The Wolf Of All Streets - Bitcoin To Hit $180,000 This Year | Dan Tapiero
Episode Date: March 15, 2025I sat down with Dan Tapiero on The Wolf Of All Streets to find out why crypto prices are falling despite huge government support. Dan shares surprising insights on how Bitcoin will reach new highs and... explains why most altcoins might fail. Plus, we explore how governments might soon adopt blockchain technology, changing everything we know about money. Dan Tapiero: https://x.com/DTAPCAP ►► JOIN THE FREE WOLF DEN NEWSLETTER, DELIVERED EVERY WEEKDAY! 👉https://thewolfden.substack.com/ 🔥 𝗟𝗕𝗔𝗡𝗞 𝗘𝗫𝗖𝗛𝗔𝗡𝗚𝗘 - 𝗡𝗢 𝗞𝗬𝗖 𝗥𝗘𝗤𝗨𝗜𝗥𝗘𝗗! 𝗖𝗟𝗔𝗜𝗠 𝗨𝗣 𝗧𝗢 𝟱𝟬% 𝗧𝗥𝗔𝗗𝗜𝗡𝗚 𝗕𝗢𝗡𝗨𝗦! Join today & get rewarded! Start trading to claim up to 50% in trading bonuses!! 👉https://www.lbank.com/activity/ScottMelker-Cashback?icode=4M3HD ►► Arch Public Unleash algorithmic trading. Discover how algorithms used by hedge-funds are now accessible to traders looking for unparalleled insights and opportunities! 👉https://archpublic.com/ ►►TRADING ALPHA READY TO TRADE LIKE THE PROS? THE BEST TRADERS IN CRYPTO ARE RELYING ON THESE INDICATORS TO MAKE TRADES. Use code '10OFF' for a 10% discount. 👉https://tradingalpha.io/?via=scottmelker Follow Scott Melker: Twitter: https://x.com/scottmelker Web: https://www.thewolfofallstreets.com/ Spotify: https://spoti.fi/30N5FDe Apple podcast: https://apple.co/3FASB2c #Bitcoin #Crypto #investments Timecodes 0:00 Intro 1:28 Trump Effect On Crypto 2:48 Bitcoin Hit $100K 5:34 Crypto Fundamentals Strong 6:06 Why Altcoins Keep Bleeding 7:44 Blockchain Voting Is Coming 8:55 Crypto Heading To $50T 10:36 Next Big Crypto IPOs 13:32 Future Of Crypto Investing 15:34 Tokenizing Real-World Assets 17:39 Government & Crypto Involvement 20:42 Where DeFi Is Going The views and opinions expressed here are solely my own and should in no way be interpreted as financial advice. This video was created for entertainment. Every investment and trading move involves risk. You should conduct your own research when making a decision. I am not a financial advisor. Nothing contained in this video constitutes or shall be construed as an offering of financial instruments or as investment advice or recommendations of an investment strategy or whether or not to "Buy," "Sell," or "Hold" an investment.
Transcript
Discussion (0)
This is Scott Melger, host of the Wolf of All Streets podcast here with the CEO, CIO
and co-founder of 10T and 1RT, Dan Tapiero.
And Dan, when I want to know what's happening in markets, you're the guy I call and I don't
understand what is happening in markets.
We've got nothing but tailwinds for the Bitcoin and crypto industry, the perfect regulatory
and legislative environment, and nothing but down in prices.
How do you explain what's happening with the market right now?
Okay.
Well, when you say the markets, you know, my background, of course,
being in the old world for so many years, I'm always going to ask you like,
which markets you talking, you're talking about Bitcoin.
Let's talk about Bitcoin and crypto specifically,
but I think we all know we need to put that in context, uh,
context of a tariff mayhem and the current Trump effect.
Look, uh, I mean, 80,000 on Bitcoin, context of a tariff mayhem and the current Trump effect.
Look, I mean, 80,000 on Bitcoin, 2,000 on ETH,
those are decent prices. And I know people don't want to hear that.
Everyone wants up only all the time.
But if I think about where we were even just, you know, 18 months ago, before Larry thinks
pivot the summer of 23 before the launch of the ETFs in early 24.
Yes, the Trump administration catalyst is huge.
I would say that the about face that's happened in the US is probably the most dramatic, most important
development of the last 15 years.
We've never had the US, the largest government of the wealthiest country in the world become
full on, not just crypto supporters, but active in crypto.
