The Wolf Of All Streets - Bitcoin & Crypto PUMP As Jane Street Collapses! Is the Bottom Finally In?

Episode Date: February 26, 2026

Bitcoin is ripping higher as legal pressure mounts around Jane Street, one of the most influential players in Bitcoin ETF market structure. Following the federal lawsuit tied to the Terra collapse, speculation is growing that a major source of persistent sell pressure may be weakening. As headlines hit, Bitcoin and crypto markets have responded with a sharp pump — fueling the narrative that structural suppression could be fading.

Bitcoin and crypto are finally showing some upside pumping a bit after the market has given us the enemy and boogeyman we needed in Jane Street. Now that we have someone to blame for everything bad that's happened to us for the past three years, the market can finally go up. Is it just that simple? I don't think so. But I have one of the most experienced, intelligent guests in the crypto and Bitcoin space say J.P. Richardson from Exodus wallet to unpack all of it. We're going going right now. Let's go. Good morning, everybody. Welcome to the show. I hope that you're having a wonderful Thursday. I know it feels a lot better when Bitcoin is at the high, high price of $68,000 instead of the low, low price of $67,500.

Let's be honest, we haven't really seen that much movement here, but it was nice to once again see a bit of a rebound when price was being pushed down. I'm going to go ahead and bring on J.P. Richardson, and we're going to talk about it live, man. And first of all, like, you had the rare opportunity to show up today and we were listening to the Bee Gees. Oh, yeah. We made it super weird for you. Disco night fever. I was going to do the whole show on my Barry Gives.

This is good. My voice can't go that high, so I'll let you do that one. Oh, whatever, man, you know. I know. I know you can. That's the thing. Give me a mic and a karaoke machine and I'm going to be singing back street. It's back all night.

So you're right. which is a great Coinbase ad apparently but so first of all let's talk about you're right you're right that was so funny the super bond bitcoin approaches 70,000 is risk appetite returns to crypto okay yeah whatever we all saw that we had a bounce a lot of people which we'll get into talking about the fact that jane street now maybe has some scrutiny on them and isn't selling our beloved coins every single day at 10 a.m but we'll get into that in a second i want to talk more about the broadstrokes which is a great tweet here from Alex Thorne over Galaxy. It aligns very much with kind of what I've been thinking and saying.

The worst Bitcoin pain is almost certainly behind us, but there could still be some ahead. Case for behind us, 200MA, half the coins underwater, RSI capitulation bottom levels, many other metric screaming bottom. I mean, we have Bitcoin going to zero like Google searches at an all-time high, right? I mean, it's absurd. And then, of course, all the negative stuff is sort of like macro, or we just bleed lower, bleed lower.

I guess right now, what do you think? broad strokes for where the market's at, having been through so many cycles. Oh, my gosh. I mean, you said it best. We've been through so many cycles. I started paying attention to this space since 2011. And look, like every, every bare market, I think, hurts a little less, but it still hurts. And you get to a point where you're no longer checking the price like you were in the bull markets, right? You're in a bull market. You might be sitting down with your wife having dinner and pull up your phone. Look at the prices. Like, oh my gosh, Bitcoin's up, you know, 7% in the last two hours. It feels great, right? You're checking

all the time. And now you don't even open your phone. So. I think it makes things that we have wives in bull markets. I know. That's true. That's true. And our wives don't, yeah. There's a lot of jokes. I'm going to leave those out for right now. We do. They might be listening. Yeah. For sure, for sure. So, so, so look, like, Are is the bottom in? That's what I think everybody wants to know. And look, if we could predict it, that'd be the million dollar answer, right?

But I don't think the bottom is in. I think that we could still wick down to 40 and or in the 40s. And the reason for that is, I mean, look, everybody's seeing what we're referring to as the AI scare, right? that AI is coming in and it's eating up these SaaS companies. And Bitcoin ultimately, I think, becomes the bellwether for a lot of these things because it's such a global liquid asset. And so, yeah, we see these price movements happen in advance.

