10x Research's Markus Thielen Calls $90K Bitcoin by Year-End, Questions the ETF Bid

Markus Thielen just put a number on it. The 10x Research founder says Bitcoin finishes the year at $90,000. Screenshot it.

Here's the part that made me sit up. Thielen isn't leaning on the institutional bid to get us there. He's openly questioning whether ETF demand is as deep as everyone keeps assuming. That's the whole bull case for the past two years, and he's poking it with a stick.

ok wait because this is actually insane. Wall Street was supposed to make Bitcoin boring in a good way. Steady flows. Sticky capital. Buyers who don't flinch. Instead, Thielen's read is that the wild rallies people miss didn't die because the asset grew up. They died because the money shows up late and leaves early.

His Ethereum take is just as blunt. ETH has to do more for holders, and he's not impressed with the current setup. Fair. The chain has been eating fees and shipping upgrades while the price chart does a sad little dance. Holders keep asking where the value lands and the answer keeps being somewhere, eventually.

A $90K call sounds aggressive until you remember Bitcoin already did the impossible part. Getting to six figures was a faith question. Getting from here to ninety is a liquidity question. Thielen's basically saying the plumbing carries it now, not the cheerleading.

Bestie, your portfolio needs to hear this. The ETF trade isn't dead, but it's not the free money glitch crypto Twitter sold you either. Flows came in. Flows can leave. And a chunk of the institutions are here forever crowd has never sat through a red week.

So here's what I'm watching. One week of net outflows across the spot Bitcoin ETFs tells you more about next quarter than any price target does. If the money holds through a drawdown, $90K is too conservative. If it doesn't, we're about to find out who was actually holding and who was just renting the trade.