The Wolf Of All Streets - Bitcoin Tests KEY $111K Support As Market Selloff Continues! Will It Hold?

Episode Date: September 25, 2025

Bitcoin faced a sharp sell-off today, wiping billions from the market and putting renewed pressure on traders already bracing for key Fed decisions. At the same time, the IMF is warning about surging global debt, with Circle weighing in on the risks this poses to financial stability and its potential impact on digital assets. Add in new developments on stablecoins, crypto taxation, and the role of banks entering the space, and today’s news paints a picture of both opportunity and uncertainty. In this video, we break down Bitcoin’s price action, the IMF’s debt warning, and the latest headlines shaping the future of crypto and global markets.

Bitcoin is currently testing 111,000 support after we had massive euphoria when it got up to 117,000. Recently, at the end of the day, still trading in a range, but definitely showing some potential weakness here. Will this support hold? Are we about to go into a much larger correction? And of course, more importantly, what's actually happening in the news and markets that's driving all of this price action? You're going to break it down today because it's Thursday. We've got Yago for Bitcoin and bullshit. Let's go.

Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the show. I hope that you're all having a tremendous day as we all are, even though, even though we're watching Bitcoin show a little weakness. We got Yago here. Good morning, sir. Not in Korea for Korea Blockchain Week. No.

Korea is a very important market, but I can only be in so many places. Korea might be the most important market quietly. Those guys, DGEN, like nobody has ever degened in the history of Degening. I think it's the not so hidden secret that most of the bright pressure

is Korean. It's nuts. It's a completely lopsided situation. Yeah, you and I started a conversation, actually, before we turned on the camera and I said, let's just save it. We were talking about miners. Obviously, it's been the story right now. I mean, I've brought this up a million times because our friend Mike Alfred here was banging

the drum on iron at two bucks on this show. It's now at 45 pre-market. Obviously, we've seen this massive move across miners, mostly because now they're being viewed as data centers that can do AI, right? But the other, we have this happening as well, breaking two trillion dollar search giant Google to buy stake in public Bitcoin miner, cipher mining, big tech backing Bitcoin. This is huge. So that, that news came out after we've actually seen this massive move on miners, but I know that you have some concerns. Well, I think the thing is you have to look beyond the headline of these, of these, of these,

players being bTC miners because their btc mining business may be in real trouble um if you look at the cost in the u.s of um natural gas of petroleum um of the inputs to energy they're flat you're on your flat but the cost of electricity in the u.s has risen over the last year six and a half percent right In fact, it's one of the primary drivers of CPI core inflation, and it drives everything else on the inflationary side. So between tariffs and energy costs, that's where your inflation is coming from. Now, why is this important? Because electricity in the US is getting more expensive, a primary driver, probably the primary driver to this, is massive need for energy by the data centers, by the AI. companies. They are just ridiculously hungry. And the U.S. as opposed to China, but the U.S.

is completely losing in terms of being able to build out new infra. So really, what these large corporates are doing, what Google is doing is they're trying to buy every single electron they can get their hands up. Just an energy. Energy story. Completely about energy and compute, right? Yeah. So there are two implications here, though. One implication is that this could force all of these Bitcoin mining companies to actually transition off of Bitcoin mining, which would mean that BTC mining leaves the U.S. This would become especially true if, and here's what I suspect is going to happen. Right now, petroleum, natural gas, they are at very, very low prices. When that spikes, given that electricity prices in the U.S. are already rising and I expect it to

rise more. If you see a spike in the inputs, that's going to be massive. It's going to hurt everyone in the US who's connected to the grid. But it's particularly going to hurt miners. The second thing is if you're buying minor stocks, what you need to be doing if you can is to look beyond sort of their designation as I'm a Bitcoin miner. That's not good enough. Really what's important is what kind of contractual agreements do they have around the pricing of their electricity? Is it fixed for the next 10 years or does it fluctuate? Because if it fluctuates, they're going to get crushed. I mean, we have hash rate at all time high, right? So difficulty has only increased the cost to mine a Bitcoin, even if the inputs stay the same, it's more difficult and higher.

So to your point, if the price of energy goes up, they're in big trouble. And this does seem like a euphoric pump at this point, right? I mean, you start pulling 10xes, 20 Xs, and we used to see miners trade sort of as beta to Bitcoin, right? You kind of needed a big Bitcoin move to the upside to see miners move. to the upside. So this is clearly very different than previous cycles. Yes. And not only that, you know, there was this historic move because of China basically effectively banning mining in China of mining, which 80% was done in China up until four years ago. But China is is building out more electric producing infra than all of the rest of the world

combined. It is it is I like 10 times. It's building the entire U.S. sort of embedded infra every three or four years at current trajectory. And so I think there's a fairly decent case that mining moves back to China. And I think, you know, in the short term, that's not so good. In the longer term, it's very much a question of how Bitcoin is perceived. but that is a strategic threat to the U.S. I agree with that.

