The Wolf Of All Streets - Bitcoin Holds $111K! Is Uptober Over Or Is A Reversal Inbound?

Episode Date: October 16, 2025

Bitcoin is holding strong around $111,000, but traders are asking the big question — is Uptober officially over or are we gearing up for a major reversal? With a potential Fed rate cut on the horizon, massive ETF inflows, and tech stocks showing signs of recovery, the next few days could decide Bitcoin’s fate.

We're halfway through October and Bitcoin is still bouncing around 111,000, 112,000, 110,000 with tons of volatility, even on low time frames, leaving many to ask if October is just a meme this year or whether we will still see follow through and a big end to the month. There's a lot of news to unpack, a lot of conversation to be had, and I've got Yago here to go through all of it with me. Let's go. Good morning, Wolfpack out there. I'm anticipating a much calmer and reasonable show today since I do not have Peter Schiff on again and I am not wearing gold chains as I did yesterday. I go, I'm assuming you didn't see yesterday. I didn't, no, but it sounds like I missed out. Yeah, I did the intro, and while the music was playing, I put on some gold chains. And I talked to Peter Schiff and a friend of mine, James Heckman, James completely plowed over Schiff and just didn't let him talk the entire time. And I sat there looking like I was ready to DJ.

It was entertaining at best. But we can actually talk about things. He's having his best year in 20 years. having the best year anybody's ever had it's yeah you know he's guys just having a good time he uses us as rage bait to go sign autographs at the bitcoin conference and sell more gold he knows exactly what he's doing i mean i guess we can get this out of the way bitcoin october vibes hinge on fed rate cut odds nasdaq tech stocks response i think that's the dumbest take i've ever heard like i first of all we know rate cuts are coming and do we like

What happened last week doesn't have much to do with rate cuts or what happens in the NASDAQ or tech stocks. We got our own little thing going on here. Yes, there's a lot going on. This is, I think, one of the factors. I think that there are, so look, it looks like QT's, so quantitative tightening is tapering off. In other words, the Fed has been for about three or four years now, reducing its. balance sheet that has a net drag on global liquidity that looks like it's coming to an end there's talk about QE so quantitative easing starting which would see the US ramp up more liquidity

than it is currently doing that is more important than the rate cuts but with the rate cuts there's some chance that there's a 50 basis point rate rate rate cut which is currently not priced in by the market and I think that would have a significant impact if it were to were to happen let's say there's maybe like an 8% chance of that but 8% is not nothing and and then you know obviously the um global trade war between the world's biggest manufacturer and the world's biggest customer um it looks like another taco trade to me yeah i mean it it feels that way just interesting to note from that article i had up before. We've still seen $5 billion in inflows into Bitcoin spot ETFs in October, even though

price is currently down 4.3%. I mean, I think literally these are arbitrary timeframes, but I find it very interesting that with all the nonsense that happened across crypto over the past few weeks, with price being down, obviously Bitcoin, in this case, I think, dragged down by leverage flushouts and cross margin on all coins. We're still seeing massive, massive, massive buying from retail, in America through ETFs and institutions. I don't think they even know what happened last week. Yeah, I mean, why would they? It happened on the weekend, and they don't work or trade on the weekend.

So, and for the most part, it was just a blip, right? The price sort of crashed. First of all, it didn't impact the one asset that they really care about, which is Bitcoin. You know, they're not monitoring, I don't know, fart coin. And so the fact that, you know, some things like, you know, Suey went down to basically zero, probably irrelevant. But also the crazy thing is that if no one told you there was a flash crash and you looked at the charts today, you would have no idea, right? there's no the the amount of residual impact is quite low open interest has gone down but only about 20 percent and is still at near all-time highs just because open interest was far above anything it had

ever been before so yes there was a slight de-leveraging but we're still highly leveraged trade volumes have been impacted a little bit prices have been impacted a little bit but not nearly as much as Friday or Saturday would have led you to believe. On Friday and Saturday, Crypto-Twitter was full of people saying that they had been wiped out. This

probably isn't the case. And even if it were the case, it's clear that that isn't most of the market, even not most of the D-Gen market. So the market has, for the most part, just shrug this off. It's crazy, though. I mean, 19-day

emissions, top-backed with it. Scott, we're losing you. You can't hear me? Yeah, yeah. You're good? Yeah, now we're good. Yeah, I just find it crazy that we had over 19 billion in liquidations in a matter of hours, which is like 12 FTXs. And here we are, as you said, only really a few tens of percent down on open interest.

