The Wolf Of All Streets - Bitcoin ETFs Buy $900 Million in Longest Streak Since October

Episode Date: July 23, 2026

Bitcoin remains resilient above $65,000 despite a wave of macro headwinds, including surging oil prices, escalating U.S.-Iran tensions, and continued uncertainty surrounding the CLARITY Act. Institutional demand continues to strengthen as spot Bitcoin ETFs record their longest inflow streak since October 2025, while lawmakers work to resolve key disagreements over U.S. crypto legislation ahead of the August recess. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Gregus believes in the art of living in choosing the pleasurable over the practical. It's why we craft our premium vodka in France using pure spring water from Jenzac. And why you hear the celebratory pub of our quirk, reminding us to make every martini cocktail count. So go on and make every moment count because there's no better time than now. Gregoose, make time wait. Sip responsibly. Bitcoin ETFs have added almost a billion dollars in their longest inflow streak since October,

price holding strong, even in the face of higher oil prices and, of course, escalating conflict in Iran. And of course, the other biggest story of the day is updates on the Clarity Act, which we will dig into. I've got Ian We're going to talk about all that and more. Let's go. Good morning, everybody. Happy Thursday. It's Thursday, right? Thursday. Yeah, happy Thursday.

It's been a whirlwind of a week, obviously, still not back in the studio right now, was recording live at the Out East Summit for the TIE out in Long Island and still on the road. Good morning, Ian. How are you, ma'am? Hi, Scott. Thanks for having me. So I've just got to do this story as a quick shout-out

because, you know, Bitmex, the exchange had invented perps shutting down, right? So, like, I don't know if you have Bitmex stories, if you were here early, but I'm seeing a lot of them coming out on social media right now. I personally was trading on BitMex back in the day. And then one day my position got randomly closed. I got a message about being an American. I tried to contact customer service. They said your email is no longer associated with an account and I never got my money back. Wow. That's definitely worse than any story I can I can think of. But yeah, I mean, they were big back in the 2017 cycle because we started corneroffs in 2017. And I remember like doing volume there.

but recently it's i'm not surprised that they're shutting down to be honest yeah they became a non-entity but i guess we do have to like you know pour one out for the homies and a and be like give them credit for inventing the perpetual swap which i think is coming to every market near you now right he's yeah he's brilliant arthur hayes is is brilliant but i don't think anyone's really crying for him i think he's doing pretty good so uh yeah pour one out for no i don't know i'm going to be okay but i think you know the presidential pardon and probably a couple billion i think they'll probably survive So, but yeah, so it kind of leads to a conversation that you and I were having just before the show, which is since you're, you know, obviously at Coin Rout, you can see what people are doing, what people are trading, what they're interested in, how they're using all of these instruments. So, you know, now what was invented on Bitmex came to every exchange, Ben kind of found its newest form and hyperliquid and now it's even stocks and everything.

So, like, what are you seeing at Coin Routes? Yeah, you know, it's really funny. He kind of started a movement. So CoinRowps is trading. we traded SpaceX perp pre-IPO our clients were trading it. And so now all of our clients are trading these equity perps on crypto exchanges, but there's something interesting. The actual TradFi exchanges are now launching single stock futures. I think it's happening next week or the week after we're supporting it. But there's no way that would have been a thing if these perps hadn't come around

and allowed people to trade equities. So now these like Tradify people are basically rapidly trying to catch up. First it was the 24-7 trading, which has been, you know, being rolled out pretty slowly and now with the with the single stock futures um they're really kind of feeding off each other at this point i think it's going to be interesting to see how that evolves in in equities traditionally like the single stock futures were never really a thing no one really traded them um but they became popular with perps on on crypto and now that same market structure is kind of going back uh into tradfai so the people that you used to see trading crypto

now trading all of these other things using the same instruments like perps yeah yeah i mean the thing is people are still trading bitcoin it's still like the store of value that's non-sovereign and beyond being a store of value it's it's actually pretty cheap to send between exchanges like i think i like our transaction fees were like 20-ish cents 50 cents something like that for a slug of bitcoin um and it's non-sovereign so you don't have to worry about you know dollars like people worry about what's happening with circle what's happening with Tether or whatever. Like I personally think they're great, but different people have different views. And so what our clients are able to do now is keep Bitcoin as collateral on hyperliquid

and finance to trade Tesla perp. And then we give them tools to see, okay, what's my risk? What happens if Bitcoin falls 10%, how does that affect the liquidation price of my Tesla perp, right? And so you have all these correlated instruments now and it's still extremely useful as a collateral asset. I think that's a non-sovereign collateral asset, it's here to stay. And it's pretty powerful, you know, for people to be able to use that to trade different assets. Yeah. I mean, this is kind of the story in the headline here, which maybe not that exciting,

but after we had the worst quarter ever for ETFs, it's nice to see things turning around. Breaking Bitcoin ETFs attracted over 900 million in inflows last week. The largest weekly inflow since early May, they're on the longest streak, actually, since October. So, you know, somebody's interested in buying here at these prices, which I find interesting because, you know, it's still ranging, right? I mean, even at 65 today, you know, 60, 62, 65 is kind of all the same price in my view. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think the hard thing about using the inflows, like, as a symbol is, like, I don't necessarily know how much of that was done in kind and how much of that was actually net new cash. Like, it's,

