Samson Mow, a well-known Bitcoin entrepreneur and founder/CEO of JAN3, has thrown a bucket of cold water on Ethereum’s relative-strength burst versus Bitcoin, arguing the ETHBTC move is being engineered by BTC-rich Ethereum insiders rotating capital to manufacture an upside narrative around “treasury” adoption—and then unwinding it back into BTC. “Let me explain what’s happening with ETHBTC,” he wrote on X, setting up a critique of both flows and psychology.
Price action provides the canvas for that claim. Ether is trading in the low-$4,200s intraday, having tagged ~$4,337 earlier, while the ETHBTC cross hovers around the mid-0.03s. In dollar terms, the immediate battleground is whether ETH can hold above $4,000–$4,100 and press through the $4,300–$4,430 supply pocket; in the cross, many technicians still mark ~0.04 as the first meaningful resistance that would signal durable ETH leadership if accepted on a weekly basis. With ETH’s all-time high at ~$4,878 from 2021, the market is close enough to invite the classic seller’s ambush that has capped prior runs.
The psychology is precisely where Mow plants his flag. “It will be challenging for ETH to break ATHs because the closer you reach that psychological level, the stronger the drive to sell. It’s the Bagholder’s Dilemma (like the Prisoner’s Dilemma except with Sell/HODL),” he wrote in a follow-on post, arguing that proximity to landmarks like the prior high amplifies game-theory-driven profit-taking.
He also waves off chart-based worries among Bitcoiners: “Bitcoiners shouldn’t be worried about ETHBTC breaking the downward trendline. Ethereum has always been a vehicle for those people to get more Bitcoin. It was true for the ICO and it’s true now.” Read in sequence with his rotation thesis, the message is that even a trendline breach on the ratio does not negate the BTC→ETH→BTC loop he believes is being run.
At press time, Bitcoin traded at $119,486.