But once the traditional markets continue to catch up, the equity markets catch up, man, I think Bitcoin can still wick down into the 40s. But you can definitely happen too. but I think it would be fast and furious in the buying opportunity of a century. Oh, look, right now it's a buying opportunity of a century. I mean, I think, so it's not all grim and bad. I mean, here's the thing. Bitcoin wicks down to 40 and the traditional markets start getting, you know,

slice and dice. And, you know, and let's say that the AI scare is real. Let's say that companies all over the tax base, Let's say they just start laying off en masse because they got now the CEOs are writing code with Claude Code. And I'm one of them, a write in code. We've got our little open claw girl. Oh, yeah. You got open claw.

We got Claude code set up over here, open claw over here. Yeah. So once you start seeing things like that and you start having more unemployment all across the United States. and we have, oh, we have those midterm elections coming up, you know what's going to happen. You know what's going to happen. I'm going to put the, start pumping the gas on that money printer. That's right.

Money printer going to go burr, baby. They will not stop printing that money. Everybody's going to feel it. It's going to be wild to watch. So, yeah, listen, I think while price is depressed, what's always interesting in the depths of a bear market is that you get constant good but none of it resonates with investors or traders and nobody buys it on the price. And I think you look back when prices are high and go, wow, that was really important.

Right? And you have a lot of things that happen like that. I mean, we've got Morgan Stanley's Amy Oldenberg here. I think she's talking with Fong from Strategy who's wearing some pretty fire like Jordan's. Look at those shoes. I literally just saw the video. I was like, hey, I don't know if they're red like in the original Jordan color or if they're orange to match the tie. It's hard for me to tell, but they're fire.

Anyways, that Morgan Stanley's coming with Bitcoin trading, lending, yield custody in the future. I think we knew that. But then you have, you know, 2.5 trillion Citibank announced it will integrate Bitcoin this year, quote, we're making Bitcoin bankable. Then you have, you know, the OCC saying they're going to start to put the genius rules into practice here. I mean, all the things we could have ever been asking for, dying for, hoping for are happening. And price is just chilling. Yeah, absolutely.

And not to mention, I know a lot of people are going to poo-poo this, but not to mention the creation of the strategic Bitcoin Reserve in 2025. And I know a lot of people look at that. They're like, oh, it's a bunch of bullshit because they just created the strategic Bitcoin Reserve, but they didn't actually put Bitcoin in it. Okay. It's the government. It's the government. And the pace that they're going to move at sometimes, it's going to take some time. but they're going to put Bitcoin in it eventually.

And I think that they will find creative ways to acquire Bitcoin without using taxpayer money. And so that alone should be a really bullish indicator right there. Yeah, I agree. And I mean, they haven't bought any Bitcoin to put in there, but we have very creative ways of taking it from people. Well, you're absolutely right, right? You go over to Thailand or Cambodia, wherever they had the pig slaughtering, whatever they do to the pigs over there.

And it was like, ah, 100,000 Bitcoin. That's, well, that. And then you probably heard with when they went in and they, they got Maduro. And then there was, there was claims that Maduro had, I think like, what, $50 billion worth of Bitcoin? Where's that Bitcoin at? Strategic Bitcoin is there. It might be making its way to the strategic Bitcoin reserve at some moment in time. But look, I was going to say, but look, like, you know, with everything that's happening and, you know, gold continues to hit all-time high.

But like, take a step back and we look at the price of gold. Look at the price of silver. Look what happened a few weeks ago when the price of silver dropped 30 percent. in one day, gold dropped 13% in one day. I mean, these are supposed to be incredibly stable assets, but these kind of price drops that happened in one day, I think signals and should signal to investors all over that volatility is here to stay and there is no asset that is safe. Exactly. Dude, I kept saying it. I was like, I guess it's really depressing when Bitcoin, it was at the time, 51% maybe we've gone down 53 or 54 from top to bottom now but i think silver did 47% in like nine

days and i didn't hear people screaming about the depressing silver bear market no you know we go we go down 47% and the world is literally ending recency bias this is the worst bear market of all history like i would love your take on that because i keep hearing it now which to me it just means we're close to a bottom that anyone who is here in 2022 can possibly think that this is the worst bar market You were here for Mount Gox for fuck sake. Like that's 2014, right? That had to be much worse than prices down, but institutions and governments are coming in, which is our bear market now.

