the computing power behind it. That's inference. As agents do more work on their own, that bill keeps getting bigger. Some crypto projects already let people buy or access that compute through their tokens. I'd check two things. Are there real paying customers? And does that demand actually flow back to the token? • $VVV $ORBIO 2. Proof of Useful Work / AI Compute Bitcoin miners burn a huge amount of computing power just to secure the network. Pearl and Nockchain are betting the same kind of hardware can do useful work (AI models, ZK proofs) and still earn rewards. Bittensor goes broader and pays people for useful AI contributions. The catch is that a network can have thousands of GPUs running with nobody actually paying to use them. So the number I care about is revenue from real customers vs rewards paid by printing new tokens. • $PEARL $NOCK $TAO 3. Privacy Right now anyone can look up a wallet and see the savings in it and every payment it's ever made. Businesses and AI agents aren't gonna move serious money on rails like that. Zcash and Monero already do private payments. Newer projects are building private apps and smart contracts. The obvious risk is regulators. Honestly, I don't have a clean answer to that one. So I'd trust usage over headlines. That means growth in private transactions and apps that really need privacy to work. • $ZEC $XMR $NIGHT 4. Quantum Resistance Quantum computers may one day break the cryptography that protects most crypto wallets. And you can't upgrade a whole blockchain overnight. The interesting part is that networks are already taking different routes. NEAR added quantum-safe signatures (ML-DSA) to mainnet in July. Starknet is aiming to be fully quantum resistant by 2027. Quantus launched in September with quantum-resistant signatures from day one. I'm honestly not sure on timing here. So I'd only care which upgrades are actually live, and whether any of it creates demand for the token. • $QTC $NEAR $STRK 5. Revenue & Buybacks The part most people still skip is doing the math after dilution. Say a project buys back $10M while unlocking $50M in new tokens. It's still putting more on the market than it's taking off. So I'd look at how much revenue actually reaches the token after unlocks and emissions. • $HYPE $UNI $PUMP I wouldn't buy all five today. I'd build a watchlist with 2 or 3 projects per sector and check those numbers once a month. The setup I want is the number getting better while the price hasn't caught up yet. That gap is usually widest when everyone's scared... like right now. The narrative gets a coin on your watchlist. The numbers tell you when to buy. Which of these five do you think the market is still sleeping on?
View original →Papertrade went live on Oct 10. Over the past week, it ranked #3 on DefiLlama's revenue rankings, behind only Tether and Circle. Hyperliquid and https://t.co/xR4HP5oUFB sit below it, and Lighter, the next perp exchange on the list, is way down at #33. Together they lost about $18.7M. Even after $11.6M in USDC rewards, most are still in the red. TL;DR - Most of Papertrade's $62.5M in revenue is traders' own losses. - Early farmers got 100 $PAPER per $1 lost. Today it's under 10. - You can't sell PAPER, so do the payback math before you farm. So who's making money here? On @papertrade_xyz you can trade $BTC and $ETH with up to 1,000x leverage. There's no order book. You trade against the platform's own pool, which people call the House. When you win, the House pays you. When you lose, your money goes to the House and you get $PAPER, which you can stake to earn $USDC. Winning isn't free either. Profitable traders pay a variable cut of their gains plus a 2% fee. And if the House runs short of cash, your profit waits in a queue. Where does the revenue come from? $57.6M of its $62.5M in revenue (about 92%) has already gone out to PAPER stakers. Only about $10M came from fees. The rest is the House's trading profit, which means users' own losses. I'd bet plenty of that is people losing on purpose to farm $PAPER. Losing money on purpose is a wild strategy, but hey, it's crypto. The attention is real though. About 5,000 daily active addresses and $40M in TVL is a lot this early. Who's getting paid back? At launch, you got 100 PAPER for every $1 of eligible losses. Now it's under 10. The top 25 losers look to have minted mostly near that early rate, and they've claimed about 62% of their losses back in USDC. They're not whole yet, but they got a far better deal than anyone starting now. Someone losing $1,000 today gets about a tenth of the PAPER for the same hit. And a lot of what they lose pays the people who got in first. Can you sell PAPER to get out? And the funny part is you can't. $PAPER can't be sold or sent to another wallet. You can only stake and unstake it. It's basically a Hotel California token. You can check in, but you can never leave. The team said this week they have no plans to change that. Their reason is security. If PAPER traded freely, attackers could short it while moving the prices the House uses, so attacks would pay a lot better. Makes sense to me. But it means the USDC stream is the only way PAPER pays you back. They're also changing how PAPER gets minted, which the team says will slowly dilute older holders. So the math is still moving. What would I check before farming? If I were looking at $PAPER now, I'd want these answered first. 1. How much money do I have to lose to get PAPER? 2. How much USDC am I earning per token after dilution? 3. How long would those rewards take to pay back my losses? Since you can't sell, number 3 is basically the whole trade. One unofficial tracker, paperdashboard app, puts payback on new PAPER at about 244 days at today's payouts. More dilution stretches that. So what's my take? Personally I like the experiment. Letting traders share in an exchange's economics is a fun idea, and I'm kinda curious where it goes. But I wouldn't rush to farm PAPER because of its revenue numbers. What am I watching next? The real test is how much revenue the product makes once farming slows. It's already being tested. Daily revenue fell from $7.49M on Oct 15 to $1.45M on Oct 20. On Oct 21 it made just $0.18M. I'm not sure yet whether it holds up without the farmers. I'd also watch whether the House keeps paying winners on time. Would you rather farm PAPER today or wait until its economics become clearer?
