The Wolf Of All Streets - Bitcoin Frenzy: Why Everyone Is Rushing to Buy NOW

Episode Date: January 8, 2025

Alice Liu, the Research Lead at CoinMarketCap, joins me today to discuss what's going on with crypto and provide her own unique perspective on the markets. Chris Inks will join us in the second part to share some interesting trades in crypto and beyond.  Alice Liu: http://www.linkedin.com/in/alicejingliu Chris Inks: https://twitter.com/TXWestCapital ►► CHAT TO ME ABOUT CRYPTO HERE! 👉https://roundtable.rtb.io/shortUrl/C9ByW2U ►► JOIN THE FREE WOLF DEN NEWSLETTER, DELIVERED EVERY WEEKDAY! 👉https://thewolfden.substack.com/   ►► Arch Public Unleash algorithmic trading. Discover how algorithms used by hedge-funds are now accessible to traders looking for unparalleled insights and opportunities!  👉https://archpublic.com/  ►►TRADING ALPHA READY TO TRADE LIKE THE PROS? THE BEST TRADERS IN CRYPTO ARE RELYING ON THESE INDICATORS TO MAKE TRADES. Use code '10OFF' for a 10% discount. 👉https://tradingalpha.io/?via=scottmelker  Follow Scott Melker: Twitter: https://x.com/scottmelker Web: https://www.thewolfofallstreets.com/ Spotify: https://spoti.fi/30N5FDe   Apple podcast: https://apple.co/3FASB2c   #Bitcoin #Crypto #Investments The views and opinions expressed here are solely my own and should in no way be interpreted as financial advice. This video was created for entertainment. Every investment and trading move involves risk. You should conduct your own research when making a decision. I am not a financial advisor. Nothing contained in this video constitutes or shall be construed as an offering of financial instruments or as investment advice or recommendations of an investment strategy or whether or not to "Buy," "Sell," or "Hold" an investment.

2025 is expected to be an absolutely huge year for Bitcoin and for crypto. According to Fidelity, this will be the year that we see multiple nation states and central banks buying Bitcoin. The game theory of the United States proposing a strategic reserve should all play out massively in favor of our beloved asset. But it also leaves many people wondering when alt season, when are we going to see the rest of the market start to catch up? Well, we have a perfect guest to discuss those very topics today. We've got Alice Liu, who is the research lead at CoinMarketCap. She has all the data to show us exactly where the money is heading and likely to head in 2025. Of course, Texas West Capital with the charts on the back half. You guys don't want

to miss this amazing show. Let's go. What is up, everybody? I'm Scott Melker, also known as the Wolf of Wall Street. Before we get started, please subscribe to the channel and hit that like button. Going to go ahead and bring on Alice now. Good morning or good evening, I guess, in your case. Good morning, Scott. Yes, it's evening time for me. Yeah, I get the good morning.

You get the good evening. So let's first start with sort of the headline story here. Why everyone is rushing to buy Bitcoin now. Nation states and central banks are expected to buy Bitcoin in 2025, Fidelity says. I think we can also add to this that we'll likely see more corporate adoption and sovereign wealth and a long list of the huge wall of money that we've anticipated coming into Bitcoin for a very long time. It seems that the United States finally leading the way here is going to put a lot of pressure on the rest of the world. So we obviously were just

trading over $100,000. We have this dip. It's terrifying a lot of people. In your opinion, how do you frame all of this and where we're at in the market cycle yeah sure so i agree with you that 2025 is going to be the year we're saying btc goes mainstream and together with the nation states adoption and i think that trend in general it's agreed across the the whole industry really um but in january alone we're having a few of the key events coming up so it's not surprising to me that we're having a bit of a dig right now two things um like the the headline themes for january which is number one is trump's inauguration on the 20th and then we have the fat meeting coming up on the 29th of Jan. But before that, as you mentioned, if we look back at 2024, we will really see that as the year everything changed, right? Because BTC went mainstream with a spot ETF. And then we saw over the sheer amount of institutional

monies that we were able to onboard via the ETFs that gives legit my that really legitimize BTC for us. And as a result, saying BTC potentially getting incorporated into the different treasury books for companies as well as reserve assets for countries is going to be a trend. So where we are in a market cycle right now, I think that's a very interesting point because people were so bullish. It was so bullish for us in December. And towards the beginning of December that we introduced a index called CMC 100, which tracks the top 100 coins and their price levels performance. So it gives us a really good way to quantify where we are in the market. We launched it on the 29th. We had the peak of it in mid-December. Sorry, we launched it on the 9th of December and we had the peak of that

index in mid-December and now it's sort of dipped back. So what we can say where we are in the market cycle is definitely just a small pullback of a very strong bull run that we're having. Robert Leonardus That's the key point, very strong bull run we're having. There seem to be a lot of people who think that we could have potentially topped that whatever's happening in global events and macro could drag Bitcoin down with it. If we see some sort of black swan or we finally see the recession that many people are calling for. But when you look at the amount of demand and buying pressure there should theoretically be, that doesn't seem to really hold much water for me. Like, I think 2025 should be absolutely huge.

And even one of these things, a major nation adopting it, should be a catalyst that sends Bitcoin absolutely flying regardless of what's happening. Exactly. I think the talk was definitely very strong when Trump started this point of using BTC as reserve assets when he talked about it in Nashville Bitcoin Conference. And then later on, we're seeing a lot of the other

sort of nation states following suit here. Last week, we started to see a Hong Kong legislator proposing potentially using BTC as a reserve asset as well. So definitely, that's the trend we're going to see. And if we say one trade, well, right now, what's the total market cap for BTC? Right now, it's just like the total market cap for crypto in general is 3.3%, right? And BTC dominance is still very strong, 56.7%.