We've seen that before. It's so funny, though, when we lost China, do you remember, like, the biggest fear in the Bitcoin community was centralization of mining in China? China was going to kill the Bitcoin network. And then the minute that China got eliminated, apparently the biggest threat to Bitcoin was Chinese miners are all turning off at once and Bitcoin is finished.

It's like the most schizophrenic bipolar narratives that we always have surrounding China. Yeah. Well, I think China's a backbox to most people, maybe even to the Chinese CCP. It's a huge and very different place, and it's difficult to get your hands around. But unquestionably, you know, the future, like, you know, there's the argument Bitcoin fixes everything. Bitcoin does not fix everything. There's a whole other world out there of key strategic inputs. electricity, AI, industrial outputs like drones, like electric cars, batteries, basically the entire electrostack. And the reality is that China is far ahead on many of those things. And many of the current US policies, as well as many of the European policies, are not helping, right?

They're actively moving in the wrong direction. This whole H1B thing, right, the U.S. needs to bring in, China and India produce far more top talent than it can be produced by the U.S. simply because they're a two billion, two and a half billion people, and the U.S. is 300 billion people. So even if, even if, you know, the U.S. Twice as good, we still get a third as many much talent, right? Exactly. The U.S. would need to generate seven times more geniuses per capita in order to break even, right? And so the fact of the president is that the U.S.'s superpower has been this ability to import the world's best talent, to attract the world's best talent. That is a critical strategic input. And to me, it feels like especially a Republican administration should be thinking in terms of the grand game, right? How do you build up the infrastructure, the energy, the industry, and the genius to be able to compete in a global world where you're competing against

this, you know, vastly larger population and power? I mean, there's literally, there's literally no news. Just be just being honest. I'm like clicking through it. We have initial job claims today, a whole lot of stuff we've talked about with the ETF approvals. We know we're about to get a thousand crypto ETFs. We know we're about to get index ETFs. We beat that to death. But you kind of said, so we just have a more general conversation, Bitcoin doesn't fix everything.

Maybe it's a good day for us to focus on the things that Bitcoin still does fix and what you're fixing on Bitcoin. Well, I mean, look, I think one of the really interesting things that is happening right now is we have, depending on how. you measure it between two and a half million and six million BTC have moved into the hands of institutional or professional money managers right and we discussed this a little bit last week the the result is that there is a new level of demand for the ability to utilize BTC without counterparty risk i think it you know the the the bitcoin community right now is obsessed with what i see as an

an extremely trivial question, right? Nuts versus core, you know, 30. I even saw sailors. Sailors are not, not or now. A Nazi, as I called them last week. Yeah, I mean, it's, it's really the question is, is Bitcoin, like there's this massive, massive institutional desire right there. High net worth, high value, institutional desire for assets which are counterparty risk free. You can see it in gold. is through the roof and just keeps keeps rising the question is is bitcoin going to be the leader in that story now bitcoin has advantages over gold it has the advantage that you can transfer it um anywhere in the world instantaneously you can't do that with gold has the advantage

that it's easier to store than gold you don't need like a vault underneath a mountain you can store cryptographically but really where bitcoin potentially can shine. And where if you've been seeing the announcements from sort of like the crypto VC sphere, talking about Sol as the, you know, Solana is their next big bit. The story that they're trying to tell is that the next big movement in the space is institutions looking for a counterparty risk-free system for settlement of transactions, trades and assets. And they're right. There is massive demand.

Now, right now, all of that demand is in Bitcoin. But the question is, can Bitcoin maintain that position if other systems are able to offer, you know, basically institutional grade to defy? And so what we've been building with Boss, I think might be the most important thing going on right now, which is institutional grade, right? not pretend defy, not dino, right, but institutional grade defy integrated deeply with the custodians, with the institutions, which allows you to do things like utilize BTC as collateral, utilize BTC for generating yield, and be able to manage risks, which doesn't look like

sort of DGEN defy. So I think, you know, we're currently sort of, in our little bubble, the big story is all of these perps platforms and the big battle between CZ and hype. I think that is important in the sort of micro, but the really big story, the multi-trillion dollar story in crypto that is playing out now. It's not, we're not even waiting for it anymore. It's happening now is where are institutions, high net worth individuals who are no longer no longer have faith in the U.S. government or any other government, no longer have faith in the regulator, no longer have faith in Fiat, right?

