Do you remember the era when you could judge a coin’s price just by reading the whitepaper and counting community activity? That era is long gone.

The rules of the crypto world have changed completely. You stay up all night tracking a project’s technical updates, only to see the price crash the next day—not because of a bug in the code, but because a CPI figure was released on the other side of the ocean. This is the current reality: Bitcoin’s fate is likely more in the hands of the Federal Reserve than in Satoshi Nakamoto’s logic.

There’s a technical term for this phenomenon—“token equity-ization.” Sounds academic? But the data doesn’t lie.

Since 2020, Bitcoin and the Nasdaq 100 index have moved more and more like twin brothers. Their correlation coefficient has stayed above 0.5 for a long period, even spiking to 0.8 at its peak. In plain English: more than half of Bitcoin’s price fluctuations can be explained by the rise and fall of tech stocks. Just think about it, something that claims to be “decentralized”