With something just shy of $2 trillion market cap for BTC, it's a lot. $1 billion is a lot for an individual, but it's nothing for a corporate. But $1 trillion is a lot for a company, but it's nothing for a nation state. So when we are talking about opening BTC up to be used as reserve assets, then the potential is really big here. If we look total 2 trillion market cap, it's nothing compared with the reserve assets magnitude that we're seeing out there. So definitely agree.

Stig Brodersen Yeah. I mean, if the United States makes Bitcoin a strategic reserve asset, we should be at 500,000 in a matter of months. I saw the past few episodes you were having, 200k seems to be a very, very conservative. I think it's 200k if we just get a normal cycle and none of this happens, right? But I think if the United States actually passes a strategic reserve bill or something, then every country has to add it. And I mean, it's just too much demand

for the supply, in my opinion. I've been wrong before, so I wouldn't be surprised. But I think it leaves people, as I said, sort of in the intro, asking when alt season, right? So I think that we've had this sort of strange barbell

so far in this cycle where it's been Bitcoin going up like crazy and then the most speculative, degenerate side of crypto, like the pump dot from meme coins going nuts for 24 hours at a time. And most of the things in the middle underperforming the real utility, the layer ones. I mean, yes,

we've seen a lot of the new ones, Aptos and Sui and all of these have their big moments, but we have not seen anything like 2021 yet. I agree. It is a barbell, as you said, heavy on both sides. But the point that I want to make, I think not many people are realizing that, which is the bar is not as thin as people thought it is. And why I mentioned that. So everything in between, right?

It is your DeFi right it is your d5 it is your ai agents it is your actual like infrastructures nfts gaming etc we can still say them having huge potentials and the the speed the power of them making a comeback that we saw in the past two months is very strong so why and what what did we realize backtrack it a little bit towards the end of december with for example the hyper liquid airdrop with the page penguin angry airdrop right we saw how quickly a theme can come back into the picture again and be so celebrated by its community so pagi's airdrop definitely brought back the NFT community again and we saw this the strong the power of that and then together uh with the things that happened the

DeFi the pump we which is you know with Trump takes the administration we think uh it's going to give a boost to the DeFi sector again so know, I know it's been for a long time that Ethereum is on the down low, but when DeFi makes a comeback, which we see a huge potential of DeFi as a sector, 5x at a very conservative level, that is going to bring Ethereum back into the picture again. I know meme coin has been a huge thing for us throughout the summer. And we had another pump of that in October, November time. Things quieted down a little bit recently, but meme coins are still a very strong part of it. It is still the number one sector on CMC by page view and community engagement. So it's interesting that you brought up Pudgy Penguins.

I actually interviewed Luca, the head of Pudgy Penguins penguins yesterday for a podcast it's recorded and will come out and it really blew my mind what they've pulled off in context of how bad nfts have been and how successful they've been as sort of this one standalone project but i do agree that i think that could be the catalyst to bring that sector back even in past alt seasons we have these sort of sector by sector moments right defy summer metaverse fall n NFTs go crazy. It's kind of one bubble after another. Right now it feels like maybe that's memes and AI agents. I'm not really so deeply active in it,

but you actually have the data as to what people are engaging with and looking at. So right now, what's there? What are people really, really interested in? And I guess, what will the bull market likely look like or be the catalyst for a true alt season where it's kind of everything? Lin Zaijie Yeah. So altcoin season, I know people talk about it, but how do you quantify that? How do you confidently say that we're in altcoin season? On CMC, we have a CMC Outcoin Season Index. So the way we measure it,

it's the top 100 projects, their performance versus BTC. And if 75% of that outperforms BTC, then we're firmly in an outcoin season. Right now on a scale of 1 to 100 we're 46 we hate 87 as the highest in December on on the 9th of December we hate 87 so that was like a full-on out season and if you remember what happened in week one of December you can sort of feel that if you try to remember that that's what an outcoin season feels like okay so right now we are 40 46 we tripped back a little bit but we definitely saw the power of what a full-on outcoin season could be to your question of what is going to pump in this outcoin season now coming back to the point how we measure it the top 100 performance tokens um and if you look at them uh the amount of returns they've printed for the past 90

days, which is the timeframe that we track over 90 days rolling basis. Number one is virtual. So that's of course, that's AI agent. That's actually up 58, 5800% for the past 90 days. And then number two, we have Farcoin. I mean, yeah, we kind of lasted, there's been a dip in meme coins, but that's because all the meme coin money has gone into Farcoin and a $2 billion market cap or whatever. Feels like that. Yeah, feels like that. But again, remember, right, you mentioned about pump.fun and the memecoin season we are having in this year, especially towards the end of last year, compared

with the memecoin season we had at the beginning of last year. There's a huge difference. And the difference is it's a lot more decentralized community driven. Back then it was mostly, you know, Elon's tweet just pump stuff but now people it's the people it's the community people want to pump what they want to pump and you can see that very strong trend and wave and how quickly things can catch up we see that started with spx uh 6 900 we we saw that with you know um all the ai16 they and all of those related things so far coin is just one of the most recent success stories of how quickly a meme project can catch trend and become so big so that's number two number three is pangui number four is hyper liquid so those are the top

