CoinKarma founder Benson Sun said in a conversation with 168X that Bitcoin is moving through a different kind of cycle this time. His core view is that BTC is becoming more gold-like, not in a complete sense, but enough to change how he values the asset, how he reads market structure, and how he positions for altcoins.
The interview took place on Sept. 29, 2026, at 2 p.m. Host Mr. Z spoke with Benson, founder of CoinKarma, after what the host described as several quiet months. Benson said he had spent much of that period focused on family and had mostly traded lending and arbitrage strategies, only adding directional exposure again after seeing what he called early signs of a new bull phase.
Bitcoin’s correlation with gold has reached an extreme
Asked for the central thesis of this cycle, Benson said he wrote in early September that the market may be seeing the start of Bitcoin’s “goldization.” He said a recurring pattern has appeared in prior cycles: when the market moves from the late bear phase into the early bull phase, Bitcoin’s correlation with gold tends to rise quickly from low levels.
Historically, he said, Bitcoin has not been as tightly correlated with gold as many assume. The median 60-day rolling correlation has been around 0.2 to 0.3. Most of the time, BTC has behaved more like a high-volatility version of the Nasdaq, moving with tech stocks and dollar liquidity. But near the end of bear markets and the start of bull markets, its gold-like characteristics have tended to strengthen.
What stands out in this cycle, in his view, is both the magnitude and the duration. Benson said the 60-day rolling correlation between BTC and gold reached about 0.64 to 0.65. Across Bitcoin’s history, there have only been 21 days when that 60-day correlation was above 0.6, and 17 of those days came in the most recent month and a half. He said every early bull phase has shown some degree of this shift, but this time it has lasted longer and reached a higher absolute level.
BTC is no longer just a leveraged Nasdaq trade
Benson said he is not arguing that Bitcoin has fully turned into gold. His point is narrower and more structural: BTC used to lean heavily toward equities, and now it is moving closer to the safe-haven side of the spectrum.
In past risk-off periods, he said, Bitcoin usually fell harder than tech stocks because many buyers treated it as a high-beta instrument. But another group in the market has always viewed BTC as a long-term store of value, and those two groups trade very differently.
When prices fall from higher levels, the liquidity-driven traders tend to exit first, he said. As floating supply settles, buyers who see Bitcoin as a store of value begin to step in. That is why, in his reading, BTC starts to look more like gold in the later stages of a bear market.
He said he often watches Nasdaq, BTC and gold charts side by side. Bitcoin still retains equity-like behavior, but it is no longer almost entirely tied to Nasdaq. It now sits somewhere between gold and equities, and he thinks it is drifting closer to gold.
He also pointed to a price pattern he finds notable. When gold falls, BTC may also decline, but it tends to hold up better. When gold rises, Bitcoin often rises more. He said that behavior was not nearly as visible in earlier cycles.
The $82,000-$83,000 zone is the key support area
On whether investors who missed the move from the $60,000 range should still buy, Benson said the market really began to confirm a bull phase once BTC broke above roughly $82,000 to $82,500. A weekly-structure breakout at that level, he said, can pull in longer-horizon CTA capital.
He compared Bitcoin to a large truck that has just started moving and is beginning to accelerate. Unless there is a major macro event, he said, it is hard to imagine that truck suddenly slamming on the brakes and turning back into what had been a more bearish zone.
From a technical perspective, he said a major resistance level often gets retested after a breakout, and the old resistance then becomes support. That is why he is watching the $82,000-$83,000 area as the main support band.
Crypto, he added, has an unpleasant habit: only about 10% of the time is the market in a true impulsive advance, while the other 90% is spent chopping around and making participants doubt themselves. If one already believes this is the start of a bull market, then pullbacks are there to buy, not to restart the debate over whether the bull market exists.
He values BTC through the BTC/gold ratio
Benson said that if the core thesis is Bitcoin’s shift toward gold, then the cleaner valuation framework is the BTC/gold ratio rather than chart patterns alone.
At present, he said, one BTC buys about 18 to 20 ounces of gold. In prior bull-market peaks, that ratio has tended to break into a higher range, with the last cycle’s more visible high around 40.
