The Wolf Of All Streets - Bitcoin & Crypto Demand SURGES As Banks & Wall Street Go ALL IN!

Episode Date: December 12, 2025

Today’s episode breaks down one of the biggest developments in TradFi and crypto convergence yet — the DTCC, the massive clearinghouse that settles over $2 QUADRILLION in securities every year, is officially accelerating its move into asset tokenization. We’ll cover why the DTCC’s new digital-assets roadmap could completely transform how stocks, bonds, money markets, and alternative assets are traded… and why this may be the catalyst institutions have been waiting for. Plus: what tokenized markets mean for Bitcoin, crypto liquidity, regulation, U.S. banks entering crypto, and the next wave of blockchain adoption

Bitcoin and crypto demand are surging as Wall Street banks, institutions, and governments go all in. We have some of the biggest news that we've seen from the regulators this week with the OCC allowing banks to fully participate in crypto activities. Of course, we also have Doquan being sentenced for 15 years, not quite the SBF level, but going to jail for fraud for 15 years. And a swath of other news coming, particularly from Washington, D.C. this is going to be a great show we've got all of it here to unpack on the friday five let's go with us. It is the holiday season, so we're going to be mixing it up on a lot of the shows, nothing unexpected. We also have some guest producers in the house. They won't be on camera, but my children are here running the stream. So if you see some cool camera angles,

that's definitely the two of them that are doing it. My son was trying to convince me to be in Minecraft for the show. It just didn't quite work out with the logo. But, you know, you never know what surprises we're going to get today. So obviously, I think the first story that we have to discuss today, here we are. U.S. Bank regulator says banks, act as crypto intermediaries. I actually sort of dismissed this as a non-news event passing in the news cycle and didn't really give it a second major thought until on Crypto Town Hall, Dave Weisberger unpacked for me just how important this actual piece of news is, and it is absolutely massive. So what the OCC is saying here is not just that banks can custody

these assets or participate in crypto, which we've seen before. That's why I kind of dismissed it. I thought that this was just a continuation of what we'd seen from the FDIC and other bank regulators. That's not the case. What they said is that the banks can facilitate crypto trades as riskless principles. This is a massive, massive step forward in what banks are allowed to do. And frankly, a huge piece of competition for the Coinbase Gemini and Crackens of the world, the exchanges that you are using and that institutions are using here in the United States, because this allows banks to match buyers and sellers directly without holding crypto on their balance sheets. So that's what it means in riskless principles. They can match a buyer

and a seller, but they can do it directly, no third parties, and basically facilitate massive trades. This is like being an OTC desk. This is a step towards being a market maker where they could theoretically participate in those things in the future. Market making, of course, there's a lot more risk because the market makers keep their own books. They custody their own assets and they keep the spread. But this is basically crypto rails being fully normalized inside the United States banking system. Now, it wasn't going to be my next story, but I think when talking about how important this is, there's really a crazy story here from the DCCC. I don't know if you guys saw this. If you're wondering what the DCC is, they're basically

the third party that's in between every security and stock trade in the United States, the depository trust and clearing company. I have a video from them because this absolutely just blew my mind. Let's go ahead and play this real quick. I'll just show you the beginning of it. Thank you. We can stop there. I think you get the idea. We now have not only the banks can fully participate, but the DTCC, which is arguably the single service that crypto and tokenization could disrupt the most is adopting the technology. Obviously, this is. one of those Netflix taking over blockbuster moments. They don't want to be the next Kodak or Sears Roebuck, and they're adopting the technology. We also had, you may have missed it, but along the same lines, we had Paul Atkins saying that

everything will be on blockchain rails in the next two years. The entire U.S. financial system, he said, we'll shift the tokenization within a couple of years, and he specified he thought two years. Now, I don't think that that's realistic, but it's very clear that right now, tokenization and moving on blockchain rails are the future of all legacy financial systems. Now, there's a long, long, long conversation to be had about whether that's actually good for the industry

