Crypto analyst and content creator Rob said Bitcoin’s move back above the 200-week moving average should not be treated as a clean signal that the bear market is definitively over. In his view, that zone has historically been one of the best places to keep accumulating, even if price spends a long time chopping around it.
Rob made the comments in a recent interview on The Milk Road Show. He is the host of the YouTube channel Digital Asset News and is known for covering crypto markets, macro trends and long-term portfolio strategy. PANews compiled the key points from the conversation.
The 200-week moving average is still a buy zone in his framework
The host opened by noting that Bitcoin had climbed back above its 200-week moving average, a level many traders treat as a rough marker for bear-market bottoms. Rob’s answer was blunt: he actually hopes the market has not bottomed yet.
He said the historical record around the 200-week moving average matters more to him than the urge to call the exact turning point. Looking back to 2015, he said Bitcoin only dipped below that line briefly before recovering. In 2018, after the 2017 all-time high, price broke below the same level again. At the time, many people thought the market was finished, but those who kept buying through dollar-cost averaging did well later. He described the 2020 Covid-driven panic as another example, when Bitcoin again fell below the 200-week moving average and offered what he called a very cheap entry.
He then contrasted those periods with 2022, when Bitcoin did not just lose the 200-week line but also traded below the 250-week and 300-week moving averages. Today, he said, Bitcoin is hovering around that broader area and may be only slightly above the 200-week average. For him, that still qualifies as an attractive DCA window.
Rob also revisited what he considers one of his own mistakes in 2022. He called it “micro DCA,” meaning he reduced his regular weekly purchase size because he feared a deeper drop and wanted to save capital for a lower entry. In hindsight, he said that was the wrong move. If he had simply stuck to the original plan and increased buys as price fell, his position would be stronger now. He added that buying Bitcoin at $15,000, $16,000 or $17,000 in 2022, or at $3,000 in 2018, turned out to be a smart decision.
His conclusion was not that a final bottom has already been confirmed. It was that investors should stop obsessing over exact entries and recognize when the market is offering a cheap accumulation range.
A layered DCA plan based on a risk model
Rob said his “buy Bitcoin every Monday” routine is not a flat recurring purchase with the same amount each week. He ties it to a risk model and adjusts size as market risk falls.
Under that framework, he starts regular buying when the risk level sits between 0.5 and 0.6. If the reading drops below 0.49, he doubles the amount he bought on the previous Monday. If it falls to 0.39 by the next Monday, he moves to 4x the usual amount. If it keeps sliding and breaks below 0.29, he buys at 8x size.
He said the process felt easy at first, but it became harder when prices kept dropping and he had to manually raise his purchase amount. The execution itself is straightforward, he said, because he uses Cash App and has the buy set to trigger automatically every Monday at 6:30 a.m. He likes the setup because recurring purchases carry very low fees and a spread he considers reasonable, which he suspects is linked to OTC execution.
In short, his system is simple: the lower Bitcoin goes, the more aggressively he buys. He tries not to overthink the short-term move and instead works from the belief that today’s purchases will probably look cheap over a longer horizon.
Asked where he stands right now in that ladder, Rob said he was not looking at the precise live reading during the interview, but estimated the risk level at around 0.3. That puts him in the 4x buying stage. If the reading falls below that band, he said he will switch to 8x DCA. He added that in the past, his bank sometimes called to verify those larger transactions, though it no longer does because the pattern has become familiar.
He sells in stages and does not chase the exact top
On the way out of a cycle, Rob said he does take profits. In the 2021 bull market, he handled exits better than he did later. At that time, he worked with clear price targets and sold in tranches as Bitcoin rose.
He said he used fractals by comparing the move with gains seen in prior cycles. If Bitcoin doubled from a cycle low, he would take a small amount off the table. If it reached 4x, he would sell another portion, and so on.
By 2025, he tried to be more sophisticated and leaned harder on technical indicators such as the MVRV score and the Puell Multiple. That did not work the way he expected. He said those signals failed him.
What stood out instead was a Reddit user who had posted three years earlier and argued, using only a four-year cycle framework, that Oct. 6, 2025 would mark the absolute top of that cycle. Rob said he did not believe it at the time, but Oct. 6 did in fact end up being the high.
He said he still managed to take some profits on the way down even though he did not exit at the exact top. In his view, nobody consistently buys the exact bottom and sells the exact top. He plans to keep using a staged profit-taking approach in the next four-year cycle as well.
