Wall Street macro investment veteran Jordi Visser: When believers abandon crypto, it's the eve of the biggest rally

Compiled & Translated by: TechFlow (Shenchao)

TechFlow Introduction: In the latest episode of the 《Convergence》 podcast, Wall Street macro investing veteran Jordi Visser, head of AI Macro Nexus Research at 22V Research, engaged in a nearly 58-minute deep-dive review of macro and technology with host Luke Martin. Jordi Visser pointed out that the current depressed sentiment, in which many crypto fundamentalists and veteran participants have wavered or even exited, mirrors the "death by a thousand cuts" dormancy that followed the dot-com bust from 2003 to 2007; and yet precisely within that same window, traditional finance billionaires and top-tier large capital began knocking on the door frequently, earnestly asking about the fundamental logic behind asset tokenization and Hyperliquid.

Centering on Bitcoin's recent 7 Sigma anomalous volatility and the exhaustion-of-sellers signal, Jordi Visser systematically explained why this bull market absolutely cannot continue to be merely a "liquidity-driven trade," and using the "Ghost Cities" model he observed in China in his early years, predicted a historic turning point in which autonomous AI agents ignite the machine economy, activate stablecoin velocity, and drive asset tokenization. At the same time, he deeply analyzed why the Fed's interest rates and oil prices have gradually lost effectiveness, how Robinhood Chain and Hyperliquid are driving the convergence of the old and new financial systems, and why AI will rewrite traditional US stock valuation logic and cede the next structural growth window to the crypto ecosystem.

Guest: Jordi Visser (Head of AI Macro Research at 22V Research, Founder of Visser Labs, former President and CIO of Weiss Multi-Strategy Advisers)

Host: Luke Martin (Host of the Convergence podcast, veteran crypto trader)

Podcast source: Convergence / X (https://x.com/VentureCoinist/status/2120272504904110124)

Original title: Why Everyone is Giving Up on Crypto at EXACTLY The Wrong Time

Air date: November 10, 2026

Key Takeaways

• Believers exiting and traditional billionaires entering form a stark divergence: Crypto fundamentalists and early staunch bulls have recently shown signs of giving up, similar to the darkest period after the dot-com bust until the arrival of the iPhone; but at the same time, traditional finance billionaires at the Stan Druckenmiller level are intensively consulting on the long-term impact of asset tokenization on the dollar and the stock market.
• 7 Sigma volatility and "price precedes narrative": Bitcoin's rise from $60,000 to $69,000 featured a 7 Sigma reversal seen only a few times in a decade, compounded by breaking above the 200-day moving average while multiple prior negative catalysts failed to push prices to new lows, confirming "sellers are exhausted"; following the macro trading creed, the market is always price first, narrative later.
• The liquidity bull market has run its course; the next leg must rely on fundamentals and the migration of existing wealth: Relying on the global 5% annual increase in liquidity cannot push a $2 trillion Bitcoin to a $1 million unit price or support a $100 trillion total crypto market cap; the real new buying must come from a trust shift and seamless on-chain conversion of the world's $900 trillion in existing wealth.
• The "Ghost Cities" analogy and AI agents as the real residents: The crypto industry has spent the past 15 years building vast on-chain infrastructure on the back of liquidity and venture capital, like the empty "ghost cities" of early days; cryptocurrency was never a tool designed for ordinary humans, but an economic network prepared for AI agents operating autonomously 24/7 with frictionless price comparison and settlement.
• AI becomes the primary macro variable; the Fed and oil prices are no longer decisive: Over the past decade or so, the S&P 500's gains were mainly carried by the Magnificent Seven (Mag 7), with most traditional cyclical companies under pressure; today's productivity revolution driven by Agent Swarms is highly deflationary and extremely insensitive to interest rates—even if oil prices return above $100 and the 10-year Treasury yield rises to 5%, stocks and Bitcoin still refuse to fall on bad news.
• Value is taxed in layers along the tech stack, with Ethereum and Solana acting as infrastructure toll booths: As consumer-grade agents (such as Instinct AI, whose valuation has jumped to $10 billion) and autonomous research nodes proliferate, agents use stablecoins on-chain for zero-friction high-frequency transactions, and Stripe, Arbitrum beneath Robinhood Chain, Ethereum, and Solana will capture transaction volume dividends layer by layer following the "city tax collection" logic.
• Robinhood and Hyperliquid drive the convergence of old and new finance and break the ice for tokenization: The "Silent IPO" has led early libertarians who rejected traditional co-optation to exit, while Robinhood, leveraging fiat capital amid the crypto VC drought, pushes US stock tokenization and on-chain business, and the round-the-clock weekend perpetual price discovery provided by Hyperliquid forces Wall Street to no longer ignore crypto assets. After tokenized stocks, private credit and the unlocking of real estate liquidity will become the next main battlegrounds for explosive growth.
• US stock valuation compression and "AI-native micro-businesses" will reshape the long-term return landscape: Although US corporate earnings grew about 30% this year, S&P valuation multiples have clearly contracted, with compute leaders like Nvidia and Micron compressed to single-digit or low-level ranges, reflecting market concerns about their "terminal value uncertainty"; in the future, AI democratization will spawn a massive number of micro-enterprises with annual revenues of $200,000 to $2 million that erode the giants' share, and the growth premium is gradually spilling over from the $700 trillion US stock market to the crypto market of under $4 trillion.

