The Wolf Of All Streets - Bitcoin Has Never Been This Bullish In September – How Long Will It Last?

Episode Date: September 19, 2025

The Fed’s latest rate cut sparks fresh debate—has Powell quietly abandoned the 2% inflation target, and what does it mean for markets and Bitcoin? Meanwhile, the SEC has approved generic ETF listing standards, clearing the way for rapid launches of altcoin and meme coin ETFs. On the innovation front, Google and Coinbase’s x402 integration paves the way for AI agents to transact with stablecoins, while reports suggest Coinbase’s Base may launch its own token to accelerate network growth. And in stablecoin news, Tether unveils USAT, a new U.S.-regulated product led by Bo Hines. From Wall Street to Web3, today’s moves could reshape the entire financial landscape.

Bitcoin is currently having its best September ever, but will it last? Many thinking that it has topped at the current price, many thinking that this is just the start of the next bull run. We're going to talk about the biggest stories of this week, how they're impacting markets, and how they're impacting price. Let's go. Good morning, everybody, and happy Friday five to all of you. I got a frog in my throat.

The minute I started doing that intro, it was great. It sounded terrific. Felt good. I like a good intro. I was telling them in the comments, and LW. It's sad, but this is going to be our last show because you and I have been hired by Disney to replace

Jimmy Kimmel. For a very short period of time. So I mouth off and say something that gets me fired. So we'll be back in three weeks. We'll be gone for one. Yeah. We'll be back in three weeks with a much smaller and more offended audience. But listen, we got this title here that Bitcoin has never been this bullish in September.

For those who haven't seen this, we've got this chart right here, 8.13% last year, 7.29% reminds me of the meme, you know, not going to lie. I thought they had us in the first half. Doesn't this feel like we're kind of celebrating a little early, though? last I checked, it's September 19. Yeah. I also, I don't think that like it's, it's up a little bit because it went down a bunch, you know, like it's, it's, it's, I don't know, it's, look, September is a, is a historically bad month for, for Bitcoin. It always is. We always get all excited about coming back from the summer and are like, all right, ready to go. And then it's dog poo. And it's dog poo for all the markets. And so this, basically it's just, it's just not awful right now is sort of

the TLDR. I don't think there's anyone out there who's feeling super jazzed about anything. It's just kind of holding its own. Now, that said, it is chaos out there. No one has any freaking idea what to make of markets. Like, you know, we got the cut that people have been wanting for a full year from Powell and it was so anticlimactic and it didn't really tell us anything about what happens next. And people don't want to believe the good. It's just, it's, it is just a rough, confused time. So the fact that Bitcoin is in the context of all of that up eight percent is super bullish but it's not it's not bullish and like all right let's you know put on our cowboy boots and get ready to rip kind of a way yeah it's like it just

feels like in my favorite football play of all time is when leon let on the cowboys like recovered a fumble and ran it all the way down to the goal line and started celebrating before i got there and little guy don bbby slapped it out of his hand like i see tweets like that and i'm like oh we're definitely going to be down by the end of september yeah yeah i mean look It's, you know, the other thing, though, is that we're living through, you know, the trying to understand what it looks like, what cycles, to what extent the four-year cycle remains intact in an era where we are now totally woven in with the broader financial system. And, you know, inevitably, it's going to be some parts of Bitcoin and crypto cyclicality are

likely persistent and other parts aren't. For example, you know, I wouldn't be surprised if the rotation between. Bitcoin and alt coins in a sort of broad way has some amount of persistence, right? New waves of people come in. They come in through sort of the big ones. They find their way to other parts of the field. That would not surprise me even in sort of financialized Bitcoin world for it to be persistent. But whether there's actual seasonality in the same way, or are we just subject to the seasonal

forces that are broader now, you know, like all of these things we're kind of just living through in it and it's, you know, we're not going to know until we know. There are definitely broader forces at play for the market and the cycle right now. The first thing I had queued up was the Fed, but I'm going to move that back because this really plays into what you're saying. SEC approved generic listing standards for faster crypto ETF approvals. We can certainly unpack exactly what that means. We've done it here before.

The TLDR is if you've been on Coinbase futures for six months, you can probably get an ETF. Here's the assets that that qualifies for. And then, of course, SEC breakthrough lets gray scale launch first. multi-token ETF, which arguably is just as big of news, but getting a little less hype. But we basically have our first crypto index fund that's trading publicly here. So if we want to talk about what could impact the cycle, what could change, which coins go where at what point, these kind of things should be massive tailwinds that are not priced

