The Pomp Podcast - The Real Reason Bitcoin Stopped Going Up | Mike Novogratz

Episode Date: February 18, 2026

Mike Novogratz is a veteran macro investor and the founder & CEO of Galaxy. This conversation was recorded live at Bitcoin Investor Week in New York. In this conversation, Mike shares why investing has become far more complex, how the dollar’s role as a global reserve currency may be shifting, and what that means for bitcoin, gold, and global markets. We also cover bitcoin’s recent pullback, regulation and ETFs, and why AI, energy, and tokenization could define the next market cycle.======================Arch Public is an agentic trading platform that automates the buying and selling of your preferred crypto strategies. Sign up today at ⁠https://www.archpublic.com⁠ and start your automated trading strategy for free. No catch. No hidden fees. Just smarter trading.======================Simple Mining makes Bitcoin mining simple and accessible for everyone. We offer a premium white glove hosting service, helping you maximize the profitability of Bitcoin mining. For more information on Simple Mining or to get started mining Bitcoin, visit ⁠https://www.simplemining.io/⁠======================0:00 - Intro0:24 - Why the investing game just got harder5:40 - Is the U.S. losing reserve currency status?8:37 - AI, productivity, & why inflation may stay low11:25 - Is Bitcoin actually “not working”?13:24 - Regulation, Wall Street, & Bitcoin’s next narrative20:59 - AI, power, & the future of Galaxy26:16 - Mike’s fantasy football league 

This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales. Using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more at Accenture.com slash Spotify. Listen, Bitcoin had a horrible year. Why do I think it happened? Well, we had a $9 billion seller and I had a friend that wanted to buy a sports team. So he sold some Bitcoin to buy a

sports team or to buy a boat or everyone took a few chips off the table. And I think we put a low one at 60. I'm not 100% convinced, but I'm pretty convinced. And so, yes, I've been buying some Bitcoin recently. And I think one of the reasons why crypto is not going away is it. All right. I like this desk. It's nice, right? You know why? Our team got mad at me the other day because they were like, you're on stage. And I was still texting them to get stuff done.

And I said, yeah, it's easy. You know, I can just do that. People are very confused in this room. They feel like the last 10 years investing, I don't want to say it was easy, but it was definitely like everything was up and to the right. You could just make money. You could buy S&P. You could buy Bitcoin, whatever. It now feels like we are in a much more complicated kind of macro-oriented world.

you've been in the macro world for i don't know 30 years 40 years long 60 years a long time what's going on i had hair like you when i started yeah uh listen it's complicated i was sitting with two of my mentors who are 72 and we were and their kids i don't know they did it right or wrong their kids are roughly the same age as mine and i said would you ever think about you know giving your kids some money to manage. They can make their own decisions with it. Like, how do you empower them? And they looked at me like, are you insane? They were like, we are entering the hardest 10 years of our careers and how to preserve and grow value. And we're at least pretty good at this. We have no idea if those kids are going to

even be, you know, an iota is good. And so, no. And I thought about that because, you know, they're right, right? There's so much changing right now that it makes value in understanding where to have your capital, A, just to stay level, right? If you measured yourself in gold, you didn't have a good year last year unless you owned a lot of gold, right? And so, does it mean run into gold now? I don't think so. I think gold and silver, certainly silver, put in the cycle high. If you look at the silver chart and you lay it over any other bubble in history, right? The NASDAQ bubble, the micro strategy bubble that we had, you name the bubble, the Nikkei bubble in 89, take the silver chart, put it right over it

and tell me you want to buy silver. You might buy it tactically because it gets oversold and it balances. But I will bet my clothes, I'll show up on this stage naked next year if silver puts it a new high. But it was an amazing story last year. And so what I think is happening is the United States is losing its position as the reserve currency of the world. And you can see that by amount of treasuries held by foreign central banks, foreign countries. they're going straight down. Partly this is by design. This is administration that has told neighbors, allies, we think you've cheated us. You got a better deal. We're very belligerent in our negotiating tactics. It can be called the art of the deal,

or it can be called being belligerent in your negotiating tactics. But what you saw from Mark Carney and Davos and Pierre Starmer, they're like, okay, we get it. You don't want to be our partner. We don't trust you anymore. We will partner with China. We'll diversify our assets. And so the good news for the US is China is nowhere close to being the reserve currency because it's a closed current account. I was actually just in Asia and I asked four different Chinese billionaires, guys who were living in Hong Kong, but mainlanders, how soon before China opens up and has a convertible currency, the most optimistic prediction was 20 years, right? They're like, no chance. There'll be so much capital flight.

