AlphaCat

Article

3 steps to see the extreme $BTC drawdown clearly—don’t let “$320,000” throw off your rhythm

When you see “$BTC could fall to $320,000,” don’t you also instinctively think: now should I run, or wait for a bargain?
Don’t get swept along by specific entry points too quickly. What’s truly useful isn’t guessing the bottom—it’s stress-testing using historical drawdowns.
Based on the data listed in the materials: the 2017 peak was around $190,000, with the following year’s maximum decline of 84.1%; the 2021 peak was around $690,000, followed by a 77.4% drop the next year. These figures show that after the cycle weakens, $BTC has seen drawdowns of 70% or more—and this isn’t without precedent.
But the calculation claiming: “a 2025 peak of $1.26M, down 72.2%, corresponding to $320,000” doesn’t add up. If it drops 72.2% from $1.26M, the price is about $350,000; if it falls to $320,000, the drawdown would be roughly 74.6%.

Article

3-layer growth flywheel drives up $SOL’s momentum—people who only look at price may miss the key

$BTC set a new high of $126,000, but the blockchain narrative of faster growth over the past two years has had one of its protagonists as $SOL .
Builders’ interest in Solana surged by 78%. What’s truly worth paying attention to is not just the 400 ms block time, but how it links together “performance, products, capital, and traffic” into a low-barrier path to participate in the chain.
Performance is the foundation. Compared with $ETH where blocks are produced in about 12 seconds, with roughly 200 transactions per block, Solana currently produces blocks in about 400 ms. When activity is low, blocks include about 1,200 transactions; when activity is high, they can typically reach 2,000 to 3,000 transactions. The historical maximum single block has accommodated 43,066 transactions. For users, this means high-frequency trading and heavy on-chain operations are easier to handle.

Article

3 indicators that reduce unproductive trades—why fewer and fewer older players touch small-cap coins?

Do you feel the same way? You dare to buy $BTC and $ETH , but you don’t dare to touch those small-cap coins that can surge 100% one day and cut in half the next.
This isn’t necessarily fear. It might be that you’ve thought it through: staying in the market for the long term is more important than catching any one sudden spike.
Compounding fears not that gains are slow, but that you can suffer a major drawdown. If a coin falls 50%, it needs to rise 100% just to break even. Even more troublesome, a single project may also face risks such as a sudden drop in liquidity, a narrative losing momentum, or team changes. Besides account losses, the emotional drain from repeatedly cutting losses and chasing after price rallies is often even harder to recover from.

Article

3 indicators to understand $SOL’s real recovery—people who only watch the price may be getting it backwards

When a chain drops from $236 to $13 and still manages to return to the mainstream spotlight, it often isn’t because it “fell enough.”
To judge whether the fix for $SOL is solid, don’t just focus on a price rebound. I’d suggest looking at three indicators: whether the network can withstand stress, whether fees are reasonable, and whether developers are still active.
1. Assess network stability
Solana experienced three major network outages and multiple performance slowdowns in 2022, with one additional outage in 2023. The key fixes it later made were improving congestion control and enabling clients like Firedancer developed by different teams.

SOL+0.42%

Article

3 steps to see the real return clearly: annualized over 10%—why you still can’t buy without caution

When you see “annualized return over 10%,” do you also think: just buy it, right?
Hold on a moment. Focusing only on dividends or price gains—like seeing $BTC a period where it rose well, then treating past performance as future returns—most easily makes you overlook what truly affects your account: total return.
Dividend payments from a dividend ETF are not “free money.” For example, if you hold 5,500 shares and receive a dividend of 0.143 yuan per share, your account receives about 786.5 yuan; however, after the ex-dividend date, the ETF’s price typically adjusts accordingly, so in theory your total assets on the dividend day should not increase out of thin air.
What really matters is whether the NAV can recover after the dividend, and whether your holding cost has decreased. Suppose your purchase price is 3.10 yuan; after the ex-dividend date it drops to 2.96 yuan, and then later rises back to 3.10 yuan. Only then does the dividend, together with the price recovery, make up the return. If the NAV keeps falling, looking only at the cash received can easily overestimate your actual return.

