For people who entered crypto in the last couple of years, the recent roller-coaster swings look like a sign that something has gone seriously wrong.
Key Takeaways
Leverton says volatility surprised everyone but does not signal a return to a prolonged bear cycle.
Accumulation near $85K and pending institutional/treasury adoption indicate demand is still growing.
Mining companies are diverging between Bitcoin-only and AI-HPC strategies, with energy efficiency determining long-term winners.
But longtime miners and infrastructure operators see the opposite: a market behaving irrationally in the short term while quietly strengthening underneath.
That contrast was highlighted by Jaime Leverton, one of the most experienced executives in the mining sector, who says that fear is highest among newer entrants, not organizations that have lived through multiple boom-and-bust eras.
Volatility Doesn’t Mean Weakness for Bitcoin
Instead of viewing the sell-off as the beginning of a drawn-out decline, Leverton argues that industry fundamentals look better than they did before the drop. The recovery from the slip below $90,000, she says, is not something a fragile market typically achieves. A “protection zone” has formed closer to $85,000, which reinforces the idea that long-horizon investors are still absorbing supply.
She believes the turbulence is psychological rather than structural — crypto traders saw what they expected to see, not what the data showed. In her view, sentiment may resemble past four-year halving cycles only because participants are conditioned to expect the pattern, not because the underlying economy demands it.
Big Capital Still Hasn’t Fully Entered — and That’s Fuel Waiting on the Sidelines
Leverton mentions that early institutional bidding — including Harvard’s buying activity — is only the beginning of what she expects to be a multi-year shift in corporate treasury management. Many companies building digital-asset strategies have not yet deployed capital. If stimulus checks return, they could amplify demand the same way they did during the 2020–2021 surge.
In other words, she sees more buyers waiting than sellers exiting.
Retail traders reacted immediately to the government shutdown, but Leverton believes the real impact wasn’t fear — it was delay. When federal operations paused, so did many capital-market processes. Now that activity is resuming, she expects incoming economic data to reshape sentiment quickly rather than dragging markets lower over time.
Mining Sector Doesn’t Agree on the Best Strategy — and That’s Not a Bad Thing
Leverton has watched mining evolve for years. Now, some miners are using their energy reserves for high-performance computing infrastructure serving AI, while others — including American Bitcoin, run by Eric Trump — are sticking exclusively to proof-of-work.
She doesn’t frame the split as right vs. wrong. In her view, energy efficiency decides winners: the companies that learn when to allocate power to Bitcoin and when to redirect it to HPC will lead innovation, regardless of philosophical stance.
A Correction Isn’t the Same as a Trend Shift
Leverton does not deny that volatility shocked the market — she openly admits no one predicted the timing or intensity. But she rejects the idea that this volatility equals the start of a classic bear cycle. For her, the story is simple: crypto is chaotic, not collapsing.