Like, boo-hoo. That's absolutely right. I mean, look, if you go back to one of the very first bear markets, what was it, a 2011 time frame or so, and I think the decrease was roughly 87%. I mean, that's just, that's just insane. And so to your point. Now we have governments here. We have institutions that are here. Bitcoin has an ETF, right, and multiple ETS. So the institutions can get in and out of Bitcoin with ease. And I, look, I've heard

people over the last couple weeks talk about now they're poo-poohing the whole aspect of an ETF, right? Because they're, they're kind of referring to it as a derivative on Bitcoin. But the aspect is, is like here you, here you have institutions that are finally interested. And, and yeah, they don't see it with the same way that you and I and the viewers see it, right? But they're still here and they're interested and they're buying. So I want to talk about your experience because now we're talking about institutions and Wall Street and all these things. And you guys pretty much were just first at all of that.

Right. So I mean, what are the big narratives right now, going public, right? Everybody's going to IPO. So you did that when 24? We. Well, you were actually already listed, but you can't do an idea. in 2024, right? I mean, we, okay, so are you aware of what happened in, in May of 2024 with with the

nice C and SEC? It's an interesting story. I'd love to hear it. I am not sure I am actually. Okay, okay. So here's what, here's what happened. Early 2024, we, you know, we submitted all the paperwork and everything to, to actually list on the New York Stock Exchange.

New York Stock Exchange, everything checked out, everything was good. Got invited out to list, ring the bell. Ring the bell May 9th, 2024. We invited 130 friends, family employees to come celebrate the big moment, celebrate American dream, right? Taking a company, public, ringing the bell. Sure enough, our friend Gary Gensler had different plans for what was going to happen for crypto. And so on May 8th, we got a call that said, uh-uh, nope, nope, you're not,

you're not going to, you're not going to, you're not going to list on the New York Stock Exchange, nothing. It's completely off. And so that was, that was actually the start of my journey into politics, into actually supporting President Trump, into actually having dinner with him in Trump Tower, telling him the story. So yeah, it's been, it's been a wild ride. So are you the one who got him to say fire Gary Jensler twice in, uh, in Nashville? Oh my gosh. Oh my God. I actually, I hadn't met him yet at that moment or no, no, that's a you told me. Exactly. But yes. Sorry when we sat down. I remembered it as you were telling it to me. I mean, it's insane. I will, I will, that moment. I remember when he said that

moment or said that statement, that moment is a moment I will treasure probably forever for the rest of my life. And I felt like he was speaking to my heart because of exactly what happened. Like I, back then, I used to like say that we needed to turn Gensler into a verb. You know, you got Genslerd. And like, you literally got Genslered worse than anyone. And you know what? That's actually literally what somebody said to me. It's literally what they said. It was a couple months later and they said, J.P., you got Gensler. This is, this is political. So you should consider going political. That's literally what somebody said to me. And I was like, whoa, I never, I never wanted this industry to be political, right? This was, this is an asset class that is for Democrats and Republicans

alike. It's for everybody, not just Republicans. And I never wanted to be political. But I felt that moment of time, I had no choice. Yeah, I think that most people who ended up political in this industry did it because it was a matter of survival. It certainly was for you. So how did you end up, though, still, you know, with Gensler sort of around, you know, I guess December 2024, I guess it was kind of that lame duck period, right? So you guys were able to get public. But I was going to say, so you've got, you know, we have like tokenizing stocks. You guys were working on tokenizing your equity long before that became a big narrative. Treasury company, you guys hold Bitcoin, right? So like, you're the good kind, which is, you know, you have like money.

What is the good kind of? I personally, like, I like, I like Treasury Companies General. What's the good kind mean? Like, you're a business that makes money and you use that to get Bitcoin instead of, like, having no underlying business and then just buying a bunch and hoping for the best. I'm not referring to strategy or some select few, by the way, that actually have a plan to, you know, buy dips. I'm talking about the, hey, we got a bunch of money. Let's buy Bitcoin at the top and then wait and see if we can stay in business long

enough. Yes, absolutely. But look, look, look, even acquiring Bitcoin over the years, it's still, like, it is, it is easy to really get caught up in the narrative that like, oh, Bitcoin's going to go up forever. It's just because it is. Bitcoin is the best capital asset to protect wealth long term. And so recently, we actually, so we acquired, we acquired this company for $175 million.

