The Wolf Of All Streets - "Bitcoin Is Following A Pattern Nobody Wants To Admit" | Anthony Scaramucci

Episode Date: March 22, 2026

Anthony Scaramucci says this Bitcoin pullback may be far more normal than it feels — and he still sees a path to $1 million Bitcoin. In this conversation, he explains why we may still be following the four-year cycle, why whales likely sold into the $100,000 level, why institutional ETF buying may have softened the crash, and why extreme fear could actually be flashing a bottom. He also breaks down the real fight over the Clarity Act, why banks may need crypto regulation more than crypto companies do, what happens to the thousands of tokens that may never recover, and why stablecoins, tokenization, and institutional adoption could drive the next major leg higher. If you want to understand how Mooch sees Bitcoin getting from today’s fear to a long-term $1 million target, this is the conversation to watch.

Everybody wants Bitcoin to go up right now. But the legend Anthony Scaramucci says that's not how this cycle works. In this conversation, Moosh explains why the current Bitcoin pullback is actually a garden variety cycle. A 35, 40% drop in Bitcoin, it sucks. I'm not saying it doesn't, but it's a garden variety fair market. Why OG whales may have intentionally triggered the sell off above 100K. There were some traditional whales, some OGs that believe in the four-year cycle. When you believe in something, you create a self-fulfilling prophecy. So these guys looked around and said, okay, we're over 100. It's sort of a magic dot number for me. I'd held Bitcoin

for 15 years. God bless the person I was able to do that. And they started selling into the $100,000 number. And why institutional buyers like BlackRock may have actually softened what could have been a much deeper crash. We also get into why the fear and greed index hitting all-time lows could actually signal the bottom. Why Mooch believes Bitcoin can reach $2 to $3 million per coin within the next decade. You know, $2032 million price target. We think it gets there by the end of that. That's a six years from today.

So if you get the opportunity to buy it here, buy it. And why almost every crypto project will eventually go to zero. Plus, we dive into the real battle over the Clarity Act, why banks secretly need crypto regulation more than the crypto companies do, and what finally brings retail investors back into this market? This conversation is packed with insights on Bitcoin cycles, institutional adoption, tokenization, stablecoins, and the shakeout coming to the crypto industry. Let's go. Sue and I were just talking before, and you think we might be following the four-year cycle more than some of us might want to admit.

By the way, I love denial. I've lived most of my life in denial. I think I'm six-foot-four, you know, in my own mind at least. Definitely not on my driver's license. but I think you have to be realistic about Bitcoin. I think you have to be realistic about where we are. And a couple of things have happened under the surface. So another big crackdown in China.

As you know, I'm just back from Hong Kong. The Chinese went around surfacing VPNs, et cetera, closed down a lot of Bitcoin mining that was happening in China. It was probably 10, 12% of the mining going on in China. You saw the hash rate come down in Bitcoin. Some of that was related to them, you know, pulling people out of the mining capacity in China. And then you had the cascade of selling in October. And the thing about that is nobody, Scott.

You can talk to five experts, 10 experts. You can't get a congruent. Can't get an answer. They get an answer, right? So to me, then, I'm saying, and this is just my supposition, my surmise, that we're in a four-year cycle. and that there were some traditional whales, some OGs, that believe in the four-year cycle. And guess what happens in life? When you believe in something, you create a self-fulfilling prophecy.

So these guys looked around and said, okay, we're over 100. It's sort of a magic dot number for me. I've held Bitcoin for 15 years. God bless the person I was able to do that through all the different moves in Bitcoin. And they started selling into the $100,000 number. I actually think the cycle has been more muted by the institutional buying. And by institutions, I mean Black Rock or Fidelity or the 11 or 12 ETFs that are out there that people have stepped into and started buying them.

