The Breakdown - Bitcoin Holds Firm Above $100K as Senate Stablecoin Bill Opens Floodgates for Crypto

Episode Date: June 21, 2025

On this week's Friday Five, NLW and Scott dive into Bitcoin's remarkable stability above $100,000 despite global uncertainty, major bipartisan passage of the Genius stablecoin bill in the Senate, Circle's blockbuster IPO performance, JPMorgan's surprising move onto Coinbase's Base layer, and Elon Musk's continued push toward making X an "everything app." Plus, Fed divisions deepen as rate cuts remain uncertain. Brought to you by: Grayscale offers more than 20 different crypto investment products. Explore the full suite at grayscale.com. Invest in your share of the future. Investing involves risk and possible loss of principal. To learn more, visit ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Grayscale.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ -- ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.grayscale.com//?utm_source=blockworks&utm_medium=paid-other&utm_campaign=brand&utm_id=&utm_term=&utm_content=audio-thebreakdown)⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Enjoying this content? SUBSCRIBE to the Podcast: https://pod.link/1438693620 Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheBreakdownBW Subscribe to the newsletter: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://blockworks.co/newsletter/thebreakdown⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Join the discussion: https://discord.gg/VrKRrfKCz8 Follow on Twitter: NLW: https://twitter.com/nlw Breakdown: https://twitter.com/BreakdownBW

Welcome back to The Breakdown with me, NLW. It's a daily podcast on macro, Bitcoin, and the Big Picture Power Shifts remaking our world. What's going on, guys? It is Friday, June 20th, and that means it's time for the Friday 5. Before we get into it, however, if you are enjoying the breakdown, please go subscribe to it, give it a rating, give it a review, or if you want to dive deeper into the conversation, come join us on the Breakers Discord. You can find a link of the show notes or go to bit.ly slash breakdown pod. All right, friends, back today with another Friday 5. Scott and I were joking that this was the first time in a little while now that it actually

felt like one of those slow summer weeks. In general, having done this type of content for a really long time, there is something of a summer lull. There tends to be a little bit less news, a little bit less engagement around the news, even in an industry like crypto that is 24-7-365. However, for the last few weeks, it has been non-stop all the time, and so, there has been absolutely no slowdown of the sort, and this week kind of felt a little calmer. Still, the hilarious thing about that sentiment is that in this so-called calmer week,

we had major stablecoin legislation passed in a bipartisan manner, and a bunch of other stories which a year ago would have been totally headline news. Anyways, that's enough for me for now. Let's dive into the show and see what the story was this week. This is one of those normal summer weeks where there's not any huge stories that are impacting price, but still worth discussing and unpacking everything that's going on. We're back. Last week, you were keynoting.

We're busy keynoting. Galavanting around Europe. I mean, just it's like your priorities are all off. You could have been here talking about all this important news and you were out keynoting. But I think we'll start here with, that's the wrong story. Analysts say Bitcoin's 100,000 levels being cemented as the base price for investors. So I guess generally here we can just talk about price action, the fact that Bitcoin seems to be

effectively glued in this range in the low 100,000s. But even with all the dips we've seen across markets and all the uncertainty, it just doesn't break below 100,000. Yeah, I mean, I think that certainly we are, you know, we're tracking Bitcoin, I think, for a couple different reasons. One, it's always a leading indicator of what's going to sort of happen next in public markets, especially when, you know, a lot of the macro things that have been shaping. potential market action have happened overnight, you know, in various regions. So that's sort of one

reason to look at it. But I think that it's absolutely the case that the longer that it hangs out at this level, the more it creates kind of the psychological, you know, attachment. We already had, we had a psychological attachment to 100K on the upside for so long. It sort of makes sense that we're sort of forming that on the downside as well. Yeah, I mean, from a psychological level perspective, there's no more impactful number than 100,000. It literally was talked about for years, to your point. So you've got to imagine that there's a lot of people are like, I'm just going to buy it every time it gets anywhere close to that.

But I am surprised we haven't even seen 99,980 or anything. It really has held entirely above 100,000. Yeah. No, it's extremely notable. I mean, again, it's one of those, it says self-reinforcing sort of prophecy. So I hope that it continues to hang out here, and this becomes the reset for, forever.