It's going to, you know, what are currencies about? Currency is about trust. I trust the people in charge to be fair with my money. And so China doesn't have it. So you go to Europe. When I graduated from college in 1987, European and U.S. GDP was roughly the same. And today the U.S. is almost double. And so you're like, oh, yeah, Europe's not this great growth story. Listen, they have a lot of good stuff happening in Europe, but it's not going to be the reserve currency. And so we're going to be in a world where we're in between, where there is no reserve currency. And so last year it was gold and silver.

The year before it was Bitcoin. Got to be in Bitcoin. Got to be in Bitcoin. Bitcoin went from $16,000, $18,000 in 2022 to $130,000. Pretty damn good way to increase wealth. But then it had its movement. It crashed for a lot of reasons we can talk about. And so you've got to constantly be on the move to figure out what's working.

The trades this year that I said made sense about a month ago and I didn't put enough on, you know, short mega cap in the U.S. and long the rest of the world. Look what happened just in the last week in Korea and in Japan. European, you know, and Asian stock markets are way outperforming the U.S. Well, that makes sense, flow of funds, and they've been undervalued for so long. And so I think sitting in your seats is a much harder job than it's been in the past 15 years. When you think about the U S as a global reserve currency, you mentioned to me that you go around the world, you talk to these people, you ask them how wealthy they are. They always quote their wealth in dollars. What happens if the U S isn't considered that global reserve

currency, or at least people start to weaken their dependency on it, which seems to be happening. Like what do they use? You know, it's interesting. I had this idea that we should create like the global wealth currency which is really the s&p 500 but for the the biggest 100 500 companies in the world and it's it's that as all these currencies debate as these countries debase their own currency because of the debt problem asset prices go up uh and what we learned and what what quite frankly kevin warsh believes and i think scott besom believes is that roughly you can grow money supply pretty quick not stupidly quick but pretty quick you can keep rates pretty low and inflation comes down cpa consumer inflation because there's so

much productivity gains there's so many businessmen saying i can set this thing up in mexico and be cheaper than in new york or now we've got ai ai will literally be the thing everyone read that article that came around the last two days that should have scared us all ai is going to crush uh inflation and so what happens is you have consumer price inflation go relatively low uh that drives asset prices up because you can keep rates low and what's going to stop it at one point and marie dalio has been aggressive talking about this is a political revolution it's mondami squared it's it's wealth taxes but not at a state level that don't make any sense but at a national level it's people just say enough because the criticism of the trump economy

interesting enough is the exact same as the criticism of the biden economy right it's not working for 60 of the people he said wait but my stock market's on the high bam bonnie 50 000 dow yesterday come on you guys should forgive everything else 50 000 that will bite and have the same thought his stock market was the all-time high right he had inflation coming down. He had inherited from a high level coming down because of COVID, right? He had the most job gains in the history. No president in our country ever had more job gains than Joe Biden, right? So if you're Biden, you're arguing, I was a great steward, same way Trump is. Well, just go walk into Queens and not Manhattan or into Des Moines

or all over the country. And most people say, it's harder this year to do what I did last year. You can call that inflation, whatever you want to call it. It's harder this year to have the same life I had last year. And so that's the real risk. And I don't know when that shows up. It's not lost on me that the private sector crushed inflation, not the Fed, right? What you're talking about here of like the Fed was able to get it from nine to three, but really it is the private sector and artificial intelligence and all this stuff that seems to be really putting inflation to bed how does that change monetary policy especially you know if you're wars you're coming in and you've got deregulation you've got tax cuts you've got deportations you've

got tariffs you've got ai i mean this is a very complex so let's navigate the one thing i would say all of us as americans should have a huge sigh of relief and a little bit of a cheer like raise a glass and share that washes in the seat um let me tell you a little about it i don't know him that well but i know him pretty well and i understand drunken miller really well and kevin sat for the last 12 years as close uh as me and pomp to drunken miller is he in the league what is he in your league in the fantasy football league he's not in our league there's a there's a billionaire fantasy football league mike's in it with a bunch of these guys so he'll tell us about that in a second um but so what about kevin what kevin horse did and why the market reacted

