The Wolf Of All Streets - Bitcoin Rallies Towards ATHs As Gov Shutdown & Sets In

Episode Date: October 3, 2025

Bitcoin is surging toward ATH's as ETF inflows accelerate, fueling optimism for fresh all-time highs. But the rally comes as uncertainty looms over ETF approvals, with the government shutdown threatening SEC deadlines. Meanwhile, Citi has raised its price targets for Bitcoin and Ethereum, adding to bullish momentum, and Kraken is seeking fresh funding at a $20B valuation just months after its last raise. On the regulatory front, SEC Commissioner Paul Atkins is calling for closer collaboration with the CFTC, while the shutdown also complicates crypto oversight. Outside of crypto, Goldman Sachs sees more upside for gold on private demand, and Stripe has launched Open Issuance via Bridge to expand digital finance tools. In this livestream, we’ll break down Bitcoin’s run, the regulatory battles ahead, and the fintech moves shaping the future of markets.

Bitcoin is trading back over $120,000 American dollars, just a few percent short of a new all-time high. Just about a week and a half ago, we were under $110,000 and the bull market was apparently over. Of course, there has to be a reason that price is back up above $120, and we have NLW here to unpack all of it for you on the Friday 5. Let's go. The Bulls are back in town. They don't care about government shutdowns or the lack of economic numbers. Nothing stops this market. Recessions are illegal.

And if you think things can go down, you are just simply wrong. $120,000 Bitcoin, just casual, like $120,000, ETF inflow, boost market momentum. What's going on with this market? There is no force more powerful in Bitcoin than the power of October. Simply put, it turns October and this happens. That's just the rule. I don't make the rules. It literally happened on the first.

I don't remember I keep saying it was maybe it was 2021, but there was like a $10,000 God candle or something crazy, a multi-thousand-dollar and percent. God candle the minute the clock struck midnight at, you know, in the Eastern standard time. Yeah. Usually actually, if you go back and look at the pattern, it's usually the first couple of weeks give us a, you know, give us a little scare. And then the second half of October is where it gets good. But to your point, you know, I think actually 2017, 2021 and now 2025. So, you know, those who calling the end of a four-year cycle be damned, you know, we've had this explosion right at the beginning of October. So yeah, it's got to.

to be it. Bitcoin seasonality. No other explanation. There could be no other explanation. So clearly the four-year cycle is then intact, which means it's all over like a month or two. Yeah, exactly. I enjoy it now. No, but you know, it's funny. I think that there's a couple things that are actually going on. And one of them is there is a bit of just sort of broader market, you know, I would kind of characterize the markets right now as sticking their fingers in their ears and saying, nah, nana, nana, you can't stop me as all of the other people try to say, you know, bubble or AI infrastructure boom bubble or, you know, like there is a really kind of a willful unwillingness to do anything but go up to some extent. And, you know, Bitcoin is

a little bit coming along for the ride for that. Now, at the same time, I do think that we're also experiencing kind of one of the things that is unique about Bitcoin, which is while it has become a full macro asset, sort of high beta to the stock market in many contexts and certainly more than it's ever been. It also still does have this huge base of ideological holders and buyers for whom this idea of it as a hedge against government weirdness is intact. And by the way, it's not just the crypto weirdos like us who have been sort of spreading that narrative. It's also what Larry Fink talks about in many cases, right? Bitcoin is a hedge against debase and just sort of government chaos more broadly.

He talks about this quite frequently on shows. And so, you know, the shutdown is actually kind of an interesting context for this where there's some narrative juice on that like hedge against dysfunction side, as well as just whatever the heck the markets are doing, which is just, you know, shaking this off entirely. So there's a two completely almost opposite forces, but that both drive number up. Yeah, I had this moment where I saw the government shutdown, which of course was coming right into October 1st and then you saw Bitcoin skyrocket sort of after hours going into the day