or if it's what we want. This has arguably nothing to do with Bitcoin and certainly with any of the tokens that we love. But this is happening and they are adopting it. The question is, as they adopted, if they're actually looking to co-opt the system entirely, I would argue, yes, this concerns me because I can't imagine that generally

when we start talking about adoption by these institutions and government and the very systems that crypto is meant to disrupt that they're going to allow our tokens to be the ones that benefit from it or the public blockchains. I would predict, if I had to, that DTC will be using private blockchains to tokenize and do these things. Maybe that won't be the case. And certainly that when we start talking about the OCC, these banks, some of them will adopt probably the rails that we have in public blockchains, but many of them will do like what J.P. Morgan's doing, create a J.P. Morgan coin or their own rails to do these things on. So the technology is certainly being adopted. I'm not sure how investable that will be for all of us or what the

benefits will be, but this is a fever dream, especially when you zoom out to what the Gensler era and the Operation Jokepoint 2.0 looked like in the United States, almost unimaginable that we would be at this point where it's being adopted by those very institutions. Once again, those are the very institutions that I bought Bitcoin to opt out of. So there's a part of me that's not that excited. And there's a little bit of cognitive dissonance there. But otherwise, it is very, very interesting to see that all of this is getting adopted at the moment. And along those lines, we still need to see clear legislation in the United States to support this. Because even as Atkins said this week, he's trying to create regulation that's future proof because we've seen

executive orders, regulators, they come and go. Right? When you get a new president and an executive order becomes effectively meaningless because they can just be reversed by executive order by the new president. And I mean, we saw to our benefit what happens when a corrupt regulator is dismissed like Gary Gensler. We got Paul Atkins, Hester Purse at the SEC, all the things we want. But what happens when they're no longer there and you get another regime coming back? You need to future-proof these things. And that's where these news stories come in. Democrats weigh GOP offer on crypto market structure bill. We all know that we've been hearing about the passing of the Clarity Act since basically Trump was elected. We got the Genius Act, but we were waiting for the Clarity Act, which we

just have not seen major progress on in months. A lot of that was because of the government shutdown, of course. A lot of that is just because crypto is not the main and singular priority for the government, the United States right now, which I think it's fair to understand and be intellectually honest about. But now we're really getting into the holidays, and then it's just going to become full-on election season for the midterms. These guys are going to be making calls to donors all day. They're not going to be spending their time worrying about crypto legislation. So we're really getting into that window where this needs to be done and this needs to be done now. Well, there's still some debate between the Senate Democrats and Republicans as to what should

be in this bill. We don't have that much clarity on exactly what this is. But we know that in the Senate is going to have to eventually get 60 votes, which means that Democrats are going to have to participate. There are quite a few very crypto-friendly Democrats that are pushing this forward, but we'll see what happens. We do need to get this done because all of these things that we're talking about, this adoption, it's going to hinge on actually getting clear legislation to make sure that it's not reversed into the future. Now, I don't think that applies necessarily to the DTCC. I think the DTCC is going to use tokenized rails and blockchain because it's just better, faster, and cheaper, and it's the future. But if we actually want to participate in that as

retail or investors, I think it's really important that we get this legislation passed. Just another story along the same lines. Bank CEOs expected to meet senators on crypto market structure. This obviously happened earlier in the week. We had quite a few of the big names in the banking sector meeting. So this isn't just the crypto industry meeting. This isn't just the senators and Congress people meeting themselves. This was Bank of America, CEO Brian Moynihan, Citigr, Jane Fraser, Wells Fargo CEO, Charlie Scharf. They're all met with senators this week to discuss just crypto market legislation. Now, we've seen a lot of stories in the past about the Brian Armstrongs of the world meeting with them trying to help impact or, I guess, influence

how this legislation is created. We obviously want crypto incumbents involved in setting crypto legislation. We don't want a bunch of 85-year-old octogenarians who think that gold is still money, backing our money. We don't need them setting crypto policy. So it's good that our industry in there participating, but this is a clear signal of where the puck is headed, which is that the institutions themselves, these are the very banks that now will be able to participate in crypto services are also involved in this legislation. Now, after the Genius Act, we saw a lot of these banks actually really angry with the way that Stablecoin regulation was, a legislation, excuse me, was passed, right? Because we had this sort of unintended

