cycle

According to Cointelegraph, asset management company VanEck stated that Bitcoin is approaching the cycle bottom, which may mean that investors should start to gradually rebuild their positions.

CryptoQuant CEO Ki Young Ju stated that early Bitcoin traders have achieved the highest unrealized gains ever in this cycle.Unlike previous cycles where the selling pressure was mainly absorbed by cryptocurrency exchange traders, the main buying force in this market comes from structural purchases such as spot trading exchange-traded funds and inflows of digital asset funds. This change has driven the unrealized profits of Binance platform traders to nearly three times the peak in 2021.

Renowned trader Killa posted that during the last bull market, Bitcoin began to recover from its lows before the ETF rumors and official approvals, emphasizing that the market often reflects positive news in advance.Therefore, this round may be similar; the current "Clarity Act" is forming a new narrative. "If it indeed becomes a catalyst, it is likely to mark the beginning of the first meaningful upward phase for BTC after the first bear market recovery, and the approval itself will soon push BTC towards a new ATH (just like the ETF approval)."Killa, a quantitative trader focused on BTC, predicted the peak of this bull market in May 2025 and has over 200,000 followers on the X platform. In mid-April, he shorted Bitcoin at $74,688 and turned bullish during the market-wide decline on June 5.

According to ChosunBiz, Samsung Electronics' System LSI Division has introduced Anthropic's AI programming tool Claude Code for semiconductor design and verification work, with some task cycles shortened to less than one-tenth of the original time. In the verification of data connection structures for customer-customized SoCs, work that was originally expected to take over a month was completed in two days; an engineer with two years of experience completed USB device model development and Android driver adaptation in one day using Claude Code, whereas similar work typically required a month.Samsung opened Claude Code to software developers in May this year and later expanded it to the semiconductor professional development field. The System LSI Division has about 6,000 employees, while its main competitor Qualcomm has about 52,000 employees. Samsung is trying to bridge the manpower gap with AI tools. Meanwhile, Samsung's DS Division is promoting an "AI transformation," extending generative AI from research and development to the entire business process, including production, marketing, and support. The report also pointed out that Claude has exhibited behavior in some verification tasks where it disguised erroneous information as ordinary messages or modified design code without authorization. Samsung emphasized the need for strict control and manual review of the scope and results of AI tasks.

Nansen founder and CEO Alex Svanevik stated that Bitcoin's current price of around $60,000 may have marked the low point of this cycle. "Personally, I don't think Bitcoin will go below $60,000 again; I believe that's in the past, and I think it's forever." Alex Svanevik said this judgment is based on Bitcoin's positioning as a hedge against global central bank currency expansion, and he has not seen signs that the global monetary easing cycle is about to end. At the same time, the crypto industry is undergoing a fundamental transformation; crypto assets were previously in the toy world of blockchain and are now entering the real world era.In terms of the public chain ecosystem, Svanevik holds a long-term bullish view on Solana, stating that the perception of it as merely a meme coin chain is completely absurd. He believes Solana has "possibly the most effective BD team" and "an incredible team." However, Svanevik declined to translate this judgment into a specific price prediction for SOL—"Intuitively, I would think it will rise, but I can't be sure." Svanevik is also optimistic about the Robinhood chain, which just launched in July this year, believing it is rising as a strong competitor to Base due to its excellent user distribution capabilities. However, he judges that Robinhood is unlikely to issue a token—on one hand, it doesn't need to, and on the other hand, as a publicly traded company on NASDAQ, issuing a token would logically contradict competing with its own stock, "All value should be directed to HOOD stock."

"1011 Insider Whale" agent Garrett Jin released a weekly analysis stating that he previously suggested gradually positioning in storage chips and buying on dips, but the market did not experience the expected pullback. He has sold half of the previously rebounded positions during the surge, not because the investment logic has changed, but because he noticed the funding structure driving the rise, stating, "This is more like a short squeeze rather than a final confirmation of the market fundamentals." Rapid capital replenishment of short positions can create short-term increases in stocks like SK Hynix, but cannot solely support a sustained trend. The risks of Korean leveraged ETFs have not been fully released, but the decline in asset scale mainly comes from net value shrinkage rather than investor exit. Currently, the cumulative net subscription of related financial products remains at historical highs and has not turned negative.Garrett Jin emphasized that the decline in the scale of Korean leveraged ETFs does not indicate a bearish outlook on storage demand. SK Hynix's 2026 capacity is already sold out, and Micron's orders are covered until 2028, with strong demand expected to continue until the second half of 2027. However, the storage industry is essentially a cyclical industry, and stock prices have already risen by hundreds of percentage points in advance. Cyclical stocks are usually difficult to sustain long-term growth through valuation expansion. The current market is entering a new phase of the AI capital expenditure cycle, shifting from "rewarding investment" to "evaluating investment returns." Regarding Bitcoin, Garrett Jin stated that it continues to meet the bottoming conditions since the low in July and maintains the position view established around $60,000.

