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🐳 Daily Edition: Is Sentiment Outpacing Price?

🐳 Daily Edition: Is Sentiment Outpacing Price?

The market has gone from Extreme Fear to Extreme Greed in just the last month, are we getting ahead of our skiis?

Beluga & Will McKinnon
August 26, 2026

At time of writing Bitcoin is racing back to $80k, ETH sits just over $2,500 and SOL is grappling with the $100 mark — while I’m certainly happy to be back in this territory, the conversation among traders would have you think everything was back at all-time highs already. The reality of course is Bitcoin is still a +60% move from the October peak, and yet we’ve just witnessed the greatest sentiment shift in my memory, corroborated by the Fear and Greed Index going from Extreme Fear to Extreme greed in a matter of weeks.

Crypto Fear and Greed Index, Source: CoinMarketCap

As volume on the majors has remained relatively muted through most of this move (aside from the liquidations last week of course), it seems to point to the main source of buying liquidity coming from the ETFs and a few whale entities. The ETF flows turning back on is not only an incredible signal for where we are in the market cycle, but also an important piece of the puzzle now that DAT premiums have dried up across the board.

In fact, the King of all DATs Strategy (MSTR) bought zero Bitcoin last week per its own filing, as its mNAV sits barely positive at 1.01x. Given their strategy (pun intended) thus far has been to issue shares above a 2.5x mNAV and lean on credit under 1.0x, you can pretty quickly see where the problem lies. As they’re all feeling the pressure of that mNAV line, I expect to see most DATs that are still around look to shift their business model from pure holding company to more of an involved ecosystem player as we’ve seen Tom Lee start to do with BMNR.