absolute mess when the ETFs were launched. So the ETFs were launched. So the ETFs were launched. And the last thing that the SEC and Gary Gensler wanted was for the crypto industry to be able to control that. But the only basically custodian who could do it was the crypto industry. So Coinbase ended up effectively costing almost all the ETFs. Gemini, I believe, some of them maybe VanX and others. But largely Coinbase got that. And the banks had been left out by Sab 121, which was the letter that the memo at the SEC that said that basically you had to keep a liability on the other side of any crypto asset on the balance sheet. So how could you possibly, as a bank custody, billions of dollars in crypto

if you had to have billions of dollars of cash on the other side of the balance sheet? That didn't apply to Coinbase. They were able to become the custodian. Well, the banks now, they want their peace of all this, BNY Mellon, State Street, Goldman Sachs, everybody, the largest custodians and banks in the world want their peace. And then when the stable coin legislation passed, they realized, wow, we might be in really big trouble if these things can be yield-bearing. Why would anybody keep their money sitting in a bank account with Goldman Sachs

or any of these, if they can go get four or five percent yields safely in a stable coin. They wouldn't. So obviously, the banks either want to be able to get that yield themselves, you know, because they pay you sub 1%, even if they're making 4%, or they want to block it entirely to make sure that you don't get to participate in that stable coin yield. So I think we're really at a battleground here between the banks and the institutions and the crypto industry and them wanting to participate, but also be in control.

So I would say that the more of this news we get, the more it feels like we're really at the crossroads of how decentralized our future will possibly be, whether they really can take over a lot of our systems, using them to their benefit and leaving us all out. So I think that it's interesting that you get these CEOs specifically meeting. And in the same time, we're seeing a number of pathways for which these large banks are starting to participate in the industry. I've talked about this a lot before. We've talked about with our guests. There's basically two approaches you can take, right? You can take the approach as a bank of building your own systems, making everything privatized. Maybe you'll have partners to do that.

I mean, I should have mentioned before, Chainlink is the partner with the DCCC. Chainlink has a partnership now with Coinbase. Chainlink seemingly partnering with everybody to be the technology behind this. But they'll either create their own or they'll literally just simply go to a Coinbase or someone else and say, listen, let's partner up. Plug me into your API. Let's do it that way right here. PNC Bank has launched Spot Bitcoin Trading for PNC private bank clients directly within its digital banking platform, making it the first

major U.S. Bank to do so, Brian Armstrong commented, exciting to see more banks embrace crypto like this. PNC. Private Bank clients can now buy, sell and hold Bitcoin in their existing accounts. PNC is the first major U.S. bank to support this type of offering. This push and pull is going to really be the story, I think, of the coming year or two as we really see adoption. And every story that I'm presenting today kind of has that same exact push and pull. We talked about it with stable coins, but are they going to adopt USDC and USDT for all the things that they're doing with stable coins? Or are they going to create their own stable coins? We've seen, I don't want to be misquoted. You know, Wells Fargo, Bank of America,

they've all had announcements about how they'll use stable coins in the future. Some of them saying they're going to pilot building their own stable coins, some of them generally adopting USDC. Now there was another story I got to find it here while we're talking about stable coins because this one absolutely blew my mind. Completely unrelated, but holy crap. YouTube lets US creators, you know, US creators, we're usually cut out of everything. YouTube lets US creators receive payouts in PayPal's P-YUSD stablecoin as the platform integrates crypto payment options per fortune. You can't tell me that PYUSD is not the worst name for a stable coin in the history Fablecoins. No person has ever looked at that word and read it as P-Y-U-S-D, but whatever.

But either way, you're going to be allowed to integrate with P-Y-U-S-D at PayPal, P-S-D. You're going to be able to use that now to take your payouts from YouTube. Now, any YouTube creator out there knows that you hope and pray that you get your pittance. You know, you're $27 a month. I think it's more than X. You get about $26 a month, I think, on X at my level. But then you're going to get your payout now if you're crypto-native, you can take that directly in PYUSD instead of having it wired to your bank account. Now, this is exciting for someone like me.