in from previous cycles. Yeah. And, and, you know, my sense of these types of things is they are massive tailwinds, but on a much longer time horizon than we think, right? This is sort of what we've seen with Ethereum, too. The Ethereum ETF's launched, and it turns out that the supply of an Ethereum ETF did not create demand for an Ethereum ETF, at least not initially. However, as we've seen subsequent to that, the fact that that instrument existed, and you could start to see the Treasury theme come into that, and then other people could watch the Treasury theme and buy into Ethereum more easily. Like, it did have tailwinds for it. It just wasn't an insta pop, right? And I think that you're going to see something similar here where we're almost inevitably doomed to be

disappointed as a new set of these things flood in, you know, kind of, you know, compete for liquidity, don't really have anything new or exciting to people. But ultimately, they just get normalized. They flow into all the different nooks and crannies of apps where people buy stocks. Like all of these things, they are tailwinds. They're just not sort of head popping in the way that, you know, five years ago, a news story would come out and a coin would, you know, go up 100%. Are you daring to imply that there's not going to be tremendous immediate it does it demand for a Pocodot, Shib, or stellar UTF? Well, Pocod has some seriously big backers who have been persistent for that thing for way

longer than it seems even a little reasonable. So I would not be willing to bet on that one. But, you know, outside of that, yes, I think that it is unlikely that we see some massive run on, on, you know, asset number 27 for in the immediate term. Yeah, I think this is plumbing, to your point, I think that the ones that have the entire flywheel of the narrative, like probably Salana right now, that has the massive treasury companies that is going to get the ETF, that has an institutional narrative, should absolutely pop on these. The rest of them, it'll be nice that they're there. We did get an XRP sort of ETF yesterday and a Doge sort of ETF because they basically skipped the line and found a novel way to launch, but actually both of them had tremendous volume. I believe I saw that the XRP, ETP or whatever call you at launch yesterday was the largest

volume on an ETF launch in 2025. Of course, the other crypto ones were in 2024. Yeah, I mean, look, the other reality is that we could be wrong. And there could be a lot of people who, like, the degeneracy could just come to the stock market in a big way, you know. It might be our final triumph. So who knows? To be clear, people are saying, don't sleep on dot and all these things.

I'm not saying they're crappy assets. I'm not saying anything about them. I'm just saying that it's pretty far down the line of things that people are looking at with huge volumes right now. Got a lot of coins in mind. The big difference, for example, is that when Kathy Wood does something excitedly with Arc or sorry, with Dot in the future, you know, she's one of those big backers that I was mentioning, there is now a place that the people who think that that's a signal can go that isn't, you know, that isn't a crypto exchange. And that's important. Speaking of Coinbase, this is one I need you to unpack for me as my AIs are. Google Agentic Payments Protocol plus X402, agents can now actually pay each other.

This is actually really cool. It's between Google and Coinbase and my AI can pay your AI without us having to even communicate, right? Yep. So basically, a couple things. there are right now the place that we're in when it comes to AI agents is there's a huge amount of the plumbing to use the term you just use being built infrastructure for agents so over the last year we've seen a number of new standards come up there's one called mcp model context protocol which is basically a sort of an agent specific API where you can wrap any set of data

in an mcp server and then any agent can access it right so it makes the creation of agents much more quick and fast and easy. There was also a new protocol called A2A, which is from Google. It's an agent-to-agent communication protocol to make it easy for agents to interact with one another, to speak with one another. And these have been widely adopted. This is self-consciously modeled to work with MCP and A2A and is meant to solve some of the very core problems of agent commerce. So this is not a highly like super generalist agents platform for everything. This not imagining, you know, agents working together to sort of make trades on financial markets or anything like that. This is specifically meant to solve some of the core problems of

internet commerce for agents. So it wants to solve things like authenticity, intent, and basically, and have a way to kind of backstop things so merchants aren't just, you know, stuck holding the bag. So it allows for a person who's programming an agent to say, in a, again, a common and standardized way. Yes, it has permission to do X. Yes, it has permission to spend X. That's sort of the level that it's functioning on. But it's extremely notable. I think there were some folks in the crypto space who were sad that this wasn't instantly sort of like fully cryptoized right from the beginning. But it is hugely telling that this is, again, the mainstream first agent's protocol, agent payment protocol that Google is releasing. And they chose to do it with Coinbase.

They have like 60 other launch partners. But this one was actually collaboration, with Coinbase. So they are very clearly thinking about the integration of the crypto system into this. Stable coins obviously being the first part of that. So, you know, again, not necessarily great news for the random AI coin that wanted to be the payment standard for agents. But surprise, that was never going to work. And this is a much sort of like more considered approach to how agents in crypto can actually intersect. I'm going to go out and a limb and say, I don't know what that coin is that you're talking about, but I definitely own it. yeah there you go somewhere in it's been air it's been i'm sure it's been airdrop to you yeah sounds really

