Trader and YouTube creator Taiki Maeda said in a video released on July 15, 2026 that he sees the current market as a reasonable window for gradual allocation, with Zcash, Hyperliquid, Lighter, and Variational sitting at the center of his positioning.
Maeda disclosed in the video that he is long ZEC, HYPE, and LIT, uses a Variational referral code, and runs a paid Discord community. He framed the presentation as his personal view rather than investment advice.
He argues the real cycle top came in July and August 2025, not October
Maeda pushed back on the idea that Bitcoin’s move to $126,000 in October 2025 marked the true cycle peak.
His case is that the breakout was weak. BTC made a new high on paper, but the move quickly faded and failed to set off a broad altcoin season. Aside from a handful of tokens, he said the market never showed the kind of euphoric behavior that usually defines a terminal top.
For him, the real frenzy happened earlier, in July and August 2025. That was when BTC first reached $125,000, ETH climbed to $5,000, and the market piled into themes such as Bitmine, with figures like Tom Lee and the broader DAT trade feeding sentiment.
Viewed through that lens, Maeda said the market may already have been in a bear phase for roughly a year. In his telling, most of the people who wanted out have already left, and there is less outright fraud left in the system than before.
Even for those who think Q4 could still bring fresh lows, he said this is at least a point where gradual buying starts to make sense. He compared the setup with an earlier cycle, when the bottoming process began after BTC fell to $20,000 in June following the 3AC collapse. Prices later went lower, but investors who built positions in that window did well over the following 12 to 18 months.
Maeda said he no longer wants to force every market view through the classic four-year-cycle framework. He also said he does not see short-term price prediction as his edge. His advantage, in his view, lies in taking a longer horizon and building conviction around specific sectors, narratives, and project fundamentals.
He added that positioning itself may become self-fulfilling. Many investors are waiting for a Q4 bottom before buying. If the market bottoms in Q3 instead, those sidelined buyers may only get to enter at higher prices. Even if Q3 stays flat, he said the amount of capital waiting for Q4 could cap the downside.
Why he still likes perpetual DEX tokens
Maeda returned to Hyperliquid and Lighter in the video because both tokens have posted strong performance even while broader crypto markets stayed soft.
He mentioned several surface-level reasons for that strength. Hyperliquid has bought back about 3.4% of its circulating supply so far this year, while Lighter has bought back about 6.3%. Hyperliquid has also been gaining share against centralized exchanges, and Robinhood’s partnership with Lighter has been treated by the market as a positive catalyst.
Still, he said those are not the main reason for his bullish view. The longer-term case, in his view, is that the next growth phase for perpetual DEX tokens will not be driven by crypto insiders trading against one another. It will come from traditional finance users, retail participation, and the buildout of real-world asset perpetuals.
Maeda said he is deeply skeptical of most altcoins and expects many to go to zero. If a perpetual DEX only serves crypto-native contracts, he said it is competing for scraps in a shrinking pool. The bigger opportunity, in his view, sits in products tied to gold, oil, and stock indexes. Those markets are still small today, but he expects them to surpass crypto perpetuals in the next six to 12 months.
He put the thesis plainly in the video: “The next wave of growth for perpetual DEXs won’t come from crypto people buying tokens. It will come from traditional finance and retail using perpetuals instead of options to place bets.”
He also referenced Jez’s theory on perpetuals. The core idea, as Maeda framed it, is that perpetual futures work as a simpler delta-levered instrument than options, which makes them easier for a broader group of users to adopt.
How he is positioned across HYPE, LIT, and Variational
Maeda said he holds three different positions tied to the perpetual DEX theme, each with a different role.
Hyperliquid’s HYPE is his core position. He said he entered months ago, initially hoped for a pullback to add more, never got it, and eventually bought back in. The main metric he watches is open interest growth in HIP-3 real-world-asset perpetuals. As long as that number keeps rising, he said he sees no reason to stop being bullish.
Lighter’s LIT is a newer position. Maeda said he kept thinking about LIT during his honeymoon in Japan and eventually bought it at market. The attraction, in his view, is distribution. He sees the Robinhood link as a major lever if traditional finance users start adopting perpetual products at scale.