Yeah, that would be amazing. It's Selkiss that always used to tweet. I can't believe this is the last time we'll see that point under X, right? So maybe we can jinx it by tweeting that, but generally it does seem like it's been really, really strong. And that's obviously, while we still have a lot of geopolitical uncertainty, Trump hints he'll hold off Iran strike, give diplomacy time. I think this is what a lot of people are watching at this point. It's incredible how quickly we absorb what's happening in the world and markets seem to shrug it off.

I mean, the very fact that Iran and Israel are lobbying missiles at each other on a daily basis seems like it would have had a greater impact on markets, but it hasn't. And immediately, markets just basically moved on to what would the United States do. Well, it seems like we're still sort of in a holding pattern on that. Yeah, markets faded this as a thing that they had to care about really, really quickly, rightly or wrongly. I mean, basically, you know, when this started happening, the debate on Twitter was World War III or Nothingburger, and markets voted, you know, not nothing burger in terms of people's lives, but in terms of what they were going to care about very, very quickly. It doesn't mean they're right, but that's certainly,

there's pretty clear consensus. Now, I think that you're right that a lot of this has to do with the various signals that Trump and the administration are giving it any given time. And it certainly doesn't seem like we're cascading towards inevitable, you know, U.S. involvement right now. So I think that that gives markets a reason to be a little bit more calm about it. But it's a fascinating one for sure. Yeah, and sort of the last topic I think here that's relevant when talking about price action

and what's happening with the market in general is that we continue to see these relatively historic inflows into the Bitcoin ETFs, Ethereum ETFs as well, by the way. But $2.4 billion in eight days, a pretty astounding number considering price isn't moving. Yeah. Yeah, it's there's a lot of movement over here for not clear reasons why. Yeah, you would think that if you have $2.4, $2.5 billion. in, you know, just over a week in buying on the ETF side that you would see spot price reflecting that. People were one, I mean, one of the sources of, or one of the discourses around this is whether

we're seeing some of that flight to safety behavior show up there rather than an actual price. You know, is that an indicator of that or is it something else entirely? Hard to tell, obviously. It's, you know, thank God because otherwise people like us wouldn't have the ability to create content speculating on things, but it's certainly, it's notable for some reason or other. Yeah, talk about the real flight to safety around the world. It's obviously stablecoins, right? And I think that's our next topic in general. Senate passes genius stable coin bill giving crypto industry first major legislative win. This obviously has now passed the Senate with tremendous bipartisan support, I believe, 68 votes in favor. That does not happen in the Senate for anything, much less crypto-related bill. So that's astounding. I spoke to Haggerty actually randomly on Wednesday, the day after this happened. We'd had it on the books for months. And I just kind of got impeccable. timing. But he said he doesn't think there'll be many impediments in the House that they're already obviously speaking with their counterparts there. And the stable act that was proposed in the House

is not far different from the Genius Act. And obviously, Trump is pounding the pavement on this to get it done. Right. He's on truth social saying this is one of his priorities. So it seems like this is going to happen. This is our first of many stable coin stories. But let's stop here for the moment and talk about the Genius Act. Yeah. I mean, after all the bluster and all the last minute, is this, you know, are things changing? Is there a resurgence of the anti-crypto army? Like, all of these considerations, push comes to shove, the bill actually addressed a lot of the concerns and had large bipartisan consensus. It's actually very encouraging to see that as much as things got sort of loud towards the last minute, it appears to be cascading ahead. Now, the one sort of like poison pill

question in the House is whether, you know, there's, there are a large group of people, including many people that, you know, we tend to agree with on these issues that are really intent on getting the market structure bill combined, Warren Davidson among them. And I don't, I don't exactly see the logic as it so clearly is not going to happen. But, you know, that's the, that's the sort of one wrinkle that I'm keeping track of in the House, you know, debate. I don't think there's issues with the reconciliation of two just stable coin bills. It's question of whether the market structure bill can find its way in there, too. That would be a disaster. market structure is so much more complicated than legislating on stable coins. This is so clearly important for the U.S. dollar for the United States. These already exist are always successful.

