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Check names $60K Bitcoin floor as Saylor issues credit

Thursday, April 16, 2026 · from 3 podcasts, 4 episodes
3 SOURCESBitcoin AndBTC SessionsBankless
  • On-chain data shows long-term holders have stopped selling, signaling a probable price bottom at $60K.
  • Michael Saylor launches Bitcoin-backed credit to end the short pressure from shadow banking re-hypothecation.
  • Bankless analysts warn declining global liquidity could extend the wealth destruction phase for months.

Bitcoin’s $60,000 price isn't just a psychological level - it's a statistical deep value zone where sellers have exhausted themselves. CryptoQuant analyst James Check argues the slide here functioned as a final purge, with transaction volume cratering because long-term holders refuse to part with their coins. His models place the current price in the bottom 10% of all historical trading days, implying a 90% probability of moving higher.

"When transaction volume drops because nobody wants to part with their coins, the market is usually hammering out a bottom."

- James Check, BTC Sessions

The bear case, articulated on Bankless, warns against premature optimism. Analyst Michael Nadeau tracks a peak in global liquidity, a primary crypto driver, noting that historical bottoms only arrive after a full year of decline. We are six months in. He points to depressed transaction counts and perpetual funding rates as evidence capital remains on the sidelines, not charging in.

Meanwhile, Michael Saylor is engineering a new exit from the volatility trap. MicroStrategy’s launch of STRC, a Bitcoin-backed credit instrument paying an 11.5% dividend, aims to create a non-rehypothecated lending market. Saylor argues the current price suppression stems from shadow banking systems that relent borrower collateral, creating constant sell pressure. His vision is to replace that with conventional bank credit, where every $10 billion in new loans theoretically buys a year’s worth of mined supply.

"Saylor strips the volatility and duration from the instrument and pushes those risks onto MicroStrategy's common equity holders. This allows the company to capture the 'float' of the credit market."

- Bankless

The institutional capture is already underway. Bitcoin And highlights that Goldman Sachs filed for a Bitcoin covered-call ETF, while Fed nominee Kevin Warsh disclosed over $100 million in crypto holdings. The narrative battle is shifting from outright dismissal to control of the financial infrastructure. For Bitcoin to reach Saylor’s multi-trillion dollar targets, the asset must first escape the cycle where its own leverage is used against it.

BTC MarketsAdoptionBanking
Michael SaylorCryptoQuantMicroStrategyBitcoinFederal Reserve

Source Intelligence

- Deep dive into what was said in the episodes

Bitcoin And | Bitcoin & Economic News
Bitcoin And | Bitcoin & Economic News

Crypto Warshing Machine | Bitcoin News • Apr 14

  • Deutsche Börse acquired a 1.5% stake in Kraken's parent company for $200M, valuing Kraken at roughly $13.3B. This follows ICE's $200M investment in OKX earlier this year.
  • Federal Reserve Chair nominee Kevin Warsh disclosed holdings in over 20 crypto entities, including DYDX, Dapper Labs, Solana, and Polychain. Reports indicate his total holdings exceed $100M.
  • UK Liberal Democrat Daisy Cooper called for the FCA to investigate Nigel Farage over his £2M Bitcoin purchase through Stack BTC, where he holds a 6.3% stake. The probe focuses on potential market abuse or conflicts of interest.
  • A fake Ledger Live Mac app stole over $9.5M from more than 50 users in one week, including musician G. Love who lost 5.92 BTC. Stolen funds were laundered via KuCoin.
  • Foundry Digital launched a Zcash mining pool that captured 29% of the network's hash rate in its first month, reducing ViaBTC's dominance from 68% to 37%. Zcash's market cap is $6.2B.
  • At the time of recording, Bitcoin's price was $75,480 with a $1.5T market cap. There were 20,015,579.25 BTC in circulation.
Also from this episode: (5)

Payments (1)

  • The US Department of Justice opened a $40M compensation process for victims of the OneCoin fraud. Victims can file claims at 1coinremission.com until June 30. The scheme defrauded investors of $4B between 2014 and 2019.

Corruption (1)

  • OneCoin co-founder Karl Sebastian Greenwood was sentenced to 20 years in prison in 2023. Co-founder Ruja Ignatova remains at large with a $5M US bounty.