Rob also pushed back on the idea that Bitcoin should never be sold under any circumstances. People have different goals, he said. For him, reducing debt and strengthening financial security matters. He still keeps most of his assets in Bitcoin rather than altcoins, but he is comfortable moving part of his Bitcoin gains into what he considers steadier assets such as the S&P 500, bonds and real estate.
He sees no obvious near-term catalyst for a major breakout this year
The host pointed to Bitcoin’s unusually low volatility in recent weeks and months, saying the asset had become quieter than gold and U.S. equities. Rob’s answer was that near-term catalysts are difficult to pin down because every possible tailwind tends to show up alongside fresh risks and FUD.
He mentioned two examples of what could upset sentiment: a break in the AI bubble or a wave of hacks tied to hardware wallets. On the bullish side, he had previously hoped the Clarity Act would pass and provide a positive push for the market. He said that did not happen. In his telling, the bill was blocked during a midterm election year because Democrats were unwilling to hand Donald Trump a political win.
Rob did say institutional participation is still building. He pointed to Citigroup, which he described as the world’s third-largest bank, and said it plans to launch a custody product called Custody+ later this year with Bitcoin support first and a design aimed at round-the-clock demand. He said other major institutions are moving in as well.
He also referenced a U.S. presidential candidate running on a pro-crypto platform, while adding that the message may also help promote the World Liberty Financial project. Campaign promises, he said, do not always translate into action.
His base case for the rest of the year is modest. He thinks the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission may step in where Congress has stalled, and that regulatory adjustments could offer some short-term support. Still, he does not expect a huge market move before year-end because the four-year cycle remains the dominant structure in his thinking.
White House meetings and World Liberty Financial look more political than market-changing to him
The discussion then shifted to politics and regulation. The host noted that the Clarity Act had not died but had been pushed back to September. On the same day the podcast was recorded, Trump was meeting crypto industry leaders at the White House. Rob was asked whether that meeting could produce a real signal for investors or whether it was mostly for show.
He said he would like to see real progress, but he is also watching developments tied to World Liberty Financial. According to Rob, the project recently obtained a temporary national trust bank charter from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, or OCC, and is trying to expand into stablecoins. He added that its stablecoin currently ranks around fifth globally, and said that effort could reinforce the international role of the U.S. dollar.
Rob said Trump would likely push hard on anything that benefits the family’s project. Some people will support that and others will oppose it. For ordinary investors, though, the practical issue is what can actually be controlled. They cannot control whether a current or future U.S. president builds a private crypto business. If White House engagement leads to legislation, that would be useful, he said, but for now he sees much of it as political theater.
His reading of the SEC framework: helpful for fundraising, not a market miracle
The host also raised what was described as a new SEC crypto regulatory framework, which lays out how digital assets can operate in the U.S., including ICOs, fundraising and an “innovation exemption” for projects still building their networks.
Rob said the government has been circling the ICO issue for five to six years already. Had a framework like this existed back in 2017, when ICO issuance was exploding and the market was in a frenzy, he said he would have welcomed it.
He views SEC and CFTC involvement as potentially constructive for capital allocation. Based on his reading of the new rules, fundraising below $5 million would face relatively few restrictions over a four-year period, while the upper limit could reach as high as $75 million. If those rules are implemented, he said, fresh capital could flow into the crypto sector.
Even so, Rob questioned whether the market actually needs more new crypto projects, more altcoins and more DeFi startups. In his words, everyone arrives claiming to have a new token, a new feature set or the next major DeFi breakthrough. Open competition is one thing. A market already crowded with millions of altcoins is another.
For that reason, he would rather see builders focus on established major altcoins that have already survived prior market cycles and proved durable. If needed, he said, Bitcoin itself can still be treated as the final settlement layer, as many early participants once imagined. So while he likes the idea of more usable regulatory clarity from the SEC and CFTC, he does not think this becomes the one catalyst that suddenly flips the whole market.
Repeated wallet breaches changed how he thinks about self-custody
A large part of the interview centered on custody risk. The host cited a run of incidents involving Coldcard, Trezor and, more recently, SafePal, and asked whether those cases could seriously damage the idea of self-custody for everyday users.
Rob said some people treat the timing as suspicious because hardware wallet failures and data leaks have appeared just as large traditional finance players are moving into Bitcoin custody and more third-party services are being rolled out. Whatever anyone thinks of that overlap, he said, one fact does not change: many people have lost life savings in these incidents.