and said, wow, this is like Silicon Valley Bank. You know, it's like something crazy happened, but then stocks just went up to and everything else went up. So nobody cares about the government shut down in any market. And so it's obviously not unique to Bitcoin in this case. But it was very interesting that those two things align so well. I mean, you would think that the government was shutting down. We weren't getting economic data that maybe stocks would take a pause. Yeah, no. That's not how it works. No, but listen, the other thing that I think is it's a good reminder that we really were very close to like high happy numbers this entire time. We just get bored, right? Like it's in retrospect, so much of like the Antipathy. 1-10 was pretty good. Yeah. And it was and it was really close too. Like it wasn't, it wasn't to your point, that massive God candle. This is just a casual 3.7% jump up in a day, which is big, you know, but not. crazy. And here we are. And we're like, oh, maybe we were whining too much. Yeah. And in the meantime,

of course, we get big targets. You know, price goes up a little bit. And we start hearing, you know, 2.5 trillion banking giant city says Bitcoin will hit 181,000 in 12 months. What was hilarious about this prediction is it came out, I think, yesterday. And it was like 135,000 by the end of the year, 4,500 Ethereum by the end of the year. And I was like, Ethereum's like 4375, right. Is there a prediction really that this could go up? I think it might have hit 4,500 yesterday the day of their prediction. So maybe we can take some of these with a slight grain of salt. And of course, 3.6 trillion J.B. Morgan says Bitcoin's under value compared to gold. That's actually a very, I think, reasonable take, suggests Bitcoin can reach 165,000. Once again, reminding people,

this is not Jamie Diamond calling in his personal prediction to Bloomberg to tell you anything to Bitcoin. Well, the interesting thing is that now we do have the potential for narrative self-fulfilling prophecy to take hold a little bit. You know, there is so much, so much seasonal history now that the combination of this plus all of the research shops weighing in now, like actually could create some meaningful momentum, especially if you have just a little bit of catalytic action, you know, I mean, this is one of the potential negative impacts of the shutdown that we might talk about is these ETFs potentially getting delayed. But, you know, if we did get the sort of self-s, self-certification type of approach to ETFs and all of that rush into market, there's a whole bunch of things that could happen that turn these very quickly into self-fulfilling prophecies, not just predictions. Absolutely. And the next story here is going back to that government shutdown is that the government shutdown could delay new crypto ETF approval. So obviously, there's going to be some secondary effects to an extended government shutdown that are not unique to crypto. You know, this could. delay any ETF approval, of course, but we were expecting October to be this massive month for up to 19 or 20 approvals of ETFs. That really just cannot happen while the government is shut down. And we're seeing a lot of projections or predictions that the government shut down

could last upwards of 30, 60, maybe even more days. So time to temper some expectations for what we might see on the legislative and regulatory front for crypto during this time. Yes, I think that this is the sort of the potentially the most negative set of second order effects for us is, you know, we were already on pretty tight timelines with a lot of this regulatory stuff. And this could be just enough of a delay to bump it into next year. And of course, next year becomes midterms. And it's just a whole, whole different kettle of fish. So I think that is something to keep an eye on. You know, look, the Atkins SEC seems hell bent on on pushing these things through. But there are limits to, So what can happen in this context? And, you know, boy, 30 or 60 days of shutdown can kill a lot of momentum. Now, the good thing is I don't actually believe that these, I think that these, this wave of ETF approvals would be narrative accretive, but I don't think that we're sort of reliant on them.

It's not like we're looking for any good catalyst to turn a tide right now. It's fuel on the fire kind of a thing. So, you know, I, maybe the, the negative impact is, but it's it's sort of we're not getting the positive impact that we might otherwise have gotten. Yeah, I think that's a very fair take. I just wonder at what point is the shutdown long enough that it completely kills momentum because we go into midterm season or they have to be concerned with other things entirely. And this is just a bit too far down the list to be a priority when there's things that have to get done. They have 90, 100 days or something I have no

idea. I'm not predicting it will go that long. But there has to be a critical point where there's a tipping point and all of a sudden they still have time to do this stuff. Yeah, that's my concern and my, you know, I think that with the ETFs, it's less of a concern. I think that because that is, you know, SEC Fiat, I think that they are going to race to get that. In fact, I can see them using that as their way of announcing that they're back and open for business again because it's so within their control. But I think that broadly speaking, this is my concern as well. And I don't think it takes 90 days to screw up that legislative agenda. I think it's more like three weeks than three months.