They're where we were five years ago. Where do they want to move to? And Bitcoin right now is in a poll position for that, and potentially can take the whole prize if institution of great defy is also part of Bitcoin. How soon do we get there? how soon it is we're already we're already we're already in the process so you know the first the first programmable bitcoin already exists of the bitcoin network we have now through boss um over 10 million dollars uh in institutional uh btc that has been made programmable we have

commitments for over a billion dollars more we're in the process of integrating uh with custodians we're actually today if you if you go today we announce the introduction of grail pro which is the the operator system allowing custodians to integrate with an institutional grade system utilizing the boss network and the boss network itself is expected to launch to the public in about two months so we're close It's not an overnight thing, but it is a, it's like the Bitcoin price right now. When you have institutions, you know, screaming about Solana, Solana, Solana, Solana, Ethereum, Ethereum. How do you get them to care about building on Bitcoin?

Well, I don't think that's true. I think the people who are screaming Solana, Solana, Solana, are, you know, Pantera are. Biggest holders of Solana, dare you say. Yeah. You know, it's their. shilling the institutions. But if you actually look where institutional capital is, it's 90% Bitcoin and 10% Ethereum with almost nothing in Solana or anything else. Yeah, that makes sense. I think that's the treasury company narrative has hijacked the institutional

involvement. Even the treasury companies, like the true treasury company, right, the treasury companies which are trading at a premium that are not getting sort of insider deals are all Bitcoin. And frankly, Metaplanet and MicroStrategy together represent 98% of all of the assets under management for the, and it's all BTC. Everything, all of the, there's headlines, but headlines do not equate to money and the money is in Bitcoin. That's true. So that's the reason that they would stay there effectively is because the biggest TVL, most secure network, all the reasons we've talked about in the past. Yeah.

So what in the perfect vision will we be able to do on Bitcoin in, I don't even know, a timeline to throughout year, five years, 10 years? Well, I can tell you what the primary interest is, right? Like what do people actually want to do? People want to be able to utilize BTC as collateral. In other words, borrow against their BTC without giving their BTC to a third party, right? So if they can create a smart program, right, smart contract, where they can say, look, here's my BTC. It's locked up as collateral.

I'm borrowing your staple coins or whatever it is that I'm borrowing from you. But it stays locked in my wallet. And it only moves to you if I don't pay back in the loan, right? That is super exciting. That is a multi-a-100 billion dollar market in and of itself. Then the next thing is, can you utilize? it for provision of liquidity, carry trades, arbitrage trades. So if you actually look at sort of what institutions want to do, they want to use

BTCS collateral, that's like 50% of the story. Then the next most important thing is futures so they can hedge and also generate yield. Right now, most of that's being done in the CME, but you can see that, and I would hope to see that migrate more into DFI. where rates are preferable and there's and you're not dealing with with CME securities and then after that it's um it's options right again for hedging and generation of yield call options um the ability to to have puts that that's together a trillion dollar market and right now hardly exists outside of centralized venues yeah there's going to be so many chains but

And I've seen pitches for another 10, 20, 30 of them that are seemingly coming to launch. And I just really feel like things are going to consolidate at the top. Like, you know, I'm sure that some of these things will be purpose fit and they'll do well in certain buckets. But if we truly get to a point where you can do all the things you do everywhere else on Bitcoin, it seems like just a no-brainer. And nobody's talking about it anymore. It had its moment. And now, you know, like when they've moved on. everything else and it'll always come back.

I think we are seeing that already happening as well. So, I mean, if you look at where the activity is, the activity is in base Solana and BSC for sort of long tail asset trading and token issuance. It's in Bitcoin for long-term store of value and institutional uses. and there's a new crop of sort of application specific basically apps that call themselves an L1 and sort of that would be the primary example of that would be hyper right and we're seeing consolidation within that right I don't think the game's over right I think if you look at what Cardano are doing in terms of being able to build themselves up as a smart contract

and defile air for Bitcoin. Huge, huge opportunity. And by far, you know, the biggest opportunity is can you put BTC to work. Again, sort of crypto can be broken down into sort of like highest category, half more than half the market is BTC. Next biggest part of the market is stable coins and then after that you basically get everything to do with token issuance trading sort of the casino right so btc um long-term store value stable coins short-term seller value that's that's most of the market and plugging into that that's the biggest opportunity yeah as far as price action here we were talking about it kind of before the show and you actually were, I won't say disillusioned, but you sort of pointed out that Bitcoin really hasn't

gone up that much when you consider how bad the dollar has been. Oh, I think Bitcoin's been extremely disappointing. The way I think about how I want to price Bitcoin is I'm trying to price Bitcoin in my cost of living, right? And I want to see sort of Bitcoin, you know, outpays my cost of living. Everyone should have their own personal sort of inflation. index, their own personal CPI, because everyone experiences, has their own basket of goods, right? But you can use various things as a proxy. So, you know, the Bitcoin peaked at over $60,000 in 2021. Right now we're at $100,000, which feels like, you know, 110, right? Which feels like it's almost doubled. But the dollar has fallen by between 50 and 20%.

