Bitcoin’s ‘biggest bull catalyst’ would be Saylor’s liquidation: Santiment founder

The Bitcoin market would definitely bottom if Michael Saylor’s Strategy gets rekt, says Maksim Balashevich, founder of the crypto sentiment platform Santiment.

“The biggest bull catalyst will be the liquidation of Saylor,” Balashevich tells Magazine.

“The bull catalyst is when everything is bad. So bad it cannot be even worse,” the Switzerland-based crypto entrepreneur says.

“It will be a final blow. But it’s a bull signal; it is the strongest. It’s like FTX crashing,” he says. When crypto exchange FTX collapsed in November 2022, Bitcoin dropped to around $15,500. By June, the price had doubled to around $30,000. At the time, FTX’s disgraced founder Sam Bankman-Fried was seen as the poster boy for crypto.

Strategy currently holds 771,992 Bitcoin, roughly 3.7% of the total Bitcoin supply, and some speculate that if market conditions worsen and persist for long enough, the company could be forced to sell or reduce its holdings to meet liquidity and operational needs. Others point out that Strategy’s debt matures between late 2027 and 2032, so it has plenty of time yet. 

Balashevich is speaking speculatively, and there are no public signs that Strategy is planning to sell anytime soon. “I’m not sure if it can even happen…but his shareholders [could] push him to sell something or move him out of the board,” Balashevich says.

We’re sick of winning, President Trump

Balashevich says the current market decline began around the time of US President Donald Trump’s inauguration, which was widely seen as a major bullish catalyst for crypto.

“What can be better for crypto? Yeah, and exactly at the time, it just goes down,” he says.

Bitcoin jumped to $109,000 around Trump’s inauguration in January 2025. Its most recent all-time high, reached nine months later in October, was only about 15% higher at $126,100, before the market reversed, and the price has since slid back to around $70,000.

Balashevich believes a major fear-driven event would reassure investors that a market bottom has formed and doesn’t think prices are that far from that point. “I mean, it already feels painful,” Balashevich says.

Santiment is famous for noting how often market sentiment foreshadows moves in the opposite direction.

Balashevich’s love for crypto sentiment

Balashevich is obsessed with how sentiment and psychology shape crypto markets. In 2016, he founded Santiment, a platform that tracks market mood across social media, including X, Facebook, Discord, and, until recently, Telegram.

“We temporarily removed Telegram. It became kind of spammy. I don’t know what’s going on, but there are some massive inflow of spam,” he says.

Before launching the platform almost a decade ago, Balashevich would spend hours scanning online discussion forums to gauge overall market sentiment. He’d then turn his observations into reports for his public following, relying mostly on reading enough to get a gut feel for the trend.

“When I read something, I get the underlying intentions and emotions of discussion,” he says.

Santiment now has a team of 42 full-time staff and trained data engineers worldwide. Balashevich no longer spends hours combing through Reddit threads, as machine learning models now handle the heavy lifting.

Despite the market maturing, with institutional interest and crypto exchange-traded funds (ETFs) launching worldwide, Balashevich still holds firm conviction that sentiment is a crucial indicator for crypto.

How does Santiment actually work?

Many skeptics probably glance at all these flashy crypto sentiment tools and wonder: Should I be using social media trackers to make financial decisions?

“I would put it this way, it was, is, and always will be the most important,” he says.

Balashevich explains that Santiment collects data from a broad range of crypto-focused social media accounts representing diverse market perspectives, not just bullish shillers, to provide a more balanced view of sentiment.

“Maybe 9000 curated accounts,” he says, emphasizing that the list is audited regularly.

“To build in the sentiment, it has to be big data,” he says, adding that there are “a lot of moving parts.”

He explains that Santiment’s machine learning model pulls in thousands of posts from various social media platforms and automatically tags them as “bullish,” “bearish,” or other categories. Behind the scenes, it does a bunch of complex stuff most people don’t see, and then spits out a simple score anyone can understand.

“We collect a lot of messages, label them, cluster them, put them together, and then run other models to assign values, and then some statistical mathematics, and then we build the value,” he says.

While Balashevich stresses the importance of sentiment, he emphasizes that it should be just one of several indicators guiding market decisions.

$250K ‘looks less likely’ in 2026

In the short-term, Balashevich thinks Bitcoin might be hovering around a temporary bottom. 

He expects a short-term recovery to $92,000-$95,000, but warns that the rally could be interrupted by another sell-off.

“A second wave might come to emerge, this sale, liquidation level narrative,” he says.

Looking further ahead, Balashevich is skeptical of the chances of Bitcoin reaching $250,000 in 2026 and says it is looking “less likely.” 

However, he says eventually, it will “most likely happen.”

“Just give it time,” he says, adding, “we just don’t know when.”