I agree because there's just going to be so many more things that they have to deal with first and the things they want to deal with get kicked down the road. But meanwhile, at the same time, we have harmonization, a new era of collaboration between the SEC and CFTC. Obviously, one of the biggest complaints that we've had as an industry and probably many have had in their industries is that these two regulators, should be crossing paths far more often than they do. They very much are in the same circles of regulation,

but seem to be completely disjointed and never speak to one another. Atkins really pushing to make that no longer be the case. Also at a time when it should be mentioned that Brian Quintends, who many believed was a shoe-in to be the head of the CFDC, has been dinged. It's not going to happen anymore. He was obviously coming over from A16Z is very crypto-friendly. Yeah. The CFTC is on a journey, man. So much so that after, so much so that after this, they had to release a bunch of statements about how they weren't just going to fold these two organizations into one another and they were going to keep them separate. Just to put a little bit of perspective on how disconnected these agencies have been. Because, you know, it's easy to think that maybe this is sort of a Gary Gensler phenomenon. This is the first joint roundtable and I think 14 years.

between these two organizations, which is actually just kind of mind-blowing that, you know, the two major market regulators wouldn't have had context to hold a joint roundtable, you know, and a decade and a half together. But look, it's sort of more of the same story we've been talking about before of the bureaucratic apparatus really wanting to kind of turn a new page, move things forward faster, not have their own processes be the barriers to innovation, you know, which now we need them to, A, turn back on the staff spigot so they can actually do work and be with the CFTC find even one person who wants to and will get approved to lead the organization I guess because right now

it's a non-functional basically as long as the government isn't shut down it seems like we're moving in a very positive direction that's all I will say you know until of course Elizabeth Warren becomes president or whatever happens next and completely ruins the entire party for us because We know that that's the only way the simulation can possibly proceed. The next story, Cracken seeks new funding at $20 billion valuation after $500 million raise. It seems like a lot of speculation as to what's going to happen with the Cracken IPO. Obviously, all this comes in context of a monster IPO season for crypto with some companies that nobody would have expected to do particularly well at all.

But we had Circle, bullish, Etoro, Galaxy, Digital, Agency, Ford, huge, huge season of all across the board extremely successful IPOs, at least at first. What's going on here with Cracken? My read with literally zero insider knowledge or conversation is that Cracken decided that based on where they are relative to how long it's going to take to IPO, but their best play for this market enthusiasm was not raised to IPO, but was take advantage in the private markets, right? Juice the valuation, get evaluation set. They haven't raised money for a billion years since the very, very beginning, very early on. And so I think that they basically

made an assessment that, you know, I don't know that I would go so far as to say that they've assessed that they have missed the window, although you have to think that that's part of the calculus is that maybe, you know, that the enthusiasm looks to be dampening a little bit. I think it's more that the way that they can play all of the enthusiasm in the immediate term is private markets, right? And so they did that. I think they closed 500 at 15 or some number, $200,000 to $300 million at a $15 billion valuation. That was sort of like the secret one. Now they're kind of re-upping again. So you look, I think it's a smart strategy. Just, you know, line the coffers, create some dry powder. You know, my guess is that they are proceeding with

haste but not, you know, insane urgency around the IPO, and they're going to make a game time decision around whether it still looks good or not at the time that it comes. I mean, I think you're absolutely correct. We were talking about Tethers, humongous fundraise, obviously, and I think it was Dave Weisberger who said there's an old adage on Wall Street, it's something to its effect, but if someone's willing to give you money, take it. Yeah. I can go into the private market and get a huge amount of money without taking the risk of, you know,

IPOing and not being able to control how successful that is or market conditions, you take the money. One of the most under-discussed stories in crypto is how much cycle winners and successful companies just set themselves up to do well during the bad parts of the cycle, right? This happens over and over again where the companies that thrive are not. the ones who looked like they were the best or the top or the most talked about, they were just the ones who had good treasury management, for lack of a better term, or had good strategy, you know, who were able to weather the storm given the intense cyclicality.