There's still tons of leverage in the system. I mean, this is obviously institutional leverage. CME group records record break. K-3-2025 crypto-diverage activity over $901 billion in volume. That's institutional leverage, right? I mean, those are futures volumes. And here we are right back at kind of the price where we started. But maybe we should talk about, so I know you have perspective on this,

how can you approach this market? What venues can you use if you actually wanted to trade? Where should you do that? It feels like you can't really manage risk if a coin can. magically go to zero and back. Yeah. So look, I mean, I think the big lesson here, whether or not people will learn it, I don't know.

But the big lesson here is that you should not be using these centralized exchange venues. We've learned that lesson in this space. I don't know how many times, you know, Mount Gawks, FTX, not to mention all of the many, many, hundreds of other exchanges, which in one way or another have destroyed people. wealth, you know, taken, limited their access to their funds, had their APIs dropped at the worst possible time. This is not a rare occurrence, right? We treat it like it's a black swan, but it's just a regular swan. And it happens every year. So you, by trading on these exchanges, especially with leverage are picking up pennies in front of an oncoming train and and yet it continues

where are we seeing better alternatives well tradfi um right now is a better alternative there is there a bit have been a pretty solid exchange but um there i think fairly stand out in that respect And part of the reason the derivative been a standout exchange is because they're dealing with options rather than perps. And institutions. Yeah. And largely institutions. Yeah. But the thing is perps are like high frequency trading without the high frequency infrastructure.

And options have the advantage of being much, much lower latency. So they're less prone to this kind of problem. So that's one thing that is happening. Another thing, but if you look at Tritfi, Tritfi now, even on options, but certainly on futures, and ETF options is larger than Binance, larger than Derrubit, larger than any of the so-called crypto exchanges, and their infrastructure is better, which kind of sucks, right? for an industry that's trying to revolutionize finance, the fact that the traditional finance or financial rails are more reliable is an indictment.

That said, that is only half of the story. The other half of the story is the defy has been managed now for a good half decades to consistently outperform not only sexes but also tradfi. and you know trading lending venues in defy have proven to be more reliable now there are exceptions to this hyperliquid was a clear exception of the weekend i'm not sure if i even classify these decentralized exchanges as defy per se like to me and and i guess they are but defy to me is you know i spoke with well it's not even defy but you know the aves that's right the lending markets the extremely efficient your collateral is there these are over collateralized or well collateralized loans they

liquidate people efficiently with proper margin calls you can borrow and you can lend and a smart contract is better than a platform built by these people but Yeah, continue. So I just think there's a different issue. I think that's an excellent point, right? Because this actually just does go to show that the more decentralized, even if they're imperfect, the more decentralized venues are more reliable. And so, you know, there's this term that has arisen over the last year or two of decentralized anomaly, dino, right?

So hyperliquid, esterra, these are dino. Yeah, I mean, Aster is like it's a centralized exchange. Yeah. So, you know, it can feel a lot of the time like, oh, why does this even matter? You know, the user base, the customer base doesn't care about these things. But people who care about actually holding on to their, you know, capital and whatever assets that you hold should care about this because it really makes a very, very big difference. So I think the lesson here is that if you are going to be utilizing these systems, you have to take into account these risks, and you have to take into account venue risk as well.

