hey everyone and thanks for jumping back into the cryptus today we're going to talk about Bitcoin and we're going to be discussing the social risk if you guys like the content make sure you subscribe to the channel give the video a thumbs up and also check out the sale on into the cryptus premium at intothe cryptoverse decom I've noticed recently there's been a lot of comments about the audio so I made some changes uh to uh my computer and so hopefully the audio is improving please let me know uh if this sounds better or not I've also seen the comments where people say that my video is covering up too much of the screen so I reduced it a little bit uh in the hopes that it doesn't do that so right now the social risk which is one of the sort of the three main risk metrics that make up sort of the total summary risk that we talk about right we have summary risk uh made up of price risk onchain risk and social risk and social risk is one of these metrics that that I created um or you know that the that the team created over here into the cryp verse we created this back in uh 2022 and the idea was to just get some insight into whether retail is here or not there's been a lot of times over the last few years where you know you hear people call for certain things right you say you know they they'll call for for Bitcoin dominance to go down or they're call they'll call for altseason in um and they'll say this is even crazier than it was in in 2021 and there's great narratives right there's great narratives and there's the certainly the narratives that get clicks but when you actually look at the the social risk what you'll notice is that throughout this entire cycle the social interest in crypto never went above the 04 to. 5 risk ban right it never actually went above the 04 to 0. 5 wristband and you can see that in 2021 and in 2017 we saw social interest go to at least above the 0.
8 wristband right somewhere between 08 to one risk and that truly was where alt season actually occurred so I think when we when we look at a chart like this we have to ask ourselves you know has there been a time this cycle where the conditions the interest in crypto has been anywhere close to where it was in either 2021 and in 2017 and the answer is no it certainly feels like it at times that everyone is interested in crypto especially when you have you know the president of the United States tweeting about it and the discussions about strategic Bitcoin reserves and the discussions about you know the ETFs but what's interesting is that despite all of that retail interest never actually came back now there's a lot of you know schools of thought as to why retail interest never came back I tend to defer to sort of the macro environment the you know persistent inflation the you know the sort of the worry about the the labor market but really A lot of it I think just comes down to monetary policy you know we saw very similar outcomes back in in 2019 when we had quantitative tightening and relatively High interest rates for the time where it just was a drag on interest in crypto and back then interest didn't even really start returning until after quantitative tightening ended you know and I know this is one of those things where it's like well how many times are you going to say that Ben you've been saying it since 2022 you know but the reality is that the conditions never actually changed from what we saw back in 2019 and in 2019 essentially what we had was a Bitcoin only rally where Bitcoin dominance went up and ALT bled back to the king and it wasn't until after quantitative tightening ended and it wasn't until back then it wasn't even until QE began that we even really saw a durable shift in retail interest in the cryptoverse now this cycle there's obviously been a lot of people that you know keep sort of trying to front run everything by saying that you know it's this time of the cycle therefore it has to occur but the reality is it's it's almost like the fact that the markets keep front running it all it almost just keeps delaying the FED to make the changes that ultimately they would need to make to bring interest back into the cryptoverse I've also talked a few times about this cycle there you know there's been this massive misallocation of of capital and I I think it's actually gotten significantly better over the last couple of months there's a lot of money in in the meme coin Market I I still imagine there's quite a lot of money there but there there was a massive misallocation of capital back in you know December January 2025 time frame a lot of those meme coins now are down like 80 to 90% um and you know ultimately the part of the healing process for you know for the cryptoverse part of the healing process to go through that and I also wonder sometimes you know when you see the social interest start to climb and and then it it it seems like there's a chance that it could just continue to go up but it seems to just die out anytime it gets up to the point4 to 05 wristband and I think part of that is due to the fact that when when social interest does start to go back up the main stuff that gets promoted and shilled is all that really frothy stuff right like all the meme coins and stuff there's there'll be influencers that launch their own meme coins presidents that launch their own meme coins and then people get rugged you know and so the people that maybe were interested in crypto back in 2021 Andor 2017 that type of Personality that that's more likely to join at tops rather than bottoms they they they come back to crypto and they just kind of find it in in almost at least the altcoin market I'm not I'm not referring to bitcoin right they find the altcoin market essentially in a in a worst in a worse State than what they left it back in 