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Bitcoin bear

Bloomberg analyst outlines all the reasons he’s sticking with his call that bitcoin will crater to $10,000

His one caveat: if it can hold the $75,000 level, bitcoin bulls may “prove him wrong.” Other experts called his prediction an “attention-grabbing extreme” and “almost unimaginable.”

Bitcoin remains stuck in a tight range, falling back to around $68,500 on Tuesday morning, down 1.5% in the past 24 hours as President Trump’s Iran deadline looms.

While most experts agree that the lack of catalysts and geopolitical tensions are preventing bitcoin from significantly breaking either way in the short term, one has a different, extremely bearish view.

Mike McGlone, Bloomberg’s senior commodity strategist, has stayed firm on his prediction for bitcoin to crater to $10,000. But this time, he added a caveat: the asset could “prove him wrong” by “staying above $75,000,” a level not reached since mid-March.

McGlone told Sherwood News that $75,000 was moved down from around $94,000 at the start of 2026 as a “potential prudent short level in a primary leading indicator and risk asset.”

“My base case for 2026 is surging volatility in gold and crude oil will migrate to the stock market, and peaking cryptos in 2025 were a precursor. Only a trickle so far. Gold and crude oil 180-day volatility has risen about 45% in 2026 to April 6, but has fallen on the S&P 500 about 3%. It’s never happened — stock market volatility staying so low with crude and gold volatility surging,” McGlone said.

He argued that when beta falls, the tide goes out for all risk assets, and crypto assets are among the riskiest and most vulnerable “to some overdue reversion of the millions, worth billions of dollars, but tracking nothing of substance.”

“Bitcoin may have the blessing and curse of being first... Crude oil surges can break stuff, and 2026 may have found its catalyst akin to 2008,” McGlone said.

“I made the same call for bitcoin to lose a zero from around $10,000 in 2018. Was 70% right, 30% wrong — the low was about $3,000,” he added.

While sentiment around bitcoin is far from bullish currently, many experts view McGlone’s view as extreme, citing bitcoin’s structural maturation and the emergence of bitcoin ETFs as support, among other factors.

“It’s mostly only an attention-grabbing extreme,” Andri Fauzan Adziima, research lead at Bitrue, told Sherwood. “It ignores spot ETFs, institutional and corporate adoption, ongoing halvings, tightening supply, and bitcoin’s maturation as digital gold and collateral.”

Fauzan Adziima argued that a more than 85% crash from current levels would require “near-apocalyptic conditions like total flight from the asset class, which feels detached from today’s hardened network effects and support floors.”

While deep corrections to the $40,000 to $50,000 level remain plausible in a severe recession, he said, a full reversion to pre-stimulus $10,000 is “low-probability theater at best.”

Another counterargument is that bitcoin ETFs have an enormous influence on bitcoin’s price, making the asset very different from what it was a few years ago.

Nic Roberts-Huntley, CEO and cofounder of Blueprint Finance, told Sherwood that the market of 2026 is unrecognizable from the pre-ETF era of 2020. McGlone’s $10,000 prediction “fails to account for the $1.5 billion in net ETF inflows we saw just this past month, while retail sentiment was at ‘Extreme Fear.’”

Roberts-Huntley continued, “We no longer operate in a speculative vacuum. We are seeing a structural floor being built by billions in institutional capital and corporate treasuries that simply did not exist during previous cycles.” He added that while bitcoin may face short-term resistance at the $75,000 level, the idea of a ~90% reversion ignores the reality of the current cost basis for the world’s largest asset managers.

“It is almost unimaginable to see the price fall to $10,000 without these institutions seeing it as the ‘buy of a lifetime’ before it gets there. That’s not to say we won’t continue to see price volatility, but it’s important to be realistic rather than alarmist,” he said.  

One point on which many agree with McGlone is the $75,000 level, which remains technically and psychologically important.

Nic Puckrin, CEO and cofounder of Coin Bureau, told Sherwood that while “BTC at $10K is an extreme call,” the $75,000 level is a reasonable one to watch.

“If bitcoin breaks above that level and holds, there is more support and momentum to the upside. But remaining below this level doesn’t mean it will suddenly crash to $10K,” Puckrin said.

Fauzan Adziima echoed the sentiment, calling $75,000 “the key near-term gatekeeper.”

“Holding above it keeps the bear thesis at bay, while a decisive break could accelerate downside pressure,” he said.

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Solana drops to price not seen since February as Drift exploit rattles sentiment

Solana has historically seen its largest price declines on Thursdays, and today is no exemption as the crypto industry reels from the over $270 million exploit that occurred yesterday on Drift, a trading venue native to the solana blockchain.

The price of solana has decreased 5.5% to around $78, a level not seen since February, data from CoinGecko shows.

Drift was one of the largest protocols on the solana network by total value locked, which now sits at nearly $245 million. The total value locked on solana has shrunk by nearly $1 billion since the incident, per DefiLlama.

Exploit likely involved from social engineering

The attack, which has turned into a wider contagion event, is unsettling for those in the industry. It did not come from a bug in the protocol’s smart contracts or programs. Humans remain the bottleneck, Mert Mumtaz, cofounder and CEO of solana development firm Helius, said in response to the incident.

The exploit involved unauthorized transaction approvals likely facilitated through social engineering. The sophisticated operation “appears to have involved multi-week preparation and staged execution,” the team said on Thursday. 

Omer Goldberg, founder of risk management firm Chaos Labs, added, The DeFi [decentralized finance] ecosystem continues to grow in scale, but not in operational security.

“Protocols now have custody of hundreds of millions in user funds while depending on admin key setups that would be considered unacceptable in TradFi for a fraction of that AUM [assets under management],” Goldberg wrote on X. 

“Most hacks come down to the simple act of one clicking a link they shouldn’t have clicked. These are picking up in pace, be extra cautious clicking any link or file,” continued Helius Mumtaz.

$270M

April 1 is known as a day for funny pranks. However, a popular trading venue on the solana blockchain, Drift, is suffering from an ongoing exploit today, on-chain data shows.

Drift Protocol is experiencing an active attack. Deposits and withdrawals have been suspended. We are coordinating with multiple security firms, bridges, and exchanges to contain the incident. This is not an April Fools joke,” the team said on social media at 2:58 p.m. ET.

TheBlock reported the exploit is at least $200 million, while blockchain sleuth Lookonchain estimates the figure is $270 million. It could be even more. At this range, the Wednesday hack is among the largest ever, according to the exploits ranking dashboard from Rekt.

Drifts exploit is concerning for those within the crypto industry. Solana treasury firm DeFi Development Corp. allocates a portion of its balance to on-chain strategies to generate yield, including Drift, though the firm announced it had no exposure to the protocol and was not impacted by an alleged exploit affecting the platform, per its press release.

Drift also provides to qualified users sACRED, a derivative token of a tokenized feeder fund that is linked to Apollo Global Management Inc.s traditional Diversified Credit Fund.

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