Papertrade beat Hyperliquid on revenue this week. But the 25 traders who lost the most are still down $7M. Papertrade went live on Oct 10. Over the past week, it ranked #3 on DefiLlama's revenue rankings, behind only Tether and Circle. Hyperliquid and https://t.co/xR4HP5oUFB sit below it, and Lighter, the next perp exchange on the list, is way down at #33. Together they lost about $18.7M. Even after $11.6M in USDC rewards, most are still in the red. TL;DR - Most of Papertrade's $62.5M in revenue is traders' own losses. - Early farmers got 100 $PAPER per $1 lost. Today it's under 10. - You can't sell PAPER, so do the payback math before you farm. So who's making money here? On @papertrade_xyz you can trade $BTC and $ETH with up to 1,000x leverage. There's no order book. You trade against the platform's own pool, which people call the House. When you win, the House pays you. When you lose, your money goes to the House and you get $PAPER, which you can stake to earn $USDC. Winning isn't free either. Profitable traders pay a variable cut of their gains plus a 2% fee. And if the House runs short of cash, your profit waits in a queue. Where does the revenue come from? $57.6M of its $62.5M in revenue (about 92%) has already gone out to PAPER stakers. Only about $10M came from fees. The rest is the House's trading profit, which means users' own losses. I'd bet plenty of that is people losing on purpose to farm $PAPER. Losing money on purpose is a wild strategy, but hey, it's crypto. The attention is real though. About 5,000 daily active addresses and $40M in TVL is a lot this early. Who's getting paid back? At launch, you got 100 PAPER for every $1 of eligible losses. Now it's under 10. The top 25 losers look to have minted mostly near that early rate, and they've claimed about 62% of their losses back in USDC. They're not whole yet, but they got a far better deal than anyone starting now. Someone losing $1,000 today gets about a tenth of the PAPER for the same hit. And a lot of what they lose pays the people who got in first. Can you sell PAPER to get out? And the funny part is you can't. $PAPER can't be sold or sent to another wallet. You can only stake and unstake it. It's basically a Hotel California token. You can check in, but you can never leave. The team said this week they have no plans to change that. Their reason is security. If PAPER traded freely, attackers could short it while moving the prices the House uses, so attacks would pay a lot better. Makes sense to me. But it means the USDC stream is the only way PAPER pays you back. They're also changing how PAPER gets minted, which the team says will slowly dilute older holders. So the math is still moving. What would I check before farming? If I were looking at $PAPER now, I'd want these answered first. 1. How much money do I have to lose to get PAPER? 2. How much USDC am I earning per token after dilution? 3. How long would those rewards take to pay back my losses? Since you can't sell, number 3 is basically the whole trade. One unofficial tracker, paperdashboard app, puts payback on new PAPER at about 244 days at today's payouts. More dilution stretches that. So what's my take? Personally I like the experiment. Letting traders share in an exchange's economics is a fun idea, and I'm kinda curious where it goes. But I wouldn't rush to farm PAPER because of its revenue numbers. What am I watching next? The real test is how much revenue the product makes once farming slows. It's already being tested. Daily revenue fell from $7.49M on Oct 15 to $1.45M on Oct 20. On Oct 21 it made just $0.18M. I'm not sure yet whether it holds up without the farmers. I'd also watch whether the House keeps paying winners on time. Would you rather farm PAPER today or wait until its economics become clearer?
