The Wolf Of All Streets - Bitcoin Just Flashed a Signal That Could Trigger a 25% Rally | Mike Belshe

Episode Date: September 3, 2026

Bitcoin is nearing a golden cross as ETF inflows and falling USDT dominance point to improving risk appetite. We also cover catastrophe bonds moving onchain, the Supreme Court fight over prediction-market regulation, Robinhood Chain speculation spilling into Nasdaq stocks, and Kraken delaying its IPO to 2027. Plus, BitGo CEO Mike Belshe joins to discuss crypto custody, institutional demand and the push to bring perpetual futures to U.S. markets. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Two and five Canadians will hear the words, you have cancer. That's why every step and dollar raised matters. On September 19th, join thousands in Toronto for the Princess Margaret Cancer Foundation Walk. Challenge yourself, friends, and family to walk 21 kilometers in support of life-saving research. Together, we can carry the fire and help create a world free from the fear of cancer. Register today at pmcfwalk.ca.ca. Bitcoin just flashed a signal that could trigger a 25% rally. That, of course, is the golden cross between the 50 and 200MA, things that we frankly don't take very seriously around here.

You know that we're going to get into a much deeper conversation about the fundamentals of the market, where it stands, and what news is driving it. And we have a very special guest today to do that with us. We got Mike Belchie here from BitGo. Stick around. This one's going to be great. Let's go. Right before we went on, we had some smooth jazz randomly come on. And I think it might have been this amazing, tranquil background. But we couldn't figure out why we were having smooth jazz playing. Good morning, everybody. I hope you're all doing wonderful today.

I'm going to bring on mic right now. How are you, man? Good morning, Scott. How are you? I'm doing great. So you said I was wearing an OK-X shirt, you've got to get me a Bitco shirt. We can do the Bitco corporate offices back here on the LED screen. Fantastic.

I will get that would be cool. That'll be cool. So listen, let's start, I guess, with the market generally. I think you've probably been here for more cycles than most. People were wondering what the catalyst would be to get us out of the doldrums of summer and the bottom of this quote unquote bare market that we are in. And here we are, you know, up in the upper 70s again. A big move a couple weeks ago.

I mean, having seen this before, what do you make of it? Well, in your intro, you said the something crossed with the something moving average, whatever. And then you said we don't really pay much attention to it. Look, I think people that have been in Bitcoin for a long time, got into this for, I think, a pretty long-term view. And the fundamentals of Bitcoin, I think, have never been stronger, regardless of where the price may be today. What we're looking at with the U.S. debt, with the bond market, globally what's happening, look, it's kind of inevitable that Bitcoin's going to go up in price. Not so much because Bitcoin has to do anything,

but because the dollar continued to slide downward. It doesn't really matter which politicians are in charge. None of them have the strength or power to change the direction. So it takes, so two things happen at once, right? Number one, the dollar goes down, which causes the price to go up by itself. And then number two, more people learn about Bitcoin, start deploying Bitcoin, and start utilizing it. So those things are both happening, just like they have been for a long time. and the beat goes on.

It was pretty clear that the catalyst, at least in the short term, was the Treasury, you know, Treasury deciding that they're going to do double the buybacks. Even though it was small, I think the amount was a rounding error, right? I don't think that's what's sent it. I think it's the signal that the Treasury is going to intervene in the bond market. That's what Bitcoin is built for, right? So I always find it funny that when you're sitting at 64 and you tell everybody that Bitcoin is an asset that's part of the debasement trade or it's a hedge, they laugh at you, but then all of a sudden

it goes up 25% and the same narrative that existed two hours before all of a sudden is in vote. Vote and Friedman's got this right. Like there's one cause of inflation. It's government spending. And, you know, you can't, there's no tinkering with the market that's going to undo the effects of overspending. So there's only one way out of this.

And we either do it early when it's less painful or we do it late when it's incredibly painful. And, you know, all signs point to it's going to happen very late. In the meantime, you know, look, people need to have assets. We do have a real problem. I think this is in many countries. It's here in the United States, although I'm in Canada right now, I guess. But this case-shaped economy, what is it about, right? We've got people that can't afford assets. Maybe they can't get a house. If you're not in assets and you're holding your value in cash, you may not have that much of it, you're doubly in trouble. A, you don't have very much, and then B, you're only one asset which only goes down. You know, you need to get to that asset side of things. We need

to help people. This is, of course, what Bitcoin is about allowing you to get your money onto something that's going to an asset that appreciates rather than one that deflates. Gabby, what blows my mind is Bessett had this comment a year ago about, you know, being laser-focused on paying down the debt. These were in the Doge days in this brief moment when it seemed like the government was going to take some sort of accountability, then a year later, 40 trillion isn't really a big deal and we're going to grow ourselves out of this increasing debt, right?

So they've given up as well, if they ever hadn't, right? But I think we're at the point where everybody is accepted that the debt is going to run away and that the only way is growing out, which I don't think anybody really realistically thinks is possible, maybe nominal terms. Well, the first things are held by Congress, right? Congress has got to make a decision

that they actually want to start doing something about this. The fraud has been identified. I think, you know, increasingly Americans are aware that there's one part of the government that just says keep giving us more taxes, but yet we can see that it just goes to waste. And, you know, what do you want to call it waste, abuse, whatever, like it all fits together. Scott Besson can't fix that. Congress has got to do something. Yeah.

So I want to talk more specifically about what you're doing, having been through all these cycles again. I think BITCO started as a custodian. And you and I had a great conversation about this, I think, in Miami. But clearly your business has evolved tremendously since you had a big piece of news that I want to bring up here. Bitco acquires Nidig's institutional trading business, expanding derivatives, and financing capabilities. Not just a custodian. So, I mean, how do you frame what you're doing now and then this news specifically? Well, I'd like to say we haven't been a custodia for quite a long time.