And because, because, yeah, no big deal. So, but because I believe that Bitcoin is the best capital asset in the world, what happened is we ultimately, we took a loan. We took a loan on our Bitcoin. And this was, this was, this would have been in November of last year. So we took a loan on our Bitcoin. I'm like, I'm like, fuck it. You know, Bitcoin's going to continue to go up, baby. Like, and I mean, I knew there would obviously be some dips.

But we took a loan on the Bitcoin. And as markets got rockier, I'm like, shit, we got to get out of this loan. I mean, that's just really what it was. And so we did. We just, we paid it off completely. But, you know, those are the worst. But, I mean, rates are coming down on Bitcoin loans. That's inevitable, especially when, like you see, comes in.

And that's going to be the way to avoid the tax consequences. I mean, that's the buy, borrow, die playbook that wealthy people have used since the beginning of time. And it's just a matter of time before everybody does that in Bitcoin. You luckily, like, had a plan. If Bitcoin goes down, I'll be able to pay off my loan and liquidated, like a degenerate, you know? Right. Right.

But it was still scary because as the prices were kind of like going down, like, oh, shit. Yeah, it's like 40% LTV. 55% LTV. Yeah. I'm like, oh, you know, like, this is, this is looking, this is looking a little dicey here. We got it, we got a, we got a, we got a bit. Right. So, but, you know, so you guys, though, I mean, you were effectively like kind of the first to

navigate all of this and get public and start to do all of these things that have now become like the big narratives for what the company can do on Wall Street in crypto. And you did that all in the United States during a contentious era with a unfavorable administration. that and what a lot of people don't know is that we pay 100% of our salaries in Bitcoin. So if you want to work at Exodus, you have to take a salary in Bitcoin. That's what it is. And what's beautiful about that is it filters out people that are like, I don't know, that sounds a little too uncertain for me.

I was like, well, don't work in a crypto company. the wallet. Yeah, that checks out. That makes sense. So listen, we got to talk about the boogeyman. You know, obviously we're a lot going on here with Jane Street. Last I checked, isn't that where like SBF cut his teeth? Like, you...

Man, I saw that. I thought the same thing. I'm like, was there something weird going on back in 2022, especially with the Jane Street Terra connection? Like, it's a little weird. So we got two things. The first one was obviously that sparked this entire Jane Street flood, which I'm not saying is it's on I'm not saying it's on warranted. But we had the Terraform basically the Terra Luna bankruptcy come out and say they're going to sue Jane Street for market manipulation.

We know they already had sued jump for over $4 billion for market manipulation. I guess the story has gotten a bit clearer. Zero hedge wrote about it. I guess we could talk about this first. But Zero hedge basically said that Jane Street was behind the 2022 cryptocurrency. a winter. To give you guys the TLDR and basically what happened is that they removed hundreds of millions of dollars from the liquidity pool for UST, which was Luna's obviously stable coin. Luna did the same. And then that caused it to DPEG. That caused everything to crash.

And then they tried to swoop in this all by the way was from an intern named Bryce Pratt. They had a Bryce secret chat. So this is all like between jump. It's all in the chats, like on telegram or WhatsApp or something. And then effectively they tried to swoop in and give Doquan an offer late to buy all of the Luna and Bitcoin basically at a massive discount, which I do not believe happened. But I guess the kicker here is that, you know, these are companies that are making, here you go, here's. The firm that allegedly used a private chat room to drain $235 million from a stable coin pool before retail could react now generates $24 billion in trading revenue through three quarters of $25, $10.1 billion in a single quarter more than Goldman,

J.B. Morgan. Over 10% of North American equity volume, lead authorized participant for the biggest Bitcoin ETF. So, okay, these guys obviously didn't get in trouble, making a ton of money. They probably manipulated the market and helped crash it. And then now we have a whole lot of evidence or potentially coming out. I will say that they've been behind. And part of this is the mechanics, I believe, of the ETFs.

Because, right, if someone's trading an ETF, that has to be settled in the morning when the market opens. But basically we saw these 10 a.m. crashes every single time. Like every day for months. And coincidentally, now that Jane Street's on the radar, those have stopped, which a lot of people are pointing out, and the market has been able to rise. So we have a boogeyman, everything's getting better. Was that it? I mean, that was kind of the very quick DLDR, took too long. I mean, what do you think of all this? It's insane. First of all,

like, let's let's roll back for a moment and into that 2022 era. And the thing that I think kills me the most throughout all this is when you have retail. kind of holding the bag. And this is one aspect where it is easier, and it was easy to shit on the SEC from this era. However, I am very sympathetic to their trying to protect retail and the thought of protecting retail. And if you go back to that era, right, like Anchor was offering, you know,

anchor was the pool where you could earn 20% on your dollars, And it was back. And so like, yeah, and as a, you're like, oh, 20%. That sounds awesome. Right. And so the whole, the whole calamity that happened, this is why I have, I have, even though, again, it was very easy to shit on SEC, shit on Gary Gensler. This is one aspect where it's like retail holding the bag. Like, that just sucks.