Markets (2)

  • Goldman Sachs filed for a Bitcoin Premium Income ETF. This covered-call strategy uses spot Bitcoin ETF shares to sell call options, generating income while capping upside. Goldman already holds over $1B in spot Bitcoin ETFs like BlackRock's iShares and Fidelity's Wise Origin.
  • Kraken faced an extortion attempt where attackers claimed access to customer data. About 2,000 individuals may have had information viewed.

AI & Tech (1)

  • The UK AI Security Institute found Anthropic's Claude Mythos Preview model achieved a 73% success rate on expert-level cybersecurity tasks. It autonomously identified thousands of zero-day vulnerabilities across major operating systems.
BTC MarketsFedBankingAI InfrastructureDigital Sovereignty
BTC Sessions
BTC Sessions

‘Sellers Exhausted’ What Bitcoin On-Chain Data Reveals | James Check • Apr 14

  • James Check argues Bitcoin's 2025 bear market was severe in relative terms, significantly underperforming assets like gold and Nvidia despite only modest nominal drawdowns.
  • Check's on-chain analysis places the 2025 peak in January, after which Bitcoin stopped outperforming other assets. The period from October saw other assets rip while Bitcoin declined.
  • Check identifies the November 2025 sell-off at $80k as a key event where long-term holders and profit-takers exited. He notes on-chain profit-taking completely stopped thereafter.
  • The subsequent move to $60k was a price capitulation event, analogous to June 2022 or December 2018. Check saw extreme fear in his DMs and released a piece titled 'Welcome to Deep Value'.
  • Check's mean reversion models show $60k was in the bottom 10% of all trading days historically. He argues there's a 90% probability the price goes higher from such levels.
  • Check developed the 'True Market Mean' model with Dave Puell to correct the Realized Price metric. It discounts lost and ancient coins like Satoshi's, placing the current cycle middle around $78k-$80k.
  • On-chain volume is falling off a cliff, which Check says is normal for a late-stage bear market as DCA accumulators create one-way buy volume and sellers sit on their hands.
  • Despite low on-chain volume, spot trade, futures, options, and ETF volumes remain healthy, which Check views as constructive for building a market bottom.
  • On timing, market mechanic models from past cycles suggest a mid-year capitulation event is possible. Check's base case is for a bottom to form before year-end, with a decent chance of testing $100k afterwards.
  • Check argues mining is an industry designed to send miners bankrupt via the difficulty adjustment. His model shows the all-in sustaining cost to mine Bitcoin is around $82k, near the True Market Mean.
  • Check is skeptical of the corporate 'treasury play', arguing few companies can emulate MicroStrategy successfully. He differentiates this from a normal business simply saving in Bitcoin.
Also from this episode: (4)

Protocol (1)

  • Check notes transaction fees are no longer a reliable on-chain signal due to fundamental changes in miner behavior and sub-1 sat/byte transactions becoming common post-December 2025.

Privacy (1)

  • Check is skeptical of wallet-based 'whale' data, arguing it's impossible to distinguish between a large holder and an exchange, making buy-side analysis from on-chain data very difficult.

Mining (1)

  • He views miners' pivot to AI not as a shift but as a necessary expansion into other compute revenue streams, leveraging their power agreements and electrical infrastructure to survive brutal cycles.

AI & Tech (1)

  • On quantum computing, Check takes a middle ground. He is instinctively skeptical but takes the threat seriously due to recent research papers, advocating for a measured plan to future-proof Bitcoin's cryptography.
BTC MarketsMiningProtocol
Bankless
Bankless

