As bitcoin (BTC) wobbles around the $90,000-$95,000 area, down more than 10% from its all-time high touched a bit less than four weeks ago, a contrast is growing between traders — whose technical analysis tools show the top cryptocurrency may be due for another plunge — and long-term investors who believe the bull run is nowhere near done.

That’s according to David Siemer, CEO of Wave Digital Assets, a firm that provides asset management services to funds and high net-worth individuals in the crypto space. The company counts Charles Hoskinson, the CEO of the firm behind Cardano, as one of its clients.

“In 14 years of owning bitcoin, I’ve never seen a dichotomy like this,” Siemer told CoinDesk in an interview. “The traders are all worried and nervous and hedged, fully neutral or worse. And the long-term people are all super bullish.”

“There’s a really good chance we’ll go to $200,000 [per bitcoin] this year,” Siemer said. “Do I think we’ll see $1 million dollars per coin in my lifetime? Sure. Not soon, you know, not in the next year. … The smart, more connected people that I know are also really bullish. More is going to happen in the next six months than most people realize.”

Top of the list of developments for the year to come is that numerous jurisdictions — including the U.S., Russia, Singapore, the United Arab Emirates, South Korea, Japan, the Philippines and some European nations — are looking to take big steps in crypto’s favor, according to Siemer. (Wave runs crypto educational programs for various branches of the U.S. government, like the Internal Revenue Service or U.S. Marshals Service, as well as other executive bodies across the globe; in fact, government practices is the firm’s fastest growing business.)

These steps, whichever form they take, will likely have positive knock-on effects on some of these countries’ private sectors, Siemer said. “[Japan or Singapore], those are societies where they actually trust and rely on their governments. If their government says it’s okay, it’s actually really okay. It’s different from the U.S. where we think our guys are idiots.”

What is spurring such sudden interest in the crypto industry? The tremendous success of the U.S. spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs), for one, is forcing financial institutions worldwide to think of ways to compete. That means spinning up exotic new products, like multi-token yield funds, to make up for the liquidity that was sucked away by BlackRock’s IBIT.

“The ETFs launched in America and they absolutely devastated all the bitcoin ETPs around the world,” Siemer said. “All of them had these terrible products, charging 1.5%. All of those guys got crushed.” Regulators, for their part, will tend to be supportive, Siemer said. For example, the European Union could end up producing a friendlier version of the Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA).

The chances of seeing new strategic bitcoin reserves is also high, Siemer said. “Even if the U.S. doesn’t do a reserve, at least several other countries probably will,” he added. Not that he’s bearish on prospects in the U.S. Wave, he said, is currently in talks with seven different states that are considering the matter of creating a reserve, Texas, Ohio and Wyoming among them.

What about the federal government? Siemer put the odds at slightly better than 50-50, in part thanks to the nearly $19 billion worth of bitcoin it already owns.

“That’s a decent start on a bitcoin reserve,” Siemer said. “All they have to do is not sell it. It’s a lot more palatable to the tax base than buying, you know, $10 billion worth of bitcoin.”

Usual Protocol, an up-and-coming decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol that has seen a remarkable rise over the past months, faced community backlash on Friday after a tweak in the protocol’s yield-generating token triggered a sell-off on secondary markets.

Amid the turmoil, the protocol’s USD0++ token, which represents a locked-up – or staked – version of its $1-anchored stablecoin USD0, fell briefly below 90 cents from $1 on decentralized marketplace Curve. The protocol’s governance token, USUAL, plummeted as much as 17% through the day before recovering some of the losses.

The selloff was caused by a change in the redemption mechanism of USD0++ token introduced by the team on Thursday that caught investors and liquidity providers off-guard.

By design, USD0 is backed by short-term government securities to keep its price at $1. Stakers on Usual receive USD0++ that comes with a four-year lock-up period, meaning that investors are locking up their funds without being able to redeem in exchange for rewards earned in the form of the protocol’s USD0 and USUAL tokens. Yield farmers rushed in, catapulting the protocols total value locked (TVL), a key DeFi metric, to $1.87 billion earlier this week from less than $300 million in October.

However, the new feature called “dual-path exit” will allow investors to redeem the locked-up tokens early at a 0.87 USD0 floor price, or at par, by giving up a part of the rewards earned, calling the 1:1 exchange rate into question.

The abrupt implementation drew criticism across DeFi users for changing the design without warning. In certain liquidity pools, the token’s price was hardcoded to worth $1, causing havoc among borrowers and liquidity providers.

“Did they just allow degens to jump in at 1:1 and then rug the USD0++?,” prominent DeFi analyst Ignas said in an X post. “They pushed for the largest USD0/USD0++ pool on Curve knowing all well that USD0++ shouldn’t trade at 1:1.”

“DeFi continues learning the most important truth about pegs: a peg is a story about why two things that are not the same are interchangeable for each other,” noted Patrick McKenzie, advisor to payments firm Stripe.

The Usual team said in a statement that the design change with the early unstaking mechanism was communicated in advance from October. The protocol will also activate the revenue switch starting on Monday and start distributing the protocol’s earnings to governance token holders who stake their coin for longer-term (USUALx).

“The current situation regarding USD0++ stems from a misunderstanding of the protocol’s mechanisms along with a communication that should have been better articulated,” the statement reads. “We apologize and we’ll continue to do our best to communicate transparent information to users.”

The episode is another lesson for crypto investors about the potential risks of DeFi products that entice users with high-yields via token incentives and rewards flywheels.

“Users who are taking risk need to know what the exact rules are and be able to trust that they won’t change, otherwise it can result in market panic,” Rob Hadick, general partner at venture capital firm Dragonfly, told CoinDesk. “We should be thankful this happened now, before the protocol became a risk to the broader DeFi ecosystem.”

Still, USD0++ traded recently at 0.91 USD0 in the Curve pool, while the protocol’s total value locked, a key DeFi metric, dropped below $1.6 billion.