It's hard to say, but it definitely is good for the market. It's a good signal. You know, the other thing that our clients are doing now that I think is going to become more popular is people can take their Bitcoin converted into Ibit on their equity broker and then also go trade stocks with that as collateral. So I think the demand for Bitcoin is definitely there in this financing game. The one thing that hasn't happened yet that we expect to happen at some point is the traditional like futures exchanges where people are trying to happen.

trading oil. Like you mentioned, the oil is in the news, right? Like oil futures, whatever. You still have to wire money to your broker's bank account in order to trade trad-fi futures. They don't take circle. They don't take tether. It's really difficult to actually get money into financing those trades. And some brokers, Merrick's came out and said, you know, we're supporting USDC. But they're still financing that. Like there's extra fees and there's extra just difficulty to trading these actual instruments. And so I think that's why people are still able to make money. So you could go and retail people could sign up,

but their retail broker and look at the price on the traditional futures, and it's going to be different from the price on finance. And so people are using our tech to basically arbitrage that. But there's still edge for people to trade those differences because it's still kind of difficult to get money back and forth. And I don't think that that's going to be there for a bit. They're still catching, they're still basically catching up to do. But yeah, I mean, it's good that money came into the ETFs, I think.

I mean, it's the end of July here, right? So this is the sort of depths of summer doldrums going, I think, from end of July to August, generally for volumes and interest anyways, like regardless of where we are in the cycle or what price is? I mean, have you seen anything meaningful in terms of a change in volume with this price rising? Or is it just a bunch of, like, low volume slop? Yeah, I mean, look, the volumes are what they are. I think, like, macros.

still kind of crazy. Like there's a bit of a drawdown in the Korean market, but those assets are still up a ton of me. Like one of them was up 300%. I mean, the top non-crypto asset, I look today, is between Sandisk and S.K. Heinex, like the memory, the company that makes memory for AI chips. So, you know, a couple months ago we talked, I think it was gold or silver oil or something. Now it's like these chips, like people are still clearly trading. Like they're just because it's the summer. I mean, I think it used to be more true, to be honest. I think now when people can trade from their phones, like, these markets can move, you know, on Christmas even, like, or whatever. Thanksgiving, I think, was a big move a couple years ago.

But, yeah, the volumes are lower, but the market still move, right? Yeah, I was just wondering if, like, specific to Bitcoin, if volumes have changed at all or if it's just kind of, you know, it's floating around. Similar. Mattelist. Similar, honestly, last couple months. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, so. That doesn't really move that much because of summer.

That's what I figured. I mean, the catalyst people might be waiting for. Senator Lemmett's ethics, other provisions in CryptoClarity Act to be further discussed. So in case you guys missed it, we finally had a report earlier in the week that the White House had sent ethics language to specific Republicans. Those Republicans now released sort of the new language of the entire bill. And it has a pretty comprehensive ethics clause. So, you know, the Republicans obviously saying, hey, you know, there's a historic move by Trump. He's saying that he can't issue cryptocurrencies and nobody else can. It sunsets in 2029.

And Democrats then predictably say it doesn't go far enough. But I think what's interesting is that if you look at it, it's exactly seven Democrats. I don't have it here, but it's exactly seven Democrats that are saying it's not enough, but that they're willing to go to the table. And the bill needs exactly seven Democrats to pass. So these are the seven people who came out. They made a statement and said, you know, we're willing to keep looking at this,

and that's exactly how many people they need. So it seems like maybe there's some progress. I guess the bigger question is, do you think this can still be a catalyst? Yeah, I mean, like, everyone I talked to is still kind of 50-50. They don't want to admit it, but at this point, it's a coin flip. What I think is interesting is while, yeah, it would be amazing for just price action if it passed,

I think from a brass tax, like, does the crypto market in the U.S. actually need it? I think it's less so because people are kind of starting to do this stuff anyway. Like you have Calci. It was just in their office. They have perps regulated in the U.S. If you had asked me a year ago, was that going to happen without clarity? I would have said no. And so all of the things that we kind of thought we needed clarity for,

it turns out people are kind of figuring it out anyway. So from like a medium long term, I don't think it matters. But I think from a short-term price action, if it passes, obviously the price is going to go up, right? What about for all coins, I guess? You know, that's kind of been the question. I think that you're right. I think everybody's kind of moved on. The regulators are regulating, nobody's waiting.