You know, Bitcoin could have gone down more if you just look at traditional cycles. So I'm in the camp that we're in a four-year cycle. We're going to chop for a while. But by the fourth quarter of this year, you'll start to see the traditional. move that you get. And I think, and I think if you look at the whales, they're buying down here again at these lower numbers. I've been buying and I don't know if you've been buying like crazy. Yeah. So my attitude is, you know, sailor's the most aggressive. He's got a $13 million price target. I think Skybridge, we have a, you know, $2032 million price target. We think it gets there by the end of

that. That's a six years from today. You know, it's another. they're having into that cycle. And so if you get the opportunity to buy it here and buy it. But I think what happens in our industry, we want everything yesterday. So Trump comes in, whatever you and I both think of him. He's perceived as pro-crypto. We get a big run. There's positive crypto regulation coming. Atkins is pro-crypto. All of that is good news. And so people were expecting in 25, myself included, and I got it wrong, 150 crypto. It did. happen and now people are in the doldrums. And so you can't be in the markets like me for 38 years and see a greed fear index, which is zero to 100 at five. So you have the fear indexes at five

and be overly bearish. You can't as a person in a citizen because I can tell you that's when you're making your money. Okay. You go to Davos, Switzerland in 2007. we're growing right to the moon. And of course, we had the 2008 crash. You get the Davos in January and 2009. We're going into the earth. Yeah, everybody's going to zero. And then you have a 10-year bull market.

So I would just tell people these levels, could it trade lower? Sure, anything can happen. It's Bitcoin. But we're getting to getting close to the bottom. I think so too. And if you look actually historically, not that it has to repeat itself, but when you get to these kind of levels using whatever technical indicator you like,

weekly RSI being oversold for the fourth of the time, you tend to see this long, very annoying time of chop and consolidation, but it is a bottom. It doesn't mean that a certain price was the bottom, but a bottoming event when you can just sit here and accumulate and you get time-based capitulation. People just quit. Like so many people have already quit.

So it's such a good point, so let me provide more evidence. I'm going to take you best. back to the first quarter of 23, where we were all annihilated after FTX. Bitcoin was cratering in January, February. And then all of a sudden, the Silicon Valley Bank looked like it was going to fail. Government had to step in. And you bliped 5,000. You went from like 22 to 27,000 on your way to the low 30s.

And everybody was looking around and how to hell that that happened? It was at a period of great disinterest and great apathy that the full market started again. And I think we'll get there. Now, again, I've talked to a lot of people in this room. A lot of people say, no, you're wrong, Anthony. We're going to go way lower because no one is floated. Nobody is floating in the Bitcoin ocean. Where's the blown out trader, the over lever guy that got taken out on a stretcher?

but I don't think you're going to see that because of the introduction of the ETSs. They already got taken out a couple years ago. That's what I think. That's what I think. And by the way, it's a very muted bare market for Bitcoin. A 35, 40% drop in Bitcoin, it sucks. I'm not saying it doesn't, but it's a garden variety bare market.

In 21, we went to 65 down to 28 in a matter of weeks and back to, I mean, 69. Exactly. He had a 55% drawdown in a year that when people look back or thinking it was the most bullish year that they'd experienced. And if you remember that was a big, that was the first like retail bull market. Remember China said, get out. Yeah. Same thing.

And Tesla members stopped accepting Bitcoin in April, May, whatever. But there was a 55% drawdown and people back then, I don't remember them this depressed or upset or that the bear market was so bad. They had a much, I think, firmer belief that things would go back up. I also, by the way, don't hear people talking about the silver bear market and it dropped 50% in a week. I'm with you. And you're making my point, actually, but I just say this to you, if you said to me in January, 2023, that Bitcoin was going to be 65,000 in February of 2000, I would be so excited. Well, that's Bitcoin.

Bitcoin got us the 126. So now we feel terrible at 65,000. And the truth is, you owe Bitcoin. So I own one Bitcoin before the rally. I own one Bitcoin during the bare market. Frankly, I bought more Bitcoin, but I'm making the point, if you own Bitcoin, stay the course. And I saw your interview with Lynn Alden,

and the quote her, nothing stops his train, Scott. Yeah, I spoke to here this morning as well. And still, not to keep you in suspense, but she still thinks nothing stops us training. Exactly. But it's not just Bitcoin world anymore, right? I do feel like there's an element of have and have nots, which is whether you have some level of institution adoption or you're left out in the cold. I mean, and again, don't forget this, you know, and I'll make this prediction on your air. I think clarity, the clarity act does get passed. Good. I'll take the other side. Okay, but it won't look, but you see, let me reframe it. No, but I think you might be right. I think the clarity act is going to get passed in a way.

that you won't like, I won't like. It'll be a watered down, diluted version of the Clarity Act. It won't be the bill that you would like to get past is not getting passed. I agree with that. Okay. So it'll be, but it will be a bill. Let me tell you why that's important because I got my 11-day PhD on the Washington Chaconery. Okay.

