According to the analyst, waiting for universal confirmation of a market bottom could mean missing the strongest early opportunities.
ByWayne Jones
Crypto trader Axel Bitblaze has laid out a fresh market thesis built on a video from analyst Taiki Maeda, arguing that assets like Hyperliquid (HYPE), Lighter (LIT), and Zcash (ZEC) are already trading like winners of the next cycle while most investors are waiting for a fourth-quarter bottom.
He says that markets tend to move before the crowd agrees a bottom has formed, so the better window to position could be mid-to-late Q3 and not whenever things look safe.
The Case for HYPE, LIT, and ZEC
On July 15, Maeda shared a video on his X account in which he said that crypto was bottoming and that he would be longing HYPE, LIT, and ZEC.
His take was expanded on by Bitblaze in a July 16 post, who noted that Hyperliquid has bought back about 3.4% of the circulating HYPE supply this year, allowing the token to perform well even as sector mainstays such as <a href="https://cryptoz7.com/new-york-ban-threatens-bitcoin-miners-new-revenue-stream/” title=”New York ban threatens Bitcoin miners' new revenue stream”>Bitcoin (BTC) struggled.
“If BTC volatility causes another $HYPE dip without changing its fundamentals… that could be an accumulation opportunity,” wrote the analyst.
Lighter’s LIT token was presented as a higher-risk alternative, with Bitblaze crediting its reported partnership with Robinhood for giving the decentralized perpetual exchange access to a much wider audience. He also noted that buybacks have removed more than 6% of LIT’s circulating supply, helping to push it to an all-time high on the second-to-last day of 2025, when many altcoins were losing ground.
Meanwhile, ZEC carries the most caution. In his market update video, Maeda said he sold the privacy coin after the discovery of a vulnerability in its Orchard shielded pool that could have allowed bad actors to create unlimited amounts of fake ZEC, triggering a 60% collapse. He did, however, buy most of the ZEC back after reassessing the project’s outlook, with the Ironwood upgrade set for July 28 expected to introduce stronger quantum resistance and use formal verification to reduce the risk of hidden bugs.
That update could help push up the asset’s price. Recall that last week, Zcash founder Zooko Wilcox said that they were close to producing a mathematical proof that Ironwood’s new shielded pools have no undetectable counterfeiting bugs, taking ZEC’s price past $500