Notable Quotes

• "I don't care why people entered the crypto world for the first 16 years; what I really care about is AI agents."
• "Whenever I see an asset refuse to fall on bad news despite a string of negative catalysts, it means sellers have completely dried up; then as long as an upside breakout appears, for me it's a confirmation signal that shorts and sellers have exhausted their ammunition. Always remember, price precedes narrative."
• "Relying on global liquidity growing 5% a year, it's impossible to support a $100 trillion crypto ecosystem; you have to make the people who manage the world's $900 trillion in existing wealth genuinely trust this system and develop real, hard demand for using it."
• "If we compare it to the 'ghost cities' I saw in China back then, the crypto world today is still like an empty city lacking daily economic activity; and just as the App Store spawned Uber and Airbnb back then, AI agents are the key to truly filling this city with economic participants."
• "Everyone should stop fixating on the Fed now, stop fixating on oil prices, stop fixating on interest rates. Applying the macro textbooks of the pre-AI era to the economic operating laws of the AI era is itself a mismatch."
• "Buy a $1 million building and that money becomes static 'dead money'—you can't take it to Starbucks to buy a cup of coffee; once real estate and various assets are tokenized, activating the $900 trillion in dormant wealth behind the $120 trillion in circulating currency, the explosion in the velocity of money will completely rewrite everything."
• "I have never agreed with those fundamentalists who say 'never integrate with the old system.' The old and new systems are destined to converge, and ultimately the new system will gradually absorb and digest the old one."
• "Today the total market cap of US stocks is as high as $70 trillion, accounting for 72% of global stock markets, largely because the US dominated the previous generation of the internet; but AI will break monopolies and democratize capabilities. Stocks will find it hard to continue their past growth myths in the future, while the crypto world with a total market cap of under $4 trillion is standing at the starting point of a new growth curve."

Main Text

When Believers Begin to Waver and Exit: From the Dot-Com "Death by a Thousand Cuts" to Traditional Finance Giants Knocking

Luke Martin: This week I've been repeatedly mulling over a seemingly counterintuitive point you made earlier: you believe the market must first see those who were originally deeply convinced of crypto stop believing in it before a real rally can arrive. Why must it reach the point of wavering faith?

Jordi Visser: This is inseparable from my personal memory of living through the dot-com bubble. In 1999 I moved back to the US from Brazil, and the contrast still feels surreal to me. In Brazil I had seen grown men crying in the streets, economic depression, currency collapse, the entire emerging market struggling through two years of turmoil. But after returning to the US, I took over a huge trading account at Morgan Stanley, and everyone around me was bragging about how the internet stocks they bought went from $2 to $100—even my high school friends from blue-collar families were talking about trading their AOL shares for a house.

As expected, the bubble eventually burst violently. Just four years later, those who had once bragged about their gains to the whole world didn't even want to mention the word "stock" anymore, their accounts stuffed with positions that had fallen to a single cent, and a large number of companies collapsed en masse. The crowd that had rushed in purely out of greed was completely washed out, leaving only disheartened structural builders and idealists. That was around 2004, but don't forget the iPhone was still a full three years away. From 2003 to 2007, it was a long, drawn-out period of attrition like "death by a thousand cuts," with the ecosystem seemingly shrinking endlessly and no end in sight.

The crypto world today gives me exactly the same feeling. Recently I've had dinners with many people in the industry who were extremely staunch bulls at all levels in the past, even going long with leverage, but now they're starting to doubt whether Bitcoin itself has a future. Just yesterday I participated in an interview where even the guest, a self-described Bitcoin Maxi, admitted he felt this whole thing no longer works. But for me, I don't care what reason people had for entering this industry over the past 16 years; what I really care about is what's about to happen next: AI agents.