He was direct on the larger point. Selling self-custody as the only future of finance no longer makes sense to him because it is clearly not suitable for everyone. He pointed to PlanB, the well-known quant analyst, who said on X several years ago that he was moving all of his assets into ETFs. Rob said that mattered because PlanB understood self-custody risks and technical details better than most people in the industry, yet still concluded that the burden was no longer worth it. As Rob framed it, “not your keys, not your coins” may remain true, but “no keys, no worries” can be a rational choice for some users.
He contrasted that with Simon Dixon, who believes the stream of wallet security failures is part of a coordinated narrative campaign meant to scare retail users away from self-custody and back into traditional custodial platforms.
Rob said he receives desperate emails from followers every one or two weeks. Some write to say they have just lost their entire life savings. In the past, many of those losses came from user mistakes such as phishing attacks. Now, he said, the picture is broader. Security failures at Ledger, SafePal and several other hardware wallet brands, or breaches of company databases, have exposed private information such as home addresses, email accounts and phone numbers. That creates not only digital risk but also direct physical and offline security risk.
He added that the deeper worry is trust in the technology itself. It is no longer only about user behavior or basic operational security. In his view, the industry can no longer fully assume that the hardware wallet stack and the underlying algorithms are beyond question. He said that uncertainty reminds him of the idea that the most dangerous things are often the risks people do not even know they do not know.
Rob said one scenario he fears is a future announcement from a major wallet provider saying that AI uncovered a long-buried flaw in the underlying code, leading to losses for thousands of Bitcoin holders. He acknowledged that some people would dismiss that as FUD, but said anyone hurt in incidents such as the Coldcard vulnerability would probably have preferred more warnings, not fewer.
His answer is diversification. He said he spreads funds across Ledger, Tangem, iTrust Capital’s custody service and ETFs rather than relying on a single method of storage.
Why he moved toward mixed custody
Rob traced that approach back to a past interview with former Los Angeles Raiders player Steve Wisniewski, whom he described as a future Hall of Fame member. According to Rob, Wisniewski had put more than $3.2 million into Bitcoin and eventually lost it all to a carefully designed phishing scam.
Rob said hearing that story in detail changed how he thinks about user risk. If someone like Wisniewski could be trapped, he said, then ordinary users are even more exposed. Sometimes the weak point is not a sophisticated exploit at all. It can be something as basic as a seed phrase printed on paper and forgotten in a corner five years earlier, only to leak through some unexpected path.
He said many messages he receives are not just about money. People ask who they should call, how they are supposed to explain the loss to a spouse, or how they can still pay for a child’s college tuition. His answer is harsh but simple: in self-custody, once the assets are gone, there is no customer support line that can restore them. Victims can contact law enforcement, the FBI, or investigators such as ZachXBT, but that does not guarantee recovery.
Rob said losing 25% of a portfolio is painful enough. Losing 100% is catastrophic. That is why he wants more people to build protection into the custody side of their portfolio instead of treating self-custody as a one-size-fits-all rule.
On altcoins, he prefers a concentrated “BEST” basket
Although Bitcoin remains the core of his portfolio, Rob said he does hold selected altcoins. He approaches that part of the market through real-world usage, especially stablecoins.
He said stablecoins are likely to become far more important over time and could strengthen the dollar’s global position. To gauge where the activity is, he looks at data from Visa’s on-chain analytics platform, which tracks major blockchains by their role in carrying stablecoins such as Tether and Circle. The same four chains consistently appear at the top, he said, which is why he groups their tokens together as the “BEST” basket: Binance Coin (BNB), Ethereum (ETH), Solana (SOL) and Tron (TRX).
That is his core altcoin group. He said there are other projects he likes, including Polygon, but his capital is limited and he does not want to spread it across every available name.
Rob also noted that while stablecoin payment volume may run into the trillions, that is still only one part of token valuation. Payments matter on the fundamental side. Speculation, he said, still does much of the heavy lifting when prices move.
As for branching out beyond the BEST group, he said he remains open-minded if conditions change. He watches Canton’s progress in tokenized real-world assets and said that a breakdown by chain on rwa.xyz shows Canton holding a large share. He is also tracking Hyperliquid because its activity and volume have been striking.
Even so, he keeps coming back to the same question when he evaluates new projects: are they really good enough to justify breaking up an already stable allocation? For now, his answer is no. His altcoin exposure remains tight and selective.
He closed that part of the interview with a familiar hierarchy of risk. If traditional finance, especially U.S. equities, catches a cold, Bitcoin gets sick. And when Bitcoin gets sick, altcoins end up in intensive care. In Rob’s view, that pattern still defines the way crypto trades.