The Wolf Of All Streets - Bitcoin’s Fate Is Being Decided Right Now! 6 Regulatory Paths Collide

Episode Date: January 23, 2026

Bitcoin is increasingly being shaped not just by markets, but by policy, as regulators around the world split into six distinct regulatory paths that could dramatically alter adoption, capital flows, and innovation. From Washington’s stalled legislation and shifting SEC–CFTC dynamics to global divergence between enforcement-heavy regimes and innovation-friendly frameworks, today’s stories highlight a growing reality: regulatory clarity is becoming a competitive advantage.

According to Pricewaterhouse Cooper's, Bitcoin is at a crossroads with six potential regulatory regulatory paths that could decide its future. And many companies and participants in the crypto industry will decide which regulatory environment to operate in moving forward. That was the most butchered intro I've ever done. So shut up and go on with the show. Good morning, you delicious, delectable, derelict little divas. It's nice to see you today. As you can see, it is snowing heavily in sunny Florida. Actually, it started snowing in Florida last week, but I'm not in Florida.

I have decided big decision to move my corporate offices of the Wolf of All Streets at all lc.gov to Greenland. Because here in Greenland, we have the opportunity to forge a news. beneficial crypto regulatory and legislative environment under the auspices of our fearless leader Donald Trump, who will be the president of all countries in the northern, southern, eastern, eastern hemispheres. So, yeah, we're here in Greenland. It is a bit cold outside, but I've decided to just make the jump as a proud American and to lead the charge into a new territory here. And listen, I said I butchered that intro, right? I butchered it pretty bad. We're going to take a look

of the market really quick. Bitcoin's at $89,207. Literally nobody cares. We can talk about Bitcoin price endlessly, but it'll probably be the same in a week or two months or when the United States inevitably takes over France. $89,200 for a single Bitcoin. The rest of the market kind of chopping around up or down 1% at any given period. But yeah, as I said, sort of in the intro before I stumbled over all my words and couldn't say regulatory. Couldn't say regulatory. PWC map six global regulatory trends shaping crypto in 2026.

And this is really a story of how different countries are going to approach regulating and legislating our beloved crypto industry. They laid out six basically different ways that it could happen. We've got innovation-friendly frameworks, which are clear rules or licensing regimes, enforcement-first regulation,

which harkens back to the era, of Mr. Burns, aka Gary Gensler, fragmented oversight, multiple regulators with overlapping or conflicting authority, state-controlled or restrictive models, communism, regulatory arbitrage zones. This is, you know, jurisdictions that exploit global inconsistency to attract crypto firms by offering minimal oversight or tax advantages. Let's think about the Bermudas and the Bahamas and the dubais of the world. And of course, the wait and see approach, which is the one that many will take, which is just wait and see what the United States does and copy it. But Pricewaterhouse Cooper making a very, very definitive point here

that they believe that the future of crypto will be dependent on the regulatory arbitrage and the district that you decide to do business in and that now regulation is becoming a competitive weapon for all of the countries of this beautiful world. I don't even know why we're talking about other countries when we know they're all going to be part of the United States. But the United States is going to be the entire world presided over in Donald Trump's seventh term as governor of the planet. All right. So that was the points here from Pricewaterhouse. Cooper's digging into the next story of the day.

We've got booze man, a man who loves to booze. Releases new GOP-only crypto draft. It's time we move this bill. The Senate Ag chair said in a statement. I still think it's hilarious that we are largely regulated by the CFDC. which is overseen by the Agriculture Committee, which makes sense, I guess, because we're commodities like corn and frozen concentrated orange juice,

$5 to whoever gets the frozen concentrated orange juice reference. I'm not actually going to pay you. But either way, it's from trading places. If you guys seen trading places, Dan Aykroyd, Eddie Murphy, true classic. Anyways, we have a Senate markup coming from this committee for the Clarity Act, but we still can't get one from the actual finance committee led by Tim Scott.

And this one is only Republicans. And so this is like a big story, apparently, that we're getting a markup on a bill. But there's this bill. There's the one coming out of the finance committee. There's another one in Congress. And Donald Trump's not signing any of them. And Democrats haven't even looked at it. So I remind you once again that, you know, we thought that this is going to pass.