Luke Martin: Besides that interview subject who surprised you yesterday, among the heads of traditional finance (TradFi) managing large-scale capital or veteran industry figures, what other recent conversations have struck you?

Jordi Visser: Anyone who has observed the market for a long time will notice an interesting split: 90% of daily discussion happens among crypto believers or retail communities, with extremely pessimistic sentiment; but at the same time, more and more heavyweights in traditional finance are privately coming to me to discuss the questions that really hit the core. They come to me because my background is as a macro strategy trader, and they believe I can answer in a language they understand.

A few days ago when the Fed first signaled its rate moves, the crypto world was flooded with doomsday talk, feeling that everything was over. But I was actually quite clear in my heart that a real bull market absolutely cannot continue to be built on liquidity easing. What's now emerging in the traditional world are the truly valuable questions: for example, what exactly does tokenization mean? Why would a heavyweight like Stan Druckenmiller invest in Hyperliquid?

Just in the past 10 days, two billionaires have contacted me one after another to discuss details in depth, asking core questions that touch the underlying architecture, like "what impact will tokenization have on the dollar's status" and "what does tokenization mean for the stock market." On one side, believers in the industry are disheartened; on the other side, top old money is earnestly doing its homework on the eve of fundamentals taking shape—this precisely shows that the cornerstone of a major rally is being quietly laid.

Bitcoin's 7 Sigma Reversal and "Price Precedes Narrative": Why Must This Bull Market Be Fundamentals-Driven?

Luke Martin: Speaking of price action, during the move where Bitcoin surged from $60,000 to $69,000, you pointed out on Twitter that this was a "7 Sigma" level reversal that has occurred only three times in the past decade. For viewers less familiar with statistical concepts, were you trying to hint that everyone should chase the rally? What is the real historical weight of this signal?

Jordi Visser: First, "Sigma" is definitely a basic concept every market participant should understand. You can think of it as going to the hospital for a checkup: suppose the doctor measures your blood pressure at 120 over 80, and by conventional standards everything seems normal; but if you've always maintained 105 over 70, then 120 over 80 is actually already elevated for you. Judging anomalies must be combined with your own recent baseline. In the market, volatility is that baseline. Because Bitcoin's previous rolling 60-day volatility had been compressed to an extremely low level, say only 1.5% average daily movement, if a 10% one-sided gain suddenly erupts at that point, converted it amounts to nearly 7 standard deviations of super volatility, i.e., 7 Sigma volatility.

More importantly, I don't just look at this single number, but at multiple resonating signals. First, the price broke through the 200-day moving average in one move; second, the 200-day moving average itself showed signs of turning from flat to rising within just a day or two; third, before that the market had experienced a dense barrage of negative shocks, including security theft incidents, violent turmoil in the AI sector, and the probability of the US 《Clarity Act》 passing falling below 20% for the first time, yet Bitcoin still held firm near $65,000 and refused to make new lows. When an asset can calmly digest all kinds of bad news and still not fall, it means only one thing: the sellers in the market have nothing left to sell. The subsequent surge on volume, even if triggered merely by some liquidity news that wasn't even a major positive, completely exposed the shorts' panicked scramble and watching momentum funds' rush to cover and grab positions.

Luke Martin: My first reaction to that candle was also immediately recalling the moment in 2019 when Bitcoin surged from $3,000 all the way to $4,500 and even $5,000. After that surge happened, everyone started desperately retrofitting various reasons for the price increase. Based on your years of macro trading experience, is it really important to obsess over attribution at the very start of a move (whether it's the Fed, macro improvement, or a moving average breakout)?

Jordi Visser: The answer is simple: price always precedes narrative. After prices violently take off, people naturally weave together a story they're willing to believe. Over the years I've discussed and exchanged views with Paul Tudor Jones many times, and we are highly aligned on this point: after the move appears, the market rushes to slap explanatory labels on it.

As a macro trader focused on long-term structural megatrends, I'm always looking for areas standing at the starting point of a super major move, and I believe the crypto market is about to enter the largest wave in history. I dare to be so certain because the epic violent washout of 2021 to 2022 has already happened. Unlike the usual four-year cycle, that crash completed an extremely thorough foam cleansing, logically very similar to the dot-com bust.

Looking back at history, the internet took off around 1994 and didn't see the App Store's big explosion until 2009—a full 15 years in between. During those 15 years, because the market didn't know how to value a disruptive technology, it invented absurd metrics like valuing by clicks and eyeballs; Amazon's stock bubble burst at one point, and its P/E ratio didn't drop below 100x until 2014 or 2015