This is a daily technical analysis by CoinDesk analyst and Chartered Market Technician Omkar Godbole.

Bitcoin (BTC) has finally surpassed a key resistance that limited recovery rallies earlier this year, after rising over 5% to $93,500 in 24 hours.

The leading digital asset by market value has topped the «Ichimoku Cloud,» confirming a bullish shift in momentum, while other major cryptocurrencies lag.

The Ichimoku cloud, developed by a Japanese journalist in the 1960s, is used to identify support and resistance, momentum, and trend change in price actions. The indicator comprises five lines: Leading Span A, Leading Span B, and the gap between the two representing the cloud, Conversion Line or Tenkan-Sen (T), Base Line or Kijun-Sen (K), and a lagging closing price line.

Crossovers above and below the cloud represent bullish and bearish shifts in the market trend, and BTC has moved above the cloud, as seen in the chart below.

The bullish breakout means the cloud can now act as support, arresting potential price pullbacks just as it acted as resistance, capping recovery rallies in February and March. BTC is also back to trading above the widely tracked 50-, 100-, and 200-day simple moving averages (SMAs).

This move now puts the focus on the resistance at $100K, a major psychological level, followed by record highs above $109K. Meanwhile, support is seen at $88,550, which marks the convergence of the 200-day SMA and the Ichimoku cloud.

A move below the same would negate the bullish outlook.

Altcoins lag

Major altcoins such as payments-focused XRP, leading meme token DOGE, Cardano’s ADA, Ethereum’s native token ETH, and Solana’s SOL are yet to chart a BTC-like bullish breakout above the Ichimoku cloud.

The above coins, though buoyant alongside BTC’s ascent, have yet to make their respective bullish breakouts.

They call him “El Presidente.” But unlike the other President, Dave Portnoy draws a line at launching a memecoin. He worries his followers will lose their shirts.

“I got involved in memecoins because I wanted to launch a Barstool memecoin, but I didn’t want my fans and followers to lose money,” he said in an interview with CoinDesk. Memecoins are “legalized Ponzi schemes,” he said, “there’s no value to it, so you gotta get in and get out before it crashes.” [Note: memecoins aren’t legalized in the U.S. but they are popular.]

While Portnoy hasn’t launched a Barstool branded memecoin, he has launched other memecoins. In February he launched GREED, a token that reached a market cap of $41.5 million. According to Lookonchain, Portnoy bought 357.92M $GREED, totalling 35.79% of the total supply, then sold all in a single transaction causing the price to crash. He made around $258,000.

The Barstool Sports founder took to X in the aftermath to say, “I warned people I could sell. I could have cashed out +1 million. I let it drop 75% before cashing out. Lots of people made money. I took profits + poured it into #jailstool which I can’t touch. I didn’t make a dime on it. Some people won. Some lost. Only the losers keep bitching.”

Portnoy started trading stocks during the COVID-19 pandemic, and even launched the YouTube channel Davey Day Trader, where fans could follow his trades. His trades weren’t always successful, and there wasn’t always a clear strategy, but they were entertaining. At one point, he pulled letters out of a Scrabble bag, put RTX (Raytheon Technologies Corporation) together, and put $200,000 into the stock.

It was around this time that Portnoy was introduced to bitcoin. “I don’t think you can be involved in anything, stock market [or] finance without crypto being a major part of it,” he says now. He has a love/hate relationship with bitcoin because he says he’s “been on the wrong side of it every time it rips.” Over the years he’s also experimented with investing in cryptocurrencies like XRP.

Although Portnoy got into memecoins because he wanted to launch one for the Barstool community, he admits that he still doesn’t understand how to implement blockchain technology or cryptocurrencies into his business model. Barstool once accepted bitcoin as part of its Barstool Fund to help small businesses, but out of $50 million raised, he said only $30,000 came from bitcoin.

“They talked big, big talk, but it didn’t work out,” he said, reflecting on the bitcoin community who persuaded him to accept the cryptocurrency. “Crypto is the league leader in people telling you what [you] should be doing, and it’s also the league leader in people I don’t trust.”