We thought that the Clarity Act was really important and that it was going to, you know, spark an alt season the likes of nobody has ever seen. And it's just not happening, guys. I'm kind of tired of talking about the Clarity Act at this point because it seems so absolutely dead that it's basically a worthless venture to even spend our time on it. But that's what we've been reduced to now on crypto channels. Crypto Channel. My crypto channel is now political trolling talking about legislation and regulation. and regulation and making stupid comments about Greenland,

although it is warm by this fireplace. Right? I was actually having a conversation recently about what we're doing with Crypto Town Hall, which is our Twitter spaces. That happens at 10, 15 a.m. Eastern Standard Time every single day, hosted by myself and Dave Weissberger and the ghosts of Mario Nafel and Rand Nooner.

We don't even have crypto to talk about. Yesterday was such a refreshing conversation here with John Wu from Avalanche because he actually talked about stuff that's happening on blockchain that isn't the tokenization of real world assets, which we're not going to be able to participate in at all, stable coins, or how Donald Trump is likely to pump our bags

with a strategic Bitcoin reserve of tokens that we steal selectively from other countries. That's what we do to get a strategic Bitcoin reserve. There's very little to talk about in crypto right now, and that doesn't mean that things aren't being built. They are. It just means that nobody cares what's being built if they know that the price isn't going to move as a result of it.

And if you're wondering why the Clarity Act is unlikely to pass right, now we've got the Don's son himself, Eric Trump here, with a quick quip and quote and clip that we can show you right here. Let's see what Eric Trump has to say. The big banks have been an absolute monopoly over our financial system for for years. You and I have joked about it a thousand times. You know, why can't you send a wire transfer past five o'clock on a Friday afternoon? You know why? Because the big banks would love to take, you know, hundreds of billions of dollars and have it sit there and clip interest off of it over the course of a long weekend, you know, as opposed to laying you just efficiently move that money using modern day technology, you know, and having a separate wallet

two seconds later, they want to be able to use their money. They want to be able to arbitrage your money. And so, you know, the big banks are doing everything they can to stop some of the crypto legislation for obvious reasons. Why should- It's kind of amazing when you think of it that we got the Genius Act passed with any language that allowed Coinbase and the others to offer rewards, rewards, yield on stable coins. when we know that the banks absolutely hate this and it's bad for their future business. But I do think in this case that Eric Trump is obviously correct. The banks do not want a more efficient system.

They certainly don't want to pass on yields down to you, the lowly customer that they depend on for their money. We know that J.B. Morgan made a casual $25 billion just last quarter on the interest that they could have paid to their customers who are holding money with them. This is fundamentally how the banks make their money. and they have zero interest in allowing us to participate in that. Now, speaking of the big banks, we have this amazing story right here, also going back to the Trumps, that Trump sues Jamie Diamond, J.P. Morgan, Chase, over debanking the suit calls political.

President Donald Trump suing J.P. Morgan, Chase, and its CEO, he named Jamie Diamond, right? They've been having a little tit for tad about tariffs and things of late, so sue him. for closing his and related entities accounts in early 2021 in what the lawsuit says were political actions. The lawsuit seeks at least $5 billion in damages. Quote, while we regret President Trump has sued us, we believe the suit has no merit, J.P. Morgan said. Now, I mean, I can only anecdotally speak about J.P. Morgan, not a huge fan, but I do have a Chase Bank account for a certain entity. And you'll hear about this story more on one of my podcasts I recorded because I was losing my damn mind about two days ago trying to send a wire. Just like Eric Trump said, I literally was trying to send money to my kid's school for charity.

My wife gets a text that it's fraud. I go to call them. They don't answer. Then I go to sign into my bank account. Bank account completely locked out online because of a fraud alert. So I call the number back. I answer, I'm not kidding. at least 17 questions.

What color was my car in 2014? Like, has anybody compelled me to do this? Did J.P. Morgan call me to ask me to send the money? Have I verified via email and phone call, the person that I'm sending the money to? Absolute insanity. They finally let me back into my bank account, which, by the way, they were like at the beginning of the call, we need your account number to proceed. And I'm like, I can't get my fucking account number.

It's in the online banking, you idiot. It's not in my brain. I can't even sign on to get it. So that took me like 20. more minutes. Not kidding, this was an hour and a half process. They're like, you need to redo the wire. Back into the bank account. Can't re-execute the one. Had to type in all the numbers again, do it again. What happens 15 minutes later? Fraud alert. I get a call from JP Morgan. We need to clear this wire, sir. Can we ask you 27 more questions? The exact same process a second time,

just to send my own money to a charity at my kid's school. It was one of the most insane processes. I think that one of my producers was videoing me, and I never lose it on customer service people. I don't believe in doing that. But I said to the woman, I'm well aware this is not your fault, that you are just doing your job, but this is insane and fuck Jamie Diamond.