Variational is where he has done most of his trading over the past year and where he continues to mine points. He said the platform currently has roughly $120 million to $130 million in open interest, with about 25% tied to TradFi markets. That mix is one of the reasons he is constructive on the platform. He also said the points program is expected to end in Q3, leaving a few more months for farming.
Maeda offered a rough valuation framework of his own. If Variational were to airdrop 25% of its token supply and list at a $1 billion valuation, he said that would work out to about $27 per point. He added that he would not be surprised by a $2 billion to $3 billion FDV, depending in part on how HYPE and LIT perform.
He also described what he called a “Texas hedge” approach. Rather than only holding HYPE, he uses Variational to gain exposure to future perpetual DEX token distributions. If he wants to short ETH, for example, he would rather do it on Variational than on Hyperliquid or Lighter. If the trade loses money, points may offset some of that loss. If it works, he still earns points while booking gains.
On SUI, he said he is not bullish on the token itself, so he shorts SUI on Variational to hedge spot exposure. If SUI rises, his spot holdings likely benefit. If the market falls, the short helps cushion the move.
Maeda rejected the tribal idea that owning HYPE should force someone to trade only on Hyperliquid. He said investors can hold multiple tokens and build a broader, steadier form of exposure.
As for competition, he mentioned Ostium as another platform with incentives, but said its scale remains well below Variational and does not present a near-term threat.
His Zcash trade: sold near the lows in June, then bought back
Zcash is the position Maeda described as both the most painful and the one he is now most focused on.
He said he fully sold his ZEC near the lows in early June after reports surfaced that Orchard, Zcash’s shielded pool, might contain an infinite-mint bug. ZEC then dropped 60% in a straight move.
Maeda said the timing mattered. He was about to leave the country for his honeymoon and did not want to hold a high-risk position in that state, so he exited and also booked a tax-loss harvest. In the video, he called it the “ultimate self-soothing move.”
What worried him most at the time was not only the bug itself. He feared the episode could permanently damage confidence in Zcash. In his view, Zcash, like Bitcoin, does not have cash flows. Its value depends heavily on whether people are willing to treat it as a store of value. If that confidence breaks, the recovery may never fully come.
After stepping away, though, he said he reached a different conclusion. If Zcash can recover from a collapse like this, it becomes anti-fragile. Each time an asset survives an event that looked fatal, the odds of it actually dying later get lower.
He compared that logic directly with Bitcoin’s own history. Bitcoin became durable, he said, because it lived through repeated episodes that looked capable of killing it but never did.
Maeda acknowledged that he bought heavily in April and May, then sold everything near the lows, only to watch the market recover without him. He said trading requires a kind of “goldfish memory.” The key question is not where he sold, but whether the asset can recover and how far it can run if it does.
Ironwood is central to his bullish Zcash thesis
The next major catalyst for Zcash, in Maeda’s view, is the Ironwood shielded-pool upgrade scheduled for July 28.
He said the upgrade brings two main changes: quantum resistance and formal verification designed to rule out future undetectable counterfeit-coin bugs. He also noted that Zcash founder Zooko used an Anthropic model to audit the protocol.
Maeda summarized the current state of play this way: does Orchard have a bug? Yes. Was it exploited? Unknown. Is there any public evidence that it was exploited? No. Is Ironwood expected to fix the issue? Yes. Can anyone guarantee Ironwood contains no undiscovered bugs? No.
He said that uncertainty is part of the trade-off with privacy systems, because it is not always possible to fully verify whether an exploit was used in the past.
At the same time, he argued that the Ironwood upgrade will effectively prove Orchard was not actually exploited. He also cited Vitalik’s writing on formal verification and said he expects that kind of process to become standard across more crypto projects over time.
From a market perspective, Maeda said a full price recovery could kick off a broader narrative revival and a reflexive loop around Zcash, which is why he wants exposure before that happens.
Why he is less comfortable being all-in on Bitcoin
Maeda spent a significant part of the video explaining why he no longer wants Bitcoin to dominate his portfolio the way it once did.
He said Michael Saylor has been selling BTC to help fund dividends and cash needs tied to STRK, Strategy’s preferred stock known as Strife. In Maeda’s view, that makes Saylor a likely net seller of Bitcoin for the foreseeable future.
That shift matters to him because Saylor had been one of the market’s most consistent net buyers over the past six years. If that same buyer starts selling every month or every two months, Maeda said, the market has to absorb a different narrative.