So when you price in euros or when you're pricing in Swiss franc or some sort of other proxy for the general sort of cost of living, what you find is that not only Bitcoin, but S&P 500, NASDAQ, have all underperformed what people are claiming that they've performed, right? So yes, S&P 500 is up over the last year in dollar terms, but it's flat. in euro terms and so much of what much of what we're seeing right now sort of like this this bullishness right like wall street's doing so well bitcoin's doing so well um is is actually an illusion because it's really the dollar that is doing really poorly i mean it's the worst year in decades for the dollar yes and that and that's only versus a basket of other currencies not in actual real terms for buying power it's much worse than it looks actually because it's not like the euro and swiss frank that you're talking about are doing well um just doing the the dollar's just

against them exactly that so so the the three or four percent inflation that is being experienced in the u.s is also being experienced in europe um but the so the euro is losing value but the dollar is losing value in comparison to the euro right it's a double whammy um and so You know, when people say their experience of life is that it's getting much, much, much more expensive. Yes, there's inflation and there's depreciation of the currency. Yeah, I mean, I thought that our grocery prices were supposed to get cheaper if we elected new president. No comment. I thought inflation was no longer going to be a thing now.

It's actually crazy that the Fed pivoted last. week or cut. I guess they've already pivoted, decided to stop pausing while admitting that inflation could be rising and that they haven't reached their target. I mean, it's such a big story. I think it is a big story, but I think it's an overblown story. You know, I think if I remember correctly, I had Lynn Alden on the show last week as well. And I think she probably says the same thing, which is that the Fed is becoming less and less relevant. And I think the stuff that we were talking about at the beginning is becoming more relevant, right? The malaise in the U.S., like everything is manageable if your economy is growing.

But if energy prices are going up and if the cost of industrial inputs is going up, right, and if it's more difficult to bring employees, and if you have a huge number of jobs that are open, but also increased unemployment. In other words, there's a mismatch between the population of potential workers and the jobs that are on offer, a mismatch of skills. That's the big story, and that's, I think, the story that people aren't talking about. The Fed cannot magic its way in or out of this. The Fed's stuck in its own problem, right? Inflation is going to continue. the U.S. debt is going to continue to rise. There's no way out of that. But when you couple that with rising energy prices and stalled industrial growth, that's how you really get stagflation.

And stagflation was, you know, people ask, you know, what happened in 1971? Stagflation happened in the 70s was the era of stagflation. It took 20 years for the U.S. to just sort of work its way back, and it's still not back, right? The productivity growth, the economic growth, the ability for people to live a middle-class lifestyle, those vanished in the 70s, and they're not back. That's 50 years. Stagflation, and that's objectively where we're heading. I mean, it's hard to argue against any other environment right now besides staggedflashmen.

Jobs are weak, inflation is sticky or rising, and we're cutting rates. I don't think there's no, you know, if with the right sort of policies, if instead of tearing down sort of solar farms, you were putting them up. If instead of making it impossible from a regulatory perspective to build nuclear energy, you were making it easier. If you introduced free trade zones, like the U.S. could introduce free trade zones in the same way that China kickstarted its economy with Shenzhen, Shanghai, Hong Kong, right? These were things that actually Trump was talking about. But right now he's ranting about Tylenol and that is a distraction. Maybe on purpose. We're distracting from a lot of things right now in this country, it would seem.

Epstein files. No, I didn't say that out loud on this crypto show. I would never. It's really nice to actually just turn off the news every once in a while and just have a conversation. So I appreciate that today. I know you won't be here next week, right? You're going to be off to Singapore. Yeah. I can't do it, man. I told you. I did it for three years. I'm getting too old for that trip. Yeah. I look, you know, travel's tough. It sucks, but you get to see the world. You do. Can't complain about that. All right, man. Well, guys, give Yago a follow, check out Bitcoin OS, BOS, of course, that we were discussing here. And I guess you and I will see you in two Thursdays. Absolutely. All right, man. Thank you. Thank you, everybody. Bye-bye. If your mobile number was stolen and your passwords were reset, would you even know it until it was too late? Your crypto wallets, exchanges, email, bank, cloud accounts, gone because someone took over your phone number and hijacked your two-factor authentication. This is called a sim swap. attack and in the crypto world, it's one of the most devastating ways to get hacked. It's not rare. It happens every single day. That's why I've personally been a customer of Afani for years. In fact, I've been with them since before it was even called Afani. When I was the victim of a sim swap and my friend Charlie Shrem introduced me to the CEO and founder, Hasim. I trusted them with my security

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