“People need to learn that institutions are not there for their best interest.” That is Michael van de Poppe, about ninety seconds into our fifth interview together, at Dutch Blockchain Week 2026. I have learned to let him run when he starts like that, because what follows is usually the part nobody else will say on camera.
Over the next twenty minutes he laid out who he thinks is really moving this market, why he calls Michael Saylor “the ideal scapegoat,” why his own public portfolio is down 45% while he keeps buying, and why he is bullish for the next six to twelve months when almost everyone around him is bracing for worse. I run these interviews myself, so let me pull out what actually matters.
| What you need to know |
|---|
| 1Michael van de Poppe argues large institutions use liquidity to push Bitcoin down, shake out fearful holders, and accumulate cheaply. |
| 2He calls Michael Saylor "the ideal scapegoat" and says the real movers are funds like Jane Street that operate behind the scenes. |
| 3His public portfolio is down 45% while the wider market is down 80%, and he says he stays loyal to his strategy on purpose. |
| 4He is contrarian-bullish for the next six to twelve months and tells holders on non-compliant exchanges to move before the MiCA deadline. |
Who really moves the market
I asked Michael about the fear gripping the market and the calls for Bitcoin to fall to 40k. He did not buy the panic narrative. “The big guys with all the liquidity are coming into the markets to manipulate and move the markets in their advantage,” he said. In his telling, fear is not a side effect; it is the product. “There is a lot of fear right now, people feel they want to sell or short Bitcoin, and that’s the ideal recipe for those institutions to get more Bitcoin and then return the markets back up.”
He is blunt about who that means. “It’s not that Saylor is moving the markets,” he said. “It’s Jane Street and all the other big guys that say, hey, that’s interesting, probably a lot of people will fear out of this, so let’s push the markets down so we can scoop up some more.” The people losing out, he added, “are the ones not getting the information that is inside those groups.”
Saylor, the “ideal scapegoat”
Much of the current fear has clustered around Strategy and its STRC preferred-stock model. Michael thinks the story is being used. “Michael Saylor is the ideal scapegoat,” he told me. “If he creates a product that is not perfect, then they will find that spot and they utilize that for their own win.” His read on the man himself is just as unsentimental: “He’s not as big as everyone makes him to be. If he buys two billion in Bitcoin the markets do nothing; when he sells like 50 Bitcoin, it’s not that he’s moving the markets.”
The pressure is real enough on paper. Strategy has sold Bitcoin to fund the dividend on its STRC preferred stock, a notable shift for a company that built its name on never selling. Michael’s point is not that Strategy is irrelevant, but that the bigger players hide behind its headlines. “We shouldn’t really give him all the credit,” he said, “neither should we all give him credit when everything goes well.”
“Maybe it’s just plain stupidity”
I asked what keeps him loyal to a strategy when it is bleeding. His answer became its own soundbite. “To be honest, maybe it’s just plain stupidity for most of the time,” he said, then turned serious. “Having such a public outcome portfolio is the way for me to continue pushing myself forward. I have the obligation to myself to trade the best I can, to research the best I can, because it’s also public.”
The numbers are stark and he owns them. “I’ve been DCAing over the past six, seven months, and I am only down 45% compared to everything being down 80%,” he said. His MN Fund, by contrast, “is just down three percent over a year, which for a long-only fund is extremely well.” The gap is deliberate: “When I invest for an external investor, I need to be way more conservative. For me personally I can take the bet, because that’s what I feel comfortable with.”
That discipline-over-conviction theme runs through these interviews. Blockrift’s Ihor Sukharev told me trading is “20% strategy and 80% discipline,” and Bitvavo’s Julian Hƶtzel gave a more cautious read on where the market goes next. Michael sits at the aggressive end of that spectrum, on purpose.
The bubble, and the tokens that finally matter
Michael is not a permabull on everything. “We have been living in a bubble where we thought crypto was actually adding value,” he said, “but we created tokens without an actual reason to have those tokens.” What has changed, in his view, is that a handful of protocols now earn their valuations. “Right now we start to see the first momentum where tokens are accruing value, Hyperliquid, Near and some other ones,” he said. “Then you can start making valuations and projections.”
He has a point about Hyperliquid specifically: the protocol routes almost all of its trading fees back to token holders, with billions in fees and revenue tracked on-chain. Michael’s broader claim is that the industry is “probably now slightly underpriced compared to the fair price,” and that the protocols actually doing something “are not getting the credit they used to have in the bull-market/" data-term-title="Bull Market" role="button" tabindex="0">bull market.” He sees “the first phase of escape velocity” as real assets move on-chain.
Why he’s bullish into the deadline
This is where Michael breaks from the crowd. Asked whether macro and geopolitics make the next six months worse, he said the opposite. “I am actually positive for the coming six to twelve months instead of the consensus that it’s going to get worse,” he told me. His logic runs through oil and rates: lower oil prices feed lower inflation, which lets central banks cut, and “Trump doesn’t have any reason to escalate any issue right now.” His warning is about complacency: “We’re getting to a state where everybody thinks it’s going to be fine, and it’s actually not, so you need to be aware of a lot of factors.”
On the calendar, his advice for European holders is simple and urgent. With the MiCA transitional period ending on 1 July 2026, he said: “If you’re holding tokens on an exchange that is not MiCA compliant, move to one that is. Very simple.” He expects the market impact of the deadline itself to be “close to zero,” but the personal risk for users on the wrong platform to be real.
It echoes a view I heard from Gini Capital’s Lorenzo van der Struik, another fund manager who reads regulation as a tailwind rather than a threat. Different desks, same conclusion: the rules are a feature now, not a bug.
What it means
Strip away the names and Michael’s message is a warning about information asymmetry. The big players have data and liquidity that retail does not, and they use fear as a tool. His answer is not to outguess them but to be honest about your own risk, stay disciplined, and own your calls in public. Whether his contrarian six-to-twelve-month bull case lands, the framework is useful: assume you are the smallest player at the table, and act accordingly.
That is why I keep sitting down with him. Watch the full conversation above, and subscribe to Cryptofocus for the rest of our Dutch Blockchain Week interviews.
