The Wolf Of All Streets - Bitcoin Braces for Powell’s Jackson Hole Speech – $100K Next? | Friday Five

Episode Date: August 22, 2025

Bitcoin sits near $110K as all eyes turn to Jerome Powell’s Jackson Hole decision and whether the Fed will signal rate cuts or stick with “higher-for-longer.” Washington heats up with Senator Lummis pushing a crypto market structure bill, the DOJ easing enforcement on developers, and banks lobbying to reshape the GENIUS Act. Globally, China explores yuan-backed stablecoins, while whales shift from Bitcoin into Ethereum and BlackRock doubles down on ETH. Even the Kanye West memecoin shows the risks of speculation. With policy, institutions, and macro all colliding, the key question remains: will the Fed’s decision spark Bitcoin’s next big move?

Bitcoin is sitting at $112,000 support right on one of the biggest news days that we have for markets. Obviously, Fed Chairman Jerome Powell about to give his speech at Jackson Hole. We break down a 112. A lot of people looking for 100,000 next. I happen to believe that this might be a really strong support, and it's going to be much ado about nothing very soon. And we're going to discuss what's happening in Jackson Hole and everything else that happened this week in Crypto News and Markets with NLW here on the Friday 5. Let's go. Good morning, everybody, and happy Jackson Hole, those who celebrate. This is the Super Bowl of financial markets. Jerome Powell going to give a

speech and we're going to deeply analyze his tone. If he sneezes in the wrong direction, which way he coughs. And every single gesture that he makes, it's Powell Day. Are you celebrating? How are you celebrating? I should say, how are you celebrating? I know, I mean, listen, it's, it's interesting because you can really, you know, it is actually a useful device to go back and sort of see how each of these speeches has captured kind of the moment. They do really provide an interesting indicator of where things were. What's different about this time, obviously, is that this is the last one for him. And so, you know, there's basically less of a reason. It doesn't make as much sense for him to try to lay out some big new kind of plan for the future, given that he's

not there to implement it. So we don't exactly know what we're going to get. Yeah, I mean, is he going that, you know, throw a grenade explosions in the background as he casually walks away into the sunset like a Hollywood movie. You know, a lot of people, I think, are looking for him to take his shots at Trump. I don't think that's his style. I don't think he's going to do that at all, even underhandedly, obviously, I don't think he's going to be like, yeah, Trump's a dick, anything like that. But, you know, he obviously has his sort of last opportunity, as you said, here to stay the course, I guess or change nothing and kind of fly against the popular sentiment of what he should be doing. Yeah, I mean, look, I think that if, if, you know, there's all sorts of prediction markets.

I was just looking at at Calshan Polymarket to see what people thought he was going to say. And it's all stupid. It's all betting around like how many times he says, you know, inflation and things like that. It's not really substantive. Although I will say people do not expect him to talk about crypto at all. I think it's just six cents. trade for that one. I know, right? But I think that the sort of like obvious play for him, based on everything we've ever seen from Powell, is to basically slightly try to tamp down

the assuredness that the market has that we're getting a rate cut in September to give himself a little bit more, more breathing space, right? So much so that you're already seeing that kind of come in. Right now, I think the CME Fed Watch has the odds of a rate cut down to 70% or just a little under 70%. It was 100 last week. I'm old enough to remember when 100% meant something was definitely going to happen. Yeah. On the prediction markets, it's down to 60 in both cases, 5960.

And that's exactly what Powell wants. Powell hates being boxed into, you know, the market's sort of preempting his policy. Now, the flip side is we could get a little bit of a surprise and see a legacy speech, right, where he tries to articulate, you know, something that the future Fed chair should watch out for or something like that. Like, it's not outside the realm of possibility. I think it is pretty impossible for him to throw grenades and lob bombs, but it's not impossible that he tries to sort of use this as a last statement to, you know, remind people

or sort of, you know, have his sort of his view felt, you know, an echo through the ages. Yeah, you might try to get that, you know, JFK or MLK quote in there that he's remembered for that gives him, you know, a strong legacy. We'll see. But I mean, to your point about predictive markets generally, even amongst Fed governors now, there's very lukewarm, certainly no consensus that there's going to be rate cuts in September. And markets really have been pricing in that that was effectively a foregone conclusion. But we're at this place now where you get speeches from multiple Fed governors and they're in no way to have this consensus of what's going to happen. Yeah. The last week has been weird. It's like the entire sort of, you know, business cycle,

the normal business cycle of the summer has been hyper compressed into one week. We've had markets absolutely freaking out about complete non-news when it comes to AI, repricing everything wildly. Like the sort of stuff that happens over an extended couple month period, usually in July and August, is now all happening in like one week, which is adding to this weird sort of sense of trepidation and volatility. It's almost like, you know, everyone forgot it was summer up until, you know, five days ago. And now we're trying to catch up. I mean, that was my literal message to you was like, we finally have one of those slow weeks. But then, you know, we have the slow week and Friday hits on Jackson Hole. So I guess slow is relative versus previous cycles.