I mean, we do operate a custodian. We do that as part of our business. but it's a means to an end rather than the end. Some of our competitors and others want to kind of pigeonhole you over there. But the financial services that we've been building at Bicco for some time have been far beyond just because we do more trade. You can see a Fortune 500 company based on volume that's all on trade vera that we generate, etc. Anyway, NYDIG, look, I've been tremendously impressed with the team over there for many years. They focused on, you know, Bitcoin and a high, you know, a super echelon type of client a long, long time ago.

They built a world class team that does derivatives and special products, you know, all of the financial things that you would expect when you're looking for kind of that white, white, white glove service. And they've done that better than anybody. So really, really proud to be able to bring them into the BitGo fold. They're going to augment our existing prime team hitting another level of client. and hopefully help us just carry forward on our route towards prime brokerage. You said they've been impressed with their team. A lot of them now work for you, right? That's part of why we did this, right?

So Pete Janney is the main guy that leads kind of all of that coming over here. He's a fantastic leader, but we're bringing people over from all the different functional areas of the company. And, yeah, excited to have them board. So we're at this point, obviously, where I think everybody is, converging on being everything. Like, you know, the idea of the everything apps, all the financial institutions and TradFi are trying to add crypto. All the crypto companies are trying to add Tradify. Everybody's tokenizing in the middle. Where do you fit into that picture and how do you see that evolving? Because I think everybody has now come to the acceptance that everything will be tokenized

and on blockchain rails. I think this has not really been under debate for a while. The one last unlock we had to have was the regulatory climate, which would allow us to figure out how to pull these together. So, you know, we had Larry Fink saying a couple of years ago, every asset, every fund, every, I don't have to quote quite right, but he said everything's going to be tokenized. And he wasn't alone, right? These are the traditional leaders of our financial markets saying, of course, this is going to happen. What happened in the last 18 months is now the regulators, like, okay, let's get serious, let's figure this out. We got the Genius Act, clarity. We'll see what happens next week. even if clarity doesn't happen, you know, from the CFTC to the SEC to the OCC, all of those

regulators are working hard to figure out what rulemaking is going to be appropriate. So with those two things, yes, you know, equities are coming out. I think there's five or six different models now. There were zero, just, you know, 18 months ago. So, yes, all of this is moving on on chain. I think it's going to be faster than people expect. Robin said good news too. What was that? Sorry. Robin and also good news too. with their chain. Yeah. There was a story.

I have it somewhere pulled up. This happened, I think, yesterday, but Robin Hood effectively had a meme coin that was somewhat loosely attached to an actual NASDAQ company and the NASDAQ company went up 350%. I got to find it. It's crazy.

Just to show you how much power the Robin Hood chain has because it's obviously attached to Robin Hood where memes go crazy. But that meme coin shenan spilling to NASDAQ has microcap mushroom seller. Farmy search is 350%. It should show you how much we're converging here. That's right.

Also, did you, I guess, pump your penis with Hymns stock? Oh, really? Oh, you didn't see that one? Well, I know Hymns is like, Hymns is not like cheap Viagra. It's like Roe or one of those, right? Yeah, and hair growing products and stuff. There's some stuff about, I mean, it's so comical. Like, I don't know how you, you know, you can't really write it any better.

I don't know, memes have always impressed with their creativity and what they can figure out. But we now have digital rails. You got programmable money. You got programmable assets. Some people might say, hey, oh, these are jokers. Back up. This is what happens when you have innovation. All of a sudden, new types of products.

And sometimes, yes, it can be overlapping with entertainment. But I think this is incredibly exciting times. You couldn't do this a couple of years ago. And yet here we are figuring this out. Yeah, man, now I'm looking through it as you were talking about it. Robin Hood has become the largest issuer of tokenized stocks by holder account just two months after launching Robin Hood chain, according to token terminal data. That's pretty astounding. Two months.

That's what happens when you have programmable money. And this is all right now outside the U.S., right? So imagine what happens when those tokens are available inside the U.S. By the way, we demo that at our earnings call just a month and a half ago. So tokenized their entitlements. You know, so entitlements is an abstract word. You don't need to know about it. But basically it's the way that you can have true ownership in the U.S.

So you can build equities into the foundation of finance and use them. You'll get your stock splits. You'll get your dividends. Of course, those will be paid in stable coins. You've got your voting rights, et cetera. Once you have that, then you can perfect the security. Now you can start to use these in other financial products. The offshore components, which are the early birds, which is what Robin Hood's doing today,

those are all right. But I think they will get superseded by a new set of tokens that will have true ownership and better capabilities for the investor. Yeah, it seems we're still working through what tokenized stocks will look like, or at least the early iterations, as you kind of mentioned. Some don't have any voting rights at all. They're effectively just exposure to price action and not really to the underlying. And some, you get the full dividends and voting rights and all the underlying, you know, power of owning the actual shares. Yeah, look, I think that's right. So with the SEC not having commented just, you know, two years ago, there was like nothing happening at all.

Some people start to push some things outside the U.S. Exchanges, their clients tend to want just the price exposure. So just the trading capability is what they've pushed first. The harder, more advanced thing is getting the full ownership with all the rights, the entitlement capabilities. That's coming, I think, this year. It's going to come from Bicco. It's going to come from DTCC. So it's happening fast, too.