good for us dc though to be quite honest because coin base obviously has a vested interest in the success of us dc and the most rational approach for agent to agent payments is going to be a dollar denominated stable coin yeah i mean look this protocol will be able to use uh everything i mean so like mastercard american express they're all in this alliance as well so a lot of this is going to be this is honestly this is the most boring version of agents payments that you were ever going to see this is does my agent that's sitting inside chrome chrome just announced that gemini is now native inside chrome this week it's this is solving for does my agent have the you know the right to buy you know the the the the random Halloween PJs for my kids that were just advertised to me it's like

it's stuff like it's stuff like it's super kind of advanced commerce it's just run-of-the-mill e-commerce stuff. What could possibly go wrong when this does become more advanced? I can't see any potential traps or pitfalls for this. I mean, you know, just having, you know, AI agents out there spending your money. It's going to be perfect. It's going to go great. We've done crazier. Thanks. We have. Well, speaking of tokens, we have some big news in a couple of corners of the internet. Base is beginning to explore a new network token. Of course, this is Coinbase's L2. I'm old enough to remember when base was started under the Biden Gary Gensler era when they said we would never do a token. The layer two doesn't need a token.

Apparently now when there's money to be made and we're under a different regulatory environment, definitely need a token. And of course, we have Metamask saying that they have a token coming as well. In all seriousness, couldn't pick two probably larger platforms or protocols, however we want to call it, to choose to launch tokens. Yeah. I mean, there's going to be demand for them. their real projects. They're going to be exciting. Like, you know, it's, by the way, the coinbase is

very much couching, couching their language. And we're totally still just exploit. No, they're not. They are what 100%. Unless, unless, unless the regulators show up with pitchforks outside of their headquarters in San Francisco. Actually, honestly, not even that. Outside of Brian Armstrong's house on a cliff at L.A., this thing is getting launched is my prediction. But this is a, it's a test balloon to see, you know, how their partners will, will interact. As we just saw with Google, Coinbase is now, they got to consider what a lot of people think, not just all of us, you know, crazies over here in the crypto world. So I think that they are kind of floating it to see, you know, are other people, you know, going to be pissed? Are they going to deal with a bunch of, you know, anger from various

coalitions that they're part of? But I would anticipate this is, this is fully, you know, 100% full steam ahead. I didn't really dig deeper. Do either of these, the Metamask token or the base token, offer a differentiated utility from other similar platforms before, like, will basis token be different than other layer two tokens?

Not saying it has to, right? Gas can be a usable utility. Will the metamass token replaced your Ethereum gas fees? I have no idea. I didn't dig into it. But what's the utility? What's the value proposition on these?

So I don't think that it's necessarily super clear yet. The thing that they are representing, certainly in Bays' case, is that they're not trying to move away from Ethereum compatibility. So it's not even clear that they would replace Ethereum as the gas token. So I don't know.

It's not exactly clear what it is. Look, tokens are a money-making thing. And they create a lot of opportunity to make money and that you can spend money to make more cool stuff. And that's sort of the idea. So the value proposition is trust me, bro. And speculation. Love it. Yeah.

My favorite. That's my favorite. This is crypto after all. Heather reveals USAT stable coin appoints Bo Hines, former White House advisor to lead U.S. business, and thank you to everyone who joined us for the launch event of U.S. AT in New York City. Has there ever been a more astronomical assent of a human being than Bo Hines this year? Paul O'Araduino before him, I guess. He put his time in the trenches, I guess. No, it's, I mean,

it makes sense now why he left the administration, certainly. Yeah, 12 minutes in Washington. He is, I mean, he was there for at least a few scaramoochis, right? Six months or something. Yeah. He probably knocked out like 10 scarmojis or something. Yeah. No, it's, it's, uh, look, I am, I think it is a huge sign that things are working and that things are improving that Tether can do this, uh, and actually launch it. I think it's hugely good for U.S. customers for businesses to have both Tether and Circle competing, uh, around stable coins. I think it leads to nothing but good stuff if you are a consumer of these technologies. So I'm glad they're here.

As a bite. And, you know, I think there was a great article on how I can't remember where it was that basically just projected that the future of stable coins was going to be, you just go to an exchange and you exchange dollars for whatever you have and the plumbing in the back decides which stable coin you're using. But there's going to be a day when you as the consumer are not even thinking about, hey, do I need USAT or USDT or USC, it's just going to be in the background and you're going to effectively use it as a dollar.

I already believe that for the vast majority of stable coin usage around the world, that is that more accurately represents consumer, you know, consumer opinion. When a consumer, especially outside of the U.S., when a consumer is using a stable coin, they're not using a tether, they're using a U.S. dollar. That's what it means to them, you know? Yeah, totally agree. So I do think that will be the future here. Speaking of the United States, we've got the UK to strengthen ties with U.S. on crypto matters.

