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Bitcoin bounced from just below $59,000 to $67,000 in the space of a week, Ethereum and Solana both surged 10% to 11% in a single session, and privacy tokens, AI tokens and several of the hottest narratives from earlier in the cycle are lighting up again.
The question every crypto investor is asking right now is the same one it always is at moments like this: is this the real thing or just another bear market trap?
Expert John Gillen says it is too early to say.
A Strong Bounce, Not a Bull Market
“The market still has to prove one way or the other what this is,” Gillen said in a recent interview.
He has spent the past ten months calling price targets within a downtrend and is not prepared to abandon that framework based on a single week of green candles, however encouraging they feel.
His base case is that $60,000 may prove to be the cycle low but he is not yet convinced. “There’s a non-zero chance, a significant chance at this point, that retest of the lows is a double bottom pattern and we just continue higher from there. But I don’t see us just getting a runaway bullish reversal just yet,” he said.
The path he expects for the summer is one of continued choppy price action with periods of both weakness and strength. Bitcoin could dip back below $60,000 before a breakout materialises.
Getting above $75,000 is where he would start asking different questions about what comes next. At $67,000, he said, “it doesn’t really move the needle for me one way or the other.”
Standard Chartered Called the Bottom. Gillen Is Not So Sure.
Geoffrey Kendrick, head of digital assets at Standard Chartered, recently declared the crypto winter over and called $59,000 the cycle bottom. Gillen’s response was generous but cautious.
“He could very well be right,” Gillen said. “Whether it is the bottom or part of the process of bottoming, to me is relatively immaterial.” His point is that trying to identify the exact low to the nearest thousand dollars is the wrong question. The right question is whether this is close enough to a bottom to justify accumulation. His answer to that is yes.
“This might be one of the best buy opportunities we get on Bitcoin and the rest of the digital asset ecosystem for a period of many years if ever,” he said.
The CLARITY Act Problem
Away from price action, Gillen flagged a political risk that is not getting enough attention. If the midterm elections weaken the current administration, the CLARITY Act, which he described as already being in fragile condition, could die entirely.
“If a defeat at the midterms happens, I think it would be worse for crypto because crypto needs congressional action to get regulatory clarity,” he said. “That kind of kills the CLARITY Act. The Democrats are never going to pass that.” He noted with a degree of dark humour that the bill had slipped so far down his list of market catalysts that he had forgotten to mention it entirely. “It’s a little dead,” he said.
Where He Is Putting His Money
Gillen’s conviction is not in chasing semiconductors or AI IPOs, where he believes all the current attention and capital is concentrated. His interest is in accumulating what he called pristine, high-quality apex digital assets while nobody wants them.
“Bitcoin is the best performing asset of all time and nobody wants to buy it right now,” he said. “That’s a great opportunity.”