Now, what we've started to see is the emergence of exchange services. Now, this is not open to retail yet, and I think most retail or sort of regular people aren't even aware that this is a possibility. But larger institutional traders, when they're trading on most exchanges, and to a degree this is even being forced on Binance, they're not holding their BTC or their ether, their tokens on the exchange. They're not like sending those funds to an exchange. They're holding them off exchange. And there's now an emerging set of custodians like fireblocks like copper who have agreements with the exchanges that you can, as an institution, hold your funds of exchange and not take on the counterparty risk of the exchange, but still get credited

with the assets to trade on the exchange. And then you net out any differences one or two or three times a day. This is, this helps protect you against a flash crash as well, right? Because if there is a flash crash and, you know, the exchange comes to you and says, listen, we liquidated your position because our API wasn't working and our risk models weren't working and just we were having a bad day. We didn't know the prices of the assets that day. I'm sorry. Yeah.

You can push back, right? Which is something that as a user who has sent your funds to Binance, to buy it, to FDX, there's nothing you can do to push back if they lose those funds or if they screw up those funds. So there's a huge amount of maturing that we still need to do as. an industry. And I think the bottom line for me in all of this is this is why building decentralized tools for Bitcoin in particular is so important because Bitcoin is the heart of the market, right? 60% of all of the assets, you know, 40% of all of the trade volume is

Bitcoin. And so we can't see maturation. outside of TreadFi until we get true decentralized systems in DFI for Bitcoin, which is why this has been an obsession for me for almost a decade now. Yeah, there's a lot to unpack, but clearly there's the counterparty risk that leverage is supposed to solve that clearly it did not, right? The argument used to be, hey, listen, if I have a stop loss that's less than 10% from price and I'm trading, then 10x leverage is actually eliminating counterparty risk from an exchange because I can put a 10th of the Bitcoin on there, right?

If I want to make a 10 Bitcoin trade, I can use one Bitcoin as long as I have a stop loss. It doesn't matter if it's 100x, 10x, whatever, but now you can't handicap that counterparty risk that you're supposed to be protected from. You just can't. Like, not after what we just saw. You can't. Yeah.

And also before what we just saw, like what we saw, and I think that's the main thing, is not that unusual. It was bigger, but it happens every year. Certainly every couple of years at the very least. And what else seems to be happening every couple years is that... I mean, just last year, what happened last year? Last year, by bit, got hacked. Oh, yeah, the hat. This is not a rare occurrence.

Absolutely. Another not rare occurrence. Billions in Bitcoin seized by DOJ for massive pig butcher and crypto scam in Cambodia. So I brought this up yesterday. We haven't really had an opportunity to talk about it. Assuming we still have all the Silk Road coins and Bitfinex coins and all that, that brings the United States holdings according to cryptoquant. And I didn't even know they had these coins yet, but $316,760, $35 billion,

one of the largest Bitcoin holders. That's a third of the way to the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve proposed by Lummis. That was a million Bitcoin in like five or 10 years, whatever it is. But, well, yeah, we don't need budget neutral ways to buy Bitcoin. if we can just go around the world and take criminals that aren't even scamming United States citizens or anything to do with the United States and just take their stuff? Listen, you're totally right. And I think we could definitely talk about the Bitcoin angle of this story.

But for a moment, I just want to talk about the human interest aspect of the story. What was going on in Cambodia is that they had sweatshops full of basically Cambodian slaves who were being forced to reach out to people across the world. and scam them by begging for money or convincing them that they had a romantic online relationship or whatever. So they had these switchups of various types of Nigerian scams, but out of Cambodia. And the people who are running the scams, which, you know, two years from now, you'll have switchups doing it with AI, but up until now it was Cambodians. But the thing is, right, these different scams, right,

which they were calling, slaughtering the pig. What is the pig? The pig is your mark, right? Like convincing some dudes that you were a woman and that you, you guys were going to get married, convincing somebody else that, you know, you just needed a loan to get to America or whatever. They amassed $15 billion. I mean, they were making $30 million a year at one point. I think it was $30 million a day, yeah, that day.