2021 um or 20122 because now right now there's not even any pretending right there hasn't even been pretending going on in the altcoin market a lot of it has just been um you know the the froest stuff gets promoted the most and any any team actually working on anything somewhat relevant is is just of and ignored so I I think that's been a big part of it and I I don't really necessarily blame you know the cryptoverse for a lot of this stuff I mean I I I do think that it's easy to point fingers and say things like well you know had crypto focused on this and this wouldn't have happened right if people had focused on this but you could argue that the reason that you know that stuff wasn't focused on as much this cycle was because of all the regulation risk back in 2023 and 2024 I think it made it so a lot of people didn't really want to take on the risk of of developing too much in the cryptus because they didn't really know what they were developing products around like were they Securities were they not and I also don't even think it's the it's the reality that even they could have been Securities it's just that that we needed regulatory Clarity and it it's kind of like when we talk about you know all the Tariff discussion right I mean I don't really think tariffs are a good thing but the one thing worse than tariffs in my opinion is constantly changing what the tariffs are and and sort of flip-flopping that's more that's more difficult for markets because markets just hate uncertain if you if you just sort of set a tariff at a certain level and just say this is what it's going to be it's still probably not that great for the overall economy it leads to sort of less globalization and more isolationism uh but at least businesses can adapt if you change it from 25% to 50% back to 25% you know how do businesses operate under conditions like that and that's what leads to this uncertainty in the markets and that's probably one of the reasons why we saw markets sell off back between say February Opex and March Opex which is what we you know one of the things we talked about so when we think about you know the social risk you know maybe I should have mentioned this earlier it's essentially just a number between zero and one and it's made up of five different metrics okay it's made up of subscribers to YouTube channels views to those YouTube channels followers to analysts on Twitter that talk about crypto or x uh exchanges on X and then layer ones on X so you can kind of see they all basically follow the same pattern but what we did was is we just decided all right we'll take all five of them and we'll calculate the average now if you think that something should not be included in that and you know you're here on on the end of the cryptoverse website and let's just say you don't want to include exchanges in this metric because you know there are marketing campaigns that exchanges run sometimes and it'll lead to these like major major um boost in follower count that's completely you know not organic it's completely unorg and um so you could argue that you know sometimes it might make sense to to reduce the weight on on some of the some of the uh metrics or completely take it out all the way um and and that's sort of the beauty of it and and sort of the rist stuff is that you know it's not like there's a right way to calculate it I mean one of the biggest criticisms I get this cycle about the social risk is well I should be looking at Instagram and I should be looking at Tik Tok and and while that may be true um I also think that uh these five metrics do just fine you know I mean I I still don't think you know if if that stuff really mattered if there was really something that that we were missing over on Tik Tok or Instagram that was changing the sort of the market dynamics then why you know why does it feel like no one's interested in crypto and furthermore if I really did miss out on on following you know influencers on those platforms why and and if retail truly did did come back why did Bitcoin dominance never go down so I I think it's an easy thing to say I think it's an easy thing to say well you know you're just missing the retail on other platforms but you know I also think that the the truth is in the charts and and Bitcoin dominance never really um never really got that big drop and you could argue it's because well retail never came back now I'm not going to argue that there's no sort of lagged effects right I mean prices going up leads to retail investors coming back but at least in Hind it when you look at this chart you can understand why alt season never occurred is because retail whenever they did come back they left and who can blame them right who can blame them they come back they get shielded some meme coin that then goes to zero the next week and then the person that shielded it to them is just moved on to another mem coin that they're Shilling you know so it's kind of like you know the cryptoverse is going I think through sort of a healing process right now and I I think they need to find the cryptoverse collectively needs to figure out what's important um but I you know I also think this is something that's happened in markets ever since markets existed you know we markets mature eventually we lose our way investors lose their way they focus on what what doesn't really matter and then you know we we get a course correction and and that's pretty normal thing so the other thing I wanted to mention is you know there's plenty of charts that you can look you know we can look at individual charts right one of the ones I like to show a lot of times is the YouTube views um because you know if we look at that what it looks like right where you basically have um a lot of different views let me let me actually pull