performing coins in the outcoin season we are seeing for the past 90 days. Now, coming back to the point that both you and I were making, it's like a barbell market. Bitcoin on one side, memecoin degen stuff on the other, and everything else in the middle, AI agents, decentralized finance, decentralized science, RWA, what you name it. But the bars are not as thin as people think. So when the altcoin season comes, we're actually going to see this barbell structure to be a more solid foundation. Yeah, it'll look more like the ones of the past. I guess the question is, you mentioned

obviously that your index went flying in December, it was up in the 80s, right? We're back in the 40s. But you still look at a lot of the sort of darlings of previous cycles and they kind of did nothing you're like listen like i have a i have you know a sizable position still in matic or pull now right from before it's done literally nothing for god knows how long i'm sure that when ethereum catches a bid all the ethereum layer twos and such will as well but it's not we still even when you said it's a full-on alt season it's not the everything alt season of the past but probably because there's just so many tokens xrp pumped and then xrp ada h bar there was that moment where those things were like five six seven

x that was crazy yeah so interesting you mentioned that because we definitely saw the strong trend of that in mid-November where it triggered us to think the previous cycle retail investors came back because the dinosaur category which we call them dino category which is the which which are all the top tokens in the 2017 slash 2018 out season and if you look at their performance, a lot of them actually had quite positive performance in get the pump this time as well. So that's why we thought the previous cycle retail investors came back because these are the names that they are familiar with, like, you know, like all the Sui, Tan, everything that we were talking about in this market cycle, they were not familiar with it. So still, in that dinosaur category, some of them did have a very good, very strong

performance like XRP did. This week we saw a stellar XLM pumped almost like 15%, still 15% up for the past seven days. So you just need to buy, just allocate your eggs in different baskets. So that's logical to me kind of early in the cycle. And we've seen that before. But I mean, I think it might literally be as simple because I know this anecdotally, even to talking to my friends who gave up on crypto, you know, years ago, who were just kind of passive investors. They log into Coinbase.

They see that Bitcoin's gone way up. Then they just remember the names that they remembered before. And they look at those and they're holding a little bit and it's up and they just start buying. I've literally had friends who were like, wow, man, crypto seems interesting again. Should I buy Cardano? It was so big last time. And they don't even know these new things exist. They're still stuck in those years ago. So that makes sense as the first kind of pump i think we're just waiting to see now when do those people find out about ai agents or you know right yeah how do they access them exactly so that's why i think things like your podcast and also things

like what we do as researchers are going to be quite crucial right now at this point in the market because it's literally for us to translate those messages and what is the new development into a digestible type of information because as you mentioned AI agents right now et cetera like all this also quantum um resistant tokens Etc all this concept tokens it's complicated even as a concept for us crypto people. And imagine trying to translate that and make it into something actionable, investable, understandable for the outsiders is going to be quite crucial. Preston Pyshko OK, so how do you see this cycle then in context of past cycles beyond

what pumps and when and all those things? Do you think it's another situation where we have, you know, six months of craziness until the summer, boring summer, one more pump in the fall, and then we're just depressed for two years? Or do you think that we have, you know, more of a chance of things sustaining into 2026, 2027 as the space, I would love to say as the space matures, but like when Fartcoin

is the thing that's pumping on the other side of Bitcoin, I don't know that we've really matured that much. But you need to let people do what they want to do. And there are two sides to crypto, right? One side is actually, you know, the solid use cases, infrastructure, the actual utilities of blockchain and decentralization. The other side, we have to acknowledge that there is a casino side of the gambling side of the industry as well.

And rightfully, if people want that arena, they should be able to have that arena if needed. Now, to your point of how this market cycle is going to be different. So I don't know. OK, so people have some of them have agreed to this point that BTC halving is a main driver for how we're experiencing the four-year cycle. But given now, the players at the table are different, vastly different compared with what we had back then. We have institutions that they are increasingly treating Bitcoin as just a financial instrument. So the halving impact is definitely toned down.

So if I'm able to take BTC out of this discussion here, so what I think BTC is going to do is to be treated increasingly like a financial instrument, and that would be impacted more on the microeconomics the the global economy etc that will be one of the major um more sort of influential impacts here on the other hand though for crypto on the other side of the spectrum as you said the meme coins the casino coins less so even for the meme coins because meme coins you need a community behind it they're what we were saying during the summer time it's literally just gambling it's new projects getting launched on pumped off on i'm unsure on all of these platforms that people just chase they buy in with the mentality of 5x 7x 100x instead of you know what means in a day yeah some did some did

something um instead of, you know, buying because you want to be part of the community, be part of the like, that's your that's what you think it's a nice, nice joke, you want to be part of it. So those casino coins, they would still exist, and they will still have their arena to attract the people that have the needs to, everything in the middle if a we are saying especially now with the trend of uh a ai agents with the trend of actually the combination of decentralization and ai if we're able to see some really solid use cases of how blockchain and

crypto can help solve the ai issue in traditional AI, traditional AI industry. If we actually have those use cases, those will be very solid projects and narratives that will, regardless of where we are in the market cycle, will stay and grow. And just more taking on the tech cycle as opposed to the crypto cycle in that case? Yeah, my skeptical guess is that every single time we get really excited about something, and then it has this massive pump and then a bubble. And then the next cycle, we see the real winners come out and actual building and iteration. I keep talking about it, but off the grid for gaming from Gunzilla.