I mean, that's nuts. And so you're under, like, how big is the DGN market? There's a sucker one every minute. It's, it's nuts. It doesn't make any sense to me. I just don't even comprehend those numbers. I mean, I'm old enough to remember when a billion dollars is a lot of money. Yeah.

I mean, $50 billion. By the way, this guy is still on the run at one point. You have to make $30 million a day for years. Yeah. I mean, this guy is still on the run with $1.8 billion in the wallet, according to this, like a casual $1.8 billion, that's all he cashed out and he gets to escape. It seems like he still did pretty good. But I'm really failing to comprehend how the United States has anything to do with this and just gets to take this. That I don't understand. But, you know, the strong do what they can and the weak suffer. what they must is. Chinese citizen, Chinese citizen, Cambodian sweatshop,

victims all around the world. It's very unlikely most of those are Americans. This money will never go back to those victims because they'll never find them. Those people would never even know how to report this or maybe too embarrassed. This is just free Bitcoin for our strategic Bitcoin Reserve. I don't know about our, but yes.

I happen to live in the greatest country in the world, with the greatest economy and the best, everything. And so I get to claim that. I also get to claim apparently like $100,000 per household and national debt. So I guess it goes the other way as well now that we're, you know, just adding trillions and trillions and trillions at a time. I think you'll find that it's closer to $300,000 per household in national debt. But, you know, what's a few hundred thousand between friends? Hey, and listen, while the United States is cashing in on pig butchering, the Trump's security of Eric Trump, have made more than a billion bucks already in crypto.

Yeah, of the wait, they're keeping about six or, sorry, seven or eight hundred million in Bitcoin. So they're building up their strategic reserve. That is very true. So, listen, he also, when we're speaking of the Trumps, he said, Eric Trump, confirmed plans to tokenize real estate with world liberty financial we have them talking about tokenization larry think this week said that black rock is building their own entire platform for tokenization tokenization of real world assets is absolutely coming i'm assuming that with bitcoin os that's one of the things on the roadmap or you know on the radar for this to happen

on bitcoin yeah so we talk about that i mean this is a false growing market. It's gone from 3 billion to 30 billion over the last two years in terms of tokenized sort of real world assets within crypto. That's 10x growth in two years. That's nuts. Actually, just to give you a sense of just how nuts that is, it's slightly faster. It took three years for open AI to 10x their revenues. It took two years for real world assets. to increase by 10x and roughly the same numbers. So Open AI going from 2 to 20 billion real-world assets going from 3 to 30. So it's a much bigger deal than I think most people realize.

And the number one chain where people want to have long-term significant asset holdings is Bitcoin. With Boss, with Bitcoin OS, we're building and bringing now to market. just in a few months, we'll be bringing to market technologies that allow this to be a possibility for the first time. And so that means that you can have stable coins, the US dollar, treasury bills, real world assets like real estate, all secured, traded, settled, and maintained on a ledger that is Bitcoin. So the strategic importance of Bitcoin goes far beyond BTC and is going to become a means for everyone, and in particular the U.S. government, to be able to continue to expand the potential market for U.S. assets globally.

Probably most people know that the U.S. stock market has outperformed the global stock market by about 3%, by 30%, right, in terms of the Delta over the last 30 years. A big reason for that is people want to denominate their assets in dollars, and people want to be where the property rights globally are strongest. Well, over time, more and more people are looking to denominate their holdings in BTC, and the strongest property rights in the world are provided by the Bitcoin network. Not only that, the U.S. is sort of trying to partner or become a primary user of Bitcoin so that it can continue to hold sort of this crown of providing the world's best property rights and therefore sucking in the world's capital. So I think this match between Bitcoin and the U.S. sort of geopolitical economy is only going to strengthen. from here i'm still blown away that we don't have an extremely viable and popular stable coin on bill quote bitcoin well we're getting that the the the technology is only now starting to emerge

um i think you know with boss we've been at the forefront of making this happen um but the part of the reason this is taking longer with bitcoin is because it's being done properly right so if you look at ethereum we look at solano all of these systems they feel like software they're constantly being upgraded, they constantly have scaling issues. The way that it's being built into Bitcoin is going to allow Bitcoin to act as the financial layer for the world in the same way that TCP IP acts as the base protocol for the internet. TCPIP does not change, but it is highly scalable because of all the systems built around it. And that's the engineering model we've taken with Bitcoin. We're building for forever.

