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10x Research’s Markus Thielen flagged a low-conviction rally in his April 27 weekly report, pointing to a structural disconnect between Bitcoin’s price action and its participation metrics.
The backdrop is a year in which Bitcoin’s near-lockstep trading with software stocks has raised a harder question: is the asset being systematically mispriced by the same institutional frameworks that govern the tech equities it moves with?
Bitcoin Is Not a Tech Stock: Why the Software Correlation Is a Mispricing, Not a Signal
Bitcoin has spent the past several years trading in near-perfect lockstep with high-growth software stocks, rising and falling with the Nasdaq as if it were just another tech bet.
When AI… pic.twitter.com/7dgd6sH1Wq
— 10x Research (@10xResearch) April 29, 2026
Thielen described Bitcoin’s push toward $80,000 in stark terms. The move, he wrote, is being driven largely by spot buying and short covering, not by fresh institutional positioning. Trading volumes are sharply lower than the levels that accompanied prior rallies of comparable magnitude.
Funding rates across perpetual futures markets are deeply negative, meaning traders are paying to be short rather than scrambling to be long, which is the opposite of what a healthy bull run looks like from the derivatives side.
Options markets show implied volatility sitting in the lower quartile of its historical range. ‘The market has shifted from a more actively traded environment to one where participants are largely on the sidelines,’ Thielen wrote, calling the current setup a ‘low-funding, low-volume regime that historically reflects hesitation rather than momentum.’
Thielen acknowledged that the setup is not outright bearish. With leveraged long positions limited, the risk of a forced liquidation cascade on the downside is reduced. He noted that near-term risk and reward is asymmetric to the upside if a macro catalyst arrives. But the structure of the rally matters because it is the context in which the broader mispricing question sits.
Bitcoin is approaching a key resistance level on thin conviction, in a market where institutional participants remain largely disengaged, and where the ETF inflows that have been the dominant source of buying pressure in 2026 are not translating into the kind of volatility or participation that would typically accompany a genuine breakout.
For most of 2026, Bitcoin has traded in near-lockstep with the iShares Expanded Tech-Software Sector ETF, known as IGV, a fund heavily weighted toward Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce, Intuit, and Adobe.
ByteTree Research documented that on a 30-day rolling basis, the correlation between Bitcoin and IGV hit 0.73 in early February 2026, a level that signals the two assets were moving together far more consistently than historical norms would suggest. By the time the Iran war began on February 28, that rolling correlation had climbed further toward 1.0, meaning the two were moving in near-perfect unison.
Over the prior three months, Bitcoin had fallen 26% and IGV had fallen 23%. Year to date through early April, both were lower by roughly 21%. Over five years, Bitcoin gained 18% against IGV’s 10%, with Bitcoin exhibiting the same directional behaviour but at materially higher volatility.
The mispricing concern stems directly from this relationship. Bitcoin has a fixed supply schedule, no revenue, no earnings, no management team, and no exposure to AI margin compression. IGV’s constituent stocks have all of those things. Microsoft faces competitive pressure from open-source AI models. Salesforce and Oracle carry SaaS renewal risk as automation compresses willingness to pay for legacy software seats.
If Bitcoin is trading as though it shares those same fundamental risks, it is being mispriced by the institutional allocation frameworks that are driving its correlation with the software complex. The price is right in the sense that it reflects what buyers and sellers agreed on. But the valuation may be wrong in the sense that the asset is being discounted for risks it does not actually carry.
The mechanism behind the correlation is not mysterious. Grayscale’s research team noted that Bitcoin’s recent price movements have closely tracked high-growth software stocks because the same institutional participants own both.
Multi-strategy hedge funds, crossover growth funds, and risk-parity vehicles that carry both Bitcoin and software equity exposure reduce both positions simultaneously when risk models signal a drawdown. When volatility rises across a portfolio, the instruction to reduce gross exposure does not distinguish between a SaaS business and a decentralized monetary network. It sells both.
Joao Wedson, founder of quantitative research firm Alphractal, put the dynamic plainly: ‘BTC is behaving like a high-beta tech asset, driven by liquidity, growth expectations, and valuation cycles within the software market. This is how smart capital truly sees Bitcoin.’ That classification, he argued, creates a direct conflict between Bitcoin and the AI sector.
Bitcoin continues to show its strongest correlation with the SaaS and tech software sector.
We’re probably among the few talking about this.
And there are signals suggesting I should share more soon about why this is happening.For now, I recommend following more closely at… https://t.co/VWXX7evs0f pic.twitter.com/Z78CiYTi5z
— Joao Wedson (@joao_wedson) April 22, 2026
As AI tools depress demand for traditional software, the same derisking impulse that pushes software stocks lower pulls Bitcoin down with them, even though Bitcoin’s utility and supply mechanics have no dependence on enterprise software spending whatsoever.
A third causal layer comes from private credit. Dan, Head of Research at The Coin Bureau, argued that the shared cause behind the Bitcoin-software correlation is private credit, which has been heavily involved in both markets and has experienced stress since mid-2025.
‘Bitcoin has a strong correlation to software stocks, but what is the shared cause? It’s private credit, which is heavily involved in crypto and software, and has experienced stress since mid-2025, hence why BTC decoupled from liquidity in mid-2025,’ he said.
That said, the correlation is not driven by any fundamental resemblance between Bitcoin and software, but by the shared funding source that has been withdrawing from both.
Matthew Sigel, head of digital assets research at Van Eck, offered the most concise version of the bull case on this question: ‘Bitcoin is just open-source software,’ he said, suggesting that the software correlation may be less of a mispricing and more of an accurate description of the asset’s true identity.
"Bitcoin is just open-source software"
The software –> pic.twitter.com/SIK8cT8oyN
— matthew sigel, recovering CFA (@matthew_sigel) February 4, 2026
However, the mispricing argument pushes back: the fact that Bitcoin is written in code does not make it economically equivalent to Salesforce. Its value proposition is monetary, not operational. It does not generate revenue from subscriptions. Its scarcity is enforced by mathematics, not by pricing power.
Thielen’s April 27 report, while focused on near-term rally structure, implicitly frames the reclassification question in terms of what would need to happen for Bitcoin to break cleanly above $80,000 and hold it. He described a macro catalyst as the key variable.
If that catalyst takes the form of dollar weakness, Fed rate signals, or further geopolitical stress, Bitcoin may at last begin to price independently of IGV and trade more like the digital gold narrative its long-term holders believe it represents.
Until then, the mispricing persists, hidden inside a 0.70 correlation with a software ETF that has nothing to do with block rewards, hash rate, or the 21 million coin supply cap.
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