That's a real AAA game in crypto. We were supposed to have those four years ago. It never happened. Here we are, right? Whether that sparks gaming or not, we'll see. But we do have a legitimate AAA game now that is blockchain based, right? So I think AI will be like a 2028 thing, right? Maybe I'm wrong and maybe it'll be a faster adoption.

And I think that we'll see some really good price action in it. But I'm just always skeptical that the hottest narrative, you know, I think never seems to play out immediately in our cycles. The only difference is gaming is such a special sector that you do need downtime. Like you need people to be like in the on the download to build triple a games like they need to be really solid whereas ai as as an industry even regardless of crypto it's so fast with this like uh it's true the different generations of updates so maybe we'll we'll have it quicker rings and repeats cycle. Yeah, you talked about something that piqued my interest earlier. You mentioned Ethereum.

Obviously, you probably don't know, but I've been a longtime believer that Ethereum will have its moment again. And I think that there's an extreme doom and gloom around Ethereum that's unwarranted, personally. And you kind of did allude to the fact that you think that, you know, DeFi and Ethereum and Layer 2s will have their moment again. I'd like to hear more about that, maybe even just for my own to make myself feel better. But I really, I strongly believe that Ethereum is going to catch a serious bid this year. Yeah. Yeah, it does feel oversold because I was looking, it's more towards mid-December. I was just looking through the market to say, okay, what else is cheap to buy?

Because at that point, everything was so pumped. The magic number was 200. So literally 200%, 200% since the 6th of November, the election news, to that point where when I was looking, everything seems pumped around 200%. Ethereum was only 87% at that point. So it is definitely undisguised. Like, it's your Black Friday sales still going on. It feels like that. Now, there are a few reasons contributing to that.

Number one is, yes, Ethereum had ETF approved, but we didn't see that inflows into it. Not that much. So again, without the institutions coming, it's very hard to pump the price up the same magnitude that we're seeing with BTC. Number two is to do with the L2s. Now a lot of the transactions face etc. around them. So Ethereum is sort of taking a bit of shine away from that. And then number three is just DeFi. People seem to forget about it because meme coin was the number one thing. But if you look at how the real, you know, when crypto regulation gets a lot more friendlier in some of the major markets, which we are saying already. For example, in Europe, Mika, Netherlands last week just approved four licenses for crypto companies to give them Mika licenses as digital asset service providers. Now, think how tough US regulation has been on crypto, right?

If Trump's taking the office, it's going to give us a more justified, friendlier version of crypto regulation that will open the door up for so many use cases of DeFi. And DeFi as a sector is very much dominant on Ethereum as the L1. So again, to me, I feel Ether is right now, it's definitely sort of a sleeping giant waiting to be opened up. So fingers crossed. I agree. I mean, I think that's where the institutional money is going to go first when it leaves Bitcoin. It's not going to jump to Solana to do pump fund. If they're going to tokenize things, they're going to do it on Ethereum first, because that's where the money is. And that's where Larry Fink is, right? It just seems very

obvious to me. And I think we do have this optimism about the Trump administration. Some, though, are saying that we should still be a bit cautious, right? Trump admin may use crypto banking ties, but caution remains. Basically saying here, this is from TD, which is one of the major banks, that they still think that a lot of banks are not going to want the risk of dealing with crypto. So maybe we don't have Operation Chokepoint 2.0 and the banks actively, you know, are the Fed actively looking to an FDIC to cut banking rails, but a lot of banks may still be very slow to adopt and have a problem with the industry. So maybe there's a middle ground of like, we're going to get everything our way that we think we're going to get with

Trump to something kind of more in between what we've had before. And, you know, in that. Good point. Yes. So, you know, I don't know that Trump's going to in his first hundred days make, you know, everything we want to do completely legal and easy, but I guess we will, we'll see what happens. So outside of what we've mentioned, I know we've only got a couple, a couple minutes left. I mean, what's exciting you the most about 2025? Like if you were just someone watching this show, what's something you'd be looking really hard at to consider, you know, maybe investing in or getting excited about that might see some real meaningful adoption or even just some meaningful price action. Yeah. So number one thing is going to be RWA. I know this was so popular last year, but sort of quieted down now because some of the other narratives are

more of a shiny concept. But RWA is the number one use case that we are seeing together with the trend of institutional onboarding, right? So we are very likely to say the first 1 billion dollar fund uh in rwa very soon because uh the the top two ones um like for example the Black Rock build fund um they are close to 800 million USD so it's within the sting of a few months so it's very strong demand and we're going to see that sector still play. And remember, this is the sector where you have a solid revenue business model. So these are the projects that can generate operational revenue out of it. So to me, I think this is still a very much prominent sector and narrative. And number two would be all these things related to decentralized

science decentralized ai uh ai agents d5 but with the ai um so i think a lot of this are very new shining concepts i would love to see where they're developing number three is i will not give up on meme coins um i i have to admit i got through the whole i got rocked so many times i'm pumped up fun i was like in the weeds i haven't even i haven't even tested it but i'm glad you're you're a braver person than me you missed out a lot i i know just you know we all have our thing that's not mine but that to be fair what you're probably about to say like i was very anti i just thought it was kind of bad for the industry, but I've come around to, I agree with you that people should be able to do whatever they want, as you said before. So that, that first, just not for me, but I think there, whether you like it or not, whether you're Bitcoin maxi, they're here to stay and they're going to find some value.