the way it did is he took the tail risk away from idiot policy he's dovish my middleman's about and he is going to probably cut rates at least the first time but he thinks rates should be a lot lower because of the ai piece but if the facts change kevin will change and he's a man of integrity. Like he's tough and he's one of the most convincing conversationalists you'll ever sit with. The last time I was in his office, he looked good. I looked fat. I was like, hey, what do you do to stay healthy? Intermittent fasting. And I got a one hour lecture on intermittent fasting. This guy knew more about intermittent fasting than anyone I've ever met. And he'd been on it for six years. I lasted two days too. Like guys like him who have discipline

end up having integrity uh and so i think we're happy that kevin's there because he took the tail risk that you're going to do something really stupid that you're going to cut rates when you should be raising rates he's got at least some period of time where he gets to keep potus happy because he's gonna cut rates and i would probably argue if he has to hike rates he will have convinced potus it's the right thing to do like the one thing about trump which is well documented it is. If you're close to him, you have a lot of influence. You can help change his mind. And he's not as stubborn as he looks sometimes. And so I think Kevin will help the dollar stay important a lot longer and will be a good steward of the economy.

We're at the Bitcoin conference. Bitcoin is not, quote unquote, working. Are you selling Bitcoin? Are you buying Bitcoin? Are you worried about Bitcoin? I put on green pants today because I'm trying to give good energy to Bitcoin. I almost wore an orange jacket. Listen, Bitcoin had a horrible year. And why do I think it happened? I think we crossed 100,000. We were the best performing asset over the last five years, 10 years, six years, eight months.

And it felt like we won the goddamn marathon. And we hugged. I even said a celebratory, you know, Twitter to our entire client base. guys, you did it. This community, I'm so proud of the community. And it's the first global brand that's ever been built by a community. It was a miraculous accomplishment. And I think that sigh of relief allowed this religious zealousness. We got to do it. We got to build. We got to relax a little bit. And you started seeing, well, we had a $9 billion seller. You started seeing some whales sell, not in a mass wave. I had a friend that wanted to buy a sports team. So he

sold some bitcoin to buy a sports team or to buy a boat or everyone took a few chips off the table listen markets are about supply and demand and flow of funds and as you had the etfs and then the the dats coming in to buy bitcoin they were met with sellers and once the buying stopped you know it doesn't take a lot of buying to push it back the other direction right markets are markets find price on based on the marginal buyer and i think we put a low at 60 i'm not 100% convinced, but I'm pretty convinced. And so, yes, I've been buying some Bitcoin recently. I'm talking to a lot of people. They're all dabbling a little bit. But a lot of the old guys don't have a lot of dry powder. And so, what we need is new narrative. And it usually takes a

while. Like, I can come up with some. Worship's going to cut rates. That'll be good. Market structure, I think, is going to pass, believe it or not. Not positive, but I think so. I literally got a call from Chuck Schumer three nights ago. He's like, damn it, we're going to get this thing passed. I was like, okay, boss, keep on it. I'm talking about left and the right. What's crazy about market structure, and this says a lot about politics in the country right now, both the left and the right want to pass it for different reasons. The right needs it because this is kind of Trump's signature thing. I'm the crypto president. How can I own the House and the Senate and not get a goddamn crypto bill passed? And so there's a real urgency for the right to

pass this bill. The left realized, yeah, we should have listened to the few people who kept telling us there are more crypto owners than dog owners in America. And crypto is pretty popular, especially on young voters. And so why are we making a what should be a bipartisan technology political? And so the core centrist of the Democratic Party was like, let's pass this thing and get it off the stage as a political issue. So the hundred and ninety million dollars Fairshake has raised doesn't go attack them in all their elections again. Like every Democrat believes that Bernie Moreno won his election

over a pretty popular senator in Ohio because of fair shake. Right or wrong, that's what they believe. And so both the Democrats and Republicans wanted to pass. The bills are this close at this point. There's one big outstanding, it's should stable coins be able to give rewards. They can't even give interest,