He put it this way: “Saylor makes Bitcoin harder to support than it was two years ago, four years ago, or six years ago. That’s not Bitcoin’s fault, but Saylor is too big a part of the narrative now.”
He also said STRK has recovered into the $70 range, but that the ownership experience still looks poor from his perspective. He even said Saylor should probably shut the stock down, while adding that he does not know what is going through Saylor’s head.
The second issue is quantum-computing risk. Maeda said his friend Evan recently argued in a post that Bitcoin faces a genuine quantum threat and that Bitcoin developers are not treating it with enough urgency. Maeda said he agrees.
He noted that two years ago and four years ago he would have had no hesitation putting his entire portfolio into BTC, and in fact did so. Today, he said, quantum risk is too large an unknown and he lacks confidence in the Bitcoin community’s response.
Even so, he does not frame BTC and ZEC as mutually exclusive. A more realistic shift, he said, is in portfolio construction. Someone allocating $100,000 to crypto might have gone 100% into BTC two years ago. Today, that same person might choose 90% BTC and 10% ZEC instead. If Zcash rallies on quantum-safety demand, he said, that could even push Bitcoin developers to take the issue more seriously.
His bottom line was simple: “Zcash and Bitcoin can be the gold and silver of crypto. They have trade-offs, but both are worth holding.”
The 1% ZEC/BTC threshold matters most to him
When it comes to Zcash, Maeda said the metric he watches most closely is not ZEC/USD but the ZEC/BTC ratio.
He pointed out that Zcash and Bitcoin share the same issuance schedule: halving every four years and a maximum supply of 21 million. At the moment, he said, the ZEC/BTC ratio is around 0.8%. The previous major resistance zone sits around $650 to $700 for ZEC, which would correspond to roughly 1% on that ratio.
If ZEC/BTC pushes through 1%, he expects two things to happen at once. First, ZEC would break above a multiyear technical level. Second, the idea that Zcash’s market value has risen above 1% of Bitcoin’s would become a narrative in its own right.
That combination of technical breakout and narrative traction could pull in more capital. Maeda said he has been selling BTC to buy ZEC over the past two months, did so last month, and repeated it again this month. He added that he is no longer selling more BTC now because his overall positioning feels right.
His wager is not that Zcash must be “better” than Bitcoin in some broad absolute sense. It is that privacy, quantum resistance, and Saylor-related concerns are becoming more important narratives in the market, and that Zcash has leverage to those themes.
He also brought in George Soros’s theory of reflexivity. In this framework, fundamentals push price higher, rising price changes how people see the asset, and that perception shift then improves fundamentals by attracting more developers, users, and liquidity. For that cycle to begin, he said, the price has to start moving first.
He added one more point. People who mocked him in comment sections for selling the bottom may find it harder to dismiss the asset if ZEC keeps recovering and extends the move. As he told it, Zcash has already lived through several events that looked severe enough to kill it: it started rising before BTC topped, climbed again in Q1 and Q2, crashed on the bug scare, and is now recovering. If all of that still fails to destroy it, the market may be forced to reassess what kind of resilience the asset actually has.
Current ranking: overweight ZEC, HYPE second, LIT third
Maeda said his current position ranking is clear: Zcash is his largest overweight, HYPE is second, LIT is third, with cash on hand and additional exposure coming from Variational farming.
He said he is holding cash for two reasons. The first is psychological hedging. His ZEC position was too large last month, especially ahead of his honeymoon, and that helped push him into an emotional decision. A smaller ZEC allocation paired with cash is his way of reducing the chance of making the same kind of mistake again. The second reason is optionality. If a new pullback appears or a fresh narrative emerges, he wants capital available to act.
He said he added to Zcash last week. His HYPE position was built several months ago. LIT was bought at market while he was on his honeymoon. His BTC position is currently under water, while the newer ZEC buys are in profit, though the position is still down on a full historical basis once his earlier losses are included.
Even so, he said that if his Zcash thesis proves right, future gains should offset those earlier losses.
Maeda closed with a straightforward summary of his stance: stay long perpetual DEX tokens such as HYPE and LIT, keep mining more exposure through Variational, and stay long Zcash for its distinct positioning and what he sees as a narrative premium against Bitcoin.
His final message was that the better altcoins have already bottomed, the market looks forward, and investors need conviction in something.