I don't think people understand how big this is, but I think it's only big because it's one more further step in the clear adoption of stable coins. Now, you have every major basically payment provider or platform starting to use this. Of course, you know, Stripe with their own layer one. They've been taking USC payments for years. conversation, which will come out on Sunday with Johan Cabrat, the head of crypto at Robin Hood, he basically said in that conversation, which I had never heard before, that Robin Hood actually uses stable coins internally all the time for payments because they're 24-7, 365 on weekends, and can be used to work with foreign clients and customers and partners. I didn't know that.

I didn't know that Robin Hood internal accounting uses stable coins, and that's exactly the kind of story that we're seeing here from YouTube. I find this just absolutely mind-blowing. and fascinating that we're seeing this move so fast. I just, you know, I think it's one of those hockey curve moments for the crypto industry where we've kind of had this level of adoption hockey stick and then goes absolutely parabolic. And I can't say that I was necessarily expecting this all to happen this fast, but humans are really bad at anticipating the timeline of things, right? We think you've seen it as a crypto investor. You always think something's about to go parabolic the minute that you start, right? You buy a coin. It doesn't go parabolic.

Then the minute you sell it, it finally goes parabolic, right? We underestimate how long it will take for something to be adopted, but then we also equally under-misestimate how fast that adoption can happen when it actually hits. And I wildly underestimated how fast this adoption was going to happen here as it hits. Now, the next story, we dug into it a bit earlier this week, but I find this one really, really interesting. Wall Street hedged big crypto bet and $500 million ripple deal. Stop me. If you've heard this one before, actually don't because you can't stop me.

This is not a story necessarily about Ripple. I think it's more of a story about the way that Wall Street behind closed doors is actually approaching crypto and certainly their crypto bets. As we dug into the story earlier in the week, we know that weeks ago it was announced that Wall Street had invested $500 million in Ripple, big names like Citadel Fortress. Brevin Howard had written huge checks to Ripple at a $40 billion valuation. That is a very, very big number.

Of course, Ripple holds over $80 billion of XRP on their own balance sheet. They had the luxury of creating that token themselves to hold on their balance sheet, which is, wow, the power of the ICO, absolutely incredible. But they've also used those tokens and selling them to the market to be able to fund their ventures to build all the things that they've built, like the acquisition of Hidden Road and quite a few other things. But this was touted when it was originally announced as Wall Street going all in on a crypto bet. They're going to make this massive investment into Ripple.

They deeply believe in Ripple and the technology. Well, when you dig into the details, that's not the entire story. I do think it is fair to say that they invested because they have unlimited upside if what Ripple says they can do, they deliver. So it would be disingenuous to say that this is meaningless and they don't see the upside. The real story, though, is how capped their downside is. So as the deal details finally were released, we found out that the maximum downside for these investors was 10% a year.

This was effectively a 10% bond guaranteed 10% payment back on the money that they invested in the first three years. If there was even another issue, if Ripple wanted to buy back their shares, then it became 25% instead of 10%. And if there was a go public event or any of, sort of large event like that or even a bankruptcy, they had very favorable terms to make sure they get paid back. So think about that.

If Ripple's holding, let's call it $85 billion, I don't know if that's the accurate number. When this deal was done, it was about $120 billion. But if it's $85 billion in XRP, at a $40 billion valuation with only $500 million to pay back with favorable terms, there was really no way that there was any risk here for Fortress and Citadel and others. And who can blame them for taking a deal like this? But effectively, as you really dig into the deal, it's more like they were guaranteed a 10% payback with unlimited upside and no downside.

