August 8. A mining pool founder steps in front of the market and tells the crowd what it does not want to hear.
Jiang Zhuoer, the man behind B.TOP—one of crypto's oldest mining pools—has put a hard number on Bitcoin's ceiling: $68,000 to $70,000. He frames it as a two-act tragedy. Act one: a short squeeze drags price into that liquidity pocket. Act two: the squeeze burns out, and the last drop begins.
His evidence is capital flows. Stablecoins are leaving exchanges, he says. USDT supply contracted. USDC supply contracted. Combined, $2.23 billion of buying fuel has vanished from the market in thirty days.
This is a serious claim from a serious source. But it contains a measurement problem that could cost traders their accounts if they act on it blindly.
I've spent my career on the mechanics side of this market. I've manually audited ICO contracts that raised millions on vapor. I arbitraged DeFi pools through the 2020 mania. I read on-chain order flow in real time as Terra collapsed. The one lesson that survives every cycle: direction matters less than the assumptions hiding inside the entry.
Jiang's assumptions deserve a full audit.
The Source
First, know the messenger. B.TOP is a mining pool. Miners are the upstream producers of the Bitcoin economy. They aggregate hash power, collect block rewards, and sell those rewards continuously to pay electricity, hardware debt, and staff. Miners are the permanent sell-side of the market. They sell into strength. They sell into weakness. They sell because their costs are denominated in fiat, not satoshis.
Jiang's words carry weight because he reads mining treasury data and order flow from operators who must sell at specific prices to stay solvent. When he says the market lacks fuel, he speaks from a position where fuel is measured in gigawatts and pence per kilowatt-hour.
But the position creates bias. Mining revenue depends on Bitcoin operating above the cost of production. Below that threshold, machines get unplugged. A bearish call from a mining executive is not neutral analysis; it is a stakeholder whose business bleeds when prices fall—and who might benefit from talking prices down before re-accumulating.
Now the data. In the last month, USDT total market capitalization fell from $184.2 billion to $183.1 billion. USDC fell from $73.28 billion to $72.15 billion. Combined: minus $2.23 billion in stablecoin supply—a shrinking cash inventory.
The logic chain: stablecoins are the fuel for buying crypto. Less fuel means fewer bids. Fewer bids mean no bull market. The rebound has a ceiling at $68K to $70K, where short sellers cluster. Their stop losses become the fuel for a squeeze. When the squeeze ends, with no fresh inflows behind it, the market falls. Last drop.
The Mechanics
This is where it gets interesting.
Stablecoin supply is a metric I have tracked obsessively since the summer of 2020. That was the season I deployed €200,000 across freshly launched Compound and Uniswap pools, using flash loans to arbitrage price gaps between decentralized exchanges during peak volatility. I compounded 140% returns in six weeks by rebalancing collateral ratios faster than the market could reprice risk.
The permanent lesson: liquidity is not a number. It is a location.
Total stablecoin supply tells you how much cash exists. It does not tell you where that cash sits, who controls it, or whether it points at buy orders. The distinction matters more than most commentary admits.
Jiang's argument, stripped to a skeleton, runs like this. Premise one: stablecoin supply is shrinking. Premise two: shrinking supply removes buying power. Conclusion: no bull market. Rebound capped near $70K. Then a final leg down.
Premise two is the load-bearing wall. And it has cracks.
A decline in total stablecoin market capitalization can come from three sources, each with a different market implication.
Source one: redemption. Investors swap USDT and USDC back to fiat and leave crypto entirely. This is a real outflow—a reduction in the pool of capital available to buy digital assets. Bearish.
Source two: rotation. Stablecoins leave exchange wallets and move into DeFi protocols, OTC settlement, or custody structures. Total supply stays flat. But exchange-visible balances fall, creating the appearance of outflow without reducing actual market-wide buying power.
Source three: issuer mechanics. Tether and Circle adjust supply based on corporate treasury decisions, banking relationships, and regulatory positioning. A contraction can reflect balance-sheet engineering that has nothing to do with retail sentiment.
Jiang's data measures total supply. His narrative claims exchange outflows. Those are not the same measurement. Making this argument bulletproof requires wallet-level data from CryptoQuant or Glassnode. Without it, the evidence gap remains.
I have been in this position before. In May 2022, as Terra's algorithmic stablecoin empire tore itself apart, I stopped reading headlines and parsed on-chain flows. I documented the block heights where liquidity evaporated across major DEXs and moved €1.5 million out of stablecoin positions before the de-peg cascade accelerated. The edge was location, not sentiment. I knew which doors were exits because I watched the mechanics, not the narrative.
That experience forged a rule I still use: when someone says money is leaving, ask which money, leaving from where, and headed to whom. If the answer rests on aggregate supply figures alone, the evidence is incomplete.