it back up over here um but you have a lot of different a lot of different people you know watching these different YouTube channels and um and so we just go down to the uh social media charts we also have other ones too like Twitter followers and and all that other stuff but um here we are YouTube views so when we look at this this is made up of I don't know this like 20 something maybe YouTube channels working at a 7-Day moving average right now the 7-Day SMA of views on these channels is approximately 900,000 views 896 th. 79k to be exact and when you when I look at it I try to think like well has there been a time this cycle where we truly saw retail return in the same way as last cycle and it's not I mean you know back at the heights of 2021 we essentially had 3 to four million viewers um per day collectively on these channels this cycle anytime we go above 2 million or get close to it it's just a pullback and back then you know we saw the markets stay at these elevated levels for weeks before coming down this cycle anytime we get close to 2 million that's it now you might say well hold on a second Ben what about this recent Spike what's what's going on there this is not actually an artifact of what actually happened in the markets this is an artifact of of you know YouTube just not um updating the statistics for like a week or something and so then what happened is it basically looks like there was no views uh for uh you know a week or so and um and now and now you know after it looks there's like basically no view no viewers for like a week or two or so and then all of a sudden it came back right you know the statistics came back and then it looks like oh everyone's all a sudden interested again in reality it's probably better to sort of smooth that out right it probably be better to smooth that out um but we haven't done that yet uh we might do that you can kind of see though that there was the interest in in YouTube views right like the 7-Day ese of it has generally been going down uh since the new Administration took office if you just kind of ignore that if we if we take this right here and and sort of average it out with the data that that occurred before it you can kind of see it's you know retail interest has been slowly waning um in the first quarter of the year it's not completely unheard of we actually also saw interest in the cryptoverse go down um maybe not I I mean maybe not I shouldn't say like that but we saw prices go down back in parts of q1 of 2017 the main difference between 2025 so far in 2017 is that in 2017 we were risk on in February whereas we've been riskof in February of 2025 therefore the March low was actually a lower low compared to January whereas in 2017 the March low was a higher low compared to January and and the last thing that I want to mention is if you go over to the workbench and you look at at some of this stuff right if you if you look at the social risk and we add that to the to the chart and then we add on here something like um Bitcoin dominance without stable coins what you'll see is that as long as social interest remains low as long as it's going down or remains low Bitcoin dominance doesn't crash right so you know you need retail here to make Bitcoin dominance crash and the reason it makes sense there's millions and millions of of altcoins there's only one Bitcoin and and you know this during these times of the cycle is what t turns to tends to turn a lot of people into Bitcoin Maxis uh but you see Bitcoin dominance go up when social interest goes away because there's only one Bitcoin there's millions and millions in NS there's a lot of arguments you'll see during Mania phases where people will say stuff like oh well you know Bitcoin dominance they think that Bitcoin dominance will go down forever simply because there's more altcoins being created just because you create something else like just because you create more altcoins doesn't mean more money is coming into the cryptoverse basically what happens is that the money that's in the cryptoverse allocated to the altcoin market just gets diluted from any individual altcoin so that's the reason why Bitcoin dominance put in a higher low in 2021 and 2022 compared to 2018 because even with all the money printing Bitcoin dominance still did not go to a lower low so again these charts show you you know why the market is so much different than what we saw back in 2021 and 2017 at least so far now monetary policy could theoretically change at some point um but that hasn't happened yet we have seen some sort of softer changes right we saw quantitative tightening slow but quantitative tightening also slowed uh back in May of 2024 and shortly after they slowed qt in May of 2024 we also saw Bitcoin get a nice little rally for a few weeks as well so I I think that the social Risk by itself is maybe not like the only indicator to use but if you are someone who values their portfolio in Satoshi and you find things like Bitcoin dominance important and you truly want to understand what creates the sort of the market conditions for something like alt season then I I do think following monetary policy I think following social interest in the cryptoverse makes a lot of sense anyways guys we're going to wrap it up there let me know if the audio in this video sounds any better if it is and I'll keep it the way it is if it's too loud let me know that too uh and if it's too soft uh let me know that as well I I I think it's it's a little bit better but I'd like to hear what you have to say and hopefully the video is small enough today where it's not covering up half the screen anyways guys we're going to wrap it up there make sure you subscribe give the video a thumbs up and check out the sale on into the Crypt premium at intothe crypto.