Rapping in market structure, which is going to have to dictate what's a security and what's a commodity, how exchanges can operate, who can custody, whether it can be the same broker and custodian. Market structure is literally everything else. Rapping these together, that goes through the House, gets complicated, goes back to the Senate, back to the House, back to the Senate. That's no way that gets done by August if they do that. Yeah, it's so complicated, in fact, that there are basically backup bills that were introduced by Emmer and others to deal with just parts of the market structure bills, specifically the securities versus commodity designation. They rip that part out as, you know, a, if we can't get market structure done, at least let's have that clarity because that's such a big thorny issue.

We can kind of focus that in. So given that people are trying to rip pieces out of the market structure bill to try to get, you know, individual pieces passed, it seems unlikely to me that we're going to be able to graph that whole thing onto another piece of legislation, which, you know, while bipartisan was still not an easy, you know, road to hoe to get it to where it is. So, you know, we'll see. It could also just be talk. It could be political strategy to get the debate, you know, so who knows? Yeah. And as we talk about that, clearly we had impeccable timing, as we've talked about from Circle with their IPO, Circle stock nears $200 per share, rises over 500 percent two weeks after going

public. So they nailed this right before the Genius Act, obviously, was, past, but they caught this perfect moment in time where there was this heavy, heavy thirst for a way to invest in stable coins. And there really wasn't. And now you could obviously buy Circle and Coinbase stock obviously flying at the same. Take a look. It's trading up 14.5% pre-market up another $29 right now. So it's going to be opening around $2.30. Yeah. I mean, I thought you were going to put up a picture of Jeremy Alara's Grouch McDuck swimming in his pool of gold after this one. But no, I mean, you know, we talked about this before, but it is very clear that all the market cared about was exposure to stable coin thesis and all of the details around, well, all the details

just didn't matter ultimately, you know. But this is, this is, you know, even more than, you know, stock price is always reflexive in the sense that it goes up and people pay more attention and it gets stronger and that creates more opportunities for it to actually get stronger, right? There's always that sort of reflexivity. But in this case, I think it's even more important, given that circle remains at the moment, the sort of stable, you know, legitimate or at least regulated stable coin infrastructure in the U.S. And the more that it goes up, the more that institutions get involved and decide to pick this horse rather than betting on whatever sort of, you know, bank stable coin is going to come next,

the more that circle has the ability to compete when those bank stable coins inevitably show up. Yeah, it's just absolutely wild to see how successful this has been. With all the missteps and bad launches that we've seen in crypto, it's just nice to see one get a massive, massive win. And following on the heels of this, it's going to be private stablecoins left and right. I mean, we've got stablecoin adoption by corporates poised to grow after U.S. Senate passes key bill. You got Walmart and Amazon publicly saying they're going to do this meta, obviously already

floating the idea of bringing back Libra or some form of that. And of course, you move over from the technologists and corporates to the banks. As we know, JPMorgan pushes JPMD pilot on base, says deposit tokens beat stable coin. So it's not exactly a stable coin, but something similar. Don't you dare use the word stable coin to describe their thing, which is a stable coin, but not exactly a stable coin? Yeah, how dare you? An algorithmic, non-alorithmic, sometimes stable coin. But on base, like I did not have on my bingo card that J.P. Morgan would be going to like the degenerate layer two world to start testing things. Certainly the most, that is absolutely the most notable part of that announcement. J.P. Morgan has been messing around with private and their own

blockchains forever. And, you know, obviously those things are connected sort of vaguely to existing infrastructure. But this is sort of, you know, the move to a public infrastructure like this is very, very different play for them. I think shows just where the world is headed. Today's episode of The Breakdown is brought to you exclusively by Grayscale. Grayscale is almost certainly a name you know. They've been offering exposure to crypto for over a decade now and offer over 20 different crypto investment products,

ranging from single asset to diversify to thematic exposure to crypto and the broader crypto industry. They have long been innovators at the intersection of TradFi and Crypto, And one of the benefits for a lot of us is that Grayscale products are available right through your existing brokerage or IRA. Now, of course, investing involves risk, including possible loss of principle. For more information and important disclosures, visitgrayscale.com. Go to Grayscale.com to explore their full suite of crypto investment products and invest in your share of the future.