Article

3 signals to judge whether you can buy $BTC—stop chasing and selling on emotion

Are you also stuck on this: in 2026, can $BTC still be bought? The real question isn’t “Will it keep going up?” but “Does the current risk-reward ratio fit me for entry?”
There are still voices of doubt in the market, but that doesn’t mean the price is necessarily undervalued; just because people around you are talking about it doesn’t mean the market will top out immediately. Use emotions to judge buy/sell points, and you’re most likely to end up with two outcomes: when it drops, you don’t dare to buy; when it rises, you can’t help but chase.
To judge whether $BTC is worth paying attention to, I’d suggest looking at three signals instead.
1. Look at the price structure; don’t guess exact price levels

Article

3 Steps to Identify the Real BTC Trend—Don’t Get Shaken Out by One Moving Average Again

Have you ever run into this: $BTC you chase right after price just moves above the moving average, and cut right after it just breaks below—after going back and forth a few times, your position size doesn’t increase, but your principal keeps getting smaller?
The problem may not be the direction, but rather that you treated the choppy period as a trending market.
In the market record from February 2nd, one very typical detail was: back then, the daily MA30 repeatedly lost and regained control over roughly a month and a half. Using the method of “buy on breakout, sell on breakdown,” you could already have been shaken out and back in as many as 5 times. A single moving average can describe where the price is, but it cannot independently confirm a trend.
A more practical way to watch the market is to first look at the timeframe, then look at the position.

Article

3 Questions to Understand the True Strength of $ETH—Don’t Let a Single Narrative Lead You Astray

Have you also seen comparisons like this? ETH has Fisher Yu, MIT has Rosalind Picard—so someone tries to use a single name to decide which school is stronger.
In the crypto market, it’s like only looking at one founder and one trending application, then deciding whether $ETH , $SOL , or $BNB is more worth your attention. The information might be correct, but the conclusions are often reached too quickly.
Useful comparisons aren’t about “who’s like Sun Wukong” or “who’s like Erlang Shen.” Instead, you should ask whether the advantage comes from a single star or an entire system. MIT is often described as a six-sided warrior, CMU is especially strong in the field of computing, and ETH has its own strengths. The metaphor may not be precise, but it highlights a key point: being strong in one spot doesn’t necessarily mean being strong overall; being strong overall doesn’t guarantee dominance in every sub-area.

Article

3 Standard Ways to Understand AI Encryption Opportunities—Don’t Get Misled by the “Privacy Narrative”

Do you also think that when AI combines with cryptography, the biggest attraction is whether AI can break encryption algorithms? The direction that’s actually closer to real-world application is the opposite: it’s not AI breaking encryption, but cryptography protecting AI.
So-called “encrypted-state AI inference,” put simply, means that your input data, model parameters, and the computation process do not appear in memory in plaintext. For users, this means AI can process sensitive information without needing to see the original contents first. Secure multi-party computation and fully homomorphic encryption are the key technologies that make this happen.

BNB-0.43%

Article

Build a Low-Frequency Rotation Framework in 3 Steps: You Think You Need to Chase Upswings, but the Key Is Knowing When to Stay in Cash

Do you feel the same way: the more you stare at the screen and trade more, the more everything gets chaotic?
What’s truly worth breaking down isn’t the single figure of “30% annualized return,” but rather a low-frequency rotation framework: only participate when the target asset is relatively strong, and otherwise prefer to stay in cash.
The historical backtest of the original underlying asset was for an ETF, not a crypto asset. The data range runs from January 1, 2020 to the day before publication. The strategy’s annualized return is 30.47%, win rate is 59.09%, maximum drawdown is 31.42%, and it trades about 10 times per year on average. Historical backtests do not represent future performance, and these results cannot be directly applied to the crypto market.

Article

Screen out stronger coins with greater stability in 3 steps—have you been only looking at the gainers list?

Have you ever run into this: $BTC , $ETH , $SOL are all rising, but when it’s time to place an order, you don’t know which one to choose?
Don’t just compare who’s up faster. A more practical approach is to look at both the “price increase” and “trend stability” at the same time, turning chasing breakouts into a repeatable screening process.
Step 1: Calculate momentum in a standardized way.
Take the logarithm of prices over a period, then perform a weighted linear regression—prices closer to the present get higher weights. The regression slope reflects the upward momentum; after converting it to an annualized return rate, you can compare different cryptocurrencies on the same yardstick.
Step 2: Add a stability check to the momentum.

Article

Understand the bear market bottom range in 3 steps. You think you’re catching the bottom, but you might just be guessing the level.