He then laid out two scenarios. If the anti-fiat-debasement narrative becomes stronger this cycle, and if the BTC/gold ratio reaches 45 to 50 while gold trades near $5,000, then Bitcoin would land in a $200,000-$250,000 range.
If BTC fails to break above the prior cycle’s ratio band and only reaches 35 to 40, then the implied price would be closer to $150,000-$180,000. He described $150,000-$180,000 as the more normal outcome and $200,000-$250,000 as the more optimistic one.
ETF access changed the market structure
One reason he thinks Bitcoin’s gold-like behavior is more visible this cycle is the arrival of ETFs. Before that, he said, pension funds and other regulated institutions had a difficult time getting spot BTC exposure. In many cases they could only buy proxies such as Coinbase or MicroStrategy rather than Bitcoin itself.
Institutions also face clear requirements around liquidity, risk control, custody and regulation. Retail traders can move BTC onto an exchange and sell it for dollars, but pension funds cannot manage assets that way.
Once ETFs turned BTC into a securitized product, he said, the setup changed completely. Institutions can buy IBIT or other Bitcoin ETFs directly, and they can build LTV structures, financing arrangements and portfolio allocations around those products.
He said there had long been a pool of capital that wanted to buy BTC as a form of gold but lacked a compliant route into the market. ETFs gave that capital an entry point that fits within the traditional financial system, which in his view makes the digital-gold path much easier to sustain.
This cycle may be longer and more segmented
Benson does not expect this bull market to look like a short, vertical blow-off. He said Bitcoin’s cycle structure has been changing for years.
In 2017, he said, the bull market was simple: it rose through the year and then ended, almost like a single straight shot. By 2020 and 2021, the market had already shifted into a structure with two clear tops. In the following cycle, the pattern became even more segmented, with one leg up, then months of consolidation, then another leg higher, all while tariffs, liquidity shifts and other macro events interrupted the trend before new highs were made again.
That is why he sees Bitcoin’s bull market as a larger cycle containing many smaller cycles. He expects that feature to be even more visible this time.
He also said the targets he mentioned earlier — $150,000, $180,000, $200,000 or even $250,000 — may not represent the final endpoint of the broader cycle. If Bitcoin’s goldization and the repricing of U.S. Treasury credit continue to unfold, he said, no one knows how long that process could last.
He raised another question as well. The market had broadly assumed that the four-year cycle would end on schedule and that a bear market should bring a 70% to 80% drawdown. This time, he said, the decline ended after a drop of just over 50%. That leaves open the possibility that the market has remained inside one larger cycle, with several smaller bull and bear phases inside it.
For altcoins, he wants price-confirmed leaders
On altcoins, Benson said he has changed his approach. After four cycles, he said, every market eventually produces stories about some token that will change the world, but most of them still end up as little more than air.
His strategy this time is simple. In the early bull phase, he wants the narratives that have already been confirmed by price, the coins that clearly have capital behind them and can trade independently. Those are the ones he buys.
He said he would rather be “an IQ 100 person” in this market. If he already believes the market is in the early stage of a bull run, then he would rather own the leaders that have already emerged than spend large amounts of time trying to discover something no one else has seen.
He also made a point about research in the AI era. Everyone now has access to AI tools, he said. If something looks obvious, the fundamentals look strong, and yet price does nothing, the first question should be why only one person thinks they understand it. The answer may simply be that the market is not wrong and the analyst is.
For most participants, he said, it makes more sense to identify the confirmed leaders, add on pullbacks, and let the trend do the work.
100x trades are much harder to find now
Benson said the opportunity set in crypto today is very different from what it was in 2021. Back then, he said, it was still possible for ordinary traders to buy SOL on exchanges at a single-digit dollar price and hold it into the tens or even hundreds of dollars.
Now, he said, it is far less common for exchange-listed altcoins to offer easy 20x, 50x or 100x upside. If someone’s starting capital is so small that they need a 100x or 1,000x return to reach their financial goal, then the issue may not be the market at all. It may be the size of the starting capital.
If traders insist on chasing that scale of return, he said, the higher-probability venue is on-chain rather than in mature exchange-listed altcoins. But that comes with a different style of trading, much heavier demands on timing and risk control, and a much higher failure rate.