I had spoken with Carlos at Securitize months ago about the DTCC news, you know, when they got the no action and sort of announced that they were going to be, you know, quadrillions of volume and bringing it on chain. And he sort of who poohed the idea of what the DCCC was doing as simply changing their own plumbing and not really being the true version of this that we would look to. It's an interesting nuance. Kind of goes back to there's a lot of ways that skin this cat when it comes to tokenization. and maybe for people who hold crypto or who are excited about it,

the DTCC tokenizing things and putting it into their own system isn't actually that exciting. I don't know. I think people undervalue distribution channels. And DTCC holds, I don't have the number quite right, 99.2 or 99.5% of the tradable stocks in the United States today. So them participating is incredibly valuable. viable. For one, it says, like, look, we're on the right track. Even the guys that are winning the entire game believe that this is the right path forward. Number two, things are going to continue

to go through flux as we innovate, as we figure out which patterns work and which ones don't work as well. And then number three, like, look, there's small companies, like, you know, I'll say small companies. We're not really that small. We're public listed, all that. But, you know, Bicco securitized, you know, kind of the newer players, maybe that's a better way to say it. And then you've got the traditional firms that have been around for 50 plus years like DTCC. Some of those are going to move faster, some are going to move slower. All of this leads to innovation, competition, better for investors. So I think it's great that they're in. We'll see what happens. And look, they want to win it too. So I wouldn't count them out. They hold all the stocks today.

They've got a huge advantage. Now we'll see what happens next. Yeah, you mentioned before that we'll get some clarity on clarity, no pun intended, maybe in the coming months. But the one thing that we definitely have is genius. And the world is moving forward on stable coins. And we've got kind of these competitive approaches, I think, now from different institutions. This is one of the big news stories. I did discuss it here. We love your take, obviously.

These banks are banding together to launch a stable coin. This is two days ago. This news came out, 21 of the largest financial institutions. It was 10, I think, at the end of the year. year and they were saying they might do it. Now it's 21 and they're definitely doing it by the end of 2026. They're going to launch a stable coin. This is, you know, Citibank, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sack, the largest banks on the planet. And this comes on the heels of the news about OpenUSD, which is basically all the fintechs coming together to launch on stable coin. And two weeks ago,

the community and regional bank associations in every state launching their own stable coins. So this is happening. Scott, this is stuff we've been talking about for the last year, like how many stable coins are going to explode. If you want to talk about who can get things done, I mean, you know, usually technology companies move a little bit faster, kind of the younger generation moves a little bit faster, the older generation of companies that stalwarts and Wall Street move a little bit slower. The only thing that moves slower than those guys is a consortium of 20 of them.

So I'm highly skeptical of a consortium of 20 plus banks being able to spell their names, much less launch a stable coin. So I'm skeptical of that one. I think it's great in that it's completely validating for the space, but I wouldn't lose any sleep over whether they can succeed or not. What was actually hidden in that news when I read it more deeply yesterday was that they announced it will happen on public blockchains and not on a private blockchain.

They haven't announced who yet, but they have come to the conclusion even as the largest institutions not to create this as a Goldman coin, you know, behind a walled garden and on some private network that they create. So I would say that that actually is maybe the major signal there is that they've capitulated and said, we'll do this on Ethereum or Salon or whatever it's going to be, or all of them. Well, look, the money is, at the end of day, a bit of a communication mechanism for humans, right? It connects us.

You walk into McDonald's. If you've got dollars and they say, hey, it's going to be $10, you pay. If they said it's going to be 10 euros and you don't have euros, you're like, what am I going to do? right? So you tend to have kind of a coin that works. Now, with stable coins, because they're programmatic, they're easy to convert. We're certainly going through a competitive round right now where lots of different stable coins are emerging, each of different strengths and stability. If they can get something together, and the technology is relatively simple. So it really comes down to can that group of institutions agree on how it is that they want to take it to market

and how they're going to deal with the future. If they can do that, it has a chance. Like I said, they've got huge distribution channels. All right, once we have a programmable form of a stable coin dollar that is standardized or, you know, heavily used, it actually turns out to be also better for digital assets because now we've just got a nice streamlined view. Everything can go in digital. It's probably good if they can succeed, even though I'm skeptical about consortiums in general.

Yeah, I think OpenUSD is dead in the water, and I think this is one's probably dead in the water as well. But we'll see. When is the last time that two people, 21 people, individuals could come together in anything, much less competing companies, right? It's kind of like I always laugh off the idea of bricks competing with the United States. Like, how do you get six dictators together to act in the common interest instead of in their own self-interest? Well, the other problem with stable coins still unresolved is yield. Of course, there will be yield. That is happening, regardless of what's currently in genius, et cetera.

The banking industry is worried about this. Personally, I don't think they need to worry about it as much, but they like their business the way it is. It's highly profitable. Banks have never been more profitable America than they are right now. So they don't want to change anything. But for regular day Americans that are getting zero interest because the banks are giving it to their corporate friends, instead of providing the risk-free rate to their retail costs. clients, there's going to be a yield that comes out. And this is going to allow us to start

redefining banking. I think technology is going to finally give us progress in an industry that frankly hasn't been able to evolve for 100 years. I saw a story two days ago and it immediately made me think of you. Open AI says Astra AI model is its first crosses critical cybersecurity capability. You know, apparently the AI are all leaving their sandboxes and they're going to kill us all. We're going full sky net, as you know. Right. But it made me think of recently your challenge. steal 100 Bitcoin Bitcoin. Bitgo's CEO challenges Claude to hack $6.3 million wallet.