Yeah. And to that point is people, again, like people learn from the process, like the mistakes that Pump.Fund made, the controversies that they got into. As a result of it, we're seeing improved newer generation of fair launch products. We're seeing like better business models for meme coins and people are more like smarter now in terms of what kind of meme coins they participate in so those are the things that we will still say and also because from cmc's side right we are uh crypto's number one traffic we have about 400 million visits per month so we collect a lot of data on what people are looking at how what projects they are engaging with memecoin has been by far the number one sector on CMC last year and this year.

And that trend is not going away. So with the engagement scores that we're seeing, the trends that we're seeing, Memecoin is here to stay. Fortunately, unfortunately, it doesn't matter. But Memecoin also as a subsector is getting more mature as well, where you have the blue chip. You also have the middle sort of community support ones. You also have on the other side of the spectrum, the gambling coins, et cetera.

So it's a full subsector game in itself. So that's the number three thing. Number four thing is I do see Bitcoin having very strong potential this year. And even in January alone, I think everyone knows that 20th of January, the inauguration is going to give us a pump, hopefully. And the Fed decisions coming later in the month, we are generally expecting a bit of pullback around that time as well. I would expect a lot of volatility both ways. Yeah. Yes. So there are, there's very healthy flows and volatilities around Bitcoin. And also, if you look at the participants, the players at the table, institutional money, et cetera, if you, for people who want to play with a different strategy,

for example, like swings, whatever, it's still a very prominent, very important market and token to trade. So a lot of opportunity, even on BTC. Yeah, at the end of the day, you can just buy Bitcoin and probably do very well this cycle, especially if some of those catalysts happen.

I just happened to open up rwa.xyz. I know I gotta let you go, which kind of shows RWA as a sector because I totally agree with you. I mean, you could just see this growth is crazy. I mean, even without stable coins, it's already at 15 billion total in value in RWA and it's really just the beginning. But regardless of what the tokens have done, you can see that the total value has just never stopped going up, right? Yeah. That is actually a very important point why we created CoinMarketCap 100 as an index.

Because RWA, if you like, is to tokenize real world assets. And what we want to do is to tokenize crypto assets in the sense that, is there any way for you to just invest in crypto as a market? Index funds. Yeah. That's the way that human beings, mature human beings, invest. People have a 401k in the United States or they have an IRA and they just dollar cost average into some index funds every month passively without even thinking about it. When I have Matt Hogan from Bitwise on here or others, they're doing that. That's a hundred percent say that's going to be the future.

Right. You'll just have a top 10 crypto top 100. Like you have a meme coin index, a layer one index, whatever it is. That's how people are going to eventually invest as long as that's unlocked from a regulatory perspective. But you guys tokenizing it is even more interesting. Yeah, exactly. It's going to be a one-stop solution yeah so are you gonna i mean you i know you have them but will you guys eventually break them down into those subcategories as well you know like a

ai agent index and a rwa index and things like that yeah um so on cmc we already have different categories for them for people to like track and the performance of that sector and just to see what the top projects are. But indexing is a very interesting point. If the market has demand, sure, we're here to serve the whole crypto industry. That's what CMC does. So I would just like you to know I've had a lot of guests and we have Alice might be his best guest ever. Alice needs to be a regular guest. This has been great.

So you've been very popular with our crowd. And we love that you can bring the data and the, you know, what you're seeing at CoinMarketCap more than just an opinion to the table. You're not on X, right? I looked to try to tag you, but you're at a LinkedIn. Where can people find you? I have 400 followers on Twitter. It's like really nothing,

but it's my new year resolution to grow it. And Scott, you have the best audiences. Well, see guys, she likes you too. Well, thank you so much. We'd love to have you back very soon. We'd love the work you guys are doing at CoinMarketCap. Have a great day. Thank you very much.

Evening for you. Have a great evening. Bye-bye. All right, guys. Before I bring on Chris, obviously, as you know, we have a long-term amazing sponsor, which is Aptos, who've been absolutely killing it. So every single Wednesday before Chris comes on,

I just give you kind of a quick wrap-up of what's happening with them. And if you guys watched all my content from Singapore at Token 2049, they sponsored all of it. My interviews with Jeremy Allaire and Anthony Scaramucci and Brian Rose, all those was made possible, that whole trip made possible by them and my review of Token 2049, obviously. So really have a close relationship with them and think that they're going to be one of the big winners when we talk about these new layer ones. I mean, to put some metrics to it, everything all time highs in December 2024 for them. 1.3 billion TVL, 10.4 million active users, 6.3 million new users, 1.3 billion swapped volume, 143 million transactions. When you take a look at the monthly active users, this is insane.

And I'm hoping that like, I obviously like I believe Aptos will be a winner. I like them, but I'm hoping that what you see here is generally a trend of mainstream adoption with crypto, you know, not necessarily with just one chain, but if we can see these, this kind of growth of actual users using things in crypto on a month to month basis and a year to year basis, this is how we'll actually get to some meaningful level of adoption. I don't know if you guys have been using Aptos yet, but I deeply encourage you to check it out. Of course, no ref link, no nothing like that.

Just a huge supporter of what they do. They're a huge supporter of what I do, and it's a match made in heaven. So all I ask is that you guys check them out. And now the man himself, Christopher Inks of Texas West Capital. It feels like we're in a dip every time you come on. I don't know. Are Wednesdays bad? Because you know, sometimes I do a show in the afternoons, occasional Wednesdays with Wick, you know, and our joke is like, why is the market so hot? And then all of a sudden on Wednesdays,

you can't find anything to look at. Yeah, yeah. You know, it is what it is, right? There was a time when I was doing my daily lives where every day at 10 a.m. when I would come on, the market would tank. And so, you know, I'm just kind of used to it, right? But, you know, again, for me, you know, I tend to look at the market a lot differently than most of the, you differently than most of your viewers. And so I'm usually prepared for the pullbacks.

