Michaël van de Poppe

Michaël van de Poppe entered crypto in February 2017 and went full-time after the 2018 cycle, founding MN Trading as an educational trading community. Trained as an economist, he combined classical technical analysis with a heavy emphasis on Bitcoin dominance, altcoin rotation, and on-chain catalysts. By the 2020-2022 cycle he had become one of the most quoted European crypto traders, appearing regularly on Cointelegraph, CoinDesk and as a featured speaker at Consensus, Paris Blockchain Week, and Web3 Amsterdam.

In November 2023 he restructured the business into a three-arm group: MN Consultancy (advisory and asset management), MN Capital (early-stage Web3 venture investing), and MN Marketing (project branding plus the New Era Finance podcast). In 2025 MN Consultancy graduated into MN Fund, an investment vehicle registered with the Dutch financial regulator that focuses on volatility trading and OTC blocks — alongside co-founder and CEO Esmee Sikkens, who runs the operational and legal side of the fund.

On Bitcoin Magazine NL he is profiled as Founder of MN Capital. He publishes daily market commentary on X to a large bilingual audience, runs a long-running YouTube channel with technical breakdowns, and has been a fixture on European crypto stages for the past five years. His public footprint — large following, public trade calls, regulated fund — makes him a clear fit for a directory of named market-active traders.

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Vitalii Kaminskyi · june 2026 · English

You trained as an economist. At what point did classical economic theory start failing you as a framework for crypto markets?

The classic economic theories haven't failed for me at all. The crypto markets are heavily correlated with the equity markets, through which you'll need to be aware of any macroeconomic aspect of the markets to have an adequate view of the crypto markets as a whole. Despite that, most valuation metrics in economic theory for specific assets generally don't make sense when markets are at the peak of their financial cycle. In that light, valuing a crypto protocol should be done differently than simply focusing on standard valuation metrics.

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Name one on-chain metric that most traders ignore but that you find genuinely useful.

I would suggest looking at overall TVL indicators and revenue data for specific protocols to measure whether the protocol is growing in terms of revenue. If that's the case, and there's a buyback program added to it (or a burn mechanism), and the underlying token isn't moving, that usually creates a giant mispricing opportunity.

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What is the longest position you have ever held? What made you hold?

I've been holding three or four positions from 2019 until the end of 2021 in specific altcoins due to their staking rewards in that period. Those were Polygon, Elrond, Fantom and Verasity back in the day and they yielded a great return for me. Outside of that, I've been holding Bitcoin for the longest period of time and the simple reason for that is that it's the purest form of money that we have.

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If you could only use one indicator for the rest of your career, what would it be and why?

I think I'd use the RSI indicator because of its impact on confirmations versus price oscillations. If I'm daytrading and looking at trends and build-ups on lower timeframes, the RSI can additionally provide value in identifying whether or not a trend is about to reverse, being overextended and can grant me additional information of executing those trades.

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What is the most dangerous thing about being a public crypto voice with a large following?

I think it's the fact that people are giving you too much value for the content that you're providing and therefore, when things go wrong, they'll start to blame you for their own mistakes and that can put your safety at risk. A lot of people should just use the information for their own thesis and build a strategy themselves.

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Is there something about the Dutch approach to money and risk that gives Dutch traders a specific edge or disadvantage?

I think many Dutch people are rational and stubborn, and therefore have an edge, as suppressing your emotions is the biggest advantage in trading. Probably it's not as big of an impact as there is, but that's what I understand could be a great edge that Dutch traders have.

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What is the trade you are most ashamed of? Not the biggest loss, but the one where your thinking was just wrong.

I think the swap from Bitcoin towards altcoins in 2024. That hasn't resulted into the returns that I personally wanted and that should have been executed in a different way, and as a result, I'm still under water since then. Doesn't mind, we'll continue to learn and improve, but that's the one that I'm most ashamed of.

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Getting regulated by the Dutch financial authority is not easy. What was the hardest part of that process?

We're not regulated, we're registered with the Dutch financial authority, which are two different things.

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Europe has very few globally known crypto traders compared to the US. Why do you think that is?

Europe has many globally known crypto traders, but most of them are anonymous as they use an avatar in their content creation. I would argue that Europe has more crypto traders than the US at this point, and they place more importance on their anonymity rather than publicity, which I think is a cultural thing.

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Have you ever thought about participating in a public trading competition? What is your take on competitive trading as a format, as an industry?

I like competitions and games, I'm always trying to win in those. Technically I've been joining a public trading competition already with my altcoin portfolio, so that's fine. It would be fun to join a public trading competition at some point, probably during a time where I'm actively daytrading again.