Portnoy has experimented with memecoins, bitcoin, and even launched an NFT attached to his popular One Bite Pizza Reviews YouTube channel that sold for $138,000. And, although he doesn’t always understand them, he says “as much as I have back and forth with the crypto community, I actually love them. I think they’re hilarious […] an interesting group, which I guess I’m a part of.”

Dave Portnoy will be sharing more about his crypto journey at Consensus 2025 in Toronto on May 15. Get your tickets here.

The maturation of DeFi technology has created a paradox: while battle-tested codebases and rising technical proficiency have lowered the barrier to entry for launching new protocols, securing sustainable liquidity has never been harder. As thousands of projects built on increasingly standardized infrastructure compete for a finite pool of capital, the ecosystem faces a systemic challenge that threatens genuine innovation and growth.

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The multi-dimensional fragmentation problem

Liquidity in DeFi is fragmented across protocols, chains and token pairs. For new protocols, securing adequate liquidity is existential — without it, user adoption stalls, costs rise, yields fall and the growth flywheel fails to accrete value. This creates a fundamental challenge: every new DEX, lending platform or yield farm must compete for the same finite pool of capital, further dividing available liquidity. The demand for liquidity vastly outstrips the influx of new capital.

The traditional finance concept of «cost of capital» has evolved into «cost of liquidity» in DeFi, but without standardized frameworks to price this risk, protocols struggle to acquire the capital they need to launch and grow effectively. Protocols use their native tokens, ecosystem funds and sometimes their own capital to attract early liquidity. Some under-incentivize, failing to attract liquidity providers. Others over-incentivize, depleting treasuries and creating sell pressure when token incentives unlock. Both approaches ultimately undermine long-term sustainability.

The VC-protocol tension

This mispricing creates a fundamental tension for projects with VC backing. Investors who fund portfolio companies via simple agreements for future tokens (SAFTs) want protocols to attract sufficient liquidity for growth and utility. However, aggressive liquidity incentive programs directly dilute their token holdings.

The result is often unsustainable tokenomics: high initial emissions to bootstrap liquidity, creating artificial success metrics that collapse when incentives decrease. This pattern hampers genuine innovation, as truly novel approaches face disproportionately higher costs to attract capital.

Market opacity and information asymmetry

The problem is compounded by lack of transparency. Most significant liquidity arrangements occur through private over-the-counter (OTC) deals with unclear terms. New protocols have no visibility into market rates for comparable arrangements, while established players and insider networks control capital flow.

Without standardized risk assessment frameworks, liquidity providers struggle to evaluate opportunities effectively. This leads to inconsistent risk premiums across similar protocols and capital concentration in projects with familiar designs rather than superior technology and innovation.

Toward a solution: a neutral liquidity layer

What the ecosystem needs is connectivity between capital and protocols — a chain-agnostic, protocol-neutral layer focused on efficient capital routing. Such a system would:

1. Create visibility into liquidity costs across protocols and chains.
2. Establish risk-adjusted benchmarks for different protocol categories.
3. Enable protocols to structure sustainable incentive models.
4. Help capital providers deploy strategically based on transparent risk metrics.

Establishing a system like this isn’t about introducing new financial products, but creating a shared understanding of liquidity pricing that aligns incentives between capital allocators and protocols.

Looking forward

As DeFi matures, standardizing liquidity coordination and risk assessment will be essential for capital efficiency. The protocols that thrive should be those that solve real problems and bring real innovation to the space, not necessarily those with the most aggressive incentives.

The challenge is clear: demand for liquidity in DeFi is effectively infinite and the finite supply is existentially important. Yet the infrastructure, services, and pricing mechanisms that determine how capital flows from holders to users have significantly lagged behind protocol innovation. Addressing this infrastructure gap represents not just an opportunity to increase efficiency, but a necessity for the sustainable growth of the entire DeFi ecosystem.