It should be noted also. We saw announcements from Bank of America that they're working on this Societe General. I don't speak French. So, you know, pardon my horrible Pepe Lapeu accent there. But this is coming every, I mean, stable coin coming to every institution near you. There's going to be a fog, sort of a bit of a fog too that is already being exploited politically where companies are going to talk about adopting stable coins. And that'll be, it'll be unclear or at least made to feel unclear, whether that means they're going to adopt stable coins as a tool or a payment that they accept versus creating their own

stable coin. If you ask the anti-crypto army right now, every company that is announcing that they're going to interact with stable coins is going and trying to create their own stable coin, which is obviously not what's actually happening. But, you know, that's it can't happen. And they won't be interoperable. They'll just, you know, I think the market, the free market will decide and will probably end up with a few incumbents and maybe a few of these larger ones using them for their own private purposes, like a JP Morgan and everyone else will probably get washed out. Yep. That's my next story here. is that Musk's X to launch trading and payments and push toward everything Act report. We've been hearing about this for a very long time.

Of course, we were already supposed to have Doge taking over the world as the base payment for the planet starting on X. But it seems like this is a real announcement that they're going to be pushing towards open trading and payments. Interestingly, I remember they kind of had a deal with E. Toro there for a while. Kind of never heard about it again. But I know they had sort of a trading, or at least you would get the stock ticker. price, honestly, I don't even remember, and payments they've been talking about forever. And that's just background. Yeah.

I mean, you know, look, both of these things are theoretically interesting and are going to be practically interesting based entirely on how much people actually want to use this for that. You know, it's a very hard thing to go from where Twitter slash X is now to the everything app that he envisions. You know, when it comes to trading, it's like, who is the audience that is going to trade on X, you kind of have to, like, it doesn't seem like it's going to be existing established traders, so you have to think that it's maybe like new people who haven't come in yet, which is totally plausible, I guess, theoretically. But I don't know, it's interesting. But I would, I would not put my,

I'm not particularly bullish on the likelihood of success. I 100% agree with that. It's not like your average Robin Hood client is going to just flip over and say, I want to trade on X. Yeah. But I also, listen, if like, if the idea of an everything app for, you know, an English-speaking market is compelling to some people, having Elon do it, who has the ability to do things that don't work for a very long time until maybe they do work is a good place for it to happen, right? Elon, if he does this, he's not going to turn around and turn it off six months later because it wasn't performing. It's going to beat that thing into it to the ground until it potentially works. So, you know, we'll see. Okay, so you and I have had a lot of conversations about Bitcoin treasury companies and what those look like in context of the greater markets. It's clearly becoming more obvious that these are the altcoins of this cycle to some degree.

But we've started to see obviously XRP treasury companies and Solana XRP companies. Now we got the first report was that TRX was going public, that Tron was going public in a reverse merger. Now the story, I guess, has been clarified a bit. Justin's son linked firm plans to go public in U.S. with TRX acquisition strategy. I believe they also had in the original announcement that Eric Trump was an advisor. And then he said, no, I'm just his buddy, but I'm not an advisor. But the topic we had was, is this putting in the top for crypto treasury companies? I mean, I hate calling tops.

But, boy, if you were going to be comfortable calling a top, you know, I don't know. Look, there's clearly still room to run in terms of market demand for Bitcoin Treasury companies. That's pretty inarguable at this point. And so the big issue is that even if this is the top, it could be a very long time before the market realizes it was the top. And that's the in-between intervening part is where it all gets chaotic. But I don't know, I will only say this. I know a bunch of people who are sort of outside crypto who have been invigorated by the return of the SPAC structure as a tool, not because they want to chimoff it, but because getting certain types of vehicles public faster is actually a useful thing to have access to.

