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🐳 Weekly Edition: Are we back?

🐳 Weekly Edition: Are we back?

The top 20 tokens are up 24% this week. Has the bull run come early?

Beluga & Aidan Carney Skytt
August 21, 2026

For the first time in a long time, it’s been a great week to be a crypto degenerate. Bitcoin is up 24%, ETH is up 27% and Uber wait times are longer because XRP is up 40% this week.

CT went from completely dead to a Project X level party overnight.

@Icebergy on X

Are we back? Are 10 months of pain and gravedancing from the AI crowd finally over?

Let’s get to the bottom of this. I’ll steelman both sides of the argument, then you can decide if you want to start preparing your Thanksgiving crypto sales pitch a few months early.

The bull run is on

In Q3 2025, the common consensus was that the market was going to top in December or January. By common consensus, I don’t just mean a slight majority. It was the uniform opinion.

Then 10/10 happened, kicking us into a long crypto winter. No one saw it coming.

The point is, the market consensus was wrong. Everyone thought they had until the end of the year to make money onchain, then the largest liquidation event in crypto history came out of left field.

If you asked everyone last week, before the complete onchain euphoria, when the next bull run was going to start, they would have told you October. The four-year cycle is three years up, one year down. This October would mark a year.

It’s possible the market is going against the grain of the common opinion again and starting the bull run early.

Crypto is a FOMO industry. Everyone thought they had another six weeks to accumulate. A pump here catches people offsides and forces them to panic buy so they don’t miss the run up.

The combination of new regulatory guidelines, the US government being interested in buying crypto again and Hyperliquid getting brought to the US market are all fuel to ignite the proverbial rocketship.

ETH pumping is also quite bullish. There has been a tremendous amount of hate for it over the last few months. People called it a stablecoin. Said Vitalik became a communist and the price no longer matters.

In spite of all that, ETH pumping is a sign of changing tides. ETH had a 20% one day candle on Wednesday. The last time that happened was May 8th 2025. ETH proceeded to go up 125% over the subsequent three months.

This week’s rally is also not rotational. It’s not as if Robinhood trench money is rotating back into majors or the recent NFT resurgence is being dispersed across chains. This is unilateral pumping of everything from Bitcoin to Fartcoin.

New money is entering the arena.

The bottom isn’t in

The four-year cycle rules all.

In spite of bullish conditions going into Q4 last year, it was time for a down year, so the market sold off. We’ve had 10 months of pain, but if history holds, that still leaves two months to go.

Across the last three cycles, crypto winter has lasted roughly a year. The bottom has also historically required complete capitulation. Bitcoin drawdowns have reached roughly 75-85% from the highs before the market finally reset.

At the absolute low in June, we were only 55% off the all-time high.

Maybe this cycle is different. Or maybe we simply haven’t experienced the real flush yet.

There are plenty of catalysts that could send us lower.

Headlines around the government buying crypto and supporting Hyperliquid are bullish, but they won’t necessarily outweigh deteriorating macro conditions. Another escalation in Iran or renewed fears around oil shortages could quickly bring risk-off sentiment back. If the CLARITY Act stalls in September, one of the market’s biggest regulatory catalysts gets pushed further down the road too.

Then there’s the rally itself.

A meaningful amount of this week’s upside was accelerated by shorts getting liquidated. Liquidations can supercharge a rally, but they can’t sustain it forever. Eventually, you need spot demand and a narrative strong enough to keep bringing new capital into the market.

That narrative still isn’t obvious.

Prices are going up, but what fundamentally changed this week to justify double digit moves across the board?

If the answer is mostly positioning, liquidations and FOMO, the rally could run out of fuel as quickly as it started.

The bear case is ultimately simple: the cycle isn’t finished, the market never fully capitulated and this week’s rally may be more mechanical than fundamental.

Ten months of pain feels like forever in crypto.

Historically, it might not be long enough.

What do you think? Has the bull run come early or are we in for more pain before the climb back to all-time highs?

Let us know by responding to this email or tagging us on X, @Heybeluga.