You go tell your CEO that I said, fuck him. She didn't. I don't think she did. I don't know if she has them on speed dial. To be honest, she sounded vaguely foreign. I'm not sure that she was operating from the United States or knows who Jamie Diamond is. But oh my God, it was the absolute worst. I was just trying to send money. So I'm going to be honest, man, cheering for Trump here. Hope he slays the dragon. I hope that Jamie Diamond has to sell one of his 17 homes in the Hamptons to help pay this $5 billion fine because we know that he has 17 homes in the Hampton. By the way, this makes me remind me when looking at the snow behind me and thinking about Jamie Diamond, do you remember last year when he had his arm in a cast or something and he was at Davos,

which has been happening this week, and they didn't interview with him on Bitcoin. He was like, Bitcoin, this is the last time I swear that I'm ever talking about the Bitcoins. It's a scam and all that. Now we know that he's kind of like Bitcoin friendly. But all of this thought leading me to wondering how you get the most powerful people on the world to do outdoor interviews in the snow every year. Like every single year you have, it's like Larry Fink, and he's in like 17 jackets with his earmuffs on, doing interviews on like CNBC out in the snow. Are they really that powerful at the World Economic Forum that they can force the wealthiest people on the planet to sit in the freezing cold just to talk about Bitcoin?

I don't know. But they also got Larry Fink to sit down with Elon Musk this year. And by the way, when did we start as an industry? A, I know when we started cheering for politicians and for institutions because we thought, frankly, they would pump our bags, which hasn't happened. But when did we start sending our representatives to the World Economic Forum and getting really excited that the guys who were telling us to, like, eat bugs and like it, are now like our friends and the crypto industry is going to go lobby them for our own self-interest.

I am old enough to remember when we mocked the World Economic Forum for being the Illuminati that was trying to take over the world. And now we're like, Brian Armstrong looks great in that seat in the snow. honestly like we have completely lost the plot as an industry i will continue to show up every day and do my show and cover the things that are important which may be politics but i want to remind you that davos sucks and the world economic forum are not your friends and us having to go tout and bend the need to like the european central bankers is not something that i'm particularly excited about or here to cheer for and i kind of feel the same way right now about politics and

and the Jamie Diamonds of the world and all of them. Honestly, dude, we don't need any of them. But that said, let's go back to politics. Trump-era brings United SECFTC crypto push in Washington, showcase what's basically happening here, just to give you the quick and dirty is that the SEC and CFDC are actively working together now to try to give us sensible regulation on crypto. You may remember that we had a pissing contest between Gary Gensler and the CFDC

for four years under the last administration, where Derek Gensler would say, I get to regulate all of. He didn't say it like that. That wasn't even a good voice. But he would say that he got to regulate everything and everything was security and the CFTC was no, no, no. These are commodities, man.

Like, let it, come on, man, we may be smaller than you at the SEC, but we still get to regulate some things. They were not like Nate Dogged and Warren G who regulated together. They were regulating separately. That was a rap reference for those who don't know the song. Regulatory. Anyways, so we are actually getting this favorable environment where the CFTC and SEC will be working together. But let's talk about things that maybe are not quite as favorable.

And that is the U.S. Treasury's face a 1.7 trillion EU dump over Greenland, forcing shift to Bitcoin of dollar safety advantages. Well, I could have just looked up to see who wrote this story and known that it wasn't going to be a Bloomberg or CNBC, that it was going to be something with crypto in the title. Because the new. notion that because somebody might sell you United States Treasury's Bitcoin is going to go up because it's a safety valve is the dumbest shit we've been saying to ourselves to be able to sleep at night, the ultimate cope that has no basis in any sort of reality. I was actually having this debate on Twitter today this morning with another person with a lot of followers,

right? I said, why in our weird little echo chamber do we believe that every time any asset goes up, there's an inevitable rotation coming to our thing. Oh my God, guys, gold and silver are up. When those finally die, everybody is going to buy chain link. It's inevitable. It's the only path. It's the only path. There's nothing else in the world that could possibly take that hotball of money and move it into, right? Everybody's saying, well, when that money comes, can you imagine? Silver's $5 trillion and gold's like $30 trillion. If just $1 trillion, rounded to four divided by 7 minus 9 gold makes Bitcoin an 87 trillion dollar asset by last Tuesday. Right?

