Bitcoin Sell-Off Just Starting, Cardone Warns of $40K Target

Gary Cardone, an investor with a 25-year energy markets background who first looked at Bitcoin in 2013 before buying in earnest in 2020, sat down with Altcoin Daily for a roughly 90-minute interview that ran the full gamut of his current thesis. He is openly long $BTC, holds hundreds of coins at a $57,000 average, has not sold any of his Strategy (MSTR) or STRC, and frames his bearish short-term call as the view of a holder, not a flipper. His central claim: $300 billion is going to come out of the altcoin market, and it is not going to flow into $BTC, which he says will keep a lid on Bitcoin even as the broader market bleeds.

Why it matters

Cardone's framing is built on the structural tension inside the Bitcoin float. He estimates roughly 3 million coins are held by long-term holders at average cost bases around $300, and another 3 to 4 million are being accumulated by Wall Street buyers near current prices, with the rest largely locked up. The two cohorts have very different agendas, and the market is only now testing what happens when the cheap cohort decides to sell into a thin bid. He is also skeptical of the 150+ public companies that followed Strategy into Bitcoin, arguing most have no yield, no business plan, and roughly 300,000 BTC of forced-sell pressure sitting above the market. He contrasts that with STRC and similar preferred instruments, which he says give holders an actual reason to stay.

On price, Cardone is explicit: he expects $BTC to test $55,000, then $52,500, then the $40,000s, with $40 likely before November. He offers $100,000 of his own money, open to escrow, on the bet that $50 prints before $100. The three upside catalysts he would watch for are a heavy $50,000 print followed by a $10,000 V-shape reversal that holds, visible frenzied buying on the bounce, and a narrative vacuum around Bitcoin rather than another Clarity-Act-driven headline pump.

Market impact

For altcoins, the call is even harsher. Cardone questions whether Vitalik Buterin has another decade in him, says Solana and Ethereum lack a clear revenue story, and argues the only viable niches for non-Bitcoin chains are payment-arbitrage verticals like adult content and gaming, where merchants lose access to card processing overnight. He is constructive on tokenization of art and watches only as a concept, not as a chain revenue story. His macro overlay is dollar-debasement bullish over a 5 to 10 year horizon, but explicitly says the next leg is a fiat-inflation explosion, not a fiat-collapse moment, and Bitcoin still has to clear the current shake-out before that thesis pays. He holds the line that this is private-equity-style patience territory, and is reassessing whether he will add above his $57,000 cost basis at all.