Willy Woo is one of the most popular analysts in the crypto space and is known for his expertise in “on-chain” metrics, market analysis, price predictions, and insights about the Bitcoin network. He publishes his findings on his website, Woobull, and in a paid subscription newsletter, The Bitcoin Forecast.
Willy Woo is one of the most popular analysts in the crypto space and is known for his expertise in “on-chain” metrics, market analysis, price predictions, and insights about the Bitcoin network. He publishes his findings on his website, Woobull, and in a paid subscription newsletter, The Bitcoin Forecast.
Woo has written about crypto as a regular contributor for CoinDesk and Forbes and has over 1 million Twitter followers. His predictions and opinions are closely watched by both individual investors and the media.
Woo is known not only for the accuracy of his predictions, but for the sound technical analysis and tools (many developed by Woo himself) that power his forecasts and commentary.
In recent years, Woo has advised capital venture firms and hedge funds on their crypto investments and was a seed-level equity investor in several crypto companies.
Personal history
Woo was born in Hong Kong and moved to Napier, New Zealand after his father was offered a business opportunity. He was interested in technology at a young age and took up programming as a hobby around age 10.
After graduating university, Woo travelled the world while working as contract programmer making GUIs (graphical user interfaces) for mobile devices. He developed an idea for an email application for the first generation of smartphones. Together with a friend, they created SnapperMail in 2002, which became one of the most popular apps in the industry.
Woo went on to become a stock trader, notably investing in gold and buying derivatives prior to the 2008 financial crisis. He also shorted bank stocks before the market collapsed. This experience provided Woo with an understanding of trading assets in volatile financial markets.
Role in the cryptocurrency community
In late 2013, a colleague on Woo’s team mentioned that Bitcoin broke $1,000. Unfamiliar with digital currencies, Woo inquired on Bitcoin and became interested in learning more. He bought one bitcoin for fun when the price was $750 per coin.
An early adopter of Bitcoin
A few months later, Woo travelled to Bali and attended a Bitcoin meetup. In 2014, the price of bitcoin was sliding but Woo believed in the cryptocurrency and continued to buy more. He was impressed with the Bitcoin community and volunteered to help run the meetup. Each meeting, he would pick a topic around digital currency and lead a discussion.
Woo often visited blockchain.io, a popular source of information at the time, to play around with their charts and to find good discussion topics. He saw a pattern emerging where the volume of Bitcoin network traffic tracked its market cap, and used this metric as Bitcoin’s P/E ratio (price-earning, or P/E ratio, is often used to determine the value of a company).
Now called the NVT ratio (Network Value to Transactions Ratio), it is calculated by dividing the network value (market cap) by Bitcoin’s daily USD volume. Woo credits this as his first analysis and tweeted about the ratio in early 2017, when popular media outlets took notice.
He began to run simulations and continued to tweet his findings. Publications, including CoinDesk and Forbes, noticed his crypto commentary and asked him to write articles for them. His number of Twitter followers took off after that.
Analysis tools
In addition to NVT, Woo uses a wide variety of measurements, statistics, tools, and research in his market analysis. A part of his site is dedicated to charts displaying statistics from multiple market areas, including market signals (the NVT ratio, price ratios, and others), investments (growth trends, valuations), monetary properties (inflation rate, money supply), and network properties (information about the Bitcoin network itself).
The site hosts articles written by Woo, as well as research papers, infographics, humour, and a section on altcoins (described as all cryptocurrencies other than Bitcoin).
Notable analysis
Woo’s commentary gained popularity during the 2017 crypto bull run, as Bitcoin was becoming more mainstream. His commentary was further sought after during 2020-2021 when Bitcoin’s rise in price increased the strong demand for guidance and investment analysis.
In January 2021, Woo accurately predicted a boom in the cryptocurrency market for the year, saying, “Given the capital flows, the dip many are looking for may not happen until higher levels…The main bull phase is here, the phase when larger than usual capital inflows drive BTC’s price exponentially higher.”
In August 2021, he introduced the Supply Shock metric, which is the unavailable Bitcoin supply divided by the available Bitcoin supply. The metric supports the notion that intent to buy or sell can be quantified and used to predict a market’s future price movements. Woo used this metric to correctly predict the Bitcoin price rally to $55,000.
Woo remained bullish on Bitcoin at the end of 2021 into early 2022, even as the price declined by almost 50% from its high of $69,000. In predicting 2022 price gains, Woo referenced the stock-to-flow model that predicts an asset’s price by comparing the amount of new supply entering the market to the existing supply. Woo said that bitcoin’s price will average $100,000 in the long-term.
When the price fell below $33,000 in January 2022 and deviated from Woo’s forecasts, he said that the fall was based on macroeconomic conditions and that the market was in a re-accumulation phase.
In the fall of 2022, Woo predicted that based on historical growth rates, Bitcoin will have 1 billion users by 2025.
In December 2022, Woo said that the collapse of the Sam Bankman-Fried's FTX crypto exchange won’t dissuade traditional financial investors from putting their money into crypto. “After the FTX blow up, many think it set the industry back many years, but this is contrary to the conversations I’ve had. Traditional finance capital allocators are seeing an opportunity to come in now. They see Bitcoin and crypto is here to stay and it’s now been de-risked.”
Investing
Woo has been a seed-level equity investor in several crypto companies, including Exodus Wallet, Radix DLT, and LVL.
Woo served as head of research for Chainlink Capital Management’s Ama Fund in 2021-2022 and as general partner at S2F Capital.
Willy Woo essentials
Willy Woo is one of the most popular analysists in the crypto space, publishing his findings in a newsletter and on his website, and writing for various publications.
Woo is known for the accuracy of his crypto market positions and analysis tools, many of which were developed in-house.
Woo has successfully predicted various aspects of the Bitcoin boom in recent years, though his 2022 predictions fell short.