Okay. So now we're talking about the, the boogeyman potentially being gone. No, no. I think people are just trying to grasp for positive news in hopes that that Bitcoin will continue to rise in the short term. Again, I think Bitcoin, I actually, I'm going to go, I'm going to go record say this. I think that we hit Bitcoin all-time highs this fall. I think so too. Right before midterms. Election time. Yep. Yep. However, along the way, in the next couple months, I still would not be surprised if we go back down.

Hey, do you know, though, yeah, listen, this is the thing is every time I go on an interview, like I'm in your chair, what's going to be the catalyst? Like if the Clarity Act didn't do it, and Genius Act didn't do it, what's going to be the catalyst? And I always say, like, I didn't know that Silicon Valley Bank would collapse and that would be the catalyst to the last bull market. Maybe it's just that we needed a heel and there's someone to blame and now people can say, oh, I'm positive. There was a reason it was down and this could be a catalyst for a rise.

I mean, you know, nothing makes you look innocent, by the way, more than deleting every tweet on your entire account. I saw that. I'm like, why would you do that? Why would you do that? Like, we know they're going to be archived. I mean, it's probably just a simple, also subpoena to Twitter or X to get those, those tweets. It's like, I was like, no way to recover those. Gone forever. Yeah, I mean, it's the most ridiculous thing ever. Like, if someone wants to read your tweets, it's the government. It doesn't look, it definitely doesn't look good for the folks over at Jane Street. That's for sure.

Yeah, I think your point is the most important, though. And I think it's probably the reason that people feel like this bear market has been as bad or worse than others if your retail and why they haven't participated at all. I mean, you look and you really can just say that I'm just, I think that if you're a Bitcoin or it's kind of fine. You're like 50, we eat a 50% drawdown for lunch, you know. I own plenty of all coins, by the way. So when I say we, I'm in both camps.

Yep. You know, but like if you've been an alt coin holder through all of this, you've experienced in some way, shape, or form this phenomenon, non-specific to Jane Street, like 10 times. Like, if you traded meme coins, you found out later that, like, one person owns 99% of the supply of that coin. Or, like, you know, if you owned any of these coins, from the past, you realize that some like founder made billions of dollars before even creating a

product, like the reverse of how, you know, Elon Musk or Bezos made their money. And you're just probably kind of sick of it. And it just feels bad because there was this whole cycle of silver and stocks and even Bitcoin going up and your thing just went down. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Absolutely. And can we even really say that in 2025 that was a bull market top? I mean, I get it. We hit all time high. But if you look at like Google search history and search trends, people were not searching for Bitcoin.

They were not searching for crypto. Like I don't even know if retail really had a big presence in 2025. I mean, don't be wrong. There were some, but I don't think it was like previous bull runs. I don't know. I don't think so at all. So I think like either, I mean, remember the things that drove, people love to like look back at history through like rose-colored glasses

and they think that like Bitcoin drove the last retail runs. It never drove the retail runs. Last cycle was Doge. And I remember, like talking to all the exchange CEOs and CZ and all in there, like we can't onboard. CZ said made a joke to me. It was like, there's not enough customer service people in China for me to onboard right now to get people signed up to Binance fast enough.