I remember. It's important because the enemy of progress in Washington is perfection. And so Brian Armstrong is listening, whoever, get something done. You got to get something done because once you get something done, you can add to it. You can have a no action letter. And I'll give a vivid example. Gensler did not want the cash spot Bitcoin ETIP, did not want it. And then he shoved it on us where, well, you had to put cash into it.

You were selling, you had to take cash out of it. It was very tax unfriendly. But we got it done. and now Atkins has modified it to make it more perfect. Right. Gensler, we got the Ethereum done. You can't have any yield. You have no staking.

But now you can have staking. So you've got to get something done that the industry can modify and adapt and build on. And by the way, if you don't get something done and the Democrats win the House. Elizabeth Warren's going to be crafting the clarity act. They're not friendly to us and it'll be a lot harder. I'd better get something done here. that is a bill that nobody in this room will 100% light. And I mean, isn't that, you know, a compromise is something that everybody's uncomfortable with.

Making my point, that's exactly right. You think it gets past, I imagine, then, before midterms, because once we're fully in midterm season, nothing's getting done, right? No, McHenry, who's a retired congressman now, said Memorial Day, I think it's going to happen before the end of March. Are you concerned that some of the provisions, since this is a bill that, like, last 100 years, could be Trojan horses or something that's so aggressive towards the industry that we have massive unintended consequences? Yeah, I think short term, yes. I think it will suck short term. And I think people will complain about it's short term. But once it's in place, I think you're going to have a throw crypto-2026 election, meaning people that are going to win.

And I think on the Democratic side, they're going to be procrypt. And I think the Republicans have generally proven to be procrept. And so I think the next iteration and the amendments and the no action letters will be better than what it originally starts at. What happens to all the projects that we've loved for all these years, if they don't get an ETF or they don't get some meaningful level of institutional adoption? It feels like a have-and-have-nots world now. Everybody talks about Bitcoin, E, Solana, maybe XRP.

Nobody talks about the ones that don't have an ETF. So Elon Musk went on Saturday Night Live. Do you remember what he did? The top of all tops. Yeah, Doge. My aunt called me before that. It was May of 2021. Yeah.

Okay. And Doge was going like this. And then the minute he got on and did his monologue. It did top. It went like that. Forever. The forever top so far. And if you had said to me in May of 2021, which hardly is five years ago,

There are 25,000 coins on coin gecko. How many of those coins, Scott, are going to zero? 24,900. That's the facts. And what I would also say to you, there's so much colfish behavior in this industry that I'm surprised that we're not there on 24,900. But now we have, I don't know how many millions of coins. I don't really count the pump fun ones that are launched and died in a day,

but we have millions of coins now. You know what I mean. Look at all these meme coins. A shot the hell. A lot of even the good use case coins are hurt badly. So I do think there's going to be a shakeout. There'll be a continued shakeout. But after that continued shakeout, some of them will rise from the ashes.

