The fear gripping the crypto space right now is loud. Charts look broken. Pure technical traders are calling it done. Raoul Pal, co-founder of Real Vision and CEO of Global Macro Investor, disagrees sharply.
On X, @RaoulGMI posted a detailed breakdown pushing back hard against the bearish crowd. Global Liquidity, he argues, carries a 90% correlation to Bitcoin and a 97% correlation to the Nasdaq since 2012. That figure alone, he says, makes it the single most dominant macro factor ever recorded. And it is still growing at roughly 10% annually with no slowdown in sight.
The GMI financial conditions index leads Global Liquidity by six months. Those conditions are still easing.
DeMark Clocks Are Ticking Down
The near-term setup Pal describes comes from two separate technical timeframes converging. Weekly DeMark indicators are set to print a very solid base within two weeks. Daily DeMark signals are stacking up alongside them. Any further price weakness from here, he says, would complete both the daily and weekly counts, signalling a full trend reversal potential, not just a bounce.
This is the same methodology Pal has pointed to across prior cycles. His use of DeMark indicators, a technical analysis tool, flagged significant turning points in previous cycles and are now pointing toward a breakout continuation for Bitcoin.
US Total Liquidity is the air pocket he identifies as the culprit behind recent weakness. It was curtailed when the government shut down, pulling liquidity from the system. That factor leads crypto by three months. Its low came three months ago, meaning the drag is now reversing and accelerating higher.
Six Tailwinds Stacking Up at Once
The eSLR, the enhanced supplementary leverage ratio, is the mechanism banks use to expand credit and absorb Treasury issuance. Pal says that liquidity channel is rising and will accelerate. Tax refunds landing on bank balance sheets add further propensity for credit creation right at this moment.
China’s balance sheet is actively expanding. Rate cuts are still in the pipeline for the US, which adds to disposable income and lifts risk appetite further up the curve.
Global M2 money supply and central bank balance sheets carry a 90% correlation with Bitcoin’s price performance, vastly outweighing the supply shock of the halving according to Pal’s framework, and that money supply is headed higher.
Stablecoin issuance grew roughly 50% last year. The stablecoin market cap grew 48.10% year-to-date, supported by new regulatory frameworks and a deeper connection between traditional finance and crypto. Volumes are already running in the trillions and accelerating further.
The CLARITY Act is the regulatory piece Pal flags as a potential flood gate. Banks and asset managers have been waiting for this framework. A wall of institutional capital has been sitting on the sidelines specifically because of regulatory ambiguity, and the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act sorts much of that out. When it passes, those flows come in.
AI Agents Are an Entirely New Market
Then there is a factor most technical charts cannot price. Pal calls it the last and potentially most explosive tailwind: AI agents. They represent a completely new total addressable market, he says, one that does not yet exist in any meaningful form. When they arrive at scale, they will hyper-accelerate adoption and on-chain activity in ways that simply cannot be modelled from historical data.
“I can see how despondent everyone is about crypto and the pure chartists are telling you it’s all over, but I don’t agree,” as @RaoulGMI posted on X, before laying out every tailwind stacking against that bearish read.
Bitcoin’s Relative Strength Index indicates the market is at its second most oversold level this cycle, pointing toward a potential recovery in the coming months. Combined with the DeMark completions due within two weeks, Pal says the setup is about as clean as it gets. He notes one risk that could delay the resolution: how long oil prices stay elevated.
The next two weeks are, by his own framing, the key window.
