Speaking on his show, analyst Ran Neuer argued the coming rally will be driven primarily by altcoins rather than Bitcoin, calling it “crypto’s first real bull market.” His reasoning is that Bitcoin’s own bull market returns have shrunk with every cycle.
The first cycle delivered roughly a 100x return, the next dropped to around 15-18x, and the most recent completed cycle came in closer to 6-7x. Following that shrinking pattern, Neuer expects Bitcoin’s next move to be far more modest, roughly a 2x to 3x gain from current levels, potentially reaching $200,000 to $250,000.
Why He Thinks Altcoins Could Outperform Bitcoin By 7x
Neuer’s bigger thesis rests on a chart comparing “Others,” meaning altcoins excluding the top 10 by market cap, against Bitcoin’s price. He said this ratio has moved in a slight long-term uptrend, despite two painful boom-and-bust cycles along the way. The 2017 ICO run and the DeFi Summer run, both of which eventually collapsed back toward zero. Right now, according to Neuer, this ratio sits near the bottom of its historical channel. If it repeats a pattern he’s seen before, he estimates altcoins broadly could outperform Bitcoin by roughly 7x this cycle.
Combining The Numbers: A Possible 14x For Altcoins
Multiply Neuer’s conservative 2x Bitcoin estimate by his projected 7x altcoin outperformance, and the math points to altcoins delivering roughly 14x returns on average this cycle. Neuer acknowledged this sounds aggressive, but noted similar altcoin-to-Bitcoin outperformance ratios of 5x and 7x have happened in prior cycles.
He also pointed out that “average” hides enormous variation, some individual altcoins in past cycles moved 1,000x to 2,000x, far beyond the broader market average.
The Catalyst: AI Agents Trading On-Chain
Neuer’s conviction isn’t just chart pattern recognition. He referenced a call he made publicly back on July 28, during a stretch when Bitcoin had been chopping sideways for 57 days and most traders expected another leg down. At the time, Neuer argued that financial markets are moving toward 24/7, globally settled trading, and that the actual participants doing that trading won’t be humans at all, but an estimated 100 billion AI agents operating at a frequency no human trader could match.
Those agents, he argued, will need to settle transactions on blockchain rails, and the fees generated from that activity will flow to crypto-related protocols, disproportionately benefiting altcoins over Bitcoin itself.
What Comes Next
Neuer said he recently sat down with fellow analyst Raoul Pal to discuss this AI-driven thesis in more depth, with that conversation expected to be released within the next couple of days. His overall framing remains consistent: this cycle isn’t primarily a Bitcoin story, it’s a story about whether altcoins have finally found genuine product-market fit through AI-driven, on-chain economic activity, and if his thesis holds, he believes it could produce the largest altcoin rally crypto has seen to date.