The Wolf Of All Streets - Bitcoin's New All-Time High, Altcoin Season, Crypto Week & $9 Trillion For Bitcoin

Episode Date: July 18, 2025

Bitcoin smashed through $123K earlier this week, kicking off one of the wildest stretches of crypto news this year. From major legislation and Trump’s $9 trillion pension play to dormant whale moves and altcoin action, this week had it all. Nathaniel Whittemore joins Friday Five to break down the biggest stories you need to know. Nathaniel Whittemore: https://x.com/nlw ►► JOIN THE WOLF PACK - FREE Telegram group where I share daily updates on everything I'm watching and chat directly with all of you. 👉https://t.me/WolfOfAllStreet_bot ►► JOIN THE FREE WOLF DEN NEWSLETTER, DELIVERED EVERY WEEKDAY! 👉https://thewolfden.substack.com/ ►► 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.io/ Spotify: https://spoti.fi/30N5FDe Apple podcast: https://apple.co/3FASB2c #Bitcoin #Crypto #FridayFive 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.

Bitcoin made a new all-time high this week. Ethereum is outperforming, calling for alt season for many pundits. We have the genius Clarity and of course, Anti-CBDC acts all passing at various levels of becoming law. And of course, President Trump saying you might unlock $9 trillion worth of retirement money for our sweet, sweet Bitcoin and crypto. We've got a lot to unpack today on the Friday five. You've got NLW and I here and I to go through all of it. Thanks. We have yet another monster week in crypto news and a lot to unpack here on the Friday 5. You know, the summer has not been boring. I think that we can officially say this is the most eventful summer we've had in at least

the last, I don't know, in the 2020s for crypto. It's the Friday 500, I think. We've got these sort of honorable mention stories that weren't even going to be included that sort of started breaking over the past few days. Bitcoin topped 120K on report of Trump approving crypto investments for retirement accounts. So he's basically trying to sign an executive order here that will unlock many, many trillions and 401Ks and such for people to directly buy crypto. This wasn't even on our docket. Yeah. So this is this is the pump my bags executive order of 2025.

So this is not just about crypto. It's about basically making it like, you know, turn a whole slew of different types of alternative assets, making them appropriate for 401ks. My guess is that that will kick up a lot of conversation that asset managers are going to be pretty into it, you would assume because it unlocks a lot of their products that aren't available right now. So I don't know. I mean, I think that this one, it will get caught up in the dragnet of controversy around

crypto, even though it's about more than crypto. But at core, it's going to be a question of, you know, the never ending battle between personal freedom to make your own financial decisions on the one hand, and you know, the regime of consumer protection on the other. So pretty interesting stuff. And yeah, I think notable that it didn't even really crack the top five. Self-directed IRA companies would be so wrecked.

Yeah, yeah. That's been one of the biggest sort of trends. It's been actually really exciting when people could take their IRA out of these major platforms, go to a self-directed IRA, buy farmland, cows, and Bitcoin, and put it into their retirement account. But it seems like you might just be able to do that on eTrade now. So we'll be interested to see if this actually passes or what happens even if he does an executive order if it actually goes into law or happens. Yeah, yeah it's good. I mean look you know any anytime that you're

building a company around regulatory arbitrage you know there's a risk that the things go in the other direction, you know? Yeah, and sort of our hint here on the next story that was also an audible mention, crypto market cap tops 4 trillion for first time, solidifying major asset class position. I think the story here obviously goes back to one we've repeated over and over again is,

when will we see Bitcoin go up, consolidate, and then see all coins actually perform? And I think we can thank Tom Lee and friends for that being the case right now. Obviously, the interest in Ethereum treasury companies and Ethereum catching a huge bid, having half billion dollar days in ETF inflows. Actually, I believe yesterday BlackRock's ETF outperformed its Bitcoin ETF, which is pretty astounding. Clearly, though, right now now we're getting early iterations

or some hints of an alt season and 4 trillion in total market cap shows that. Yeah, I mean, the other piece which we didn't talk about and maybe should have been sort of somewhere buried in here, Coinbase went from in the monthly app rankings, went from I think like 465 to 164. I'm sure I'm wrong on the exact numbers, but that sort of order of magnitude, which is another indicator that there's some early Yeah, there