So question. There's going to be, this is a lot like you. There's two analogies I want to draw quickly. One is cloud computing. 20 years ago, someone came to me, take all your confidential information, all your client data and take it off of your server, put it on my server. I'm like, I'm not doing that. And then they said, well, you are going to do that because it's cheaper, it's more secure,

and it's anonymous. So if someone breaks into your office to get your client data, they can't get it. And it's on an anonymous server farm somewhere. They were right, I was wrong, and we all adopted that. And now you have, I don't know, 12 different cloud vendors. that's the layer one industry to me there will be a real world asset token for real estate there'll be a stock and bond token the nirk stock exchange may use salana i don't know what they'll use but yeah there'll be different vertical sleeves and we'll be sitting here 10 years and now

there'll be 10 tokens that are the operating layer for real world activity real world liqueification. And that will hurt the 2000, the 24,900, but the industry will be doing better at that moment. Other example I would give is the Uber example. You know, the banks are the taxi cab company. Yeah. The banks are going to the government crying. I want you to block the guy that has better technology and less bricks and border than me that's going to offer higher yield to the customer, which is better for the customer, I want you to stop them. And I want you to prevent them from doing that. That's what the taxi cab commissions were like. Didn't go well. And it didn't go well. Stop. More for your company. Don't hold on to something that's going to change, embrace the change.

I heard a really interesting take. I had not heard before about the Clarity Act today from Chris John Carlo. I saw talking to him earlier. And he said that the banks need the Clarity Act more than crypto companies and not because of the yield because they actually can't innovate and adopt the technology until there's laws in place. So actually, they're being held back to some degree. Well said. Which is I had not heard anybody say that before. And that was a strange.

It's well said because they need, they need quote unquote clarity to allow for custody. But think about it, though. They don't want it. They're telling the Congress, slow them down. But that's what it is. It's slow them down so we can catch up. That's a dinosaur instinct. Okay?

But evolve. Otherwise, you're going to get hit with the meteor. You're not going to like it. Evolve. Yeah. Obviously, the big narratives now, stable points, tokenization, real world assets.

How investable do you view that for your average retail person? I think because there's obviously a chance that a lot of that is captured by Wall Street. Private this, private that, our tokens zone. So let me talk as a former private banker, right? I can tell you that there's an ease of use on Wall Street. And let's talk about the people that have the money.

You know, the people that have the money are 60 plus, the baby boomers. And when you came out with a Bitcoin ETF, you're like, oh, I can call Morgan Stanley, I can call Merrill Lynch, buy me the Bitcoin ETF. Those people, even though it's very easy for you or me and very personal, They're not going on Robin Hood. They're not going on Coinbase. They're not doing it. But if they can call their broker or I can call my private banker at JP Morgan and say,

hey, buy me half a million circle USC. And USC's yielding XYZ. It's very easy. In other words, the easier you make it for the richest group of people, the more adoption you're going to get. I agree, which is kind of contrary to the crypto. for everybody progressive nature of it, but that really is the truth.

That's what's going to move the market. That's what's going to move the market. So that said, what do you view as the future for stablepoint adoption now that we have genius? Because clearly that's been the killer use case, right? That's the one we have clarity. Yes, I think that stable coins,

you know, I hate to paraphrase John Carlo, but I think he's giving you a good point. Stable coins are going to do well. you got the Genius Act in place, there'll be more market share of stable coins. But until the banks can have their own stable coin or be able to have circle or tether in their custody, they're not going to scale to the extent that we would all want them to scale. So you do need this second leg of the legislation to happen. And, you know, Tom Emmer said to me, and he was really pushing last year to try to do both at once.

and that would have been way better for all of us here in the industry. John Carlo said exactly that. He's like, man, looking back, I really wish we had just gotten them both done because it's become, the big point basically, it's become not only left and right political, but you have those two powerful forces, but all the lobbies are against each other too. You have crypto versus the banks versus the politicians.

That's why I just feel like it's so muddled. And that could be the reason why it doesn't get done, but offsetting it is fair shake. Yeah, money. Exactly. And when I call the crypto, corporates because fair shake and the crypto corporates could spend a half a billion dollars on the midterm election. And remember, they spent $40 million on the Sherrod Brown election in Ohio.

Yeah. And he was at 18. He was a three-term veteran. And you know this, but three-term veterans have like a 95% re-election rate. And they dumped the money, grassroots campaign, negative campaign. they knocked them into center field. And I don't think the younger Democrats are going to want that for themselves. And I think the thing we learned in 2024, I don't know if you would agree with me, but there's no anti-crypto voter. Elizabeth Warren says we're going to have an anti-crypto army. Why?