but give rewards that kind of mimic interest or not. And the banks are like, absolutely not. And Brian Armstrong is like, absolutely. Yes. So intellectually, Brian's 100 percent right. The real innovation is stable coins that pay interest. That's an innovative product. It's great for the consumer. It hurts banks. What is driving me crazy, and I've been privately loud about this, but not publicly, is the senators are like, you guys have to figure it out. So they keep putting the banks and the crypto execs in an office saying, you guys come up with the compromise. I was like, guys, isn't your job to figure out what's best for the country

and set the rules and you're going to piss somebody off. Okay. Like that's, that's how progress happens because of so much money in politics, both Republican senators and democratic senators are scared to piss anyone off. And so we're in this weird standoff between And Brian, and listen, to be fair, the other, you know, Jeremy and, you know, Chad, Pascual at PAX, they're backing Brian. And Brian's right intellectually, period. There's not, you know, I hope he wins. I don't think he will.

And so we'll see, you know, where the compromise. So that's the one thing that could hold this thing up. I don't think it will be held up. I think it'll pass. and maybe if that passed, that gets us a little more narrative, right? Wall Street wants to participate, not because of Bitcoin. They understand we're going to move from a world of accounts to wallets, right? Paul Atkins said, I want everything on-chain. And you look at how fast some of these on-chain ecosystems grow. And so the idea of tokenizing Galaxy stock

or SpaceX shares, you're not going to sell them to the same people that are buying them already in the US, you're going to sell them all around the world to the 5 billion people that don't have great financial services in Cambodia, in Benin, in Paraguay, in Uruguay. That's where crypto really matters. The same people who use stable coins. You're not going to use stable coins. You got your little phone. It works perfectly. We have amazing payment systems in America and we have amazing financial services offered. And so the crypto revolution has always been about serving the underserved and why it's so important for america is it is an amazing platform for us to tell our stories for our champion brands who everyone wants around the world to raise capital

to have investors in and it's an amazing chance for those people to invest in google like forget bitcoin forget anything like google's been a pretty goddamn investment since everyone wrote off the new CEO, right? And so most people in the world don't have a chance to invest in those things. And so why market structure is important is it brings Wall Street in. Wall Street is here to sell. Wall Street is one of the great selling machines ever built. They sell mortgages, they sell equities, they sell private equity, they sell stories. People on Wall Street get paid to sell, not to buy. Wall Street's going to sell crypto. And that crypto is going to run on the Ethereum blockchain or the Solana blockchain, that story, once you have a wallet, you got to have some

Bitcoin, right? And so my hope is the bell goes down. There's an acceleration of TradeFi into our space that legitimizes it more, right? I always said nobody did more for Bitcoin to legitimize it than Larry Fink. So now we need a Larry Fink in each of these organizations. And all of a sudden, the 2% allocation of Bitcoin just becomes, of course. today's episode is brought to you by arch public i absolutely love these guys arch public is an agentic trading platform that automates the buying and selling of your preferred crypto strategies using sophisticated algorithms like the intelligence arbitrage and oracle protocols arch public executes advanced automated crypto strategies fully customized to your goals is your

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and an ai company my soul is in crypto but my wallet is an ai these days uh i read i read a forbes article says you have 20 billion dollars in ai i wish don't believe everything you read we have 1.63 gigawatts of power that we own at galaxy at galaxy uh and right now power is the scarce commodity and so we've already leased out 800 to core weave and they sub lease it out to tenants we're in the process of you know now entertaining quarters right you guys know who they are. It's Microsoft, NVIDIA, Amazon, Google. They're all racing to get power. And it's really power 2030, 2029, 2028, 2027, which we have. And so we have a great asset, which we are hoping to maximize the return on. That's a big business. Who knows what it's worth? I think it's

worth a lot. Morgan Stanley said in their research report, said our crypto assets are double what our stock i mean our data center assets are worth double what our stock price is trading at uh we still have a great crypto business our crypto business did 500 million dollars of revenue last year the business itself not the balance sheet the balance sheet lost money because crypto was down um and so right now it doesn't feel like we're getting a lot of value for you know a plus b is equal less than c that that's not always the case and so we're doing what what you're supposed to do. We're building each business with, you know, heads down, a lot of hard work, grinding away. I haven't at all given up on Bitcoin. Like there's 300 million people that