And the adoption is inevitably coming. I mean, we've talked about the tokenization of real world assets, but I mean, the largest companies in the world here are expanding their crypto payment solutions. Everybody's rushing in. Bank Corp announced to form a new unit focus on Bitcoin and crypto. I mean, these stories are a dime a dozen. They're almost non-stories individually, but it does tell the story of the inevitable adoption. of stable coins and then anything tokenized right because that's the the people don't realize it but i mean stable coins are the first and best use case of tokenized real world assets is a tokenized real world absolutely they're the gateway drug for real world assets the the i think

you know a lot of people sort of ask why isn't retail in crypto why hasn't this bull market sort of followed the trend of other post halving markets um and a big part of the story of the story, which I think isn't mentioned enough, is that a lot of the hype has been sucked away from crypto and into AI, right? There's a new big narrative that people are focused on. But I think the crazy thing is that actually the best way to invest in AI, right, is through Bitcoin. And it's not because of like the silly, oh, the agents are going to, you know, AI agents are going be transacting in Bitcoin. That might happen, but that's not actually the crucial part. The crucial point is that if AI is successful, and there's no point in making that investment if you think

AI is not going to be successful. But if you think AI is going to be successful, what that does is it significantly increases global productivity rates. It significantly reduces the value of human labor and it will increase the amount of capital in the world because they're just these far more credit and far more things being produced and as a result more money being printed but at the same time it turns the big technology companies into commodity providers right they have to have these they go from basically being capex low companies right to companies that are very hardware heavy massive they're building out their own data centers they're building out their own electric power stations.

There's currently in Texas, just one of these companies with one of their data centers is building out a data center farm so large it is as large as the island of Manhattan and has 10 power stations that they're building just themselves. So the CAPEX is intense. And so what happens is these companies are going to go from extremely high margin, software to providers to extremely low margin commodity compute providers. So compute. Which will be accounted for, I guess which will be, you know, accounted for in size.

It'll be so big, get the small margin. But look at, look at, we've seen this before, right? You can have very, very large companies. Like Boeing and Airbus are very, very large companies, right? With hundreds of thousands of employees. But they're worth, both of them together, worth less than Home Depot. And the reason is they're not very profitable. Their margins are low. So what's computer is being commoditized. Intelligence is being commoditized. We're going to see

massive increases in both competition, reducing profits, but also productivity, increasing the amount of money. And so where is all of the value in the world going to accrue? It's going to accrue to the one thing which is going to remain scarce and digital, and that is Bitcoin. And so the crazy thing is, I think the bet for the next 10, 20 years, if you think AI is going to be successful, is that the way you're going to actually collect, you know, accrue the value, extract the value from the world is by owning the one thing that is going to remain scarce in an AI world. And the only thing that remains scarce in an AI world is Bitcoin. I love that.

What a good way to end. I mean, before we do end, like maybe just give the quick update on where Bitcoin OS is on the timeline right now. We've got very big news coming in the next few weeks. We're going to be launching the system in just a few weeks. The boss token is going to be launching in just a few weeks. And things are going to start going a bit crazy. can't wait awesome everybody you can give yago a follow obviously check out bitcoin os which he has been diligently a part of building for a very long time here and we don't talk about enough on the show

to be quite honest well we can we can do it maybe next week or the week after we can do a special just about yeah well maybe we'll just do like one of the i you know hour long recorded sunday things like good old times and really dig into that single topic i think that would be great all right we're going to do that we'll talk offline about it everybody else i'll be back tomorrow with the friday five jago thanks so much man thank you very much have a good one