There's pro-crypto and they're single-issue crypto voters, but there's no anti-crypto voters. So if I'm your consultant and you're the candidate, I'm like, give it up. up, man. To shut up. You know, give it up to be neutral or pro-crypto. Yeah, it makes no sense. But interestingly, it feels like the anti-crypto army, not on the voting side, but in

politics is peaking its head out again. Exactly. Because of Elizabeth Warren. Exactly. But I think they've been emboldened by Trump's participation in the industry itself, and they see that as a potential political, you know, a hot potato. If we're being objective, he heard, you know, I was on a panel in Davos, Switzerland with Brian and Jenny Johnson, January 2025.

And he had just launched his mean point. I said, guys, this is going to hurt us. Because a regulator or a Democrat in opposition to the president is going to be miffed about this and is going to want to not vote for him. Not going to want to give him a win on something. See what I mean? Yeah. So he weirdly is a pro-crypto.

president, but that sort of stuff, too much backflow on the industry, too much back. Yeah, I mean, that's what's led to my belief that clarity is less likely to pass because I think the Democrats will want that ethics clause and he ain't signing it. I think they're going to cut them some slack on the ethics clause because they don't want to go up against fair shake. That's my prediction. It's amazing how politics. Well, it's about the money, man.

Follow the money, man. Follow the money. It's just like that. Isn't that what we were all here to? I could be wrong, but I think that's what's going to happen. To exit, wasn't the promise of Bitcoin was to not have to do it? I mean, that's what happens in life. Your ideas, as great as they are, they come in contact with the world.

They come in contact reality. Like what Mike Tyson says, you've got a plan, then you get punched the face. Or, you know, Eisenhower said, well, we got a battle plan. And then the 82nd Airborne, they landed 35 miles off the battle plan. and they had to fight their way out of a 360 degree perimeter against the enemy. But they figured it out. And so we'll figure it out. So we obviously talked about Bitcoin to some degree.

I'm assuming you're still bullish on Solana and some of the others. I bought Bitcoin last week. I'm bullish on Solana. I'm bullish on Avalanche. I mean, they're down a lot, but I like these positions long term. I think they have real use cases. You know. We bought some stellar.

Got a nice stable point industry there. Yeah, we've got a collection of assets that we like. And again, some of them may not win. But we would prefer on our layer ones to take a portfolio approach. I've been saying that for years. It hasn't worked great. But people would always say, you know, how should I invest in the industry if I'm new? And being an index fund investor, my view of what an index fund in crypto is just by layer ones.

I'm not going to pick the 50x D5 thing. But if it happens on Solana, I should gain some benefit from that. The only thing I would say, the only thing I would caution people about quote-unquote indexing is look at what happened with Luna. So Luna was the seventh largest crypto project. And so if you just indexed, you would have gotten caught in Luna and, you know, maybe you would have sold it. But, you know, a lot of people wrote Luna, unfortunately, to zero. So we have to be careful about things like that. I learned that less than the very hard way.

I was so proud that I had no exposure to Luna when it was collapsing. Then I got an email from the CEO of ARCA, which I was invested in, about how they were doubling down at $24 on the way down. That went to zero for me. Our mutual friend, Mike Novagrads, had the same situation. Look, this is a tough industry. It's a new industry. And I have been humbled by life.

I've been humbled by markets. and I think that it's the things that we think we know that we actually don't know, Scott, those are the things that get us in trouble. If I know of a risk and I have a knowable risk, I'm probably managing that. But if I think with great certainty something's doing to do this that it's actually going to do that,

that's when I get caught, you know. Like my buddies had Lehman Brothers. They were very confident. A Lehman Brothers was going to 300. It went from 44 to 89, 89 to zero. Right? It's the things that you know or you think you know with great certainty that you actually don't know that gets you in the most trouble. That makes a ton of sense. What do you think brings retail back to get people excited again? Because I can just tell you anecdotally, it seems like retail's gone.