I actually saw that a Bitcoin staking ETP, I believe, launched today in the UK, which obviously we have not gotten here, staking or in kind, something. I don't want to misquote it, but it does seem like the UK in all of their glory or whatever problems you might think they have are looking to become more crypto-friendly. They see the trend that's happening around the world, and they have not been that crypto-friendly in the past. I don't know, man. It's every other week, the UK has a new prime minister and they're like switched from being crypto friendly to not crypto friendly. It's very unclear to me what's going on there. Now, the reason to be sort of like interested in this and not just super cynical out of the gate or even to care if you're in the U.S. and who cares what the UK is going to do is there are a bunch of interesting experiments around cross-border real world asset tokenization like sandboxing stuff that they're. that the U.K. and the U.S. seem like they're going to go do, which could be very valuable in terms of sort of bringing real world assets to a larger context. So I was interested to see stuff about that. Mostly, it seems like this White House is just trying to shore up the kind of like the innovation corridor between these two countries. They seem like they want to make that a key

aspect of whatever sort of go-forid trade relationship we have because there was a, they had a boatload of AI-related commitments that they announced at the same time, like, you know, tens of billions of dollars of U.S. companies investing in the U.K. and things like that. So there's clearly a, it's sort of the crypto is a very big part of it. And in fact, I think that it was a bigger part of it than it even thought it was going to be. Basically, you know, a lot of the headline making stuff was supposed to be AI, but then a lot of the discourse it sounded like in practice behind the scenes was about crypto.

So, you know, I think it's a very sincere, conscientious effort. I do not think it's just sort of window dressing, how much it actually impacts. anything tbd just you know from benjamin in the ukay they have a general election every five years and they have one last year and keir starmer has been p.m. for over a year so you're being hyperbolic about your comments on the uk i can't we are american we don't care we already had the tea party it's over we won sorry sorry all right and speaking of things that happen only in america here are five key takeaways from the feds big interest rate decision i push this to the back i don't know how much we want to talk about it, but damn, if Jerome Powell didn't just look defeated.

How could there possibly be five key takeaway? What are the five key takeaways? I don't think I, I don't think I had any key takeaways. The dot plot, so nobody knows what, nobody knows what's coming soon. Markets weren't sure what to make of it. Is that really good? Okay, at least some of the confusion may have come from Powell characterizing the rate move as a risk management cut. That was a real zinger in there. The meetings began, but I don't even know how that's a takeaway. Yeah. There's no, those aren't takeaways.

That's word salad to try to make something out of nothing. Yeah, that said, look, we all got to write articles. We're here slinging content as well. We know the game. Look, it's, you know, we got the cut that people wanted. It is, I think that when it comes to what comes next, we have basically an equal split between people thinking it's zero cuts and people think it's two cuts for the rest of the year.

Just a couple people think it's going to be one. And then there's an outlier who's definitely not. the new Trump ally, Stephen Moran, in there, who thinks that we're going to have five for the rest of the year. And so no one knows really what to make of that. It seems like the bond market isn't loving it, is kind of rejecting it, whatever. It's just, it feels like. I saw mortgage rates went up. Yeah. It feels like more of the same, you know, it did not solve whatever anxiety people were hoping it was going to solve and we're just still very much in the same spot

of not really being clear on what the state of the economy is. To be fair to everyone whose job it is to focus on that, it is a super confusing time. We've got this booming AI economy, but people are worried that it's a bubble. We've got real weakness in other areas. We've got inflation that seems like it's inevitable

but hasn't shown up. We've got some indication, you know, it's a very strange time. Plus you layer on top of that, the like intense politics around it and no one knows what to kind of do with it right so it's um you know i don't know that there could have been really anything the only fireworks would have been if powell all of you know for if for some reason they didn't vote to uh to to cut but it was you know it was 11 to one with the only uh holdout being the person who wanted the double cut so yeah as i

said before 150 bips or shut up don't tibby with this 25 bips crap we're either doing this or we're not, and clearly we're not really doing it. I can't believe that, by the way, we left out, like, Nakamoto's price action is one of our stories. Oh, yeah. And forward raising 1.65 cash and then just yoloing into $1.5 billion worth of salon on a weekend and then hit us with a $4 billion. But guess what?

We can just talk about treasury companies next week because I know we'll have stuff. Yeah, we just gave ourselves a little break. We're saving the treasury story for next week. It's coming soon. Sure. Also, I mean, B&B at a thousand bucks. That's crazy to me. But hey, those are the other ones. Those are what I would have given as honorable mentions. Otherwise, guys, check out the breakdown. NLW breaks all of these topics down in much more depth. Every single day newsletter, all of the things where I get all of my information that I can steal to sound smart on my shows. Highly recommend you do the same things. You can sound smart with your friends and coworkers. Otherwise, man, thank you very much. See you next week. Later, guys. the world. But right now it's stuck in the hands of just a few big players. But what if AI could run openly, verifiably, and on-chain? That's what ZeroG is building. The world's first decentralized AI operating system open to everyone. Imagine a network where you don't just trade tokens, you train,

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