The recent Bitcoin price crash is not just another dip in the market, according to analysts; it could be one of the most critical phases for its long-term bullish structure in this cycle. Crypto market expert Tara has emphasized that this ongoing retracement sets the foundation for Bitcoin’s next major bottom. Her analysis points to a potential Wave 5 correction that could drive the BTC price as low as $94,000 before the next major bullish trend begins.
Bitcoin Price Eyes Recovery After Wave 5 Retracement
In a technical analysis shared on X social media, Tara disclosed that Bitcoin’s latest price correction “is probably one of the most important retraces it will have in a long time.” She views the decline as an essential process that prepares the leading cryptocurrency for a strong rebound in the future. Based on her Elliott Wave analysis, there are only two waves left before the broader market shift begins.
The analyst notes that the primary reason the Bitcoin price crash is important is that it allows the Relative Strength Index (RSI) to recover, creating ideal conditions for a Bullish Divergence. Subsequently, this divergence could establish a solid bottom for BTC, which is a critical signal for the start of a renewed uptrend.
In her chart, Tara identifies a key Fibonacci Retracement zone between $103,400 and $104,900 as the resistance range for its current wave. The 0.382 Fib level is located near $103,478, where the Bitcoin price intersects with the Moving Average (MA), while the 0.5 Fib level aligns with $104,943. The analyst notes that this range could act as a crucial pivot zone before BTC resumes its correction in the final Wave 5 down to $94,000.
Additionally, the chart shows that Bitcoin is currently retracing from a previous low near the 0.618 Fibonacci Extension around $103,755.79. Trading volume has also declined by over 48% in the past 24 hours, while RSI remains weak at 33.96, signaling that the market is still oversold.
Why The Path To $94,000 Matters For The Next Bull Cycle
In responding to questions from crypto community members under her X post, Tara clarified that Bitcoin could first rise to $104,000, representing a 0.97% increase from current levels above $103,000, before crashing 9.6% to $94,000. She expects a price bottom to occur quickly and soon, whereas it may take longer for Bitcoin to build solid support before reversing into a new bullish phase.
Tara stated that the ongoing retracement could peak around the day of her analysis, but the bottom might take a few more days to form. Despite the anticipated “pain,” she reassured market watchers that the correction is necessary for Bitcoin’s next leg higher. She also emphasized that the market may not feel bullish until mid-December 2025.
Over the years, I have experienced that sinking sensation of the investor-CEO disagreement in that first board meeting.
After the back-and-forth negotiation of the deal process, each side having played its hand, everyone gathers for that first board meeting and — surprise! One side or the other shares information or intentions not revealed pre-signing, in a way that can’t be easily reconciled between the private equity partner and the founder or CEO.
Through 25 years in private equity, I am not alone.
The nature of the frustration and emotion with the First Board Meeting Surprise is not that something arose post-investment: It is that something knowable in advance of the deal comes to light after closing and is a material change to expectations.
The surprises I’m referring to don’t arise from bad actors trying to intentionally mislead. In fact, it’s because they regularly occur among well-intentioned individuals that these surprises are so maddening.
Case in point
Bob Morse
For instance, consider the operating partner who shows up at the first board meeting and shares vetted candidates to replace an executive the CEO feels loyal to.
The CEO wonders why he was kept in the dark about his new investor’s view on this key executive before signing. Perhaps, thinks the CEO, there are other things I wasn’t told. The new investors wonder why the CEO is reluctant to build an “A” team. Perhaps, thinks the operating partner, this is not our kind of CEO. Neither side backs down; both feel justified. That is a First Board Meeting Surprise.
It’s embarrassing for all concerned, and it happens more frequently than we’d all like to admit. Research from Alix Partners found that roughly three quarters of portfolio company CEOs are replaced during a fund’s hold period, with a majority of those happening in the first two years.
While the sponsor and the founder/CEO want to be aligned, the dynamics of the investment process work against them.