It's unbelievable from the treasury Secretary to the Vice President to
all sorts of people in the cabinet. We have people who really believe in the future of
cryptocurrency and blockchain. And so digital assets, Web3, however you want to call it.
So, you know, I think this was becoming obvious in September and then October, November,
and markets are discounting mechanists. So we went up, we went up to 100,000.
I always said, and I've said this on Twitter, on X, many times, we were always going to stop
at 100,000. There was no matter what news was going to come or happen, it's a big round number.
It's the big round number theory of markets.
Just like gold, I think is gonna stop at 3000,
just like when you have NASDAQ stopping at,
you know, three, four or five thousands.
So I always expected us to spend months
consolidating around 100.
I think we're gonna chop up back and forth
between 70
and 100 to digest all this news.
And at some point, we're going to head back up.
And I've had this 180 target in mind for a while.
I know some people have been more aggressive.
But I think this bull phase, we can hit that this year,
or potentially early next year.
But I'm thinking more this year.
So it's just the way markets work, right?
You've got 85% or 90% bulls up at 100,000.
And now you're down at, what is it, 15% bulls and people are despondent.
They think the world is over.
And yet it's at 80,000, which is still up, you know, two, three X from 18 months ago.
It's pretty, pretty incredible.
Yeah. And I think Bitcoin was trading in the 60,000 X from 18 months ago. It's pretty, pretty incredible.
Yeah.
And I think Bitcoin was trading in the 60,000 six or seven months ago.
So it's still a tremendous rise, especially when you have markets generally dropping.
I mean, do you think that the reason that Bitcoin to some degree is chopping around
here with all of these tailwinds is because of all of the market uncertainty in macro
markets right now?
Or do you really think that we hit 100, consolidate
for a while, it goes back up, we look back and say it was as easy as that?
Yeah, I don't know if we're going to say it's as easy as that. The volatility certainly
turns up a lot of people. And I always say, I don't think the difficulty is suggesting,
let's say, is the price of Bitcoin and some of the other digital assets going
to be higher, let's say five years from now? I don't think that that's a difficult call.
I think the difficult call and the difficult action is to actually hold through the insane
volatility of the space. And so I said months and months ago that we were going to stop
at 100. So I think that's what we're doing.
There is uncertainty in the macro landscape, the doge and the fiscal tightening that's going on,
I think will eventually get offset by interest rate cuts. So I think we're going to be fine in
terms of the economy. We have a 4% two-year note. I don't see that we're going to have a lot of problems buffering a slowdown that
we're going to see. And I suspect the unemployment rate heads up to north of 5%. I've been a little
wrong on this. I thought it would happen already. It hasn't. China has been very weak. Europe has
been soft. I don't think there's any inflation problem in the US. So it's just about, you
know, having a bit of consolidation here. But in no way are the positive fundamentals
that are coming along with, you know, potentially a clear regulatory framework, you know, stable
coin legislation, other things like that. Those things aren't discounted. It's just
that you can't have everything all at once, right?
You definitely can't have everything all at once.
And one thing that surprised a lot of people, I think, is that Bitcoin did reach 100,000
start to consolidate, but altcoins have continued to bleed.
There really hasn't been much performance of significance in the rest of the crypto
market, which those who look at the cycles would have anticipated
happening by now.
What do you make of that?
Well, I think a lot of those things deserve to go to zero.
And I think their venture investments,
I think that they're still searching for their use case,
some of them.
I mean, look, I also think it's a problem
that there seems to be an infinite amount of,
let's say, meme coins on Solana. You know, even the Trump coin and other coins, they sapped a lot
of liquidity from the market. But look, I, you know, the alt coins, there's infinite supply. So,
you know, if you've developed a use case, and there's network effect, I mean, if you
take a look at some of the larger ones, you know, Ripple, for instance, and other ones that have
been around for a long time that have, you know, very high market values, they've sort of held in okay. I think just the most speculative end of the market is
specular and 99% or 99.9% of those specular tokens will end up going to zero.
So I don't see anything different happening than has happened in any other
cycle that we've been in. I tend to agree. Now you mentioned Doge and fiscal
tightening before Elon Musk floated
the idea of putting the treasury on the blockchain. We've seen people talking about putting multiple
different government agencies on the blockchain. Do you think that with this new government
coming in with technologists in all these positions that outside of Bitcoin becoming
a reserve asset or becoming a legitimate digital goal,
do you think it will actually see some adoption
of the underlying technology for uses by governments
and larger institutions in the coming years?