I just don't understand why there would be a forced shift to Bitcoin if there's a problem with the dollar. Yes, that's a great narrative that we love. But like the rest of the world doesn't go, oh shit, I'm in trouble. I need to go buy Bitcoin. It just doesn't happen. But that said, it is a pretty big deal that there's likely at 1.6. trillion dump of United States treasuries that clearly nobody wants unless their name is

circle or tether. This is the real case actually for stable coins is that nobody wants the United States crappy debt anymore. And so we can just sell it to the stable coin issuers or issue more stable coins. We'll back it with treasuries and send those around the world. Yeah, man, I'm not trying to be bearish or negative. I just don't believe that you can naturally default to Bitcoin goes up because something else went up and now we're going to get that money. That money could go literally anywhere. It could go into Pokemon cards, right? I think Pokemon cards have as good of a chance as your average all coin of going up as a result of Bitcoin, you know, silver and gold going up.

And also, like, metals are not a monolith, right? It's not one huge industry and all that money goes from one place to the next. gold is really going up because central banks have been buying it because they're dumping treasuries and buying gold because they're not comfortable with their relationship with the United States and they want to hoard more of a you know they want to scrooge McDucket and go diving and swimming through their gold vaults that's what's happening in central banks I've seen live feeds of it but silver is a little different I think silver but that's only a five trillion dollar asset actually Bitcoin was bigger than silver for a little while there but only a five trillion dollar

asset. Silver, I think that is retail, FOMO, people who maybe would be the alt-coin-type buyers buying it because they think that they can sell up because they heard about it on the news and it's the thing that's going to make them rich and it's going up. But I don't even think that gold and silver money are necessarily the same. So I don't think you can just say the money from metals is going to trickle down into crypto. I certainly don't think that you can say that because people are selling treasuries on a national level that that money is somehow going to go to Bitcoin. Like, is Finland right now like, damn it, what are we going to do with? all this cash we have from these treasuries by ex-rp.

Obviously. Obviously, that's the next step. So we have another story here that I think is really, really interesting. Not at all. FTAX exec, Carolyn Ellison is now a free woman. She looks free. She looks free. I wonder what her experience in prison was like, to be honest.

But now she's out, and it's raising a lot of... I can't mock her appearance. I see you guys are looking. looking at me, right? Huh? We got to get Carolyn Allison for a podcast. That's why I just heard from the back. We're going to get a camera and Mike on these guys who are back behind the scenes here. We're going to get Carolyn on for a podcast. I promise you. I don't know. Honestly, I don't know if I can be in a room with all that hotness at once. But FDX exec, Carolyn Ellison is now a free woman. So like Sam's going to be in jail for a really, really long time. But clearly she flipped all over

her ex-boyfriend and she's paying the price for her telling the truth and she's out now. Why are we even talking about her? Carol Dillian said. Ledger plots four billion in New York IPO. Here's six other crypto firms planning to go public. First of all, like, it blows my mind. When you think about it, we kind of think about ourselves as a nascent, small industry. But think about how many companies in crypto are able to go public with multi-billion-dollar value.

And Ledger, like last I checked, their business is selling hardware wallets. I would argue that most people in crypto or certainly most people own crypto don't own a hardware wallet because they probably keep their money on exchanges. There's multiple very viable, exciting hardware wallet options. So Ledger isn't even the only one. They've definitely been hacked a couple times for all of our data. And I blame Ledger to some degree for the 74 texts I get a day telling me about a new trading strategy or trying to get into my non-existent Coinbase account. But that's neither here

and there. It's actually astounding to me that they sell enough hardware wallets and that this industry is big enough to have a $4 billion IPO. But that said, this is obviously a continuation of the IPO season we saw with Bullish and E. Toro and Circle from last year. There's a lot of other companies that are planning to go public this year. We've got CERTIC. That's the Web3 security firm. They do a lot of the audits for all the points that are completely. dead. So that's exciting. They announced this at the World Economic Forum. I mean, nothing against CERTIC, but does that not illustrate my point before?

They're like, you know, where can we make the most impact with our likely IPO announcement? We're going to go to Davos. Like, are the crypto DGens who are going to be excited about a CERTIC ICO or IPO hanging out at the World Economic Forum? Probably not Cracking. I think we are all actually very excited to see Cracking go public here for that. Consensus infrastructure, a crypto infrastructure giant consensus.