The purchase of a company is a one-time, distributive negotiation with large dollars at stake, and it can be adversarial, full of tension and tiring. On the other hand, the relationship between investor and CEO in operating and building a company is a repeat-player game. That game requires a completely different approach.
Stay prepared
Our solution to the First Board Meeting Surprise problem is to adopt repeat-player thinking before signing the deal. What would happen if our underwriting plans — due diligence findings, best “secret sauce” ideas, and proposed actions — were shared with the founder and agreed to in writing before signing the deal?
It’s not without risks. The founder/CEO might see our work and insist on a higher price, shop those ideas to a competing bidder, or simply adopt our best ideas without taking our investment at all. The founder/CEO might disagree with the course of action entirely and simply walk away. We then lose a deal we could otherwise have closed.
But perhaps the founder/CEO would be excited about the action plan, provide input to improve it, and refocus their energy entirely on where we were going to go together. And, because nothing knowable in advance of the deal on our side would remain hidden, and reciprocal engagement from the founder/CEO on the plan would reveal their true views on critical items, there would be no First Board Meeting Surprise.
Putting this into practice can feel risky for those used to the traditional information-control approach to closing deals. It was for me. Just before founding Strattam Capital, I was trying to recruit a CEO I held in high regard to lead a new platform investment we were evaluating.
He was wary, so I shared our underwriting and diligence. He insisted that we commit to building out a full product suite and adding to the leadership team, so I went to the investment committee and secured an upfront commitment for follow-on capital. Ultimately, we put a set of five actions down on a single page, shook hands, and only then signed the deal.
On the day the deal was announced, he shared that action plan in his all-hands meeting, and it formed the agenda for the first board meeting. Intermedia grew several-fold in size to become a UCaaS leader. I have that one-pager framed on my desk today.
The five-point plan
We turned that approach into a process we call the Five-Point Plan, which requires us and the CEO to agree up front on post-transaction actions. That means we not only agree on the five key actions to take after the deal closes, but the CEO knows he or she has the resources and support to execute them. More importantly, we’ve eliminated the problem of the First Board Meeting Surprise because no one has any surprises to share.
We have accepted that the price for materially improving sponsor-CEO alignment in the deals we do close is that we will lose some deals we could have closed but for agreement on the Five Point Plan. In practice, we have closed several dozen founder-led deals versus a handful of walk-aways. Both we and the founder are better off without doing those deals where we would have discovered a fundamental disagreement the day after closing.
Expecting the unexpected
Of course, the world always intervenes, and the moment the deal closes, events unfold: tariffs, interest rate changes, AI breakthroughs and so on. While we all expect the world to change around us, there are some surprises we can avoid.
We can minimize the risk of friction between the CEO and Board due to differing goals. We can begin our repeat-player relationship before signing the deal.
In the founder-led technology buyouts, we believe that a more transparent pre-signing investment process, like our Five-Point Plan, is the most promising way to begin a partnership between a private equity sponsor and a founder/CEO. I am sharing this approach in the interest of encouraging others to experiment with it. Consider showing your hand more openly before closing. Invite the founder/CEO to do the same. See what happens.
The latest raise follows a recent $1 billion tender offer at the same valuation, the company says. However, reports claim that Ripple “came up empty-handed” after the attempt to buy back $1 billion worth of shares from employees.
Meanwhile, Ripple executives say the new fundraise follows the company’s “strongest year to date.”
“We started in 2012 with one use case – payments – and have expanded that success into custody, stablecoins, prime brokerage and corporate treasury, leveraging digital assets like XRP,” Brad Garlinghouse, Ripple CEO, said in a release. “Today, Ripple stands as the partner for institutions looking to access crypto and blockchain.”
Global venture funding to financial technology startups in 2025 has, as of Nov. 5, reached $43.5 billion across 3,188 deals, per Crunchbase data. That’s a 26.8% increase in dollars raised compared to the $34.3 billion raised across 4,214 deals during the same time period in 2024.
Growing acquisitions
It has been a busy couple of years for the fintech company. In just over two years, Ripple has completed six acquisitions, per Crunchbase data, including two valued at over $1 billion each. Those buys helped the company expand its footprint across payments, custody and stablecoins, while entering new markets in prime brokerage and treasury management.