I always take that bigger outlook, right? Wildly depressed at every 5% move. That's weird. No, no, not at all. Not at all. I mean, let me see the pull this chart up here. Let's start off with Bitcoin. What we're looking at here.

The first thing I wanted to show you on Bitcoin here was we're getting this bounce off this S1 pivot. It's one, two, three, four. We're five waves up. That suggests there's maybe some sort of low in here. So we look for a pullback and head up. If we can get here above this 15-minute pivot on the 15-minute, if we can get above that 98, 598, I think that's a pretty good indication that low is probably in, but let's kind of zoom out a bit here. Here's that four hour. You can see we pulled back 70 and a half percent.

That is my favorite. That's an institutional pullback level. It's my favorite fib level to watch when we get pullbacks. So, you know, we just kind of dip below the hourly pivot here. We'll see if we can get this break back up. This to me looks like five, it looks like one, two, three, four, and then five up here. So, you know, potentially an ABC right here to finish off. So I'm not feeling too bad. Low volume note. I mean, it hits where you kind of expect it to hit. We just want to see it kind

of come back up, you know, through this hourly pivot area here. And then I believe, you know, we'll be off to the races. You know, we'll get like a one and a two here. And if that is a one and a two right there, five waves up off that swing low, we'll get us, let's see here, up there almost around 120,000 without any kind of overextension or whatnot, just off this swing low. So I'm not here to complain about 120,000. You know, it feels good. It looks good. We've got the new yearly pivots here that show up on the weekly and the monthly. And so let me kind of clear this out here

you know again we're coming in sideways between the pivot and the r1 that's usually a pretty strong move uh i mean you know even if we were to drop to 80 000 here just to just to push back to 80 000 i wouldn't feel like any sort of way about it um Now, if we, on the weekly, if we were to get an impulsive breakdown and close to something like a larger candle spread, you know, body of a candle, some spike of volume through that, then we could maybe look at that and go, okay, maybe there's some sort of bigger term top in there or maybe even the top, but I don't think that's there.

But until that, you know, any kind of movement down here doesn't have me feeling any sort of negative way. Um, that that's kind of my, my initial line in the sand, let's say around 80,000 or so. Um, but as you can see right here, there's a, I don't even know if you can really see this. It's it's cause there's so little volume up here, but this is all a very large, low volume node. There's like nothing in there. Yeah. And generally speaking, for those that don't know, you'll notice this kind of flew up through that area. So usually what happens is it provides support

when you come back down onto it. So if it's going to break down, it's usually not right away. Most of the time it'll hit it and bounce and hit it and bounce. And maybe on the third or fourth or fifth time, it'll break through. So it works as support there if it's going to break through. A lot of times it'll just use it as support and then it'll take off. Right. And if you're coming at it from the bottom, most of the time you kind of hit it, you hit it, you hit it, you hit it here, and then you break through. So, you know, if you, if you have your VRVP here,

uh, on your indicators, again, if you're on tradingView there, VRVP, visible range volume profile. And I have- It's funny, I thought it was VPVR over there. Yeah, I thought it was VPVR, but you're doing the other one. Yeah, VRPV. Yep. Yeah. And so I always set by just a 10% width over here and then, because everybody always asked. And then my row size is 384. And I do that because it gives you a lot more, um, you know, blocks in here to really kind of see these low volume nodes, look for those low volume nodes. You can see that they work as support and resistance, um, you know, through right here, right? So here's support, here's

resistance on the same areas. It's just the areas that the market's really not interested in. And so price, you know, especially on the first try, doesn't just like chase through it. They kind of give up when it hits that area until finally they push it through. So, I mean, you know, again, for me, as I'm looking at this, uh, this chart, I don't really feel any kind of negative way about it at all. Uh, you can see on the weekly, we've already had this pullback halfway here and we haven't even moved that much. We've gone from like 108 to 91. I mean, it's a $17,000 move, not even 20%.

We've almost got a half, almost reset halfway here on the stochastic RSI on the weekly. The daily, I have to say the daily is kind of ugly. It's a little head and shoulders-y. We'll see. Well, I wasn't even

talking about that. I was talking about this, I wasn't even talking about that. I was talking about this. Peter Brandt was talking about that. Yeah. It doesn't matter now. I mean, you'd have to break below basically 90, but yeah. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean, not even just break below.