you go. Good. indicator that that that retail is finally coming back. I mean, one of the things that's been interesting about this cycle is, you know, let's put it this way, institutions got over Luna and FTX a lot faster than retail did, you know, or has. I think that there's still a lot of lingering like, thanks, but no thanks, even now. But you know, we are seeing some signals that maybe people are getting interested in again. And you know, that seems to be coming to bear finally. It's interesting, we kind of look at these signals from previous cycles

as reliable now, but I would say that they diminish with time as well. We always talk about Google searches for Bitcoin, but at this point, who the hell needs to Google search Bitcoin? Yep, absolutely. So it's like, yes, Google searches aren't back. That doesn't mean retail's here.

It just means that everybody knows about Bitcoin. I would also imagine that there's a lot of people who are now coming back after many years to crypto who have a Coinbase account. So I don't expect Coinbase to rocket to number one to be the final signal that we've got all season. Yeah. Although I don't know that that that one's always interesting, because just the you know, the I think that what pushes things up Apple is very attuned to velocity. So I wouldn't surprise me if a relatively small number of, of sort of new subscribers could drive it up. But in any case, certainly going up, you know, 300 positions or whatever it was, is a is a pretty good

indicator. So we've entitled the official first section, which is a funny title for us as crypto week shit show genius and clarity pass. And what a shit show it was. But we actually, I think got what we wanted here. You see Alan Otero, who I actually had on yesterday or two days ago, all three crypto bills just passed the house and the genius act is now headed to real tunnel Trump's desk to become the first major piece of crypto legislation signed into law.

I think what's most notable here is the numbers with which the Clarity Act specifically passed. I think we knew the Genius Act once the Freedom Compass got out of the way was going to happen. Donald Trump literally had his signing for today scheduled on the docket Monday as a total foregone conclusion that this was going to happen. But the Clarity Act, which is more market structure, 294 to 134 with 78 Democrats voting in favor, more than double the 35 expected, and more than the 71 who voted to pass FIT 21 last year.

That is a massive number, and you never see this level of bipartisan support for literally anything. This could be like, don't give cancer to unicorns and puppies act and it wouldn't have had this much bipartisan support. Yeah, I mean man, the absurdity of the path that it took to get here this week is, and I probably shouldn't say this out loud given that we both have daily content, but there is a lot to be said for just that, you know, just tuning into this show every week because it looked just absolutely insane for three days. So much so that the anti crypto Democrats were just sitting on their hands, you know, kind of joyously watching they didn't even have to get involved in this one because it was just an internal fricassee. For completeness for anyone who wasn't paying attention, the central question was whether the Genius Act was

enabled sort of a backdoor way to get CBDCs into America. So this is the Freedom Caucuses problem is, despite the fact that there was another anti CBDC act, they were concerned that the Genius Act itself didn't didn't cut that off. When all was said and done, Marjorie Taylor Green still wouldn't change her vote because of the mark of the beast system, which was the exact wording that she put in her tweet. But Trump had to haul their asses into the White House on Tuesday night to get them on board. And then

finally, it all came together. But you know, push comes to shove, it didn't matter, right? Like, all three things that were supposed to move forward in crypto week, moved forward in crypto week. And I think it's absolutely accurate, and you're absolutely correct to suggest that the most notable part of this was the overwhelming majority for this market structure bill, for the Clarity Act. You know, I haven't read yet, maybe because it's still fresh, like any sort of the policy wonk explanations of how much support it had. I don't know whether it's, so from here we have to go to the Senate. The Senate isn't just voting on this bill. They have to sort of, they're gonna take pieces of this,

combine it with things that Senator Gillibrand and Senator Lemmis had had done in the past. So maybe part of the, the sort of like the overwhelmingly is a signal that, yes, they want this done, but they know there's going to be a process where they get to dig into specifics more, you know, but still, it's, it's extremely notable to have over 300 votes in favor of this thing. Yeah, city market clarity is going to be difficult and it should be because it's actually

relatively complex. It requires a deep understanding of this industry and they have to absolutely get it right to not have major unintended consequences in the future. So I would actually hope that there's a lot of debate and amendments to clarity as it goes through. But clearly the House said, hey, let's get this done and throw it to the Senate to figure that out. Yep. Yep. Pretty much.