He summed it up with a line: large capital can make small percentage gains meaningful, while very small capital often cannot make even large percentage gains matter enough. In a more mature market, he said, that is a hard reality to avoid.
On-chain and exchange trading are different home fields
Asked why he has not leaned more heavily into on-chain trading, Benson said the first step is to know your own home field.
On-chain trading requires intense focus, he said. Traders may need to sit through long stretches waiting for a handful of real opportunities, while dealing with many failed projects in between. Among the people he knows who made very large gains on-chain, returns were usually concentrated in a very small number of trades.
He compared it to a card machine. Out of 10,000 hands, perhaps only 200 or 300 are truly good on-chain opportunities. In exchange spot and secondary markets, he said, maybe 2,000 or 3,000 out of 10,000 are playable for him.
Given the trade-off between time, energy and the stability of the return curve, he prefers exchange-based secondary trading. That does not mean on-chain is bad. He said younger traders with more time and more willingness to wait for rare setups can still do very well there. But with a family and children, he no longer treats that market as his main battlefield.
His conclusion was direct: not every alpha is worth chasing. The important thing is to know which opportunities fit one’s capital base, time budget and circle of competence.
His four altcoin themes are ZEC, HYPE, UNI and NEAR
Benson said his current core altcoin list is limited to four names: ZEC, HYPE, UNI and NEAR.
He still rotates tactically. If HYPE reaches a round-number level such as $100 and he sees visible selling pressure above, he may step out briefly and rotate into SOL or another stronger coin. But he stressed that this is a tactical move, not a change in his long-term theme list.
Because he knows the market well, he said, he can sometimes switch based on price behavior. But for people who are not watching every day and do not have experience across several cycles, he does not think that is necessary.
In his view, the most common mistake for ordinary traders is not choosing the wrong main theme. It is trying to be too clever by constantly switching between leaders. Simply holding may work better.
One market-level indicator, not a separate system for every coin
For position management, Benson said CoinKarma uses a 0-to-100 Market Pulse Index to gauge where the broader market sits. The closer the reading is to 0, the closer the market is to a relative low. Higher readings indicate a hotter market.
He said that from May through August this year, the index spent a long stretch in the teens and 20s, which for him was a zone where he could buy freely. On Sept. 16, when BTC returned to around $75,000, he applied a simple quantitative rule: if the index was below 25, he would dollar-cost average $10,000 every hour into the core altcoins he had already identified.
He does not build one strategy for ZEC, another for HYPE and another for UNI. Most of the time, he said, these altcoins still have a high correlation with the broader BTC market.
So his method is to treat the market-level indicator as a waterline. Below one level, he buys. Above another, he sells. The goal is to capture larger swings.
He said that as a trading system matures, it often becomes simpler rather than more complicated. The point is not to prove every day that one is smarter than the market. The point is to build a framework and execute it repeatedly.
Why he swapped all of his ETH into UNI
Benson said that in the previous cycle he mainly held BTC, ETH and SOL, but in this cycle he has rotated his entire ETH position into Uniswap.
The reason is his view that one of the major altcoin themes this cycle is the migration of U.S. equities on-chain. If tokenized stocks truly enter DeFi, then DEXs and AMMs will become core infrastructure. Uniswap already has the largest decentralized trading network effect, so he would rather own what he sees as the more direct beta for that theme than hold ETH.
He also pointed to regulation. In the past, many crypto narratives were forms of regulatory arbitrage: products existed because regulators had not yet reached them. If regulators begin to place AMMs, liquidity pools and tokenized securities into an operational framework, he said, the meaning changes completely.
In the old setup, the logic was that a product could exist because regulation had not caught up. In the new setup, the logic could become that regulation explicitly tells the market how to operate, allowing traditional capital to enter. He sees those as two very different markets.
As a supporting point, the interview noted that on Sept. 17, 2026, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission formally issued a temporary, conditional Innovation Exemption. It allows eligible tokenized securities venues, under a specific framework, to trade certain tokenized NMS stocks through permissioned AMMs and liquidity pools.
Top signals now depend more on institutional liquidity
Benson said CoinKarma recently launched an Institutional Liquidity Index because the old top indicators are becoming less reliable.