It's said to be in talks with J.B. Morgan and Goldman Sachs. By the way, every single one of these, like J.B. Morgan and Goldman Sachs with the bankers go public. Evernorth, which is apparently an XRP treasury firm, likely to go public this year. And Amoka Brands, that's awesome. We're going to have you back on the show very, very soon. One of my favorites. So they're likely to go public this year. And, of course, I say bit, bit thumb.

I've heard Korean's pronounced Bitum Bitum you could be a person with buy thumbs which is two thumbs

but has two thumbs and excited about this ICO this IPO this guy buy thumbs right but I think it's very clear to see that a lot of companies

the crypto industry is still looking to get public get that huge capital inflow, make that money, cash out right now while they can. And I think that's very, very exciting. But to be honest, like, these all can't do well and your altcoins also do well. It's just not possible. There's just not enough money in the world interested in buying or gaining exposure to crypto in different ways that all these things can be successful. The IPOs have been

successful. Digital asset treasury companies had their moment up and down. We have all these ICOs lining up. I mean, I just don't see where the money comes for, A, all of these to be successful, but also, once again, I always kind of joke, but, you know, coin number 47 on coin market cap to also go up. All of these cannibalize one another, and I just don't think that this is a big enough market or that there's enough potential money coming in. We can't even get, like, retail to buy Bitcoin right now. So I would say that this is going to continue to cannibalize the alt market and makes alt-season even less likely. We did have a lot. We did have a lot of it. We did have a major IPO yesterday. Of course, that was BitGo. That's very excited. I'm excited for Mike

Belchie. He's probably been on the show four or five times. Great guy, a great company. So yeah, they're heading into their second day. They launched it at 18 bucks after raising 200 million-ish dollars. They were up as high as 35 percent during the day, paired all those gains throughout the day and ended up closing marginally a few percent above where they launched. But by all definitions, a successful launch. We also found out that this Chad right here, who got out of jail before Carolyn Ellison, which I think is justice. What if the two of them were in jail together? That would be crazy. Champaign-Bing's out-backed Wisey Lab said Thursday that it made a strategic investment in Bitco's initial public offering. The firm did not disclose size of the investment,

but said it is a strategic institutional investor in Bitcoin. Further prove, I'm telling you, all the money is going into the public equity side of the crypto industry. It makes you really wonder what is going to really be a catalyst for all coins to move anytime soon. It's supposed to be like, you know, Bitcoin goes up and it consolidates and all coins go. This hasn't happened. Maybe my own fear, uncertainty, and doubt about the all coin market is a signal that we're near bottom. It's likely to go up, but I've kind of felt that way for years now.

So I'm not sure if we're just rationally down or if maybe. you know, this market is not looking too hot. That's all the stories that I have for you guys today. It was a weird week. Once again, kind of focused on the World Economic Forum and politics, policy, job numbers, and the economy. I miss the days when we could just look at a chart or your friend could just tell you, hey, buy this thing and it would go up 100x. Seems like those days are gone.

Every time I talk to somebody now who's like big in crypto, they're like Bitcoin, Ethereum and Solana. It's all I own. I own the large caps. The blue chips. George, I have George from Cryptos R Us on tomorrow. We recorded, and that's what he said. He's like, he did like this really cool clash royale thing on a pump fun that's actually

been excited. But then the rest of his portfolio is those. When I talked to Rand Nooner, I'm like, you know, what's in your portfolio? He's like, well, throughout time, I told my guys that they just need to find money to buy Bitcoin every week, which meant selling all the garbage that was in our portfolio over time just to buy Bitcoin. I mean, even the most, like, aggressive alt-coin believers over time have consolidated their portfolios into just a few assets at the top. And who can blame them?

That's sort of been my strategy. Obviously, you watch me do it with Archpublic over and over and over and over again. Yeah. So anyways, guys, I'm going to let you go. You know, got to go out there and explore Greenland lay claim to Melker territory up here while nobody owns it, clearly. I did not bring a jacket. As you can see, I'm sitting here in short sleeves in front of the snow. But I'm going to be honest, guys, cold never bothered me anyway.

That was frozen reference. AI is reshaping the world. But right now it's stuck in the hands of just a few big players. But what if AI could run openly, verifiably, and on chain? That's what ZeroG is building. The world's first decentralized AI operating system open to everyone. Imagine a network where you don't just trade tokens, you train store and run independent AI models at scale. No lock-ins, no black boxes, no single point of failure.

Just quick, cost-effective, auditable AI that anyone can build. If you believe the future of AI should be a public good and not just another corporate monopoly, join us at 0g.aI. That's the number zero and the letter g.aI.