I think everybody's here for that. And at the end of the day, today we're going to have our first major piece of legislation, the Genius Act will be signed into law. And I think that the market has reflected the excitement around that. The next story, which you did a great breakdown on, so I'm just gonna let you run with this because I listened to it in the car the other day. Dormant Satoshi era Bitcoin whale moves 4 billion,

but it may not be a sell-off indicator. Dormant Bitcoin whale from 2011 awakens, moving 4.7 billion to exchanges. We got kind of a lot going on with this. Everybody's talking about it, but is this somebody that's intending to sell or is there another story? Maybe I'll leave the next article for as we continue into the conversation about it. Yeah, I mean, so so obviously, you know, this is a fun sort of crypto archaeology story,

initially, you know, 80,000 BTC move for the first time in, you know, 14 years. We talked last week, I think about the weirdness that it was already organized in these $10,000, you know, chunks. And it wasn't clear if it was, you know, movement from, you know, old wallets, which are generously called wallets, to new infrastructure. It wasn't clear if it was maybe about a potential sale. I think that's sort of the most obvious conclusion. Now that we've got these things moving to Galaxy, I think that people are more of the mindset that this is probably a sale, at least in part. But there are other reasons that you could move this to Galaxy. Let's basically it's it's not as definitive as moving it to finance, right? To just, you know, unload. But it's hard to say, you know, exactly what's going on.

If it was if it was a sale, the market ate it with no problem. You know, yeah, that might have been our dip to 115, yay. Yeah. Right? Which is, it's just a sounding that we're trading right back. I haven't looked, but I'm assuming right around 118, 119 already today, if not 120. But there's some other theories here. Maybe that these aren't specifically those coins,

but I've heard that a lot of people think it's Roger Veer. That was one of the- That was the initial, that was the initial, the leading contender. And then obviously we have, at the same time as a similar amount of tokens, coins are moving, we have the announcement of Adam Back's Bitcoin Standard Treasury Company.

This was first reported in a strange way actually, because my impression from the initial reporting was that because Cantor Fitzgerald's already involved in 21 with Tether and Jack Mallers and such that this was part of that but it seems that Cantor Fitzgerald was backing an entirely new Bitcoin standard treasury company. It was labeled as a sale of Bitcoin by Adam Back to these, but it seems like it's more of a transfer of his tokens into a Bitcoin treasury company. Maybe you can unpack this better than me because it feels like, A, the part I find astounding

is that these guys like Adam Back and Roger Beer, they just have hundreds of thousands of points. Well, couple interesting things here. The way that it was reported was Adam back rolled over, woke up, stretched and decided to sell 30,000 Bitcoin today. You know, that's kind of like the vibe. Now, Adam, for his part has aggressively maintained over over the years that you know, whatever his stack was, it wasn't it wasn't billionaire status. But it's not exactly clear like how much of this is block streams Bitcoin versus the other one that I missed. Like, it's very weird. One thing that is interesting, that's maybe a not not tinfoil, Hattie, but just sort of is, is something that's sort of vaguely talked about behind the scenes is, if you are a Bitcoin OG, who's looking for some amount of liquidity in in your stack, but who also is still firmly committed to Bitcoin, moving it into a Bitcoin treasury play is one of the better options that has become available as a way to get some liquidity on that on that stack. And this, you this, again, we don't even know how much of this is actually backspit coin versus blockstreams, Bitcoin versus whatever.

However, it has sort of been noted behind closed doors that this is something that some of the early classes are doing as a way to get liquidity without moving out of their Bitcoin, which I think is fine. It's unrealistic to expect people who have billions of dollars to just sit at their planted forever. So finding ways for them to get access to it is good. Yeah. You can take the cynical view or the positive view. It doesn't really matter. What's happening here is that we have a way for Bitcoin billionaires to insert themselves into the normal billionaire playbook of buy, borrow, die.