So I think this is a cautionary tale in the way that we read stories and the way that we celebrate things and the way that we discuss them when really behind the scenes we're dealing with a whole lot of sharks who know exactly what they're doing and did not just take a venture capital bet that could go to zero on Ripple. right once again lots of deals like this i'm sure this is not necessarily a ripple story as much it's just not fair to say that fortress and citadel like took a bet that could go to zero on the flip side switzerland's amina bank first in europe to launch ripple payments big news amina bank global is the first european bank to go live with ripple payments this partnership provides a crucial compliant bridge between traditional fiat and blockchain rails solving a major friction point for crypto-native clients, right? So there is a story here, and this is one of the first where we've seen a major story about Ripple actually being adopted for cross-border payments and to be that

liquidity layer that they've discussed between traditional finance and between tokens, a very quick bridge to be able to convert from a stable coin denominated by a foreign currency or an actual foreign currency to another crypto token. This is the promise that they've been saying that they would deliver over time. So it's interesting to see that we are actually finally getting some clarity and maybe a deal in that direction. So, you know, if we're going to be honest here, we have some good news and some, I guess, shaky news about the ripple investment there. But this is yet just another story in the way that Tradfai is going to continue to adopt crypto rails. Now, the next story we have here, look at this guy. I haven't seen him in a while.

Remember this guy, steady lads? Cryptomogal Doe-Quan sentenced to 15 years in prison for fraud. I saw a report that this was the largest fraud sentence in the history of crypto. And I was like, SBF, bro. Yeah, 25 years, right? The co-founder of Singapore-based Terraform Lab is given more jail time by U.S. judge than prosecutors sought.

So I think he also has cases open in another of other jurisdictions. I know South Korea was trying to get their hands on this guy. It was interesting, I think, the push and pull here with Doquan because a lot of people said, you know, he created something, had a lot of hubris, believed it couldn't blow up, it was structurally poor, and it fell apart,

and oh, well, bad things happened. Well, clearly there was some actual fraud here, some false promises, and a lot happening behind the scenes if he's getting thrown in jail for 15 years. So the Doquan story, obviously, one of the biggest ones that we will see this week, I don't think we'll be hearing about him much into the future. So, guys, that was the extent of these stories this week. Of course, when we don't have NLW here, you have to listen to me, rant, and rave like a crazy person about PYUSD.

But I'm very confident that we're going to see an uptick in stories like the ones that we unpacked today. Now, while none of these were like some massive monster story, they all show exactly the direction that things are headed. And that direction is for the institutionalization and adoption of governments and those institutions of blockchain rails. Tokenization is absolutely coming. Paul Atkins saying it's going to happen in two years. The DTC saying that they're going to start tokenizing their securities.

Oh, and you may have missed this week also. Paul Atkins gave some clarity and said that he doesn't think any of this stuff as securities unless it is a tokenization of something that's already a security. Oh, and of course, we also had the CFDC this week saying that Bitcoin, Ethereum, and USC will be able to be used as collateral. We didn't talk about the market. I mean, I haven't really even looked, to be honest. I mean, how unexciting.

I guess we can bring up a point market cap here. We got $92,000 Bitcoin. He zoomed out back two years and said, Bitcoin will be 92 grand in 2025. If you were not a deep believer in the four-year cycle, you'd probably actually be really, really excited. But, of course, we did not get the 2025. We promised we have a basically flat market from a year ago.

I think most of the move happened after Donald Trump was elected. in November, that's where the real excitement happened. Maybe that's the peg for this market. But I think it also means that the four-year cycle is likely pretty much dead. And if it's not, well, watch out below. Why are we all here? Because if we really topped at 126 for three or four years, that would be pretty brutal. That said, the previous all-time high was around 70. We only got to 126. That's not even a 2x. So calls for Bitcoin to now go down 75 or 85% seems absolutely nonsensical. Why would we get all of the downside of previous bear markets without the disproportionate or proportionate, I should say, upside, which we did not see. So I personally am not stressing too much.

I think this is a sideways phase. I think 2026 will be a new liquidity regime. Things are going to be moving forward for us to the upside. That's all I've got for you guys today. I hope that you have an amazing, wonderful weekend like I intend to have. We will be running it back on Monday, of course, with Dave, James and Mike. for another installment of macro monday you guys have a good one see soon peace