There's a lot more happening in Jackson Hole beyond just this speech. Obviously, we have the Wyoming blockchain symposium 2025. This was, you know, presented by Saul, Anthony Scaramucci. Interesting place and interesting time to go and do a blockchain summit. This wasn't really so heavily on my radar. But when you and I discussed show notes and topics, you said you could do hours and hours on everything that happened here. Yeah, it's, you know, whatever Powell decides to use this speech for, it's clear that the Washington sort of economic establishment decided to use the blockchain symposium to really reinforce the sort of deep integration of crypto and the financial system. We had a couple of different Fed governors who spoke. And importantly,

the, you know, the conversation has shifted away from just being about sort of the need for, for, you know, quality and even permissive regulation into even there was a whole discussion of how the Fed should use crypto rails and embrace these things. I mean, it's very clear. sort of another inflection point moment past which we are kind of moving into a new era, I think, of integration for crypto. Yeah, I didn't get a chance to listen to many of the speeches, but as you said, they obviously took the opportunity to talk about all of the things that could happen in the future for this industry.

And obviously, Lummis is from Wyoming. This week, we got the announcement, which we don't even have is one of our main topics, at Wyoming launching Frontier Stablecoin, which I actually think is a relatively big story that a state is launching a stable coin. And then, of course, Lumas also saying, you know, we're going to get market structure by 2026. Actually, 2026 almost seems bearish from what we've heard before because we were supposed to be talking about it for August and September. That's clearly not happening yet for clarity. But she's pretty convicted that this is going to happen. Yeah. I mean, the big, so, you know, we got a,

commitment to a timeline as much as a policy should commit to a timeline. It's not obviously in her control. So that part you kind of have to take with a great assault. What was more interesting is that we got a lot more information around how the Senate seems to be thinking about their bill versus the House bill. And basically what Lemis said was that the House had done a good job to get real bipartisan support for this thing. So the Senate was probably going to lean pretty heavily on their version of the bill on the on the on the on the house's version of the bill versus the sentence version of the bill which that was the big question coming out there were sort of you know these fundamentally different definitions of how to handle the whole securities question

and it and it seems at least from where we're sitting now at least from what lemmas said that they're really going to lean on the on the sort of the house approach which you know hold aside with the debates on on right or wrong it's an interesting you know it's clear that they care about the the actually getting this thing through if they're kind of making a calculation on path of least resistance to do so. Yeah, and it seems like we still have this sentiment that we need to strike while the iron's hot. We're already starting to see a lot of action ramping up towards midterms and seemingly some fear that we might not have the same environment after midterms as we have now for

patching legislation. One of the other stories this week that we didn't choose was obviously the Winkleweigh wins, choosing to give, I think, $25 million to a new super PAC. So clearly the crypto lobby is ramping up to make sure that we still have an environment for passing legislation if this doesn't get done quickly. Yeah, I think that it is the correct, it's the correct mindset to operate under the assumption that past the midterms, we're dealing with the totally different set of circumstances. And so nothing can be taken for granted. and we have to move as fast as we can now there's plenty of room and the people who are in

washington the crypto lobby you know as much as the you know our kind of our chattering class might have given up on the on the left side of the aisle certainly the crypto political lobby hasn't they are out courting and working and they will be working you know throughout this election cycle on you know pro crypto dems not just pro crypto republicans however it would be a historic for these sort of the majorities that the republicans have right now to persist uh there's There's lots of reasons to think, you know, just based on the normal kind of pattern of U.S. political history that there will be a bit of a rebound. And, you know, Warren is still out there kicking. And who knows what the resurgence of the anti-crypto army could be. So I think

that we have to operate under the assumption that things are, you know, relatively more difficult past the midterms, which is to say nothing of also just the fact that nothing gets done when people are campaigning for midterms. You know, so it's like, it's a double whammy. Yeah, that people need to remember that Elizabeth Warren would become the chair of the Senate Finance Committee once again if somehow the Senate flips. And we would have the Queen of the Anti-Crypto Army leading the Senate Finance Committee. That could be a very, very bad situation. So you can't get complacent, I guess, if you're going to be lobbying and pushing for the industry in Washington.