You send your billion dollars worth of Bitcoin to a treasury company, you haven't sold it. So you don't have the taxable transaction. You basically are exchanging that Bitcoin for stock in a publicly traded company that's trading at a multiple. So even if it was one-to-one, this is a good deal for them. But if it's two or three to one, you're getting a lot more and then you can borrow against that stock until the day you die.

Yep. And never sell anything, never pay taxes and you get to keep the street cred like you invested in a Bitcoin treasury company rather than say, hey, yeah, dude, it's 120 grand. I'm selling some of this. Yeah. I mean, honestly, this is, I think, one of the best uses for these Bitcoin treasury companies that we've had. It's a sort of a, it's an alternative approach to, you know, BlockFi, basically, like, you know, at scale and at size.

Yeah, listen, for these guys, I can tell you that, you know, I privately have had conversations with the number of the bigger ones, and this kind of liquidity is drying up. I think most of the guys who are going to do it have done it or have looked at it or have a plan. So these like multi-billion dollar raises I think are going to become fewer and far between which is fine.

I mean even Bloomberg here, everyone wants a Bitcoin treasury, right? And you'll see we're getting Ethereum treasury companies, Thomas Lee, obviously the new Michael Saylor of Ethereum. I wrote about that in my newsletter this morning. But, you know, hyper liquid treasury companies, next RP treasury companies, these are all the same thing. Nobody like a hyper liquid treasury company is not a deep belief that hyper liquid is the greatest balance sheet asset of all time. It's a way to for people who are holding a shit ton of a coin to transfer it somewhere and get some liquidity when they couldn't go sell that on the open market if their lives depended on it.

Yeah, I mean, look, you know, I think that it's of all stripes is that there's a weird melange of traders, you know, short term, long term and everything in between. And, you know, free markets are going to evolve lots and lots of different options. So it's kind of just everyone's along for the ride and people are going to make money where they can. I will say I've been critical of these. I think your take is the best. I think it's reasonable that these people would do this. I do think a lot of retail will once again get wrecked when they buy the stock at the top. But I will say that one thing I like from the pitches I'm hearing is that people are realizing that simply sending coins to a treasury company is not going to cut it now, that so many people have done it. And I do think they're finding

novel ways now the new pitches that I'm seeing to actually make these meaningful companies that do something differentiated from the others. So I think this will advance the ball on much more compelling ways for public companies to hold crypto. Yep, yep. Look, there's there's there's always learnings in the wreckage. The hope is that, God, it's so optimistic I don't even want to air it, but maybe the interaction with the public markets creates some speed bumps that slow down the full insanity of liquid crypto, but we'll just have to wait and see.

Okay. So the next story, which is another absolutely wild one that the forensic cryptologists have been going nuts over, obviously is the story that the United States Marshals, here you go, did the US sell 85% of its Bitcoin holdings, Marshals FOIA report sparks debate. So David Bailey, I believe in March said right here,

I'll pay $10,000 to the first journalist who can get US Marshals to confirm the quantity of Bitcoin and crypto they're currently holding. We had a Freedom of Information Act where a journalist, this person right here, not even gonna try to pronounce that, went out and said, yeah, they got about 29,000 Bitcoin. This leads down so many paths with so many questions.

A, is the US Marshal the only holder of United States Bitcoin. I don't know that, but that seems to be the assumption by people. Actually, she went ahead and unpacked that and said, this is only forfeited and not seized. So I think there might be some differentiation there. Also, we have the executive order from Trump on the strategic Bitcoin reserve that basically said, I believe he had 90 days or 680 days, whatever it was to get a report and get an

audit and this sort of preempted that but that is within a week. That date is coming up. So we're supposed to get answers on this as well. Maybe you can unpack this more because I'm seeing so many takes that are so inconsistent. Well, I think that first of all, a whole bunch of people realize that all of their thoughts about this were just based on whatever some other person had said,

right, you know, like where these numbers of estimates had come from and things like that. Like, you know, I looked credit to David Bailey for creating a mechanism to have someone go out and do the thing. Now, Lola literally just filed an FOIAI request like, you know, a week ago or something like that. And to their credit, they got right back to her, you know, pretty quickly. I think that it brings up all the questions that you just articulated. Where does Bitcoin in the US government