But listen, you're, I mean, you guys kind of moved out of the States, right? Are you waiting for clarity for like coin routes to be fully, you know, like operations? No. I can't really talk about it. We're doing some stuff in the US now. Like we kind of looked at all these other people doing stuff and we said, okay, this is fine. Like we have a path. Is it more expensive without clarity? Yes. Are we going to have to spend more on lawyers? Yes. Is it going to take longer? Yes, but we will get there regardless. That's just to say that still people are going to move back a lot slower if it doesn't pass. But stuff is happening here is what I can say. There's this one like kind of like bank that's not a bank in the U.S. That's a broker dealer that's like kind of holding crypto and they're kind of got provisional. Like people.

In other words, people are able to do stuff now. It's just taking longer and it's going to cost them more in legal bills if clarity doesn't pass. I think that's the biggest difference. So I mean, going back to sort of where the market is, Bitcoin now it's right at 65, right? I mean, it was sideways. But I mean, what do you generally think of the market and the notion of the four-year cycle at this point? I was a big four-year cycles dead person, but sort of certainly looking like it rhymes at the moment. Yeah, I mean, could it become a self-filling prophecy?

Like maybe, like I think that's part of it, right? Like these things kind of tend to reinforce themselves. But I mean, who knows from here? Like you just have all these weird macro drivers sucking liquidity out of crypto. I mean, I was on the phone with a major exchange and they were like, oh, you know, AI is taking all the whatever, people don't care about crypto anymore, which is like kind of half true. I think that they're both important and they both like serve different, you know, aspects of the ecosystem.

But I think at some point, people are going to realize that like memory chips shouldn't be worth 10 times what they work now versus a year ago. Like that just doesn't make sense. They can just, you know, it's made out of sand at the end of the day. Like they can go make more and they will make more. And so I think when that happens, you know, there's going to be more inflows into crypto. To me, it feels like we're like sort of at the top of some of the tech stocks. I think Nvidia, I mean, I looked at Nvidia, they have, on some of their GPUs, 80% margins

on what it costs to produce. I mean, that's crazy. Like, they're literally on their enterprise GPUs, they're making 80% margins on those chips. So a chip that sells for $10,000, they're, you know, they're paying $2,000 for, right? Like, yeah, I mean, that's crazy. Like, that can run a while. But, like, we'll, like, Sandisk and these other companies and the memory chip companies run, like, maybe not as much because that's more, like, there's more competition that's more

commoditized. So I think some of these stocks have a long way to run. and some of them might be near their top. I mean, do you still think that AI is sort of the prevailing narrative when we were talking before the show. I was like, you know, what are you thinking about? What are you talking about AI, AI, AI, AI, AI. Everyone's talking about AI.

I mean, look at it. Look at like the top, whatever, the magnificent seven, like stocks and it's carrying the S&P, right? Like, it's insane. And to some extent, even Microsoft is correlated to AI, right? Like, they all are. And so that is dragging, like, the macro trend. Like, people are trading these stocks.

Like, if they're not trading Bitcoin on a crypto exchange, they're trading Sandisk or S.K. Hynix or whatever. And I do think it is, I do think we have room to run, but some of the stocks maybe not as much. Yeah, I mean, I tend to agree, but you're not concerned about dumerism and global recession and depression coming anytime soon. It sounds like, you know, I don't know. I kind of am a little bit, to be honest, but not anytime soon. I do think like for the first time ever, we no longer need labor as much. I think like the machines can think for themselves now. And in the back of my mind, I'm like slightly worried about like evil robots taking over the world. Like we had one guy running a coding agent with a model and they were trying to do something.

And it was just like, oh, I couldn't find a database server. So I installed it and here you go and it's running. You know, and like what happens when it's when you're asking it to do something? And it's like, oh, like, you know, humans are in the way. Let me just kill them. Like I don't know. In the back of my mind, I do think about that. There is actually this great wait but why article. And it more or less lays out exactly the path to rope. Like, how would conceivably an machine that's like innocent a program to do good, like kill humanity? And it was more or less the fact that, like, they had asked it to make paper clips. And the robot was like, the AI machine was like, okay, like, how can I make the most paper clips?