So listen, you've been at the security game for a very long time and you basically seemingly had enough of these narratives and put your money when your mouth is, so to speak. So maybe you're talking about what you did here and why. Well, don't forget the Bitcoin's worth $7. I don't know, $7 million at this point. So the bounty's gone up. As far as I know, the Bitcoin's still there.

I'm pretty sure I'd get a lot of loud noises if it were not. Look, I think there's a combination of AI is advancing. In terms of cybersecurity, we have to be looking at it in huge detail. Everybody's got to be using it for defenses right now. If you're not, you've got to get on it. Good news. It's going to give us better defenses than we've ever had before. The second thing that's happening is this theatrics within the AI companies.

So look, as a regulated company, and we're regulated here in the U.S. as OCC chartered national bank, regulated by similar trust companies at seven different places around the globe, I think it would be terrible if the AI in the U.S. were handicapped by regulation today. It's just too early. If you can't pinpoint the problem that you're solving, then you can't regulate it. All it will do is it will create slowness in America. It'll put American firms behind. It'll make us so we have less defenses.

We won't be able to use the best models, which I guarantee you the hackers in North Korea will have access to. So I think any form of regulation on AI today, anything that slows it down at all, is a problem for America. And I'm highly against it. In terms of these sandboxes, you know, look, I don't know why Open AI can't build a sandbox that contains their own bot. I think it means that Open AI has a problem. A sandbox is not hard to build. I think they ought to be able to build one. I think it's pure theatrics.

It's marketing. Yes. I mean, that's what you called Anthropic out on effectively, right? Was that, okay? Yeah, I feel like they sell a hell of a lot more subscriptions when they talk about how powerful and dangerous their models are. Look, people are scared of it. It's kind of an American phenomenon.

I think you've seen this, like, in China, the polls are coming out, that, like, actually they're really excited and optimistic about what's coming with AI. And for some reason, America is so worried about it. We're worried about our jobs and the economy and all these other things. A lot of this is marketing that's happening across the board from Anthropic and Open Act. Yeah, I'm looking. 53% of Americans worry that AI can replace their jobs. Gen Z anxiety is climbing. Those feeling excited about AI dropped to 22% while anger or negativity rose to 31%. Meanwhile, robots are having like sprinting races in China. I think it comes back to the K-shaped economy, you know, especially for the younger generation.

They do not have the wealth. They're not advancing the way their parents did. The American dream is hard for everybody to see right now. So you combine a little bit of uncertainty about your future with AI and it's going to eat your job along with the existing, you know, offshoring that's happened over the last 20 years. And yeah, of course there's worry about it here in America. So I think it's really rooted back to the money. And, you know, there's that saying, you know, fix the money, fix the world. Maybe that's the crack in motto, I forgot exactly, but it's a good phrase. And I think that's the real issue.

It's not yet. Yeah, I mean, I feel like it's, I'm, you know, 49 years old and I'm not exactly the most tech savvy human being on the planet, but it's made my life so much better. At Rockbot, I mean, does so much, it's just incredible, you know. Then like it really is a meaningful difference in my workflow and my life. It shocks me that a younger generation that should be so native to this is so against it. Well, I saw you put up that AI slop image of you and me on X. I didn't do that. Some of my team did that.

But that was a high. And I don't know, your face has never, never looked less good. You should work on that. Yeah. So. For the moment, I haven't. I haven't seen the thumbnail to me. I'm going to be honest with you, but where like my wife would like text our team and be like,

why does Scott look 75 years old? Isn't they? Huge eyebags, completely gray. It's this crypto years. You age faster in the crypto world. Dog, dog years at best. So, yeah, and we mentioned the Clarity Act before. So I just want to dig in a little bit more to that because I'm assuming you're closer to it than most of us.

I mean, A, I mean, what do you? think the odds are we actually see that at this point and be how important is it i mean i can pull up the prediction market odds i mean it looks like some 50 percent even to get it done mid next year right uh and last i checked now these aren't the right ones let me let me uh tag 26 right i mean it's really low at this point like there's not much optimism that this happens 11, 11, 4% for November 1st, December 1st, October 1st, October 1st, 2026. 4% is what the prediction markets are putting. Meanwhile, you have, by the way, everybody close to it on TV saying it's getting done.

We have deal fatigue. You know, when you let these things linger, you know, people just kind of get tired and they get skeptical that it's going to pass. To be honest, it's really hard for me to read whether it's going to pass or not. I do think we had a real window. I'm disappointed that, you know, Coinbase had a point in time where they said they wanted to withdraw their support for it. I think that they actually accidentally blew it up. And so now we're down to kind of our last legs to see if we can get it through. All right.

But here's what I think people should be thinking about. Number one, you know, we just went public last year, started to talk to all these institutions, these classic investors that touch all kinds of different markets. but they hadn't really looked at crypto in much depth. They're all like, you must be really excited that clarity is going to pass. It can be great for your business. And I was kind of like, huh? Why would you say that? Because, you know, look, we've been navigating this for a long time.