live? Are there other pockets, You know, were people just assuming it was all in this one spot, but it's actually spread over? But really what it highlights is the need for a thing that was already requested, you know, as you just discussed, which is an audit for where this is. You better believe that this is gonna create

a whole lot of buzz. I think we saw Senator Lummis tweeting about this yesterday. There's, you know, there's gonna be a lot of pressure to actually get that report done. I think there was probably someone who had it, who's had it at the bottom of their to do list for, you know, three months now, who's going to be working this weekend. You know, that's, that's the big implication of this, I think. Yeah, I mean, listen, if this is entirely true, it's wildly disappointing that the United States strategic Bitcoin reserve is now effectively a rounding error for someone like China.

Right? I mean, I'm not I'm not saying that 30,000 Bitcoin is something to sneeze at. But when you're talking about the central bank of the world's largest economy, that's literally like an hour of our national debt. Right? Yeah. So it's not a big deal there. I guess the positive view is,

hey, we have to buy a lot more Bitcoin. That's what people are saying. I don't really take that view. I think we need a lot more information to figure out exactly what's going on here. It definitely shows what an absolute nightmare, even doing a simple financial audit of our Bitcoin holdings is.

Also, by the way, if we only have 30,000 Bitcoin left, that means that the United States had to have sold off Bitfinex Bitcoin, which I think everybody with a rational brain agrees should have been Bitfinex's Bitcoin. Yeah. If I were a betting man, I would say that this is a matter of a very specific request asking for one group's Bitcoin holdings that got the information that they asked for in a very specific way. I'm definitely not getting all flustered until we have way more information. Yeah, I agree with that.

I love that we can even have conversations like this about Bitcoin in the United States government in 2025 though. I actually just really quickly as an addition, I asked Perrienne Boring basically about this, I think two days ago on Spaces. Obviously she's relatively close to everything happening in Washington. And she had a take that was super surprising.

And she said, was a maybe. But she basically said that when Trump wrote the executive order, there's a lot of rumors that these agencies were told in the executive order to send all of their Bitcoin to Treasury. Right? So we don't have an audit at all of Treasury. And she said that a lot of them rather than send their Bitcoin to Treasury said this money is ours and basically sold it so that they would continue to have that money within their agency rather than having to transfer it out. And she said that explains why we had such muted price action

when there was so much excitement about Trump earlier in the year, because after the executive order, it was very possible that there was massive selling from different agencies in the United States government who didn't want to take that Bitcoin balance and transfer it to Treasury. That sounds like something for the sluths to dig into. No idea if it's true, but I've never heard Peria and tell me

something that seemed like a wild tin foil hat theory, right? I mean, she's about as like conservative and honest as it gets. So definitely something I'm just gonna kind of have a mental note on our final story here today is macro US core CPI rises less than expected. Again, despite terrified back, okay, but let's actually just talk about pal markets rattled by credible threat of Trump trying to fire pal. So we had a story that he had written up a letter to fire

pal, then he denied that he had written up a letter to fire pal. Everyone in the right mind knows that he can't actually fire pal unless he basically goes so far out on the borderline of dancing with violating the Constitution. And what the hell's going on here, man? Oh, my god, Powell's nerves, man. That's just like, so okay, so he says he's got a, you know, rumors that he's got a got a fire Powell, he walks it back. But the way that he walks it back is saying, No, I'm probably not gonna fire Powell, he walks it back. But the way that he walks it back is saying, No, I'm probably

not gonna fire Powell. Market says they wouldn't like it. Unless there's some big fraud that's happening. Like, I don't know, some people are saying that the buildings that they're renovating is, you know, sick. And then he goes on to articulate a case that the renovations of fed buildings are fraudulent. It's like, Oh my God, who knows? Yeah, well, the market in mind really quickly is that we've seen there's like the clearest playbook of the Trump administration when he wants to get something done or spread a narrative. He's so good at this. He takes one of his cabinet

members. And he's like, your job is to make noise about this thing. Like it was Lutnick with tariffs at the very beginning, talking the narrative that obviously never came to fruition, that we're going to get the internal revenue service would be the external revenue service and all these. And now he's got Pulte just attacking Powell relentlessly all day every day. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it is also the construction of some people say is a very, very useful one, you know, means means nothing and everything all at once, depending on what you want to hear.

