October’s wobble hasn’t damaged the cycle, Alex Thorn, Galaxy Digital’s head of analysis, argues.
The observe was first despatched to subscribers of Galaxy Analysis’s Weekly Analysis Temporary and later reproduced on X.
Thorn says the Oct. 10 sell-off started with excessive leverage slamming into skinny order books, then worsened as trade auto-deleveraging capped some market-maker shorts and thinned liquidity on the worst level. He cites roughly $19 billion of liquidations as bitcoin slid from an Oct. 6 all-time excessive close to $126,300 to an intraday low round $107,000, with ether falling from about $4,800 to roughly $3,500 earlier than markets steadied into the weekend.
Threat urge for food light once more as macro jitters resurfaced. Thorn factors to softness in chip shares, a hawkish flip from a Federal Reserve governor, renewed regional-bank worries and geopolitical noise. Traditional risk-off markers strengthened the tone, he notes, with gold and silver setting recent information and the 10-year Treasury yield dipping again under 4%.
He additionally flags a crypto-specific drag: digital asset treasury firms have cooled. He says that with fairness costs down throughout that cohort, there’s much less price-insensitive shopping for to deploy into crypto, which provides to near-term fragility even after the preliminary washout.
Medium time period, nonetheless, Thorn stays constructive and highlights three forces he thinks can energy the subsequent leg increased.
First is AI capital spending. He frames the present wave as a real-economy capex cycle led by cash-rich incumbents — hyperscalers, chipmakers and data-center operators — strengthened by important U.S. coverage assist, moderately than a rerun of a purely speculative dot-com bubble. Company budgets and authorities posture, he argues, level to a protracted runway.
Second are stablecoins. Thorn factors our that dollar-linked tokens proceed to achieve traction as cost rails, broadening participation, deepening liquidity and anchoring extra exercise on public chains. He believes these plumbing results can assist the ecosystem even when value motion chops.
Third is tokenization. In line with Thorn, transferring real-world belongings and items of conventional market infrastructure on-chain is shifting from pilots to implementation, creating recent demand for block area and for core belongings that safe, route and settle that exercise. Thorn says that transition advantages platforms tied to that circulation.
Inside that backdrop, he stays optimistic on bitcoin’s “digital gold” position amid persistent doubts about fiscal and financial prudence. He additionally sees a good setup for majors like ETH and SOL tied to stablecoin utilization and tokenization, even when near-term rallies threat stalling under prior highs.
The near-term message is warning — respect thinner liquidity, post-crash psychology and a “wall of fear” temper. The medium-term message is resilience: three tailwinds are in place, he says, to maintain the development pointing up as soon as markets end digesting the shock.