For example, in April, Ripple announced it was acquiring brokerage house Hidden Road for $1.25 billion in one of the biggest M&A deals ever in crypto.
It’s been a good year for the crypto sector. Shares of blockchain lender Figure closed up 24.4% at $31.11 in first-day trading. More recently, shares have been trading in the $38 range.
And in early June, shares of Circleclosed up 168% at $83.29 in their first day of trading on the New York Stock Exchange, minting the stablecoin issuer with a market cap of around $16.7 billion and renewing hopes for an IPO market rebound. More recently, shares have traded in the $118 range.
Why acquire a startup when you can get a piece of it instead?
Increasingly, that’s the mindset of the world’s most valuable technology companies.
Over the past couple years, the top tech giants have made comparatively few big-ticket purchases of venture-backed companies. However, the Big Five — Nvidia, Apple, Microsoft, Google and Amazon — have been actively and extravagantly investing in startups, particularly of the AI variety.
Those stakes are adding up. Last week, OpenAI and Microsoft drove home the reality of just how valuable a startup investment can become.
Under an updated company structure OpenAI unveiled last week, Microsoft holds 27% of OpenAI Group, its for-profit arm. That stake is worth around $135 billion, based on the generative AI unicorn’s recently reported $500 billion valuation.
Other big solo stakes
Microsoft’s OpenAI stake looks to be the most valuable private startup holding by one of the five largest technology companies. It’s also the most expensive investment, with Microsoft shelling out $10 billion in a 2023 financing, as well as backing follow-on rounds.
However, other tech giants have also poured billions into startup deals in the past couple years. These include both solo financings and investments made as part of broader syndicates.
Not surprisingly, the largest solo investments have mostly gone to generative AI leaders, topped by Anthropic and OpenAI. These are both strategic and financial investments, as the tech giants jockey to maintain their market edge in the AI age.
Lead syndicate investments
More commonly, the Big Five invest as part of syndicates. They don’t always insist on leading rounds, but they often do.
Many of those deals turn out to be quite large. To illustrate, we used Crunchbase data to put together a list of the largest financings of the last couple years with one of the tech giants as lead or co-lead investor.
Besides the strategic benefits the tech giants derive from these investments, they’re also generating enormous paper wealth.
Take Microsoft’s OpenAI stake. At $135 billion, it’s more than 6x larger than the purchase price of the largest completed private startup acquisition to date. (Meta’s 2014 purchase of WhatsApp).
We don’t know the precise value of Amazon’s stake in Anthropic, but it’s also certain to be sizable. The e-commerce and cloud giant committed to invest $8 billion in the Gen AI company in 2023 and 2024.
With Anthropic’s valuation nearly tripling over a six-month period this year to hit $183 billion, Amazon’s stake has obviously appreciated. Ditto for Google, which also invested in the company at lower valuations.
Not just giant rounds
The Big Five aren’t just making huge AI investments. They’re also actively partaking in startup rounds at various sizes and stages.
Per Crunchbase data, so far this year, the group 1 has made at least 208 disclosed startup investments, with those rounds collectively valued at just over $70 billion. 2 Annual deal count for the prior four years also held up at similar levels, as charted below.
Why invest in startups rather than acquire them? It’s probably not a money issue. Given that the five top tech companies have a combined market capitalization of over $18 trillion, they can afford to buy pretty much any startup they want.
More likely, tech giants see strategic advantages in owning stakes of the most promising upstarts in relevant sectors. And seeing how many of these companies have shot up in valuation, there are financial gains to be had too.
Includes investments by the companies directly as well as through Microsoft’s M12, Nvidia’s Nventures and Google’s GV venture arms.↩
Collective value includes lead and non-lead rounds. For syndicate rounds, the individual investors’ shares are not broken out. For 2025, most of that total is due to Microsoft’s participation in the SoftBank-led $40 billion financing for OpenAI.↩
Login