Have you also been watching the “bear market bottom” for a long time, but the more you watch, the less you know which price level to trust?
What’s truly worth using isn’t a single precise number, but a range-projection method you can repeatedly verify.
Step 1: Look at the repeated drawdown magnitudes in the same market cycle.
Based on the weekly samples in the material, before $BTC the first two rounds fell by 36.5% and 38.78%, and before $ETH the first two rounds fell by 47.15% and 48.99%. When the two drawdown ranges are close, you can use them as a reference for the third segment’s trend, but you can’t simply copy them, because market structure, liquidity, and the news environment may all change.

Article

One indicator to understand the $BTC ETF capital structure—people who only watch price are likely to miss it

Do you also only focus on whether $BTC and $ETH go up or down, yet can’t quite tell whether the money is chasing the rally or laying out positions on pullbacks?
When looking at ETFs, the price is only the surface. What’s more worth watching is the difference between “the growth rate of ETF units minus the net asset value (NAV) price increase.” When ETF unit growth is positive and that difference reaches 20% or more, it indicates that the pace of new unit creation in the primary market is clearly faster than the price movement.
You can break it down into three steps.
1. Don’t just look at “price down, units up”
The old approach can easily catch contrarian subscriptions, but it misses another kind of signal: the price has already risen, yet the ETF’s unit growth is even faster. In the original dataset, this kind of situation showed up for categories such as semiconductors, communications, and AI—so the old screening method would miss it.

Article

3 indicators to understand the long-term value of $ETH—if the ecosystem is more prosperous, should you be more cautious?

Do you also think that the more ecosystem projects there are in $ETH , the more support the token price will have in the long run? I’m bearish on Ethereum—not because I think it will disappear, but because I doubt whether the thriving ecosystem can continue to translate into sustained ETH demand.
First disclose my position: I have set up a 2x leveraged short position on an Ethereum ETF in the US stock market. This is only my personal holding and does not constitute trading advice.
When assessing the long-term value of $ETH , I only look at one thing: when users use the Ethereum ecosystem, do they necessarily have to keep buying and consuming ETH?
The previous answer leaned toward “yes.” Issuing tokens, on-chain transactions, DeFi lending, and stablecoin transfers all require ETH to pay for Gas. The more projects there are and the more frequently transactions occur, the more obvious the demand for ETH becomes—this is also an important support for Ethereum from the ICO stage to the DeFi phase.

Article

3 indicators to judge whether you can heavily allocate to $BTC — first-year newcomers are most likely to miss the second one

Are you also thinking: I'm in my first year now; the timeline is long enough—why not wait until the second half of 2026 to heavily allocate to $BTC ?
What really matters isn’t whether Bitcoin will rise, but whether you can withstand its volatility—and whether, at that time, the capital is still willing to back this narrative.
Don't look at the price first—look at the three indicators.
1. Look at incremental capital
$BTC itself does not generate cash flow, and the price is highly sensitive to liquidity. To judge the market environment, you can continuously monitor the Fed’s interest rate path, the total supply of stablecoins, and the capital flows into spot Bitcoin ETFs.
If these three areas don’t improve in sync, then even if the coin price strengthens in the short term, it doesn’t mean that long-term capital has already returned.

Article

3 steps to spot a real vs. fake negative headline—don’t mistake “ETH security screening” for a big deal in the crypto world

When you see “ETH starts security screening for applicants from China,” isn’t your first reaction: $ETH —here we go again, another regulatory negative catalyst?
Don’t rush to check the market. Here, ETH refers to ETH Zurich, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich—not Ethereum. If you misread one abbreviation, you could mistake study-abroad policy for a crypto-market catalyst.
Public documents show that starting in October 2024, ETH Zurich has begun security screening for certain master’s and PhD applicants, involving China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia, with specialties mainly in the engineering and science fields. On October 28, the rejection criteria in the screening documents for master’s applicants were adjusted from “more than one yes” to “several yes.”

Article

Understand BTC and ETH in 3 steps—stop treating the two logics as the same thing

Don’t you also feel that $BTC and $ETH are both mainstream coins—and besides price and rank, they don’t seem that different?
The real difference is just one sentence: Bitcoin is more like “digital gold,” while Ethereum is more like an open “world computer.” Once you understand that, when you look at the chart you won’t just obsess over up and down movements.
Step one: see what problems they solve.
The core of $BTC is distributed ledger accounting: recording who owns how much asset without a central authority. Its value narrative is more focused, emphasizing scarcity, consensus, and value storage.