and they all want to trade Doge. It's like, that's the reason. And you've got to remember back then you had to have a centralized exchange account to trade meme coins. And the NFT craze and like the metaverse, like these huge bubbles, that's what brought retail in and got them rinsed. This time it's ETFs. Like it's, that's not the thing that's going to get the gamblers and speculators

and I need to get rich quick people for better or for worse into the market. We just had no major retail catalysts, but we have all the more important catalysts that those people are not paying attention to. Do you think that prediction markets have kind of captured that retail attention over mean coins and NFTs? And that's kind of what happened now? Yeah. Do you think it's kind of what's happening? Can't call it gambling. I wrote an entire, I showed it yesterday. I wrote an entire article about that in December, and it's been my narrative for six months and people thought I was nuts. I said that prediction markets have taken, for being intellectually honest about crypto, it was mostly speculation,

even the things with utility. And now I can go speculate on the weather 24-7, 365. from any country in the comfort of your own home and you don't need to go like find a meme coin to flip and then silver goes nuts too so all the shine no pun intended silver uh has come off of like speculating on crypto so maybe that leaves us with a few things that do fundamentally well but like why would you go buy a meme coin with like a where you know you're basically like fighting against a manipulated like insider trading when you can go bet on something where you might feel like you have an edge i think that's absolutely reasonable. I think you're spot on in what you're saying. I mean, I think when it comes to meme coins,

I don't know that the narrative returns for meme coins unless the coin itself has some degree of utility, right? Like if you have like, I don't know, some rock band. We open up talking about Backstreet Boys, right? If the Backstreet Boys create a meme coin and by possession of this meme coin, somehow you get accessed backstage passes or super cool NFTs or something like that. Like that might fuel some of it. But I agree. I think people just buy meme coins, hold meme coins. I think that's going to be behind it. I think all of that will come back at some point, like whether it's through NFTs or meme coins or whatever we call them where there's an actual utility fan token, the narratives that we

loved about Web3. Remember Web 3? Remember that? Yep. Do you hear anyone say Web 3 anymore? No, no. No. In fact, I think some people are moving on to what they're calling Web 3. four, which is like a combination of AI and defy. We're living in Web 7 over here. I know. Our AI agents. That's right. I was just yelling at my AI agent all night.

Do you have a, do you have an open cloth setup? Yeah, we're running very newly. But yeah, we're running it in here, telegram chat, doing the thing. Does it actually have access to like your own personal email or you made like a name for it? Like, did you? And you made its own email address? stuff. Her name is Athena. I was just going to ask you. What is, okay. Really? My wife named her.

So I would just want you to know, I didn't have some weird, like, you know, like I went to a strip club once and. Yeah, Diamond is her name. Passion next on stage four. But yeah, and, but we, no, we haven't given it access to literally anything. Like, I think the best way from what we've, like, research is you kind of give it its own email address and you can see see it and then do approve and actually like actively approve or deny potential responses and don't let it free into the wild like it's not having calendar access I did however give it all of my banking and crypto wallet keys very smart yes I feel like that is safe no we are very millions of dollars in the last couple days I'm guessing

exactly we're slowly easing into it you know to see like where it can kind of like I guess eliminated inefficiencies or, you know, so we can optimize our humanity and leave some of the more laborious tasks to it. But yeah, we're actively doing it. Pretty cool, man. You just telegram chat it gives you your update in the morning. Like, you know, it's not so useful yet, but I think it will be. Yeah, I know we're right at your time. Is there anything else that I miss that you want to add? Tell us why Exodus is the greatest wallet ever invented of all time on this planet. Because it's the easiest, most simplest wallet ever. And I think what What's really bigger than that is where we're going.

People right now, let's just say for you, for example, you have probably at least three financial apps on your phone. You have a banking app. You have a peer-to-peer payments app like Venmo or cash app. You probably have one brokerage app like Fidel. You may even have more than that. So we see a future where it shouldn't be just three apps or more. It should just be one app.

And on top of that, no crypto complexity. That's the thing is what's super important is with where we're going. You should have to worry about addresses, L1, L2. Who cares, right? And still have all the cool and power and control that self-custody brings you. So that's where we're going. And I think that's what's most important is to give everyday real-world utility to the everyday person. Yeah, good.

Awesome. I'm glad we finally did this. I know we've sat down in person, but for some reason we just never made it happen. It's like you're busy. Here we are. Here we are. I know. It's like, yeah.

I would play you out with the BGs, but I'm going to get dinged. Fair enough. Fair enough. And it's like, you have a copyright strike. It's totally right. We could sing it, but I'm not going to do that to you. All right, guys, that's an amazing show. Once again, JP, or welcome back.

Literally any time. I will be back tomorrow. And he will be back, hopefully very, very soon, man. Good luck. And we will speak to you soon. Bye, everyone. All right, thank you.