Now, hopefully, you know, one part of the four-year cycle that I think everyone would be totally happy to jettison is the three years of horrifying bear markets that we have to go through every time. But the winners in crypto tend to be the people who are prepared for those sort of, you know, cyclical downturns and interest downturns and enthusiasm downturns. And so, look, you know, storing up a half billion bucks is a good way to position yourself for, you know, long duration, you know, during whatever it might come. Yeah, we've seen it so many times where companies in crypto are depending on a treasury full of illiquid shit coins as their entire, you know, balance to operate in the future and lose

their runway completely. And we even saw it with a lot of publicly traded miners who bought mining equipment at the very top of the market at $20,000 for machines that were $4,000 a year later and couldn't get that capacity online until the depths of the bear market. So there's a lot to be said for not assuming that the sun is going to continue shining indefinitely. Bullish exists because a long time ago, EOS decided that it was a good idea after their four billion dollar IPO to trade a bunch of their coin for bitcoin period full stop now they've done a bunch of stuff since then i'm not discounting that but at core that company would not exist if eos hadn't made that decision forever ago you know what a wild ride and our final story of the day

introducing open issuance from bridge a new platform to launch your own stable coin we've now reached stablecoin inception where not only do we have to worry about companies launching stable coins now you can launch your own stable coin using a company that launches stable coins we're going to have so many of these things yeah it this almost nullifies the previous conversations and hand ringing and pearl clutching we were doing before around whether there was going to be too much market fragmentation and everyone was just going to do it basically stripe now says you'd be insane not to do it and here's a platform to do it and so maybe we're we're kind of round tripping to the point where you know, we're going to avoid the liquidity and, you know, interoperability issues of everyone,

you know, having sort of mass stablecoin fragmentation by having mass stable coin fragmentation, but all issued on the same platform. It's a super smart play from Stripe. I mean, just absolutely if I were a circle, this would be the single most nervous announcement that I had seen, you know, period, full stop. More so, I think, than just another big thing. bank trying to do a stable coin, a consortium that can all use the same rails where they don't have to care about liquidity, but they can control their own issuance. That to me seems like a real threat to USDC dominance in a way that other stuff that we've seen so far has not. Incredible how all in on stable coin Stripe is. I mean, we always joke that, hey, you don't

want to be Kodak or Blockbuster. And Stripe is obviously a payment company and realizes that this is just a better, faster, cheaper technology. But man, it's like one announcement after another. They were one of the first to adopt USDC to actually use the technology to help their business. Then they announced tempo, right? I mean, their own, you know, layer one to do this stuff. And now probably on their layer one, anyone in the world is going to be able to launch

a stable coin. I wonder what comes next. Yeah. It's like I said, it's a, I wish the stripe would get public so we could buy them. yeah and the most important story of the week have you canceled your Netflix yet no what happened with Netflix I missed this one oh you just go online man just get in there I've been just apparently like Netflix has a cartoon where there's a trans character or something and Elon Musk tweeted about it and so you know if he tweets about

it it's over and then there's like another show or girls kiss or something I was really in this story like my friend he has an eight year old and he was like there's girls kissing on Netflix, like, I'm like, there's girls kissing in the street, by the way, but there's girls kissing on Netflix. I'm canceling Netflix. And I was, and this is a guy who's like eight-year-old plays Fortnite three hours a day. And I'm like, yeah, are the girls kissing, like, worse than the killing people and talking to strangers on the internet all day? I don't know, man. Listen, I'm all for like, if you don't support a paid company to like not pay that company. I do. Listen, I love, I I love capital markets create the greatest mechanism for protest that's ever existed.

And so I'm never mad when people are loud about shit because it gets solved out. But yeah, listen, I live in my happy little world of AI in crypto news and here we are. Okay, well, go follow Elon Musk on X because you're going to have a field day today. All right, guys, that's all we got for you on the Friday 5. Of course, check out all of NLW's work on the breakdown. And if you're interested in AI, as he said, does that too. That's all we got for you today. We will be back next week for the next Friday.

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