Is This The Last Big Bitcoin Dip Before New ATHs? w/ John Gillen

**John Gillen** (0:00)
As soon as the market starts to flip bullish, as soon as we start to see confirmation of a breakout, you could see an enormous amount of capital from retail, from institutions, from all over the place come into crypto and digital assets in a way that has never been possible.

**LGD Set** (0:11)
What's up, everybody? It's LGD Set here, and welcome to The Milk Road Show, the daily crypto show that can't decide what it hates more, the price action on Ethereum or the fact that I'm holding tons of it. Today is May 18th, 2026 Bitcoin is pulling back, and it turns out many analysts actually called this, both internally at Milk Road and on the show last week. But this may be part of a deeper issue in the economy, as bond yields rise and send shockwaves through the market. And maybe this time, just maybe, it won't just be crypto going down. Today's episode is brought to you by Cape, the privacy first mobile carrier, Pharos, the layer one built for RealFi and Nexo earn interest, borrow and trade crypto. John, I didn't even say you were going to be on the show in the intro, but I think people assumed it.

**John Gillen** (0:49)
Yeah, well, we started doing this every Monday, so if people are paying attention, they might have caught on to that pattern by now. But it's really good to be with you, LG.

**LGD Set** (0:56)
How awesome would it be to do this every day? Just you and me, just shooting the shit, watching the price action on Ethereum.

**John Gillen** (1:05)
This is some foreshadowing, but yeah, I think we'll do a little bit more than shooting some shit. But yeah, it's always a good time.

**LGD Set** (1:14)
Always a good time, man. Listen, I have a confession to make to you after I go through this little bit, which is that last week, literally a week ago in the Discord, we were popping off to like $81,000, $82,000 Bitcoin. You were telling people in the Milk Road Pro Discord that we were due for a pullback, maybe pulling back to like $70,000 or so. Then that sentiment and analysis was also shared by a friend of the podcast, Julio Moreno, from Crypto Quant, who came on for his regularly scheduled bear appearance, and told us the same thing.
He told us back on March 15th that we were going to go up to around the range that we were at and last week he told us that we were bound back down for $70,000 through a slew of different metrics that he shared on the show. But basically that thesis is playing out.

**John Gillen** (2:05)
Yeah, so I think just to give a little bit of context on this, I have had a bullish bias for the last several months here as Bitcoin has been trending up and going higher. We've been coming up towards this retest of the bear market resistance band. And I think we've now kind of seen that retest. And the thing I was watching for was to see whether or not the momentum that we were showing was going to be strong enough to break through that and flip that into support and indicate that Bitcoin had moved from a bear market into a bull market and was now going to continue higher.
It seems like what we've seen happen here is that Bitcoin has gone up, tested that resistance and found some resistance and gotten rejected. Now, what I'm watching for at the moment, as I said in the Discord, there's a chance that that means that this is a rejection, that this is a failed rally, and that we're going to continue to see the bear market price action play out, and that could see us sweep the lows of 70K, maybe lower. But I don't think that that's a foregone conclusion, because there's also scenarios where we went up to 81, 82K, tested the resistance, and we've come back down. Now, we're holding in the high 70s. It's not to say that we can't go up and do another retest. It's not to say the market has to go to 70K immediately, but I'm starting to lean in that direction for a few reasons that Julio also mentioned, the biggest one being that a lot of this movement higher we've seen has been on leverage, on speculation, and I think just people just front running the Clarity Act, other things, just expecting Bitcoin to move higher. But we haven't seen a lot of spot volume come in to support that movement as well. And so that low spot volume makes things dangerous for a lot of reasons, because it means the order books are thinner and they can be cleared. So in the last 24 hours just here, we've seen Bitcoin pull back pretty sharply. And along with that, we saw, I think, $700 million. The number is changing pretty regularly here, but around $700 million of liquidations in the digital asset space. Now, a lot of this was actually in altcoins, in Ethereum and in other things. So that's interesting to me, because it means that a lot of the leverage that's speculating is speculating on things outside of Bitcoin, which to me would imply that people are speculating on the Clarity Act. So they're thinking, okay, if the Clarity Act gets passed, then that's generally bullish for the altcoin space. And so they're kind of taking a speculative long on digital assets outside of Bitcoin there. But we, in any event, we saw these liquidations happen. We've seen this pullback. And I think at the moment, what I'm watching for is to see, do we go back down and where do we find support? Or do we see the market come in here and have the bulls find some strength and push back up to retest the top of that range? But right now, I'm kind of leaning more in the direction of, we've seen the retest, we couldn't get the volume, the momentum to break through that. And so I'm kind of thinking we're going to go down and see if we find support at 75k or 70k. But I don't think, I think that the strength of this rally and the length of this rally, for me, makes me feel like I don't think we see new lows in this market. It's possible that we could see a sweep of the lows from February. But I don't think we'll spend a significant amount of time going lower or further.