I think the next big story that we have here kind of crazy is Michael Saylor making some waves. I haven't dug too deeply into the fights that are clearly happening. happening on X amongst the community, but micro strategy, strategy eases MSDR stock sale limits as shares hit lowest level since April. We got basically, I think, a 21% retrace on strategy this week. And last I checked, Bitcoin certainly not down 21% this week. So clearly this is something unique to micro strategy and strategy that is not dependent on the price of Bitcoin. it is a nice compression of MNAV, though, you'd have to imagine. Yeah.

So I think it's really hard for me to parse out how much of this is strategy or micro strategy specific versus risk off. Now, to your point, the fact that Bitcoin hasn't fallen that much suggests that at least some amount of it is specific to micro strategy. But if you look at sort of more broadly what's been happening with markets, a lot of the market's recent favorite stocks from a risk's perspective have just been hammered. Right. Palantir has been hammered. The AI stuff has been hammered. There's a real concern right now. Basically, the way that the the nervousness heading into the rate season is being manifest is everything that has been a pillar of stock market performance in a way that people have worried seems like it's way too much of a pillar of stock market performance is being questioned right now. And I think that strategy obviously isn't quite the same as, you know, invidia when it comes to that. But it's certainly in this basket of things which have been, you know, willful out performers

throughout the course of the market that sort of seem to not care and have their own gravity vis-a-vis everything else that's happening in the markets. And so maybe some of it's part, maybe some part of it is that. The other part is that, obviously, you know, the short of it is, you know, strategy had announced certain guidelines for themselves around when and how they couldn't buy based on, you know, sort of, you know, ratios. And then we're like, eh, actually, we're going to do whatever we want. which is like, have you been watching Sailor forever?

Like, of course he's going to do whatever he wants. You know, like this is not surprising. But, you know, look, when you're a public company and you say one thing and then you immediately kind of go and turn around and say, no, actually, we're going to do it a different way, it causes nervousness, especially because, you know, micro strategy for better or worse are the, you know, Exhibit A of a trend that people are both exuberant about right now, but also nervous that they might be wrong about or or at least sort of like, listening for when musical chairs ends, let's put it, on the whole theme.

Yeah, in a vacuum, what he did doesn't concern me greatly. But when it's at a period where Bitcoin is sort of trading sideways, which we know without volatility is generally bad for micro strategy or anybody who's taking this approach to buying Bitcoin, and then he changes it, they're going to be market participants who haven't done too deeply into the strategy who are going to feel a bit panicked. or they're going to feel like he's a bit panicked. Yeah. That he's making this decision that he's basically like creating a floor because he's concerned.

Yep. Yep. So I don't know. I think I've had to watch the markets really closely recently, not just for crypto related things, but because it is there's a huge explosion of sort of like the, you know, nervousness around AI narrative. And my read broadly is that,

one, as much as we have felt like we are not in a normal summer, we still are dealing with thin liquidity and sort of, you know, normal summer trading environments. And two, there is so much narrative going on right now. Like all the decisions are being made, not based on fundamentals, but based on narratives and conversations. You know, there's this unbelievably sort of, you know, weak MIT study in the AI space that said that 95% of, pilots are failing based on interviews with like 52 executives. And numerous analysts have cited that as a reason why, you know, by Palantir and NVIDIA are going, like, it's just, it's a weird moment. So I think it's worth, this is like, you know, we haven't had to touch much grass this

summer because there's been so much to actually do and pay attention to. It's a real good touch grass moment is sort of my TLDR. Yeah, I agree with that. And listen, I just happened to bring this up because on spaces yesterday, Toma Strolide mentioned this, but this is strategy, variable, rate, perpetual, stretch, PRF, share, series, A, yeah, one of micro-stratities, many assets here, this was STRC, obviously, the biggest IPO of the year. You might remember, this is trading now at 94.44, it was down to about 93. This is supposed to trade on par at 100, and this is an asset that gives,

I believe, an 8 or 9% yield. So if you believe that micro strategy, this is just fud and it dropped for no reason, this thing, you basically, they have the incentive to push it back up to 100 and then you get the yield on top. This seems like you could be a really, really good trade if you believe that micro strategy is fine here. Yeah, I mean, look, six percent, you know, six, seven percent, and you should get the nine percent yield on it. Yeah, look, in moments like this, the touch grass is a really reasonable approach. the you know the be greedy when others are fearful is also you know long term historic wisdom you can get caught without your shirt on but you know for those who for those who've got the got the long term conviction they're there they're not a lot of better moments in this i guess you know as they say