Well, I don't, I think it goes without question.
I actually think for the next election,
they're gonna figure out how to put voting on a blockchain.
So that, you know, I mean, it's strange that we have this great
democracy. And the voting methods are still so archaic, you know, you go into a little box and
you flip a switch. I mean, it's extremely weird. I mean, it's not hanging chads anymore. But it's
still, you know, it's it's still terrible. So I think that yes, that distributed ledger
is going to be applied across the board.
And you've got Andreessen as well,
Mark who's been vocal along with Elon
and the other technologists.
If anyone can figure out how to do it, they're going to.
So can you imagine, just think about all the eventual productivity gains coming to
the US.
I know short term, we're feeling some pain here.
People feeling the uncertainty, what are they going to do?
Tariffs, this, that, the other thing.
But the bottom line is I think medium term, everything we're doing is very bullish for
the US.
Now, your first fund, I believe, was called 10T, right?
We've discussed many times why that was the case because you believe the market
cap of crypto space would go to 10 trillion.
Obviously that became far too boring for you because now you're on your fifth
fund and it's called 50T.
Is that a hint as to where you think this space is going?
Yeah. I mean, again, the, the idea for 10T I had in
the middle of 2019 and the fund, you know, didn't launch until early 21, but in the middle of 19,
the space had a value of 300 billion and I thought, okay, well, it can 30X over the 10-year
life of the fund and no one's going to believe that that was actually my view, so I have to put it into the name of the fund. So 300 billion to 10 trillion is a 30x. Now here we are
in the space five years later, it has a value of five trillion and that's Bitcoin,
all the altcoins and then all the equity in the space. And you know, launching the
fifth fund now, it just seems a little, you know, there's not a lot of
homes I'd left if you think it's 10T. And as we sit back and I think about the next 10 years,
I think Bitcoin definitely can 10X from here, that would take it to 20 trillion.
The altcoin is probably another 10 trillion. And then I would have the equity value in the space
is going to head to 20 trillion. You add those up and that's 50T. I think
the big change coming now over the next, let's say one to two years, is that we're finally going to
see many of the private companies that we own and others of course too go public. And I think, look,
the Trump administration has a goal to make the US the crypto hub of the world, crypto blockchain hub of the world.
The easiest way to do that is not to try to get people to understand why different blockchains have different use cases to parse the code of certain chains versus others. The easiest way,
I think the best way is yes, okay, we have a Bitcoin ETF, that's wonderful. But we only have
one large crypto blockchain public company in the world,
and that's Coinbase. The way to make the US the hub is to get 30, 40, 50 of these private companies,
later stage companies, public. I think you've seen the announcements of some of the companies
announcing their intentions, Circle and Etoro and Kraken, recently Gemini there was a story about.
So I think that the US administration should be focused on with the NYSE and NASDAQ.
How do we bring some of these companies that are making hundreds of millions in revenue public
so that the American investor can get exposure to businesses that are building this new digital asset ecosystem.
Yeah, you mentioned a five trillion valuation.
Obviously, the tokens themselves are about 2.6.
So I guess that puts the capital markets or the publicly traded companies at 2.4.
I agree with you.
I think we're going to see 10, 20 companies in the next two or three years going public.
But I don't think that's unique to crypto either. It seemed like there was an entire freeze on companies going public over the last four to five years,
not even just in crypto.
So you'd have to imagine that we're going to see a just slew,
generally, of direct listings and ICOs and SPACs and people going public in a variety of different ways
in and outside of crypto in the coming few years.
Get it while it's hot, so to speak. public in a variety of different ways in and outside of crypto in the coming few years.
Get it while it's hot, so to speak.
Yeah, but I think it's different for crypto because as I said, there's only one, right?
There are a lot of tech companies out there.
You know, there are a lot of, you know, even AI, you know, I'm just saying I, I think one is just as a small number, it's a low number.
And so I can't really speak to the broader interest.
It just strikes me that this is a real gap.
And I think a bunch of them are going to eventually be in the S&P 500.
Coinbase I think they just passed over, but I think they're coming.
They'll be in the NASDAQ 100 if they're not already.
So how does this affect the way that you approach your fifth fund?
Because we're obviously in an environment where a number of these companies will be going public
or might look for different strategies. You obviously spend most of your focus on private companies in this space and on equity
investments, not necessarily on tokens.
Right.
Well, this is a bit of a departure for us.