And eventually it found out to get enough carbon or whatever to, like, create all of the glue and everything for the paper clips. Like it had to kill all the humans with a bio agent. And like, it, like, slowly got there over like a period of time. And I do a little bit worry about that, but I think we're, you know, always away from that. But in the meantime, there's these massive productivity gains that are going to be seen. And I just think there's just going to be way more, you know, tech that people are going to create. Like, people are going to have the ability to do it.

I'll give you an example. My, you know, one of my family members was like, oh, like, I want to go sell clothing or whatever and make a website. But I need to go pay a designer. And I'm like, no, you don't download clog. Go in the app. have it make the website, have it make the whatever, and do it. And so now all these people that couldn't have small businesses before are going to be able to do it. And so the barrier to entry to new commerce has gone down.

So I do think like it will create jobs. Like will it destroy some jobs? Yes. But at the end of the day, I do think it's going to, you know, create this whole new economy. What do you think about the intersection between AI and crypto and, you know, agents, transacting micropayments and stable coins, all those things? I mean, do that's a future catalyst? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I mean, look, like, circles arc chain, like, we're going to be doing stuff with them, potentially. And I do think it makes sense. And then Coinbase is like X402. Like, yeah, like, an agent isn't going to open a bank account. I mean, that's crazy, right? Like, we're still dealing with that in financing. We have to worry about, like, when the banks are open, you know, and the banks are not

actually supporting the Fed now, like the new U.S., like 24-7 payment system. the banks realize that they support it, they're going to have liquidity issues. So a lot of them are just refusing or they're capping it at like $100,000, right? So this whole like, oh, we're going to make the Fed 24-7 doesn't work because the banks are making so much money on the interest. So basically, like, if you deposit money at your bank, they get to get free interest on it for the day or two or whatever that they take to unlock the funds to you. So they're making all this free money. So of course they don't want instant settlement, right? Yeah, I mean, I think that that's probably where the most of the crypto volume will come from.

But I don't know that that helps us that much if it's a bunch of stable coins with almost no fees and, you know, us, like as investors. I think, you know, I think that, like, again, the reason why I think it matters for Bitcoin is, like, if you look at USBT and Circle, there still is some, like, there is, like, obviously, like, there's, it's controlled, like, by the U.S. government to some extent. and I don't know what the treatment of agents as people will be. I think what's going to happen is they're going to say no. Whoever wrote the code is the owner of the agent, and this agent has no separate responsibility. And I think that's another interesting thing. You saw there was news about an open AI agent that hacked some other company.

I was like, what is hugging? And so am I going to have to get insurance for the agent that I built in case the agent does something horrible? Like, am I responsible for that? Like, that's crazy to me that you build this thing that doesn't necessarily do what you want. And then it goes and does something bad. Like, am I going to go to jail for that? You know what I mean?

It doesn't really make sense. And so I think that's why Bitcoin could potentially be better there because then it's not technically under the purview of any government. Right. Yeah, I mean, just it's kind of a story that sort of leans in that direction. There have been more crypto hacks in the first seven months of 2026 in any full year on record, 145 by 22nd of July. The previous annual record was 97.

The pace doubled after April, coinciding with the release of Mythos, which heralded the new generation of frontier. Yeah, of course. Of course. And it's a problem. I mean, I think at least with crypto companies, like they're pretty tech forward.

And, you know, they have like good technology teams, etc. But what about like all these legacy banks? I mean, they've been, you know, subject to this as well. And of course, AI has sped all this up. It's kind of made the barrier to enter cheaper instead of a team of 10 hackers you can do it with a guy or two now at this point

and so yeah it's only it's only going to accelerate it's kind of this game of cat and mouse how good is your dad at poker i think he won something didn't he he went to the Vegas he loves that sounds like he's really good yeah yeah yeah i think he's good he's pretty good you know to me personally like he tried to teach me and i kind of play a little bit but I prefer like trading perps if I'm going to if I'm going to gamble to be honest I don't know. That's not gambling. It's not gambling.

I'm like I'm like 10. That's fine. It's not gambling. I didn't say that. There you. Prediction markets aren't gambling either. No. Revitives.

Derivatives. Before I let you go, I know, because I'm traveling here. Anything else on your mind? No, I think that's good. This was fun. Thanks for having me. Of course. We'll see what happens with the Clarity Act. I think that's the next big story. And otherwise, I'll be back for everybody tomorrow, man.

Thank you so much, Ian. All right. Take care, Scott. Thanks. Bye, everyone. Today's video is sponsored by Securitize. You've heard the word tokenization, putting assets like funds, bonds, treasuries, and stocks on-chain. Securitize is the regulated infrastructure, the biggest names in finance build-on. They're the tokenization partner for BlackRock's on-chain Treasury Fund Biddle.

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