when the when the tide goes out and can see who's swimming naked maybe you can just be the one stealing the clothes from those people yeah exactly on the beach uh so the next story that we have You're really interesting, actually, in context of everything that's been going on with Roman Storm is that we have some clarity from the U.S. Department of Justice saying writing code without bad intent is not a crime, making that clear. This is one of the biggest talking points that we've had for years. Obviously, we have samurai wallet guys just effectively pleading guilty, Roman Storm being charged in one of the three. and it seems like video saying what they did is fine. So we have this really kind of

conflicted moment. There's obviously good news, but I'm not sure that the courts got the memo. Yeah. I mean, look, this is one of those there's a difference between an administration and the representatives of an administration saying a thing and trying to articulate it and trying to

sort of like influence policy and it being shrined in law in the judicial process. And And, you know, I think that if you're a developer, every sort of statement like that one is helpful. And we want more of them. The more that that can become sort of like the norm, the better. But it's still a, I don't think anyone's sort of looking at that and saying, okay, great, now I can go, you know, do the thing that I was going to do without any concern. You know, it's, this is going to, I can't imagine this ever being a fully resolved issue, frankly.

in the U.S., it's just always going to be some amount of gray area for interpretation. Maybe if you're Roman stormed, though, you're saying they're thinking, my appeal just got Stanley more bullish. No, 100%. I mean, look, that's why it's one of those things where, you know, you neither want to overstate how important it is in terms of actual practical implications, but you don't want to understate the significance of, you know, leading officials coming out and saying a thing that we've wanted officials to embrace as policy. So it's, you know, it's, it's entirely 100% bullish. It's just

how kind of positive is its actual input? That's the only thing. Yeah, how much will it end up mattering in the individual cases? And the final story we have today, China weighs Yuan back stable coins and major policy shift. China's cabinet or review of roadmap that included Yuan pegged stable coins to bolster you on internationalization sources told Reuters. This is really interesting to me, it seems obvious. And they've already been piloting and using a one central bank digital currency for years. So how is their policy to not have stable coins if they have a central bank digital currency? I think it's the difference is how much control they're willing to give up for the for sort of the private sector to do the work of digital yuanification of the world,

right? Like that's really the question. China is watching the U.S. dollar have it. It's, you know, it's best long-term resurgence potential created because of stable coins, right? You know, as much as people talk about what's going to take down the dollar as a sort of an international, you know, the sort of currency, currency of the world, it's stable coins are arguably the thing that is extending its dominance as the world's reserve currency, right? When you have people who have, you know, used $20 bills forever as their favorite currency and all of a sudden they have access to a proxy that's, you know, easier to get, works just as well. Everyone accepts it. It means that they don't really have to look elsewhere, right? And it's very clear that stable coins are now a geopolitical force, right? The U.S. has gotten that memo, you know, the ends.

And I think China is as well. And, you know, with China, it's just a question of, like I said, how much they're willing to give up control, right? With a digital yuan, the actual CBDC, they have control of the supply, the issuance, the redemption, all that, you know, if they allow or if they sort of encourage private digital yuan, you know, in the same way that there's a, you know, a circle equivalent or whatever, there's some control that's lost. But the trade-off is that the influence of their currency might be a lot broader if they allow that to happen. So I think that that's sort of the calculation right now. Yeah, it's not going to work. I mean, one is a stable coin backed by anything other than U.S. dollars gained any traction anywhere. I get why they're doing it and you're 100% correct, but that doesn't, to me, mean that anybody's going to all of a sudden want to use Chinese currency.

Yeah, supply in this case, I do not think, creates demand. But, you know, there's there's also things that China can do to influence sort of adoption of, you know, their currency in this ways. And who knows, like, what sort of international trade kind of, you know, pressure they can put on to use whatever. You know, like, there's. Yeah, you do not get your small plastic toys unless you transact in Yuan back stable quotes. They're not sending them. It's not happening. All right.

I think we unpacked everything. This is, I think, our slowest week. but the reality is we're good to see what happens in Wyoming today, and that's going to probably dictate next week, or at least the next three days' worth of news and how people interpret it. I think the big takeaway from today's stream, as you said, is just go touch grass. Yep. That's what I'm going to do. All right. Yeah, me too.

Guys, go check out, obviously, the breakdown, everything else NLW has going on. It's funny, I see people, like, in the comments sometimes referring to, like, the AI guy is here. And I've just never referred, I've never thought of you. is the AI guy. You were the crypto guy before you were the AI guy. Yeah. Yeah, it's just times keep changing, man. Like I said, it's a little Asian girl. Why not both? Anyways, that's what we got for you today. We will see you next week for the next Friday 5. Thanks, man. Bye. Hey, folks, a quick disclaimer. This segment is brought to you by a partner of this channel.

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