Crypto analyst Kevin (Kev Capital TA) says Jerome Powell has effectively signaled the wind-down of the Federal Reserve’s quantitative tightening program—an inflection he argues has historically unlocked altcoin outperformance and could underpin the next broad crypto rally.
He added, “The Fed telegraphs what they’re going to do with monetary policy… they don’t want to come out in surprise rate cuts or surprise rate hikes.” Several experts like BitMEX founder Arthur Hayes and Walter Bloomberg confirmed the interpretation via X.
FED’S POWELL: MAY BE APPROACHING END OF BALANCE SHEET CONTRACTION ‘IN COMING MONTHS’
Kevin’s core claim is unambiguous: durable altcoin cycles have required a neutral or expanding Fed balance sheet, and QT has marked their demise. “We know the correlation between the Fed’s balance sheet and durable altcoin outperformance is literally one-to-one… That’s it. That’s the correlation. It’s one to one. It’s 100% hit rate,” he said, pointing to a multi-year chart of “total others versus Bitcoin” that he has tracked “for years.” According to his read, every time QT has started, altcoins have entered a bear market against BTC; when the balance sheet has shifted to neutral or QE, “altcoin season is able to occur.”
While his macro read is overtly constructive, Kevin emphasized he is not trading it blindly. ” In practice, he is waiting for validation across two pillars: Bitcoin’s higher-timeframe moving averages and the USDT dominance structure.
The stablecoin gauge—USDT dominance—remains his market metronome. Kevin described a “classic textbook macro descending triangle” in USDT.D with a “flat bottom” near “3.9%–3.7%” and lower highs into two-week moving averages. “There’s a 70–80% chance that this descending triangle ends up breaking down and crypto goes higher,” he said, cautioning that a minority of such formations do break up. “I don’t plan on doing a thing until it does break… I ain’t going to be the guy who sat here this entire time tracking this incredible pattern… and then deviate away from it now.”
Beyond liquidity, Kevin addressed the perennial four-year-cycle debate head-on. By his dashboards—ROI since halving, ROI since cycle bottom—“you’re at the end of the cycle… the four-year cycle’s over.” But he argued that macro still governs whether price must top on schedule.
Technically, he remains cautious on breadth. He highlighted persistent weekly bearish divergences on Bitcoin, Total2 (large-cap ex-BTC), and Total3 (ex-BTC, ex-ETH), and the failure to secure decisive weekly closes above “120K–125K,” which, in his words, produced “two weekly reversal candles [and] a monthly reversal candle” and “lower highs in the weekly RSI.” The August-to-present message, he said, has been consistent: “Be cautious… If you’re in altcoins from way lower, take some profits… Don’t buy anything right now… wait for a resolution.”
Still, the QT call is the pivot he’s watching most closely. “We are at a critical stage in the history of crypto… I want a definitive answer.”
At press time, the total crypto market cap stood at $3.79 trillion.