And boy, are they like, crypto is going to screw it up again for us after they heard this announcement. And it's hard to do. Whether it or not, I already said that when it wasn't TRX, to be fair. But it is pretty crazy. I guess it was Dan from Chart Guys. yesterday and he was basically saying, I think it was him, but he was saying that all the all coin coin market is suffering because you can just go trade coinbase in circle. Yeah. Like, if you get or Nakamoto or 21 or micro strategy, like the same people who were investing in ICOs and making

these quick 20, 30 Xs, if not more are now playing in public markets where there's 100x the liquidity and it's a stock. I don't know. We never learn. We'll see. We'll see. We'll see. We'll see. We'll see. We'll never learn. Listen, our final story is not necessarily crypto related. but everything is apparently crypto-related. Fed officials hold rates again. Still see two cuts by year end. I mean, these two cuts have been right there on the horizon. Yeah, the report on this is actually weird because so there was a,

this is the most divided, I think, that the Fed has ever been in terms of where they think things are going to land. Not divided in terms of necessarily of, you know, disagreement about what should be done in the short term, but divided in terms of what they're in, you know, what they believe will come next. Powell's whole conversation was about humility and having, you know, no idea how these tariffs were going to impact things and needing more time to see. And when it came to the cuts, I think it was, you know, by a margin of like one vote,

the consensus was that there were going to be two. But the number of governors who thought that we were going to get zero cuts this year jumped from like four to six. So you got one group who's still on the two train, but you have another group that's growing that thinks we're going to see no cuts. So the TLDR is that no one has any idea. And to their credit, they're saying they have no idea, basically. And in the circumstance of having no idea, Powell's default is always going to be to turtle up and do nothing. Trump had some not so kind words for him again this week. You know, he kind of backed off on the rhetoric for a while. What he called him? I don't know if he called him dumb or not so smart, but he, you know. It's like you can tell that he's trying not to do it. And then once he starts vomiting about Powell, just goes, it goes, he goes. Yeah.

I don't know if he's trying that hard. Maybe not. Yeah. Yeah. Good point. I don't think maybe it's fair. I think you love him or hate him. Donald Trump's probably going to tell you what he thinks.

Yeah. Yeah. No, I listen. I, the tough thing is, I don't know, there's the, this is right now what you should do with Fed policy is an area where a lot of reasonable people actually just disagree. It's not strong consensus. I do think that in general, people are, I'm seeing more people peel over to the side of its time to cut than, you know, then head in the other direction. But, you know, it's hard to argue that things are like real clear, given, given just how much is up in the air.

You know, we have, we have real volatility and we have self-imposed volatility right now. And, you know, those two things combined to a very tricky environment. Yeah, man. We nailed We cooked through that. Honestly, this is still way more exciting than last summer. Yes. We were doing these shows

last summer. We were like five. Yeah. How about the Friday, one and a half? And we really don't even want to talk about that. Seriously,

let's go. What, let's do the thing that they do, like on the top 40 countdown where they go, like, list last year's top five and listen to the full first top one song just to kill time.

Yeah. Yeah. It's because they actually had good songs. Well, yeah. We had bad songs last summer in that context. So I'm glad that we were actually talking about huge things. I think it's actually,

more just a function of how big news has become small news as we've become mainstream in such a part of the popular narrative. There's obviously a time when a stable coin bill passing would have filled five hours of conversation for two months. Yep. No, no, it's just, it's derogarage. It's just part of the part of the scene. I'll take now. And I'll take Bitcoin at 105. Exactly. Exactly. It's, there are worse situations to have just be normalized. By the way, I love the new emails coming from Blockwork for the breakdown. I don't know if they're new, but I've started getting them. They are. We've integrated the brands, which is always kind of the intent is to sort of like bring, you know, make, make the breakdown have its own life. That's not just me. So excited to see that. For those who don't subscribe to the, what is the breakdown newsletter used to be the Blockworks Daily newsletter. It's great. It's, you know, some of my favorite writing in the crypto space.

Wait, so that is the old Blockworks newsletter is now Breakdown newsletter. Correct. That is huge. Yeah. Congratulations. I didn't know. I thought I was just, honestly, I guess I should have noticed I wasn't getting the Blockworks email anymore. But the fact that it started appearing is the breakdown. I was like, yeah, it is really, really cool, really well done. It's great. Good stuff. Yep. See you guys next week.