And the regulatory landscape, the legislative landscape, they go up and down. But we figure out how to roll with that. And our business is fine. Nonetheless, from the traditional side, like when you want to talk about the debates that happen within J.P. Morgan or B.N.Y. or all these companies, I don't mean to call them out individuals, but, but, you know, the main stalwarts of U.S. Wall Street. Internally to those companies, there's a lot of debates that go on. And for them, you know, having a legislative path is a real clearing of the roadblockers. It really opens things up

for them. So it would bring all the traditional finance in. They'd be like, yeah, it's legislated. We've got a path forward. Of course, when Trump came into office, you know, myself and others, we all were in the White House. Our number one ask was, please take all these executive orders and put him in law. And he's taken that to heart. He's been trying to push for that. He wants the Clarity Act done. So this is the path to get that done. All right. If it doesn't happen, the regulators, that is, you know, Paul Atkins at the SEC, Johnlin Gold at the OCC, Mike Selling at the CFC, they are all right now working as a team. And you don't see this among regulators very often. They're coordinating together. They all want to make sure that there's as strong

of a path forward and they're going to do rulemaking. So ideally you'd have the law first, then you're going to have 12 to 18 months to like finalize all the rules and do the rulemaking. And then all that's in place and then people start to use it. And then you're in a really good place. Now they're moving on to the rulemaking because it does take 12 to 18 months. It's going to take time, takes coordination. They're going to bring that. Hopefully that'll at least even if clarity doesn't passively give us a really strong foundation regardless of what happens in the next administration, whatever that may be. Yeah, I agree with you. I think that strangely, even though the banks seem to be the ones opposing the Clarity Act, they need it way more than anyone who's been here

before in the crypto industry for now. I mean, listen, Coinbase is offering yield last I checked, right? So Genius effectively allowed them to do that because they're not the issuer, right? you've been providing all these services now for over a decade. And right now, it's a lot harder for B.N.Y. Mellon and J.P. Morgan and State Street to participate without the Clarity Act. So the banks need it more than the industry does in a weird way, but they're the ones who seem to be lobbying against it just on these sort of smaller issues that they have with it. I think it's a little hard to tell. I think everybody's kind of doing their own little thing to try to get their persuasion. I think the politicians also kind of concluded,

if we pass this right now, then we're not going to get as many campaign contributions. Like, let's just delay this another couple of sessions, and we'll pull another 100 million box out of the, out of the crypto industry. So I think you got the politicians with their thing. You got the traditional finance, which a couple of different parts, I think the banks that are against yield, they kind of want some more protections for them. You know, Coinbase and the crypto companies, we've got, at the end of day, I don't think any of it matters because there's a lot of details in the Clarity Act, but it's the rulemaking

behind it, which is really going to be, I think, the more, the more interesting part of what happens. We've got to get to that phase. So, look, yes, if clarity happened, it would open things up for the traditional financial players much, much more. Bickgo, Coinbase, all of us that are in the crypto space, we're going to be just fine. It might even be better in some ways if the traditional finance guys kind of back down. And I do predict that if clarity doesn't pass some of the announcements that we've heard from traditional finance, they're going to be like, they're going to lay back a little bit more.

It doesn't mean they're going to cancel their blockchain things. I think there's a lot of momentum and the initiatives of moving forward, but some of them will peel back if they don't think clarity. Yeah. We have this interesting period now where even if clarity doesn't pass, we have two and a half years of these regulators no matter what. So I think it actually puts the onus on the industry to become too big to fail if we get the rulemaking. To some degree, right? You get the rulemaking. It's favorable. Of course, that can be reversed by another administration. So it becomes so big and so important and so powerful that they can't reverse it because it's not politically palatable. I disagree with this. So the traditional financial firms, they need too big to fail. The only reason they work the way they work is because they've got the regulatory modes that they have. The new generations is coming in. We're on blockchain. We're open. This is programmable money. You don't like your service provider. You move. it and you have the power and you have the control. We're not looking for the regulatory

mode. We're actually looking to unwind the regulatory mode. So, you know, this idea of we have to be too big to fail, totally disagree with it. Actually, we're trying to dismantle that so it doesn't happen anymore. What we do need is the rulemaking to be codified. It's harder to undo rulemaking, and it takes a lot more effort to undo rulemaking. I think we have enough time to get that done. You know, I hope that in the next administration, we just end up with kind of another Republican administration for another four years. I think a lot of the anti-crypto sentiment is not anti-crypto.

It's anti-Trump. Yeah. I'm not saying he deserves it. That's not my point. My point is that people just, they're so opposed to anything he says, they're like, okay, I don't like crypto either. So we need a four-year buffer kind of after this administration. where we're not having to swing radically to the other side.

And if we can get that, then this is all going to be good. Look, we are on the right side of history, giving people access to their money, giving people their yield, you know, unlocking regulatory modes, programmability that's global, all of this is the right side of history. It's funny because going back to a conversation on price, like, who cares about the price, objectively? We're in the best place we've ever been as an industry by many multiples, in my opinion. Totally. Look, I mean, you know, Bicko is known for being a regulated financial player in the crypto defy space.

But what's happening? The capital, we're now in three markets, right? A, there's the crypto market. B, there's the capital markets. C, there's the banking markets. Banking is being redone. First is stable coins. The next one that we're going to conquer is the way lending is done. We're going to put it on blockchains. It's going to be open. You're going to be able to participate. Private equity is going to be able to participate. Everyone's going to be on this open. open blockchain instead of having this coupling of deposits and lending on the capital markets, that's coming right now. It's $70 trillion of size. And it's not like we're going to get 1% of that. No, 100% of that is going to come in digital. It's an all or nothing game. So we're at the nexus of putting these all together. And now you can orchestrate your money from your crypto, your defy, to your capital markets, to your banking. And it all connects. You're right. I'm an average unaccredited.