Yeah, well, that's why we're out of five on the Fear of Greed Index. But I would say three things and all of which I think are going to take some time. Clarity Act passes. I think you're going to get some use cases. More Wall Street tokenization with clarity. You're going to get the banks are going to be able to custody things like Bitcoin. And then they're going to pick up the phone and slowly call their private banking customers and say, hey, we have our own Bitcoin ETF now. Or, you know, if you buy Bitcoin, you hold it here at this Money Center bank, we're going to get an XYZ yield office. and it's a call option on the future of money or future store of value.

And then all of a sudden, you're going to see the movement. And then you'll catch the positive forces, the virtuous circle of that movement. On the tokenization side, Atkins a few weeks ago, months ago, basically came out and said, listen, we think that most assets would be tokenized by the end of 2026. I couldn't believe that he said it. And then the DCCC had their news that they had received a no action letter from the and they said by the end of 2026, everything would be on blockchain rails. Do you think things are going to actually happen that fast?

That blew my mind. I didn't think that was possible. So, again, I think there's a but for in there. And I think the butt is this is going to happen as long as we get the Clarity Act best of some semblance of it. If you're telling me that, you know, they don't want to give Trump a win and they're going to throw in the towel on clarity, you can't get the 60 votes. in the Senate, you can't find 10 or seven Democrats to vote for it, then I don't think it's going to happen. But if you tell me that, you know, I'm right or McHenry's right, it passes by Memorial Day, then I do think a preponderance of that will happen.

What do you think happens if we don't get clarity and we do get some level of shuffling in the House of the Senate? Actually, I just ask you first, like, do you think we get a shuffling in the House of the Senate? I think it's an foregone, almost a foregone conclusion that something goes blue. Yes. Happens every time. I think that they will, I think the Republicans will lose the House. Yeah. I don't think they'll lose the Senate.

But I want to stipulate that in February, nine months in American politics, it's like 200 years. So a lot can happen. You know, if you tell me, Warsh comes in and he cuts rates and the economy's booming into the third quarter, then they're not going to lose anything. but if you're looking at sentiment today, the election was held tonight, they're losers. Yeah. Okay, so, well, you got nine months,

but having said that, if they do lose and clarity doesn't pass, we'll be okay, but we're going to grind. And those banks will not be able to step into this. The banks stepping into the industry, as painful as that is for the libertarians in this industry, it's good for the prices.

It should be good for the prices. Listen, there's always been the notion that Bitcoin would become the Global Reserve asset, but then the people who believe that are pissed off that institutions are involved. And there's no way you get there, even if you have, believe it, without plowing through the... That could also be the excuse, you know. It could be just said, hey, man, I held this thing for 15 years. Oh, that's good. I bought it at 10.

When it got to 100,000, I told my wife, I'm going to sell half of it because I got to make sure I have some diversity. It's really easy to be a libertarian when your portfolio is a million dollars, and it held a lot harder when it's a billion dollars. Right. Exactly right. It is a good excuse, though, to get out. That's human nature, my man. Yeah, and just finally, I mean, the other thing I want to ask you about is the Treasury companies. And obviously, that had a boom and a bust very fast.

Yeah. Looking at those, I mean, what do you think is the future there? So I'm not contrarian on this. I actually think there'll be some consolidation. if you tell me that we've got three or four Solana DATs and they all merge and create one, I think it's possible. I think there'll be some consolidation on the Ethereum Dax, even some of the Bitcoin ones.

And if there isn't, I think there'll be some activism. Some of these things are trading below their NABs, right? It feels like an opportunity. Yeah, so, I mean, again, it's so bad. That generally, when it's this bad, something good happens. Well, I mean, the prices go up. Yeah. Magic cure.

Bitcoin goes up. If you got something that's got $20 worth of value and its price at 12 on its way to 10, someone is going to step into that market and take that arbaces. You think so. Well, man, I know you haven't gotten much sleep. It came in straight from Hong Kong. I appreciate you. I'm here for the wolf of all streets.

Maybe pomp, too. And pump. Yeah, you got some credit of it. Thank you, many much. Since that's pop put me on a much lower chair, at least- Yeah, we got a high chair. At least this is the place where I'm at high parity. And extreme heat.

Thank you, brother. I appreciate it, man.