own some Bitcoin. They're not going to say, oh, that was a mistake, right? They're going to dig in. They're going to, and we're going to have a seller's exhaustion, which I think we did. People want me to ask the hard questions. Are you going to break up Galaxy and an AI and a crypto business? You know, I said this publicly and I'll say it again. We constantly make, we look at what makes sense and we'll make the right decision it's not as easy as just snapping your fingers and breaking things up and it's like people oh you should break it up today because you're not getting value like i'm looking two years ahead and saying okay what's the capital structure look like and there's one argument that in two years we're gonna have a billion dollars

of free cash flow coming into the company just from the data center business and that gives you a real advantage of like trying to win in crypto uh but we're gonna we're gonna take that you know quarter by quarter we think about it um and you know one transaction internally or externally can change a lot of the way you think about it and so we'll see tokenization tokenization you guys have announced that you may tokenize galaxy stock or thinking we did tokenize we're the first sec tokenized stock that's the good news the bad news so far it trades on super state which is kind of a closed garden so it doesn't trade with a lot of ball you have to have an appointment basically to trade it. We are working really hard with the SEC. And I would tell you, the SEC really wants

this to happen where we get, and that's one of the negotiations in this bill, where we get kind of sandbox authority for our token to trade on decentralized platforms. So imagine a trading on Uniswap or Hyperliquid, like that's awfully cool. And that is the future of DeFi. Why DeFi it's going to be so powerful is you're going to trade all these assets on these exchanges around the world. Now, is that fair to the TradeFi guys that have these huge infrastructures of compliance? I'm not sure if it's fair or not fair, but that's where innovation happens. And so it's the same thing when I think about the business I feel stupid about that I kind of missed is prediction markets. Prediction markets are going to be huge. We're looking constantly to

figure out our angle back into there i mean i could have shane was asking me to invest when he was a young kid and i was like i didn't think the regulatory hurdle would walk away and you know he's awesome but he's a little crazy uh and so i was like yeah we'll see and we'll see when from zero to 10 billion in about a week uh why they had courage they they basically broke the law when they said screw it we're gonna let you trade on politics and all of a sudden people saw what attention, right? Where the world has attention, they're making markets and they're making them really quick.

I mean, 80% of their revenue now is sports betting. And so if you're fan duels, I can't beat them, join them or try to blow them up. And they're all doing this both, right? There's an army of lobbyists in DC right now from the casinos and from the sports books saying this is no fair, this is no fair. But the CFTC is like, eh, we already made a ruling.

We'll try to change it some. We'll see. I saw the CFTC came out recently and said, we'll see if we change it. So I'm telling you that story because none of this is a straight line. There's punch, counterpunch, and it's going to be the same thing with DeFi. But that's where the tokenization story really works. We've got to go here, but can you tell us about the Fantasy Football League? 25 years we've been playing this fantasy football league it is great spirits and there's a replica

of the the super bowl trophy with a cricket on top it's the hopper and whenever you get cocky people like oh he just called the hopper and it started because first year me and adam levinson my partner we had amazing semi-finals it looked like we were 100 going to be in the final and i of course wrote looks like it's going to be an all fortress final and two five standard deviation deviation events happened in football joe horn had four touchdowns with the silva you just couldn't believe and neither of us were in the uh and so one of the guys told this amazing story of you know don't jinx yourself and he called it calling the hopper and so our trophy has a gold cricket on the top of it and so who else is in the group though um you know everyone the great

thing about macro investors is they learn, they listen, you know, they share ideas. We don't see each other as competitors. Like in some ways, I don't want to use the word collaborator. It's a bad word, but we're, we're co-competitors, right? But not like it's when you're in the credit business, you're fighting over a piece of business. There's as much dollar yen to buy. Like I can buy as much as I want. And it doesn't matter if Stan Druckenmiller or Paul Jones is buying dollar in. And so we exchange ideas, we exchange thoughts. And so slowly but surely, I think every single one of the people in the fantasy football league has, you know, Bitcoin is one of the instruments of their arsenal. And I think one of the reasons why

crypto is not going away is it's now on every dashboard, right? Everyone's Bloomberg has the S&P and the Bitcoin price. It comes across CNBC tape. And so it's becoming part of institutional infrastructure in terms of weaponry, right? And so most people in this business are in it to make money. And so if they think they can make money, they're going to pour right in. Right now, most of those guys are on the sidelines. Mike Novogratz, everybody.