View original →BTC went up 5.6% in two months. Raydium went up 178%. Uniswap 80%. Aero 77%. I dug into what the winners had in common. It wasn't that they were cheap. https://t.co/ZKXdzBSfkI
View original →It could one day drain wallets by cracking the keys that protect them. Ethereum has a 2029 deadline, but Starknet might leave Ethereum to move faster. Here's where 9 of the biggest names in crypto stand: 1. $ETH: Targeting full quantum resistance by the end of 2029, covering wallets, validators, and the data layer the whole network runs on. It's also building a way for existing wallets to switch to quantum-safe signatures on their own schedule, so nobody gets forced to move funds all at once. 2. $BTC: Developers are working on proposals like BIP-360 to cut the risk from quantum attacks. The harder problem is lost coins. Millions of BTC sit in old wallets whose owners will never come back to upgrade, and deciding what happens to them is gonna be ugly. 3. $NEAR: Already supports quantum-resistant signatures through ML-DSA. You can upgrade your wallet's security without changing your address or moving your assets, which is a big deal if you've got money spread across DeFi. 4. $STRK: Wants to be fully quantum-resistant by 2027. Starknet wallets can already switch to new signature types on their own, but upgrading the network itself still means waiting on Ethereum. That's mainly why the team is considering becoming its own L1. Nothing's decided yet. 5. $QTC: Quantus went the other way. Instead of upgrading an existing chain, it launched in September with quantum-resistant signatures built in from day one, plus Bitcoin-style proof of work and a 21M supply. The tech is interesting, but it's a very young network that still has to prove it can attract real users. 6. $TRX: TRON has quantum-resistant signatures running on its testnet. @justinsuntron says they're ready to bring them to mainnet at any time. I'd watch for when regular users can actually use them. 7. $SUI: Just completed its first native quantum-safe transaction on devnet, using a signature system called ML-DSA-65. Mainnet support is targeted for early 2027. 8. $ZEC: Zcash is working toward quantum resistance through its Tachyon roadmap, and it has a harder job than most. It has to protect funds without breaking the privacy features people use it for, so swapping out wallet signatures won't cut it. 9. $COIN: Coinbase could matter just as much. They're working with Bitcoin developers and researchers on how to move existing BTC wallets to quantum-resistant security, and they've said the lost-coins question needs its own debate alongside that work. So how serious is the quantum threat? Today's computers can't realistically break the cryptography protecting Bitcoin and Ethereum wallets. A future quantum computer might by working backwards from a wallet's public key to its private key and draining the funds. Nobody knows when that becomes possible. And upgrading billions of dollars of crypto isn't something you do overnight. I think the most interesting opportunity here could be the infrastructure that helps existing chains upgrade. • NEAR users can change their security keys without moving their assets. • Starknet wallets can adopt new signature systems without waiting for a major network upgrade. • Then there are the teams doing migration work for existing chains, like Coinbase on the Bitcoin side. Personally, I'd check three things: 1. Is it live? A working mainnet and a roadmap promising 2027 are very different things. 2. Can people upgrade easily? Nobody wants to unwind their DeFi positions just to secure a wallet. 3. Does the token benefit? A chain getting more secure doesn't automatically make its token worth more. Run the list through the first two and $NEAR is the one name that clearly passes both right now. Everyone else is still on a roadmap or, in QTC's case, too new to be tested. Which project do you think is best positioned for the quantum era?