In 2017, he said, the top was easy to recognize. Retail speculation was extreme, funding rates exploded, and on-chain indicators all flashed overheating. Later highs, including around $69,000 and $126,000, did not show the same kind of broad mania.
The reason, he said, is that the marginal buyer has changed. In earlier cycles, retail buyers chased price at the top while larger holders sold into them. Now, when BTC is already at elevated levels, the key question is whether institutional money is still flowing in.
CoinKarma’s Institutional Liquidity Index tracks three things:
- overall U.S. dollar liquidity, including some fiscal-side data,
- MicroStrategy’s mNAV,
- and the 30-day net flow into BTC ETFs.
When Bitcoin keeps making new highs but institutional liquidity does not keep up, the model marks a divergence. Yellow signals a lighter divergence. Red signals a more serious one.
Benson said backtesting showed that red divergence lined up with the prior cycle near roughly $123,000 and the cycle before that near roughly $67,000. Yellow divergence also tended to match important local tops.
His broader point is that future bull-market tops may no longer look like a market where everyone has gone mad. They may look more like a market where price is still making new highs but the money behind it is no longer keeping pace.
CoinKarma wants to build a crypto trading operating system
On product direction, Benson said CoinKarma does not want to remain just a data dashboard. The goal is to become an operating system for cryptocurrency trading.
Most data products, he said, still stop at showing users information. After that, users have to connect data APIs, exchange APIs, run backtests, write strategies and deploy them. The process is long and fragmented.
CoinKarma wants users to take the platform’s data and write conditions in language that is close to natural speech — for example, enter when an indicator is above 3 and exit when it is below 1 — then send that directly into a backtesting engine.
If the strategy makes sense, he said, the platform can host it directly. Users can allocate capital, let the system execute automatically under the rules, and adjust parameters later if needed.
At the time of the interview, he said the platform had more than 700 live bots, around 1,000 users, and about $14 million in total AUM. Each bot functions like an independent position and is separated from the user’s other exchange assets.
When Mr. Z said that sounded easier to implement than letting an AI agent decide how to trade on its own, Benson agreed in part. He said the biggest problem for AI agents is not whether the model is strong enough, but what data the model is given.
If the input is limited to candlesticks, price and volume — data everyone can already see — then even a strong model will struggle to generate alpha out of nowhere. Facts themselves may be cheap, he said, but interpreting facts is expensive. Either one must see data others do not see, or interpret the same data better than others do. Without unique data and insight, even a smart AI agent is just cooking with ordinary ingredients.
His trigger for Bitcoin’s real main rally
At the end of the interview, Benson gave a simple rule for identifying when Bitcoin’s real main rally begins: watch the rolling 30-day net inflow into BTC ETFs.
If that 30-day total exceeds 60,000 BTC, he said, he would consider the market to have the conditions for a true main rally. In previous strong rally phases, similar conditions appeared, and in more extreme periods the 30-day net inflow even reached 100,000 BTC.
The logic, he said, is straightforward. At Bitcoin’s current scale, if the asset is going to rise 20% or 30% in a month, institutional ETF money can hardly be absent. That is why 60,000 BTC is a useful threshold.
At the time of the interview, however, the figure was only around 30,000 to 40,000 BTC. His conclusion was clear: the real main rally has not arrived yet.
He also said he would use that signal in reverse as an altcoin de-risking indicator. If altcoins make up 25% of his portfolio, the first true main-rally signal might lead him to cut that to 12.5%. If it happens again, he may reduce altcoin exposure to almost nothing.
For him, the most dangerous part of a bull market is that people often do the exact opposite of what they should. Early in the cycle they are afraid to buy and only allocate 10% or 20%. After several profitable pullbacks, they build confidence and habit. By the final top, they are running maximum size and maximum leverage.
He ended with a metaphor. When the music starts, you need to be willing to step onto the dance floor. When everyone is drunk, you should be the one at the bar asking for a glass of ice water.
Mr. Z closed the interview by reducing the discussion to four judgments: Bitcoin is moving from high-beta tech exposure toward digital gold; this cycle may be a longer macro cycle rather than a short blow-off; altcoin traders should stop fantasizing about undiscovered alpha and focus on leaders already confirmed by price; and the real main rally should be read through ETF flows, while the real top should be judged by whether institutional liquidity keeps up.