Up or Down from Here? Bears vs. Bulls • Apr 14

  • Michael Nato posits that crypto cycles consist of four phases: early bull, wealth creation, wealth distribution, and wealth destruction, with the market currently in the wealth destruction phase that began in early 2025.
  • Nato argues the four-year cycle is a law of nature for crypto, driven by business cycles, liquidity, credit conditions, and reflexive investor psychology, similar to traditional finance cycles.
  • A bullish case for Bitcoin bottoming cites that its price dropped close to its realized price in early February 2025, and market sentiment hit bear-market lows comparable to 2022 levels.
  • Nato counters that key Bitcoin valuation metrics like MVRV-Z Score at 1.14 are not yet at deep-value bear market levels seen in 2022 (0.76) or 2018 (0.70), suggesting the bottom may not be in.
  • The bull case points to MicroStrategy purchasing $7.6 billion worth of Bitcoin in 2026 and ETF resilience as structural shifts that could mute this bear market, making it shorter and milder.
  • The bear case anchors on Michael Howell's global liquidity framework, which shows liquidity has peaked and is rolling over, with a six-month lag expected to impact traditional markets.
  • Nato notes Bitcoin historically peaks before global liquidity cycles peak, and the current liquidity downtrend suggests the bear market resolution could still be months away.
  • Bearish indicators include collapsing on-chain activity, with Bitcoin spot volumes and Solana DeFi metrics at levels last seen in deep 2023, and no signs of leveraged long positioning in perps markets.
  • Nato argues the Iran conflict is more complex than 2025's tariff scare due to multiple international actors, and elevated oil prices could reduce US consumption GDP by roughly 1%.
Also from this episode: (3)

Markets (1)

  • A bullish view on traditional markets cites projected Q2 2025 S&P 500 earnings growth of 19.2% and sustained AI demand from companies like Anthropic as reasons the broader cycle may not be over.

AI & Tech (1)

  • Despite strong AI sector demand, Nato contends the broader liquidity and fiscal cycle outweighs it; the S&P 500 breaking its 200-day moving average in March 2025 signals a potential correction phase.

Protocol (1)

  • Nato assesses a 60% probability that Bitcoin has not yet reached its cycle low, citing incomplete market structure reset and a lack of liquidity or fiscal catalysts.
BTC MarketsMacroFedBusiness

"Fix the Money, Fix the World" — Michael Saylor's Master Plan (plus questions on Quantum and Ethereum) • Apr 13

  • Michael Saylor's 21-year thesis forecasts Bitcoin's price will reach $20-21 million per coin, implying a $400 trillion market cap as it becomes the world's dominant digital capital.
  • Saylor sees Bitcoin's long-term annualized growth rate averaging 29%, decelerating from the past five-year rate of 37%. He believes the asset is currently oversold and will be much higher by year-end.
  • MicroStrategy's STRC instrument is a variable-rate monthly preferred stock designed to strip away volatility and duration, offering pure yield. It recently traded with less than 2% trailing 30-day volatility, making it one of the S&P 500's least volatile securities.
  • Saylor frames STRC as asset-backed credit, converting a volatile capital asset (Bitcoin) into a stable income instrument. The model pays investors a fraction (e.g., one-third) of Bitcoin's expected capital appreciation as a dividend, using over-collateralization to manage risk.
  • Key drivers for Saylor's $20 million Bitcoin thesis include global regulatory recognition as a capital asset, bank credit networks forming against Bitcoin collateral, and the securitization wave via ETFs and digital credit instruments like STRC.
  • Saylor argues the current price suppression stems from re-hypothecation within the crypto shadow banking system, where cheap loans require collateral to be re-lent, creating selling pressure. Bank credit networks would reverse this by allowing non-rehypothecated loans.
  • MicroStrategy's business model is to perpetually issue digital credit (like STRC) to acquire more Bitcoin, aligning with equity investors who want amplification. Saylor sees no reason to diversify or stop accumulating, viewing Bitcoin as an infinitely scalable homogeneous collateral base.
  • Saylor's ultimate vision is to 'fix the money' by providing a billion people with a bank account yielding more than the inflation rate (e.g., 8%). This would be built on a stack of digital capital (Bitcoin), digital credit (STRC), and digital money distributed by traditional banks.
Also from this episode: (2)

Protocol (2)

  • On the quantum computing threat to Bitcoin's cryptography, Saylor adopts an optimist's stance, warning against iatrogenic solutions. He believes the Bitcoin community will upgrade in due time and cautions against panic driven by alarmism seeking clicks or funding.
  • Saylor's view on Ethereum has evolved, acknowledging its role as a leader in the staking network segment for tokenizing securities, currencies, and commodities. He sees regulatory clarity as the next step but believes the ultimate utility and winners will be determined by market competition.
BTC MarketsAdoptionBankingMacroProtocol

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