Because that's still a thing. Investor in the United States, five years from now, what will I be able to do that I can't do now? So I think the number one thing is we're going to be able to get you out of the fiat dependency. You're going to be able to help climb out of the K-shaped economy. Here's what we want to do. We want to make it so you can have access to assets. So maybe that's Bitcoin and tokenized gold or whatever on just the hard assets. But also, what about your equities? You know, there's a lot of people that I got. There's a lot more people that have $20,000 of Apple stock or IBM stock or whatever.

then have $20,000 with a Bitcoin. Today, if you need to use cash, you have to sell your asset as a small guy in order to have cash to pay for college or whatever it would be. You ought to be able to do the same thing that the wealthy do, right? You ought to be able to borrow against it, hold your asset, pay your interest way back later. So you're not having to be on this cycle of getting rid of assets and then being stuck with the one asset that's going down in value every single day. I think this is going to be huge. I think it's going to help lift out of that K-shaped economy and start putting us on the road to recovery. So will I, you know, I agree with that fully.

But will it be, you know, that I'm on a BitGo wallet doing all these things? Will I be on a Robin Hood wallet? Will I be, will this happen in Schwab or on E-Trade for Morgan Stanley? Or is everybody going to be competing for everything? I mean, this is the competition that's happening, right? So look, Robin Hood's making great strides. Coinbase is making great strides. Bitco is making great strides.

The traditional financial markets are just coming into it. They couldn't even try less than 18 months ago. So we'll see how far they can get. They're also going to come. They've got the distribution. So we already got Morgan Stanley says they're going to do trading of Bitcoin. And then Charles Schwab's, they're doing trading of Bitcoin. By the way, you know, Coinbase makes about 150 basis points on retail on their trading,

which is it's pretty large. large spread. So Oregon Stanley comes in and says, hey, we're going to do it for just 75 basis points. By the way, it's still like 15 times more than when institutions pay. And then Charles Schwab says, oh, no, no, no, we're going to do it for 50 basis points. Still 10x too much for what what you should pay. At Bicka, we believe, like, retail deserves what institutions demand. The entire traditional financial industry has ripped off retail for decades. It's well known. But once this is programmatic, like the relationship part, the expensive part, the expensive part, the direct sales part that goes into prime brokerage and even broker dealers, et cetera,

that's all knocked down. This is all programmatic. These take rates are going to go way down. Retail is going to get a way better deal. It's going to be much more on level footing with traditional finance. Whether it's going to come from the Robin Hoods or the coinbases or the Bitcos or the traditional finance, you know, that's the battle that's happening on the playing field right now. That's a race to the bottom.

Those fees can't last, right? I mean, you look at even the way because of the competition in the ETF race when they launched how cheap the ETFs have become for Bitcoin Spot ETFs. I think Morgan Stanley, when they launched theirs, came in at 14, 16 Bips or something, right? The undercutting BlackRock who was in the 20s, undercutting bitwise. I mean, it's a race to zero because people are going to demand no fees. Look, you always pay fees. I mean, you've heard a payment for order flow and other things. What people forget, like the traditional financial trading system,

is highly optimized. Like, you know, we complain about the overhead of it, and there is a lot of overhead. It's been optimized so much, however, that, you know, you can pay five cents for a, for a trade on Charles Schwab. I mean, it's incredibly cheap. So this has been around for a long time. You can't come in and say, hey, I'm going to replace it with this blockchain stuff and suddenly jack the fees and say, well, it's better because it's blockchain.

People don't care. So, of course, the fees are going to be relatively low. But the financial services that you're going to get are going to be different. You know, you as a retail person are going to be able to borrow against it and use in ways that you haven't been able to before. When you go to Schwab or others as a small guy, you don't have the private banking type relationship that the big guys have. That's going to get broken down. You will be able to do far more with your money than you've ever been able to do before. And the firms that are providing these services are not going to be able to make money solely on trading.

Instead, it's going to be the amalgam of these things. you're going to have trading, you're going to have staking, you're going to have borrowing and lending, you're going to have other things that are going on. Anyway. So how do you decide what blockchain to build things on when you're doing it on the back end at Bitco? Right? I mean, it seems that there was a million layer ones, now the layer two is there's a lot of options here. And we were talking about, you know, they're going to have to choose this for the stable coin providers. You know, how do you view that? Well, Bitco's had a different evolution, right? So we support more. We actually build

the wallets, you build these secure wallets as two out of three models, sometimes it's MPC, sometimes as multi-sig, across more blockchains of the top 100 than any of a provider. A lot of people hire us to use our technology that they then deploy in their own financial services. So we support all of these blockchains. The blockchains have gone through evolutions over the years. We started out with the layer one kind of wars. Initially, you had Bitcoin, which didn't have any smart contracts. You had Ethereum, then you had a little smart contract war. Should it be solidity as your programming language or Russian? for your programming language, et cetera.

Everybody's trying to build their L-1s. Fees get too expensive. What do people do? They go over to Tron, right? Lower fees. Then eventually what do they do? They go to the layer twos, the arbitrams and the optimisms, et cetera. Well, look, now there's another thing that's happening on stable coins, which is they're like,

why do I have to pay a little Solana fee when I'm just trying to move this USDC around? This doesn't make any sense. So USDA's got their own chain, Arc. Stripe's got their own chain called Tempo. So there's still technological innovations that are happening. The other thing which I think blockchains have not addressed, again, by the way, because regulation got in the way, privacy chains. So of course your money should be private.

If you're getting paid your paycheck on a blockchain, do you want that to be public? No, of course not. Nobody wants that. And yet the regulators said, no, no, no, if you're doing privacy change, you must be doing bad things. Wait, I just don't want my coworkers to know my salary. What are you talking about? And Citadel, by the way, doesn't want everybody know their order flow either.

It's not just a... Oh, this is my next point. Right. So Canton comes along and builds a blockchain for institutions, right? So it's a private permission ledger, and they added some privacy onto it. And they go to the regulators and they say, well, institutions need privacy. And the regulators are like, oh, yes, of course, institutions need privacy. Wait, what?