You have to kind of close below, right? And then, you know, keep it going there. Yeah. But, you know, if it was to do that, you know, my initial target would be this, just blindly would be this daily S1 pivot around 86, nine and a half, 86, 950 or so. And then the next big target below that, of course, would be that weekly pivot there at around 80,000. But as I watch this range right here, because zoom in again here again, you know, if we continue down further from where we are, this hourly S1 pivot is my initial target. That's right around the 78.6 retracement, right there around 93.5. So, you know, if we do continue to break down, that's where I would look for reversal. And then if we can get that impulsive breakout and close above that hourly pivot there

at around 96.190, I think we'll, you you know we'll be good to go to head up higher but that's only if we do break down there and we're not already bottomed right here so overall you know daily kind of looks like crap uh four hour looks pretty decent one hour is building bullish divergence on rsi here as we're doing this overlapping price action uh you can see that we are catching some more volume down here as we get to this low area so i'm definitely interested in it and again as we looked in the 15 minute if we were to rally from here it wouldn't be a surprise it is the 15 minute s1 pivot we do have one two three four five waves up right now so we just want to see this hold and kind of break out higher and see if we can start getting this trend headed back up so that's kind of you know where i am i take the quick look at the four

hour yeah i take the quick look at the four hour and it's not quite oversold yet so maybe one little more dip and then you know we we kind of yeah yeah and it doesn't have to of course yeah it may you know it may yeah right there right right now is not the time if you're a trader right now it's not time to go oh it's definitely going to do this or that right now is the time to watch and to uh observe and to kind of you know see okay can we get some kind of confirmation that it's going to do one thing or the other that's what we're trying to do right now if you're trading um real quick i've got this stock i've got microstrategy i've been talking about this one for a while and uh basically we have this um what looks like an a and then b is a triangle and then c down here or a wxy but three waves down into what becomes uh just beyond the 50 percent uh retracement here

we get a one two three four and so coming off here looks like, let me kind of zoom in a bit here. We're above the hourly pivot, which is great. It looks like one, two, could be three, four, we get a five up here. But nonetheless, especially if this hourly pivot holds here at 322 and a half, we should expect this to continue higher. Once we break out above that four 37 and 61 cents, that should indicate that that low is complete. And based on the height of, uh, of this pullback here,

we've actually got a target up here around eight, 10 and a half. I bought a lot of micro strategy, uh, uh, late yesterday on the debt. I bought a lot of micro strategy actually yesterday did you for that for the first time in quite a while well and i got faked out by the way because

i thought there was a i i thought there was a breakout uh coming uh you know i'll show you on the breakout i'll show you here yeah uh so i was buying like the 360 right here kind of on that and then i bought a little more when it dipped yesterday because i still have pretty high conviction but yeah when you pull the fibs i mean look at that 38.2 right there yeah i i like it um it looks full flaggy regardless okay look hey look full flag yeah there you go there you go yeah yeah yeah i mean it looks it looks pretty good to me again i've been talking about it for a while to have further upside. And that again, that's just based on the height here, that target. It could, especially if Bitcoin rallies up and does some kind of blow off top, I see no reason why we wouldn't expect MicroStrategy to do the same.

So we can see MicroStrategy upwards of $1,000 or $1,200 even potentially by the end of this. So I think it's a good buy area. We'll see if we can continue to get that push up there. But again, we just kind of want to see this 323 area kind of hold this support as we continue up there. As you can see, we're kind of right here around the pivot. And I said this could be four. Also, you know, one, two, three, four could be five up there already. So we're getting a wave two pullback. But we broke out. Here's the pivot. And I said this could be four, also, you know, one, two, three, four could be five up there already. So we're getting a wave two pullback, but we broke out. Here's the thing. Zoom back in here again. All right. So if we look at this as a one, two, three, so if we look at this as a WXY here and, you know, ABC breaking out above that second wave, if three wave corrective breaking out above that second wave should confirm that that's complete there.

So, you know, again, this breakout above right here adds more to this idea that it's probably complete. And, you know, again, we're on our way heading up there toward 800. So I really don't listen to all the nonsense about micro strategy and why it has to fail and all these other armchair economist nonsense online with that. As far as what we got here with crypto goes, I don't know that I have a whole lot of anything. There's not much to see. I do have OXT USD here. This looks like 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and then ABC pulled back just beyond 50%

right to this little volume node right here. And let me zoom in a bit. And so we're getting this great candle right now after the four-hour RSI and stochastic RSI reset into oversold. So I think it's looking pretty good here. We definitely want to see an impulsive breakout and close above, again, the hourly pivot here at about $0.12. If we can get that, we should be good to go. Based on this potentially being one and a two here, that would give us three up around almost $0. five up around 24 cents. And that five up there

around 24 cents, this is three waves on the pullback here on this larger move. So based on the height of that, we have almost a 23 cent target. So that gets us right up around the same way. So I'm feeling pretty good about that at the moment, but we definitely want to see that breakout above that hourly pivot there to kind of get it going. Let me see here. XLM was another one that's looking kind of interesting to me. It does look like a one with a flat as a two here. She was just talking about that. Yeah, so we got three waves on the pullback here right now to the hourly pivot. I like that. Again, low volume notes sitting right below it.

It's a 38.2 pullback. It's our initial fourth wave target. So we're going to see if we can get a rally here. What we're looking for is a breakout above this wave right here, this 44 cents. So if we can rally up and breakout above that, we should should be good to go based on the height of the pullback. We've got about a 53 and a half cent target up here. And again, it could overextend on that,

but that's just, you know, a pattern target based on this, the height of this pullback. If this continues to break down, we'd look for it to catch a bid right here around the 50% retracement at about 39 and a half cents. And then that would,

I would up our target there for the fifth wave. Oh, 50% retracement at about 39 and a half cents. And then that would, I would up our target there for the fifth wave. Oh, uh, probably pretty close here to about 55 cents or so on that. But again, you know, low volume note here, what I said earlier,

but you hit it, you hit it, you hit it before you finally break through it. Well, here we go doing that same thing right here. Um, so again, XL that same thing right here. So again, XLM looking interesting as well. Everybody asked about XRP.