Ahmed Shihab, Chief Product Officer of Western Digital, stated that the key to AI storage competition is not simply pursuing the fastest medium, but whether it can continuously scale capacity at an affordable cost. He believes that many architectures run well in the early stages, but when the data scale grows from several PB to hundreds of PB or even EB levels, issues may arise due to uncontrolled costs.Flash storage is suitable for high-performance, low-latency scenarios such as model weights, GPU overflow, KV caches, and session contexts; HDDs are more suitable for large-scale, long-term storage, and cost-sensitive data such as training corpora, logs, checkpoints, compliance records, synthetic data, and inference outputs. He summarized: "Flash handles the present, HDD handles the entire lifecycle."At the scale of AI, storage costs themselves will become an architectural issue. Long-term storage of large volumes of data on high-performance media will crowd out budgets for computing, networking, power, and personnel. For many bulk storage workloads, the issue is not whether flash can store, but whether customers can afford the total cost of using flash in the long term.In the future, AI storage will not be dominated by a single technology, but should be designed in layers based on performance, cost, power consumption, density, reliability, and data lifecycle. He emphasized that this is not a competition between flash and HDD, but rather a need to match the appropriate medium for different workloads from the very beginning; otherwise, the architecture may impact business sustainability as it scales.

According to official social media news, Huobi HTX will hold a live debate themed "AI Infrastructure Inflection Point: The Ultimate Divergence of Computing Power Bubble and Storage Supercycle" today at 8 PM. At that time, Cong Ge, Jiezou Xia, Cha Ge, and Zhang Facai will represent the affirmative side, engaging in dialogue with the opposing representatives Xiyu, Chan Ge, Bafang, and Wenle, focusing on the core industry variables under the AI wave, and deeply discussing whether the demand for computing power is overestimated, whether there is a bubble risk in AI infrastructure, and whether the storage industry can usher in a new supercycle.

Well-known trader Killa (@KillaXBT) posted that the Bitcoin cycle is accelerating, with the last cycle taking only 476 days from the bottom to a new ATH, much faster than the previous two cycles. It is expected that this cycle will also reach a new high before the next halving.Killa, as a quantitative trader focused on BTC, predicted the peak of this bull market in May 2025 and has over 200,000 followers on platform X. In mid-April, he shorted Bitcoin at $74,688 and switched to long during the market-wide decline on June 5.

Bloomberg ETF analyst Eric Balchunas pointed out in a recent report that the performance trajectory of gold ETFs over the past 22 years may provide important references for Bitcoin ETFs. Both gold and Bitcoin ETFs are packaged products centered around "non-yielding assets," lacking dividends, interest payments, or government backing, with prices primarily driven by investor sentiment.The report states that the leading gold ETF, GLD, once topped the list of the world's largest ETFs, then experienced a prolonged period of stagnation lasting about eight years, but each cycle's peak has gradually risen. Balchunas believes that Bitcoin ETFs may similarly undergo a repetitive cycle of "rapid ascent—sharp pullback—prolonged recovery," with peaks gradually rising with each cycle.

Cryptoquant indicates that its 365-day PnL index signal continues to decline, showing that the current BTC cycle may not have reached its peak yet. BTC is currently trading at approximately $62,656, down about 50% from its historical high of around $126,000 in October 2025.Cryptoquant's bull-bear cycle indicator turned green on May 12, 2026, marking the first bullish signal since March 2023. Cryptoquant stated that this indicator had shown false positives in 2022, and the green signal itself does not guarantee a sustained upward trend. A major whale bought BTC worth $98,900,000 at the low of $59,734 on June 5 and made a profit of $3,500,000 within two days after the market rebound. BTC has since maintained above $60,000, trading at approximately $62,550 at the time of writing.

A report released by the Bank of Korea on July 13 pointed out that the global semiconductor market is still in a state of supply shortage, and the chip supercycle driven by artificial intelligence (AI) is expected to last for a long time, which refutes market concerns that the chip cycle has peaked.The central bank's analysis states that the current chip cycle is different from previous ones, primarily driven by competitive investments made by companies to respond to the fundamental changes in the industrial ecosystem brought about by AI. At the same time, due to the current market being dominated by customized products such as high bandwidth memory (HBM), the pace of supply expansion is more constrained than in the past.Recently, concerns over excessive investment in AI infrastructure and potential oversupply of memory chips have triggered a sell-off in tech stocks, with significant declines in the stock prices of South Korean chip giants such as Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix. In response, the Bank of Korea stated that although there remains uncertainty regarding the speed of AI technology adoption and profit prospects, major investment banks such as JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley generally predict that the global semiconductor market will maintain strong momentum at least through next year.

Sharplink Research Director Steven Ehrlich published an analysis pointing out that Ethereum started strong in July 2026, with an increase of about 11% so far this month. Historical data suggests that investors should pay attention to ETH's performance in July. Steven Ehrlich noted that the core advantage of ETH's July performance is not merely volatility, but the asymmetry between rises and falls: when July sees an increase, the average rise is about 43%, while in years of decline, the average drop is only about 5% (from 2020 to 2025).Historically, months of significant gains for ETH are usually driven by "Ethereum-specific catalysts + supply-demand imbalance." The current market environment also presents similar opportunities, such as: institutional infrastructure is being built, the Ethereum roadmap is continuously upgrading, and corporate funds are consistently increasing their holdings of ETH. Currently, Ethereum is entering a new development phase, where institutional adoption, technological upgrades, and capital allocation may become important factors driving ETH's market performance.