Institutions get it, but retail can't have privacy? What are you talking about? Of course you should have privacy for both. both retail and institutions. Again, retail deserves what institutions demand. Totally on all these things. Anyway, back to your question. I think there's still technological change and innovation that's happening on the chains, and that's going to affect what wins, what doesn't win at the end of the day. And real people don't care, right? It's going to be on this chain or that chain because people are able, because service providers are able to provide great service. So I think the fees are a big deal.

We've seen that already on the crypto side. People continue to go towards wherever the lowest fees are. Secondly, having to pay your fees in a third party token is weird. This would be the example of back to the McDonald's saying, you go to McDonald's, you buy a $10 burger and they say, oh, by the way, that'll be 30 cents in euros to pay this. And this is kind of weird. So of course you're going to have to have that. Lastly, is the decentralization debate, which kind of gets washed in all of this. But Bitcoin will always have its own token. The token is the value. It is the decentralized asset.

There's no debate that it provides a level of decentralization that is completely unparalleled. Ethereum has done a little bit. And then it's a quick drop-off in terms of the true decentralization for the rest of the coins. So I think it's probably going to be more centralized than we like, not as centralized as the past, and the change is still fighting it out on tech. I may maybe ask you the most important question I can ask you. If you're that same average person in the United States and you own Bitcoin right now, how should you custody your assets in light of what we've seen with Cold Card? The data breaches from everybody. We always had this not your keys, not your coin sentiment.

I think a lot of people have had it with that for better or for worse. And we've seen some evidence that people maybe even are selling their Bitcoin into ETFs, right, to hold it in that wrapper because they view it as safer. It's been a rough couple months for self-custody. Well, let's see. I don't like to say universally what everybody should do. I think it's really important that some amount of self-custity gets preserved forever because that's the only way the people retain power. should the financial institutions go against them. And it's happened in the past.

It will happen in the future if we don't retain some amount of it. Look, I'm also very proud at Bicco. Obviously, I mean, our product we specialize is what we've done. From the beginning, we do multi-signature. It's absolutely the best way to protect your Bitcoin. You're hearing a lot about this in light of the cold card hack, etc. You can come to Bicco for just retail individual users. It's free.

We've got the full complement of self-requent of self-examplement. custody wallets so you can do that. And we've got the full complement of custody wallets. When you sign up, it'll ask you which region you're in. We've got custodians in the U.S. We've got them in the Middle East. We've got them in Singapore. You can pick which ones right for you. Of course, your jurisdiction is probably obvious which one you want. And then I think most people ultimately end up with a combination of a bank like Bicco and some amount of self-custit. It's the same thing that happens to the U.S. is today. I mean, look, you don't have, I'm assuming, a big pile of cash sitting in your closet somewhere.

Use a bank for that. You probably feel pretty good that you don't have, you know, a large amount of your net worth in cash in your closet and then have to have a security guard for your closet and alarm systems and all that. People are not as individuals very good at security. I mean, all of us get tricked. We make mistakes.

When you think about how do you mitigate against all of the various thefts. And we always worry about someone coming and taking it from us. But what about a fire, right? So even for the folks that have ledgers who are doing all of the right things, and ledger is a great company. I'm not trying to slight it. If you really want to protect it, you've got to have a backup copy of your seed phrase, and you have to have it off-site. You can't have it at your house because if your house burns down and burns your ledger and your backup at the same time, you lose your money. That's happened to a lot of people in California a couple of years ago.

Sadly, it's happened. And they know this. It's not like they're dumb, right? They just, it's difficult. So, all right, I think people are going to want that. There's other things, and I've seen this over the years. We've been in the industry now, 13 years. I don't probably every month or two, I still have somebody that comes and says,

hey, Mike, you know, I've had this self-custody Bitcoin. It's gotten to be worth a lot of money. I'm afraid that, you know, if something happens to me, my wife won't be able to get it. My kids won't be able to get it. Look, if you put it into a bank like Bick-O, you can do those things. You can put your wife on it. You have a joint account. All of that, all of that is there.

So I think we're going to see more movement there. The early days of Bitcoin, remember, like, you didn't have any players that focused on security, got the regulation right, got the insurance, got the audits, became a public company, et cetera. Like, you had to hold on to it yourself much more carefully. So that that need was different then. I think we will see a generation of digital asset, native banking, regulated firms come out and people are going to. say, okay, I'm going to use that trust. It's going to give me safety at night. I can sleep. They take care of the security stuff. That is what they do. And on top of that, you know, even if something should happen to me, my family is not going to be losing the money. So we're going to see

a shift towards that. But I do hope that we continue to have the self-custody. And again, Bicko is the only place you can do both. I don't use anybody else. Yeah. I've always wondered, like, if there was a product, Now I'm going to, you know, maybe it's brilliant and I should have made it, but where self-custody can be insured. You know, I don't know what it would be like, but maybe it's a single device and you actually acquire the Bitcoin on that device and everything's on that device. And because it's on that single thing, that's fully insured by somebody. And maybe, you know, that's based on how much you put there in assets. And then self-custody, people would be confident again because they get hacked. They're insured.

So the challenge of that is insurance fraud, right? Yeah. So you say you lost it, but did you lose it? voting accident. Yeah. So actually, there's a company coin cover. They've been around for quite some time. They do do insurance of self-custy wallets when you set it up in a multi-sig type environment.

And then basically in the underwriting of that, they just have to take into account the insurance fraud that can happen. So most people don't want to commit insurance fraud. You know, there's some bad guys out there. They have to deal with that, just like any other insured type of product. But it is available. You know, there's some limits on it. But we're checking out if you want. Yeah, it seems cool.