Look, I think that markets have been clear. It's like, you know, it's a it's a standoff every time he talks about this markets show that they don't want it, you know, it's a battle. But I think it's I think that mostly, even for someone who, you know, kind of decides mostly to pick all the battles, rather than picking their battles carefully, it feels to me like Trump has decided somewhere along the way that he's going to get in his digs, but this is a battle that he's not going to pick. The line of sight is close enough on the horizon that he's mostly interested in sort of diminishing credibility more than

actually getting him out. I think what might be actually more interesting to watch is how the contenders who are kind of like using their public statements to basically audition for this role, how they're threading the needle between Fed independents but also saying what Trump wants to hear. So if you look at Kevin Warsh's statements recently, how he's been articulating, you know, a need for a better relationship between treasury and the, and the, and the Fed. But that's not about losing Fed independence, but you know, they're being limited independence.

Like it's, it's fascinating to watch that sort of narrative jockeying, uh, because they're all trying to anticipate what's going to kind of pass muster for both Congress as well as Trump. Yeah. Man. They give us something to talk about every day. They give the financial media something to talk about every day.

It is absolutely peak entertainment. I'm going to be honest, I don't like the Fed, obviously, I'm a big pointer. I don't love Jerome Powell. I think he's been wrong more than right, certainly on the way up with transitory inflation. But right now, we've got incredibly strong economic data, if you believe it, and markets at all time highs. incredibly strong economic data, if you believe it, and markets at all time highs, that is not an environment where you cut rates. Yeah. Yeah.

Like I just don't see where the bullying comes from. Given I think mortgages, it would be nice if they were down below 6.5% or wherever they continue to hold up to. So that would be nice, but last I checked when they actually did pivot and lower rates, interest rates on houses and mortgages went up. So yeah, that didn't work anyways. Look, you know, here, here's a weird, weird optimism. One of the things that that Trump does for markets, you know, markets are addicted to the to the news drip, right? They're addicted to whatever latest signal might provide some alpha and some insight into what's gonna happen next.

To a degree that like might be problematic, right? It's extremely, it creates extreme short-termism rather than sort of like big long-term fundamental thinking. We have to talk about this sort of divide all the time. Trump is in some ways retraining markets to be a little less freaked in the, or at least be really willing to walk back there freaked outness, because it's just so so volatile about you know, what comes out that there's less signal in the

signal, you know, and I don't necessarily think it's that bad for markets. If at the end of all of this, they just didn't stress out quite as much about every single new thing that was reported by, you know, Walter Bloomberg. But you know, who knows, maybe that's overly optimistic. Well, it gives us a job, as I said, so I can't I can't be mad. This has been a very entertaining summer when usually we would have been out talking about touching grass and we're getting real real movement here. I think that the promises of this administration are largely being filled. Whenever you think of Donald Trump, if we're just zooming in on this

being a crypto show and how it's affected our industry, just go back a year, man, and think about how miserable we were. I mean, this week was a perfect example of this, like absolute chaos to get there. But all three things that were supposed to be signed were, you know, we're, we're passed for past. And so if you're kind of outcomes oriented and focused on results more than process, you know, it's hard to it's hard to have too many complaints right now.

Well, guys, I highly recommend you listen to the breakdown every day, like I do, as I've said to you 1000 times on the show, besides listening to the all in podcast for like seven minutes once every six months. The breakdown is the only thing that I regularly listen to. And you go into much more depth on most of these same topics throughout the week. And it's just incredibly comprehensive and powerful. And everybody should be listening to it. So I highly recommend that you guys

all listen to the breakdown. Otherwise, give it lw a follow. And I think we'll see you guys next Friday to the breakdown. Otherwise, give NLW a follow, and I think we'll see you guys next Friday, right? I'll be here. Thank you, everybody. See you next week. Bye, guys. Bye.

Let's go.