About 60% of the fund will be in earlier stage and growth stage companies, generally looking
for companies making more
than 40 to 50 million in revenue. We're also going to have a sleeve for what I call growth
stage protocol. So cryptocurrencies, where the revenue accrues to the cryptocurrency
rather than to the equity in the business. And these are things like, let's say, Radium or Lido or tokens that are Aave
that are more DeFi focused.
I do think eventually over the next sort of 10, 15 years
that all value is migrating on chain.
So on the one hand, we're equity focused,
but on the other hand, equity is the most common
and accepted way for investors to take positions. I think
that in the future, they'll be much more comfortable also owning tokens where there is no equity.
And then we're going to have a bucket of 25% for that we're going to hold back for the
next bear market for 27, I think is when it'll hit.
And that'll be for distressed opportunities, special situations.
One of the reasons we've pivoted a little bit into this growth stage protocol area is that
we operate one of our companies now, which is a complete departure.
We bought a company out of administration
and we operate, it's now called Zenrock.
And Zenrock is about to launch its first product,
actually this week, ZenBTC.
It'll be the first decentralized,
eventually it'll be yield bearing, wrapped Bitcoin product.
So, you know, we have a road token, the rock token,
we moved from just investing in the growth equity
to actually operating a company, very esoteric.
It had built over the previous 40 years, decentralized multi-party computation technology,
which is the next level of security after multi-sig for digital assets. So,
having built that company from the ground up and launched your own token and gone through that whole process, we really do have a skill set now to make fundamental value judgments
about tokens, but it's not going to be these early stage tokens. It'll be tokens where
there's at least 40, 50 million in revenue that accrues to the token holders. So I know
that was a bit of a mouthful, maybe a bit esoteric, but after doing this
and only this for the last five years,
the team has grown and the skillset that we've developed
is sort of beyond anything that we had
even like two, three, four years ago.
Well, the product that you just described,
wrapped BTC, yield bearing product,
alludes to where I think many view the puck
is going, which is to tokenizing real world assets and unlocking everything that comes
with that.
That is a multiple huge market versus anything that could come from native crypto adoption.
In my opinion, if you think about tokenizing everything,
you're talking about tens of trillions of dollars
in unlocks.
Hundreds, hundreds of trillions.
Yeah, hundreds of trillions.
I mean, at what point do you think we start to see
that really happening?
I mean, you have BlackRock tokenizing Treasuries
and others doing those things.
So I think we're getting the first iterations of that.
But once you have Bank of New York, Mellon and State Street
and all these companies cussing Bitcoin,
they're obviously gonna want to turn it into an asset
like any other that can earn yield
or be used as collateral.
Yeah, I think it's happening now.
It's just, you know, we've all sort of dreamed about this,
you know, for years and it just happened more slowly
than we anticipated. The tech is a little slower.
And also look, I mean, the regulatory framework has been very unclear. I think with the SEC and
their crypto task force, the Treasury has a crypto focus group. You had that meeting last week
at the White House. We had some of our CEOs of our companies present. It's just a
whole, you know, change, a change of worldview. So I think it's maybe not too crazy to say
it's going to happen over the next four years. You know, you have Ondo, you know, tokenizing
treasuries, you have, you know, Apollo also has a few things that are tokenized.
Figure a company we own is focused on this as well.
But you know, it's slowly, slowly and then hopefully all at once.
And we have companies in our portfolio and in the 50 T-Port, there will be in the 50
portfolio that will benefit from this trend of tokenization. Is it a positive or a negative for Bitcoiners to have this much involvement from governments
and institutions?
I think the original cypher punks would have said we created these assets to have parallel
systems so that we could avoid governments and institutions.
But then the sort of adults in the room and those who maybe want the number to go up are cheering the Black Rocks and the United States government and such
coming into the space. Yeah, I mean that really is a tough question to answer because, you know,
the ETF really changed things in terms of awareness,
you know, bringing, making it easy for people
to just punch a button, you know, push a button
and all of a sudden in their equity account,
they're on Bitcoin.
Again, they're on DTF, they're at actually long Bitcoin.
I think it sort of reminds me a little bit
of the way gold financialized.
I mean, you have physical gold bars, and there are lots of people who still want to own gold bars.
And there's that group, self-custody. But then there are a lot of people who are just happy
owning futures or owning the gold ETF, and they want to trade it more.
So I think that the world is big enough for both. The people
who want to self-custody Bitcoin on their ledger, walk around with it in their pocket or have it,
they're safe and never touch it, don't care about using it as collateral or yield or anything else.