Okay, so before I let you go, anything else I might have missed, anything you guys are excited about, anything you're specifically building we didn't talk about? Well, I'm really excited about, I mean, I mentioned it, the programmability of all of these different asset classes and money, and now the orchestration and composability that you get by having all of them on a single chain. So, look, I think it's a really good time

in terms of the regulation changes that have happened. in the United States first, but then that also exports globally. And then lastly, yes, very excited to have the NIDIG team joining BitGo. They had a huge amount of horsepower in terms of the types of clients that we can work with and service in an effective manner. So really appreciative of them having confidence in us and us being able to make that happen. It's funny. I can say I onboard it to Bitco because I had a small amount on FTX.

They ended up there. It actually ended up because of the... Okay, well, now I have to clarify. Bitco didn't touch FTX. We were not involved with FTX until after they flew up. Very specifically, I said that, you know, as the recovery in my assets, I chose Bitco to receive those assets and increased and utilized Bitco further as a result of, you know, experiencing it and getting my hands on it. Yeah. I said this in D.C. a couple weeks ago.

at the White House and whatnot, every single politician should be supporting Clarity Act. And FTX is the reason. Like, FTX could not have happened if we had clarity. Simply could not. And so for anyone to say Elizabeth Warren, whatever, that somehow clarity is not providing consumer protection, it's just false. Yeah. Imagine if FDX was, I don't know, audited. Imagine if they had a CFO.

Seriously. You have a CFO. I mean, when you look back, it's just crazy what they got away with. It's absolutely crazy. It is, yeah. And, you know, back to kind of the self-custy versus custody thing. Like, in that environment where you've got those types of things that can happen, I mean, of course people have to lean on self-custody.

And they're like, just get off of this crazy system, right? There's too many untrusted parties. As we go forward, if we do get some regulation and some clarity acts, especially, we do get to a point where like sooner or later i don't know what percentage your net worth has to be on blockchain but you will likely say i want to use some of i want to use a a bank to store some of this yeah absolutely all right mike thank you so much for your time i'll let you go keep going for always a pleasure hope to see you soon take care awesome yeah bitcoin is amazing i'm going to get a bitco t-shirt for mike and bitcoin corporate offices here here in the back

So yeah, just I saw people in the comments asking you might have missed it at the beginning because, you know, it is, it is the headline. So we have to address it. Bitcoin's fabled Golden Cross is coming. And UST may be the real signal this time. So for those who don't know, golden crosses when a 50 MA, I can probably just bring it up. I got a chart. 50MA crosses up above the 200 M.A. That's the blue 50 movie average above the 200. Now, to be honest, I think that golden crosses and death crosses on larger timeframes for those who do care. are generally lagging indicators because moving averages tell you what happened in the past and there are no way predictive of what it's likely to happen in the future. But we do often get a roughly 25% rally historically when this happens on the few times that it actually works. That's what the story is about. Maybe more interestingly in that story is the fact that USDT may be the real signal this time. And that is because USDT dominance is getting a death cross and maybe dropping. But once again, those death crosses sometimes come.

at the bottom. So that is what the story there is about for those of you who were asking. But I mean, in the meantime, you know, we have spot ETFs recording their highest monthly inflows since July 25, $3.5 billion in August. I think we know that right now with price skyrocketing up, bullishness has generally increased, which means people are going to buy ETFs, which yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, right? Right now, I think pretty bullish that Bitcoin is sitting at I can't read so good. 78. Bitcoin fighting, man.

Really, really, really fighting here. And one of the things I love to do, obviously, now that I'm a prediction market homer, and I can actually use them with Kalshi here, is take a look at just what sentiment generally is, the one I kind of tend to look at. So we looked at clarity before. But Bitcoin price at the end of 2026, just to sort of gauge the level of bullishness here. Okay, so not many people think we're going below 20 grand. supplies, there's 1.1% people who would make that bet. But anything below, you know, 30, we'll call it

even now, even in the 40s. Below 50 grand, there's less than 10% of the people. 50 is even kind of low. It seems like the numbers start to pick up now, which makes sense that we're almost at 80, with only a few months left, you know, 6.6%, 60 is 65, 8%. And then the big cluster here is basically from 70 to 85, which I think, you know, maybe people just kind of generally, they go towards where price currently is. But I'm finding really interesting as I look at this, is that there's really very few people who believe will be above 100. 100 to 105, 3.5%. Above that, you can't get anyone over 2% to believe were that bullish. To me, that says when I look at this waiting, that there's a very viable chance. The prices could go much higher than people think

by the end of this year. I mean, I personally am of the belief that we saw a major regime change when Bitcoin went up 25% on volume on the biggest short squeeze ever in a matter of days. And I think that that is a very, very, very meaningful signal. I would be remiss also

not to inform you that we, if you want to use CalShe, which is available in the United States, use code WOS. It's in the description. You get $25 when you trade $25. I actually use their prediction markets. find it really interesting information so you can sign up there to do that. What else do we got? I think we've covered everything today.

Yeah, we've covered it all. And it's almost 10 o'clock. That's all we got. Mike Belchie's amazing. Thank you guys for listening. Check out the Daily Wolf today at noon. And otherwise, I will see you guys tomorrow. Let's go.

Two and five Canadians will hear the words you have cancer. That's why every step and dollar raised matters. On September 19th, join thousands in Toronto for the Princess Margaret Cancer Foundation Walk. Challenge yourself, friends, and family to walk 21 kilometers in support of life-saving research. Together, we can carry the fire and help create a world free from the fear of cancer. Register today at pmcfwalk.ca.ca.