Quantum computing might be crypto's biggest threat. It could one day drain wallets by cracking the keys that protect them. Ethereum has a 2029 deadline, but Starknet might leave Ethereum to move faster. Here's where 9 of the biggest names in crypto stand: 1. $ETH: Targeting full quantum resistance by the end of 2029, covering wallets, validators, and the data layer the whole network runs on. It's also building a way for existing wallets to switch to quantum-safe signatures on their own schedule, so nobody gets forced to move funds all at once. 2. $BTC: Developers are working on proposals like BIP-360 to cut the risk from quantum attacks. The harder problem is lost coins. Millions of BTC sit in old wallets whose owners will never come back to upgrade, and deciding what happens to them is gonna be ugly. 3. $NEAR: Already supports quantum-resistant signatures through ML-DSA. You can upgrade your wallet's security without changing your address or moving your assets, which is a big deal if you've got money spread across DeFi. 4. $STRK: Wants to be fully quantum-resistant by 2027. Starknet wallets can already switch to new signature types on their own, but upgrading the network itself still means waiting on Ethereum. That's mainly why the team is considering becoming its own L1. Nothing's decided yet. 5. $QTC: Quantus went the other way. Instead of upgrading an existing chain, it launched in September with quantum-resistant signatures built in from day one, plus Bitcoin-style proof of work and a 21M supply. The tech is interesting, but it's a very young network that still has to prove it can attract real users. 6. $TRX: TRON has quantum-resistant signatures running on its testnet. @justinsuntron says they're ready to bring them to mainnet at any time. I'd watch for when regular users can actually use them. 7. $SUI: Just completed its first native quantum-safe transaction on devnet, using a signature system called ML-DSA-65. Mainnet support is targeted for early 2027. 8. $ZEC: Zcash is working toward quantum resistance through its Tachyon roadmap, and it has a harder job than most. It has to protect funds without breaking the privacy features people use it for, so swapping out wallet signatures won't cut it. 9. $COIN: Coinbase could matter just as much. They're working with Bitcoin developers and researchers on how to move existing BTC wallets to quantum-resistant security, and they've said the lost-coins question needs its own debate alongside that work. So how serious is the quantum threat? Today's computers can't realistically break the cryptography protecting Bitcoin and Ethereum wallets. A future quantum computer might by working backwards from a wallet's public key to its private key and draining the funds. Nobody knows when that becomes possible. And upgrading billions of dollars of crypto isn't something you do overnight. I think the most interesting opportunity here could be the infrastructure that helps existing chains upgrade. • NEAR users can change their security keys without moving their assets. • Starknet wallets can adopt new signature systems without waiting for a major network upgrade. • Then there are the teams doing migration work for existing chains, like Coinbase on the Bitcoin side. Personally, I'd check three things: 1. Is it live? A working mainnet and a roadmap promising 2027 are very different things. 2. Can people upgrade easily? Nobody wants to unwind their DeFi positions just to secure a wallet. 3. Does the token benefit? A chain getting more secure doesn't automatically make its token worth more. Run the list through the first two and $NEAR is the one name that clearly passes both right now. Everyone else is still on a roadmap or, in QTC's case, too new to be tested. Which project do you think is best positioned for the quantum era?
View original →$BTC and alts are pulling back again, and people are already panicking. Most people won't make it to the next cycle with their gains intact. 10 lessons to make sure you're not one of them: 1. Stop trying to follow every sector. Pick 2-3 and get to know them better than most people do. You'll find more opportunities that way than by chasing whatever CT is yelling about today. "I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times." - Bruce Lee 2. Pay attention to macro, even if you hate it. Crypto keeps getting more tied to how much cheap money is floating around (interest rates, ETF flows, that kinda stuff). Nobody's asking you to predict the Fed. You just need a rough sense of what's actually moving the market. 3. The next big narrative won't save your old bags. Money is jumping between AI, RWAs, perps, and memecoins faster than ever. Your token pumped in 2021? Cool, that doesn't mean anyone wants it in 2026. 4. A good product doesn't always mean a good token. A protocol can make millions in revenue while token holders never see a dollar of it. So before you buy, ask the boring question… where does the money actually go? 5. Don't buy a token just because it announced buybacks. If a project buys back $10M while unlocking $50M worth of tokens, you're still getting diluted. Check the unlock schedule before you get excited. 6. Be careful when everyone starts calling a token undervalued. 5x annual revenue looks cheap right up until that revenue drops 70% next month. Cheap on paper doesn't mean much if the business can't keep making money. 7. Know how long you're holding before you buy. Some tokens are worth holding for years and some for a few weeks, and you should know which one you're buying going in. Don't turn a short-term trade into a long-term investment just because the price went down. Honestly, that's how most bags get made. 8. Decide your exit before you enter. Know your profit target and what would make you sell if the trade goes against you. Otherwise you'll keep moving the goalposts every time the price moves. "The investor's chief problem, and even his worst enemy, is likely to be himself." - Benjamin Graham 9. Rotating profits into riskier tokens is just moving to another table at the casino. Actually lock some of those gains into BTC, stablecoins, or fiat. 10. Protect your capital like your life depends on it. You don't need to catch every 100x or every new narrative. Missing a pump stings for a week or so, but blowing up your portfolio is the kind of mistake that sets you back years. "The first rule of compounding is to never interrupt it unnecessarily." - Charlie Munger I still think the opportunity in DeFi is huge. We've got real businesses, institutional money coming in, stablecoins getting used for everyday payments, and financial assets moving onchain, and the basics still apply to all of it. Make the money when it's there, and when things get ugly, focus on protecting it so you're still around for the next run. What's one lesson crypto taught you the hard way?
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