No matter how many times I show it, everybody asked about it. I do believe we have a triangle here. So A, B, C, D. E could be complete right here. It does look like three waves right there at that hourly pivot. Based on the height, again, based on the height, we've got a pattern target, $3.75 almost. We need to see a breakout above wave B here. So we need to see a breakout above. Let me see if I can get that lined up there.

$2.00 and basically $2.72, $2.73 here. We can do that. That should indicate that the pattern's complete and that we're headed up there toward that $3.75, which is a new all-time high, folks, right? So, yay. Quickly, we had a question.

Might as well address. If HBAR breaks channel, what target looks like flagpole. So I just happened to pop it up while I was saying that. So obviously on the weekly, you had kind of this massive move, right. And break here. It looks like a pennant here. So your target, by the way, would be massive, right?

Because it's this entire flagpole. But if you zoom in on the daily, I'm just curious your perspective on this. Looks like it looks like a descending triangle. Yeah. Yeah. To me, that looks not like bullish consolidation. Listen, descending triangles actually still in a bullish trend break up like 53% of the time or something. So it's not that it's bearish, but that doesn't look like a pennant to me. This looks like a bouncing ball that's putting in slightly lower highs and the flat low. So I would actually expect that. I would be careful with that personally. And also look at your volume down there. Look at how your volume drops off as that price continues to consolidate. That's what you want to see in a triangle. I would just take, I would measure that a hundred percent from the

swing low to the swing high, like I did with the XRP there. And then look at the one six, one eight extension. And by the way, I use log. So when you're on, I use log charts and then I use my trend-based fib extension and my retracements based on log. Oh my, did you see my tweet? No. While we were talking, because I was thinking about that, because I was looking at my fibs and I also use log, I literally just, while we were talking, said TA expert's question for you, do you use logarithmic or linear charts? The answer should be logarithmic. This is four minutes ago.

And do you change the Fibonacci levels to be based on log scale? Because I do. So I see a lot of people charting Bitcoin on linear, which is, by the way, nonsense, like just stupid. Too much movement, yeah. So that's what I wanted to see. And then ifing Bitcoin on linear, which is, by the way, nonsense, like just stupid. Too much movement, yeah. So that's what I wanted to see. And then if you're on log, I see a lot of people using still the linear Fibonacci levels, which is like apples and oranges.

Well, and you might remember back, I think you were still over there at TWC with us when trading was a bit off. Yeah, because it wasn't a thing. So we had to yeah it took us a while remember it took me about a year of of trying it out and practicing it to make sure that it worked out all right and it works out pretty well so um i definitely there's a little check box for those that don't know um you have your fib uh your trend-based fib extensions or your or your retracements yeah down in the first style right there at the bottom so if you're using log you want to go ahead and check that watch what happens if you take it off. So if you're on a

log chart, watch where your Fibonacci levels land if you take this off. Yeah. Totally different. Totally different. But that's a linear chart. So just, you know, one is based on price. One's based on the absolute move. One's based on the percentage. You can't have one of each. Yeah. And for those that, you for those that want to argue about the linear thing, especially on the big movements like Bitcoin and these things that move a lot, here's the idea, guys. When you buy in, you don't buy in thinking, oh, I want to make 50 bucks or 100 bucks. You're like, oh, I want to make 10%. And so 10% at 1,000 is 100 bucks, whereas 10% at 50,000 is $5,000. And that's why it works because as human beings, that's how our brains work, right?

A $1,000 move at 10 grand Bitcoin and $100,000 Bitcoin are not the same and should not be reflected as the same thing in a chart. And that's what linear does. Exactly. Exactly. So 1% versus a 10% move. I mean, it's not the same thing. Yeah. So anyway, yeah. So on HBAR, that's a big move up it's large candlesticks it's large volume it looks like a wave three to me triangle for wave four is is exactly what makes sense and then so we'd have a wave five up again pattern target the 1.618 of uh of that wave four and that pullback yep i think it goes up like i said more of the time it was but if it is descending triangle i

would just be a little careful at this like 0.234 level if it breaks down but then you know what exactly what happens we know then you do this yeah it drops through there bounces here and you have a perfect bull flag so yeah don't get scared yeah yeah looks good i mean i like it i like it i can't you know i can't lie um so you know um overall daily on alt is looking kind of rough still, uh, but there is some potential, um, you know, reversal setting in on, you know, the one hour, the four hour, maybe. So just be a little careful if you're jumping into alt at the moment, don't get in and say, okay, it definitely has to do a, B or C right now. It definitely, it never has to definitely do anything other than what it's going to do, but especially right now. So, you know,

be a little patient, uh, look for some sort of confirmation. Don't try to rush it. Cause that's how you lose your money. Uh, and then, uh, I think we'll be good to go here. I don't, I'm not concerned about the pullback and a lot of people freaked out. Um, but you know, I, I did the grand scheme of things. We're just sideways at like on Bitcoin. We're just sideways. Right. So it's been sideways for weeks now. All right, guys, check out everything Chris got going? So it's been sideways for weeks now. All right, guys, check out everything Chris got going on, texaswestcapital.com, I believe, correct? And of course, give him a follow on TX West Capital on X-Men.

Always a pleasure. See you next week. Yes, sir. All right, guys, check out Aptos, check out Chris, and we will see you tomorrow. We have another female guest tomorrow i can't torvich two in one week a lot you know it's nice to prove that there's actually uh women here she's brilliant she's awesome we've had her many times so you guys definitely check back in

tomorrow and thanks to alice for uh being a great guest for the first time all right chris thank you Let's go.