The Squeeze
Now the second half of Jiang's script: the $68K to $70K squeeze-and-drop.
This is a liquidity structure play, and it deserves respect. Price ranges accumulate leverage over time. Short sellers enter near resistance, place stop losses above the range, and unwittingly create a pool of future buy orders. When price pushes through, those stops cascade. Forced covering pushes price higher. Higher price triggers more forced covering. The squeeze feeds on the pain of late bears.
But a squeeze is terminal. It does not generate new demand. It consumes existing demand—the shorts' panic purchases. When the last short is liquidated, upward pressure disappears. Without fresh buyers, without stablecoin inflows converting to spot bids, price falls under its own weight.
This is the liquidity trap pattern: the classic structure of a bear-market rally. I have watched it in commodities, in equities, and in crypto's previous cycles. It appears during distribution phases, when the market must manufacture one final high to drain the last of the bullish energy and trap remaining believers.
There is a tension in Jiang's position. If he is genuinely bearish, why hand the market a $70K upside target? Why not simply say sell now?
Because the order book does not allow a straight-line decline. The short interest above spot is real. The market has to manufacture that high, bait the late bears, burn them, and then fall. Whether Jiang is describing his own trading plan or reading the structural landscape, the script is coherent.
In early 2024, I ran a variation of this logic from a trading desk. After the Bitcoin ETF approvals, the basis spread between spot ETFs and the underlying asset went persistently positive. I built a delta-neutral portfolio with €3 million in notional to harvest that spread, executing thousands of micro-transactions over three months for a 12% return with virtually no directional risk.
The lesson from that episode: inefficiencies do not disappear when institutions arrive. They migrate. They get smaller, faster, and more hostile to retail participants. Liquidity traps still form. The levels are tighter, the exits narrower, and the cost of mistaking a squeeze for a reversal is higher than ever.
The same mechanics now govern AI-driven trading. My pilot work with a Paris-based AI startup showed that machine-speed models cluster at identical levels and pile up at the same exits. The market always makes the consensus trade expensive—whether that consensus comes from humans or algorithms.
The Other Side
Now the argument against the man whose thesis I just laid out.
First: the measurement problem. Total stablecoin supply fell by $2.23 billion. That does not prove exchange balances fell. Without wallet-level verification, outflow is an interpretation, not a data point. I have seen stablecoin supply contract while exchange balances grew and prices rallied. The relationship is conditional, not mechanical.
Second: the incentive problem. Jiang is a mining pool founder. Miners are structurally short Bitcoin—they produce it and sell it continuously. Their commentary is inseparable from their inventory position. When a miner says last drop, a part of me hears please sell so I can buy lower. This is not an accusation. It is an acknowledgment that every participant has incentives, and smart traders map those incentives before trusting the message.
Third: the execution hazard. The script has two phases. Phase one rewards bulls and destroys late shorts. Phase two rewards bears. If you position for phase two before phase one completes, the squeeze liquidates you. Most account sizes—and most nervous systems—cannot survive that counter-move.
Fourth: the invalidation level. Jiang has handed us a test: $70,000. A daily close above that level on real volume, confirmed by stablecoin inflows into exchanges, kills his thesis. The specificity of this call is its vulnerability. Respect the structure, even if you doubt the author.
The Framework
Here is the operational path.
Track the fuel. Watch Tether and Circle's weekly supply reports. Watch exchange wallet balances, not aggregate market caps. Shrinking supply toward $70K? Expect the squeeze to fail. Supply inflection upward? The bearish foundation cracks.
Respect the sequence. Do not short below $68K. The squeeze will take your margin before it takes your thesis. Wait for the top of the range. Wait for funding rates to spike. Wait for volume to fade. Then consider the short side.
Mark the invalidation. A confirmed close above $70K changes the entire map. The last drop does not arrive. The squeeze becomes a breakout, and the scariest moment in Jiang's script becomes the best buying opportunity of the quarter.
Understand the crowd. Retail traders who read Jiang's post and short at $65K are the fuel for the move to $70K. Late shorts who enter above $70K are the fuel for something worse. The market converts certainty into pain. The only defense is knowing which part of the script you are in.
Terra's code was poetry; Luna's exit was prose. The structure of failure never changes its shape—only its date and ticker.
Options don't reward conviction. They reward precision.
Arbitrage doesn't disappear when the crowd finds it. It moves where the crowd isn't looking.
Slippage is the gap between belief and reality.
The question Jiang left on the table is simple: is the $2.23 billion contraction the beginning of a capital exodus, or the tail end of a rotation that is already completing?
Watch the wallets, not the words. The answer will arrive before the price does.