What happened
Raoul Pal, the former Goldman Sachs trader who runs Real Vision and Global Macro Investor, posted a chart on Wednesday plotting Bitcoin against the Nasdaq from the November 2022 cycle low. Bitcoin sits 318% higher across that window, ahead of the index by a wide margin on a percentage basis, per BeInCrypto's reporting on his post. Pal used the chart as a single-image rebuttal to the 'crypto is dead' framing that has cropped up in financial press during the recent grind.
His argument is the one he's been running for two years: Bitcoin is a liquidity asset, global M2 is still expanding, and the cycle is not over because the macro tape says it isn't.
Why it matters
Pal sits on the short list of macro voices crypto traders actually listen to during a drawdown. When sentiment cracks, his liquidity chart gets passed around in group chats and on trading desks because it offers a framework, not a price target. The 'crypto is dead' narrative isn't new - it surfaces every time spot Bitcoin trades sideways for more than a few weeks - but it carries more weight in 2026 because the ETF complex was supposed to smooth out these patches.
It hasn't. Pal's post is an attempt to reset the lens: judge the cycle on the macro liquidity curve, not on three weeks of range-bound tape. Whether that holds depends on what M2 actually does into the back half of the year.
Market impact
The post didn't move price in any visible way, and it wasn't meant to. The signal is in sentiment, not flow. Crypto Twitter response was split along the usual lines: macro accounts amplified the chart, while shorter-timeframe traders pointed out that 'beating the Nasdaq since 2022' tells you nothing about whether the next six weeks chop or trend.