Ah, predictions. Who doesn’t love a good guess made in public?

The problem with predictions is that when you’re right, it’s a coincidence, and when you’re wrong, people make fun of you.

I don’t dabble in predictions.

That said, we can set some realistic expectations, can’t we?

The months ahead

From an on-chain perspective, the market’s starting to rebuild the foundation it lost earlier this year.

Let’s look only at Bitcoin. Wherever Bitcoin goes, the rest of the market always follows. We can use Bitcoin to get a sense of what we can expect in the next few months.

New address growth has ticked up after trending downward for most of the year.

Among the cohorts of existing wallets larger than .1 BTC, we see growth, too.

Stablecoins continue to rise.

I won’t go into charts and analysis of HODLers and various other metrics and trading charts. You get enough of that in my newsletter, Crypto is Easy. Suffice to say, nature is healing and we’re seeing healthy churn among market participants.

Keep your wits about you

Of course, let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

We still see plenty of selling from OGs and entities that hold a lot of Bitcoins.

We also don’t know how much overhang remains from miners who shut off this summer and recipients of Bitcoins from Mt. Gox, a defunct crypto exchange that recently gave billions of dollars in Bitcoins to old users.

More importantly, I don’t see new sources of inflows in any of the data I look at, and I have heard nothing from my contacts that suggests such inflows should come soon.

So what does that mean?

The market will continue to move sideways and down until it breaks this trendline:

Once Bitcoin’s price shifts trend, it won’t take much to send the market higher, especially if we still see the trends and behaviors I shared in this answer.

As for timing?

Doesn’t matter. We know the destination. That’s enough.

Mark Helfman publishes the Crypto is Easy newsletter. He is also the author of three books and a top Bitcoin writer on Medium and Hacker Noon. Learn more about him in his bio and connect with him on Tealfeed.