I think that's always going to be there and that'll grow and it'll grow as some percent.
But the overall pie in terms of people understanding Bitcoin, cryptocurrency, digital assets, Web3,
I think that the technology, as you call it, underneath is going to seep into everything we do.
So I think it's net net a positive. I still think you'll have those people self-custodying and and they'll be off the grid.
So I think you're going to have both.
I know it's a bit of a strange answer, but it's my thought.
I think that's actually the right answer.
I totally agree with everything that you just said.
So listen, you're obviously looking to deploy an entire fund here, as we discussed, which
means that you're probably getting a bit of a glimpse into the future of what's coming
for the space, what's being built, which areas people are spending their time and efforts
on.
What's the most exciting things that you're seeing built right now in the crypto space?
The thing that's really taken off, I think, is DeFi and revenues from DeFi.
If you look in as early as December, January, you had $200 million of revenue coming from
various DeFi protocols.
That's up from 20 million 18 months ago.
So remember, I'm a growth stage investor.
I'm looking for businesses, projects that already are making
a decent chunk of money, not venture.
Just because I'm in this space, people think,
oh, you're venture capitalist.
You know, this whole area is very speculative.
I think it's incredible that we finally have significant,
that's monthly revenue coming from DeFi.
So I think that's sort of the big focus.
You know, the expansion L2s, but then also potentially Bitcoin L2s, staking and restaking,
I think, become something that's growing tremendously.
And then as you mentioned before, if we can build out that world with RWAs, and then stable coins, I
think you're looking at a world there that's just become digitized. That was not just five
years ago. I also think, you know, we've done a little less work on this, but NFTs aren't
going away. I know they've been in remission and they've been in a bare face, this and that, but I think that NFTs will still, I think, prosper. It sort of touches a
little different part of the world, the media, the media sort of webstree world. I mean, I don't know how to say it. I mean, it's not as much about value storage
as it is about community building and hobbyists and gaming. And I know that's been a little bit
in remission, but I think that will come back as well. I agree. I know we're coming to the end of
time here, but you talk about sort of the growth of DeFi. It's interesting because we had DeFi summer and that was the most speculative
side of the crypto space. But now DeFi is actually boring. It just kind of ticks along
and it works and nobody talks about it anymore. What do you think it takes, I guess, from
a risk management perspective for the largest institutions to participate in the decentralized
finance protocols that we have now? Or will they
have to sort of build their own that are wild gardens to make sure that they're secure?
Wow, that really is a good question. I think that some of the businesses out there,
the more forward, I call them Web 2.5 businesses already are using stablecoin and
crypto rails. I think it was Stripe that announced the other day. Was it Stripe that over the
weekend they do settlement on stablecoins? Yeah, stablecoin rails. So I think that's
starting. I don't know that Bank of New York is ready for that. But yeah, so I think it's already starting.
But again, you know, there are still plenty of people in institutions out there
that have no idea about even Bitcoin.
I mean, they've heard about the ETF and this and that, but they don't really get it.
They don't understand it.
There's still a huge percentage of the world
that is way, way behind.
So do I think a bank in the Midwest or something
is going to all of a sudden be active in DeFi?
Probably not.
But it's all early signs.
And I love the fact that you said DeFi's been boring.
I mean, the revenue's coming out of DeFi
dwarf what they were during DeFi summer.
And I mean, literally are more than 10x,
I think more than 10x that time.
So you just have to wait and be patient
and not get destroyed by the volatility.
And, you know, survival really hears a lot about risk management, even this sleeve in our new fund.
It's only going to be 15% of the fund and it's only going to be in four or five of these protocols.
It'll be very controlled because, you know, as you know, I've been good in the space every three, four years, everything goes down 50 to 80%
right. And as you said, now the altcoins, there's there altcoins
now that are down 90% in the last year, right. So you really,
you know, have to know how to manage risk.
Well, I'm just hoping, Dan, that your next fund is going to be
called 100 T because we're already 50 and 50 is way too
boring.
Yeah, it's too boring.
I'm saying I'm hoping that we get to 50. Okay, let's say you
have to name your next one 500 T just to give us.
Yeah, I hope you're right.
All right, Dan. Thank you so much. I know we're up against Me too. All right, Dan.
Thank you so much.
I know we're up against time.
Really appreciate the conversation as always.
Great to see you.
Great to see you.