The Wolf Of All Streets - Crypto Market To Reach $50 Trillion?
Episode Date: July 25, 2025Retail investors are surging back into alts — but is this a warning sign for the cycle? We’re breaking down the Senate’s new crypto market structure bill, JPMorgan’s move to lend against crypt...o, Goldman and BNY’s tokenized money market play, and Coinbase launching perpetuals for US traders. Plus, David Bailey’s hedge fund sees a 640% gain... but is treasury concentration now a risk to Bitcoin? 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.
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Is the entire crypto market cap headed to $50 trillion?
Not my words, but those of our friend Dan Tapiero.
We're going to discuss that and all of the massive news stories of this week here on
the Friday 5 with NLW.
Let's go. Good morning, everybody.
And happy Friday.
Let's talk about really big numbers.
We've got Dan Tapiero here, friend of the show.
He's crypto ecosystem reaching 50 trillion as he launches the new 500 million fund under
50 T rebrand. So his crypto ecosystem reaching 50 trillion as he launches the new 500 million fund under
50 t rebrand.
He used to be 10 t for those who remember because he thought crypto go to 10 trillion.
I always mocked him and said, why so bearish?
I guess he listened.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You know, changing times require changing updates, you know.
Yeah.
I mean, 50 50 trillion is a big number.
Actually though, I mean, you know, stablecoins
count as a part of the crypto market cap. And if they explode to, you know, 1020 trillion
over the next 10 years, this is pretty doable. Yeah, I mean, 50 trillion is sounds insane,
except when you realize it's a 10x from here. And also that like, you know, there's a there's
a calculation going on here about sort of the general increase in global wealth, what
portion of that, you know, resides in crypto, what portion of that is represented
on crypto, you know, there's a lot that goes into that, right?
I think, you know, Dan is a sophisticated investor.
He's not saying, you know, Dogecoin goes to a trillion or anything like that.
This is a much, much sort of more comprehensive prediction.
If I put that headline, I would get another warning and get a strike.
Dogecoin was going to do that.
They would tell me that it was harmful content again.
Here we go, though, with our first real story of the day.
Senate will end up passing House version of crypto market structure, says Tom Emmer.
This isn't exactly the story.
Obviously, the story, as we know, is that genius was passed into law last week.
Going to the Senate, you actually
unpacked this exceptionally well on the breakdown. This week, usually, there's not much deference to
the House from the Senate, which kind of rewrite their own bill and send it back and say, Hey,
guys, sign this. We actually got an interesting and quick write up from the Senate. And it's not
exactly the house version. So maybe you can explain this further.
Yeah, so it's interesting.
So we didn't really get like a full version of the bill,
or at least what we would have expected.
The House version of this bill is, you know,
hundreds of pages of long.
What we got from the Senate was 20 something pages,
maybe 30 something pages.
It was really short relative to what you would expect. And the main point of
differences around how to handle the securities commodities
classification sort of piece of things, right? Whereas in the
House Bill, there's a whole system for how a security like
thing becomes not a security. In the Senate conversion of the bill,
they're basically just treated as not a security a priori
because they're named as some different type of asset class,
an ancillary asset.
It's basically, it harkens back to the original
Lummis-Jillibrand bill from a few years ago,
sort of closer to their conception.
You know, the key point,
I think, for now is not which of these wins, but it's more of how it gets reconciled from here.
The Senate bill is also sort of missing the CFTC portion of how to deal with things. It's really
just focused on handing over a bunch of stuff to the SEC. So it feels very starter, you know,
So it feels very starter, you know, a very sort of starting place rather than complete. But, you know, it continues to advance the conversation.
And I think it creates space now for people who are actually interested in this to have the discussion around the right way to handle these,
this thorny question that's been at the center of things forever, which is, are they securities? Are they not? And if they're not, what are they?
Yeah, they seem to have improved at least slightly and addressed a few more concerns.
But even David Sachs said in an interview, he doesn't expect this to be law before, you
know, late September, maybe October or November. So clearly we're still in the early innings
of it. I think it's just encouraging to see progress so quickly out of the Senate. Yeah, what what is cool, this was a moment, it felt to me like a momentum continuation
thing, right? If they put out something to discuss, then people discuss it, it keeps
the balls moving. If they don't, then you know, we get drawn out and moved on to other
topics. And so, you know, that's sort of how it reads to me. It's taking a bunch of concepts from, you know, previous legislation or legislative efforts, putting them together, and particularly highlighting
things that are different about how they might want to approach it from the House bill. So that's
where the conversation naturally, naturally trends. Yeah, and sort of in line with politics,
crypto industry boosted lobbying to pass coveted stablecoin bill, not sure how much of a story there is here when we know that the crypto lobby is now willing to spend lobby and
push for anything that they want, but 6.9 million in the second quarter, a 21% increase over the
previous three months. So obviously, there's a heavy appetite from our industry to participate
in Washington and get things done. Yeah, I mean, whatever 6.9 million, these are lobbying
numbers for ants. Like, what is this? Yeah. No, but this is
this is this is definitely a we haven't had very many actual
summer weeks so far. But Bloomberg writing a story about
the that basically says, when important legislation
came to be a focus, crypto lobby spent more on important legislation. That's really what the
story is. So I don't think there's much to see here. Crypto lobby continues to be an important
force in Washington. And you know, look, one thing that is interesting, if you're going to try to
draw some actual interesting notes from this is in the immediate aftermath of
Trump winning, there was a bit of a fracturing, a bit more fracturing of the crypto lobby
than we had seen, which had been pretty consolidated when we all had a common enemy, right?
Which is very natural.
Like you have a common enemy, so everyone comes together, they put aside their differences,
everyone embraces even XRP, and we all kind of fight together.
In the immediate
aftermath, when it seemed like crypto was going to have an easier time of it, or now was the time to
kind of go on the offense, there was a bit more splintering. Subsequent to that, as these key
legislative pieces have come up, it's been interesting to track how much the crypto lobby
is acting with one voice versus fractional and, you know, fractional and multi different
tier of voices. So to the extent that you are watching things, rather than just how much the
crypto lobby spends watching to see, you know, is the group are the groups that are representing
Coinbase saying the same things that are representing sort of broader industry groups, like those are
the types of things to watch for. Absolutely. Moving on, the next topic here is
the state of alt season.
Crypto's altcoin season stumbles out of the gate being the first year, but you had a great breakdown. Sort of the implication is alt season, the beginning of the end here, but alt season or exit liquidity parsing the crypto markets next move.
And then we can obviously dig into everything that's happening around ETH and treasury companies here.
But interesting take here, cryptos alt coin season stumbles out of the gate.
Yeah, I don't know. I mean, the question is just, we are unmoored right now because we have so
routinely had the sort of the precedent of the-year cycle that we could lean back on and reference
against, right? And everything was either, this is how it was working then, or how, you know, or it's doing a thing that's
different than it was working then. Now we have such a different set of forces that I think no one really has a super clear
idea of where we sit in the cycle. The cycle, what the cycle means is up for grabs. And so I think that we're trying to kind of read
a lot of those different signals into things
when we might just be in a completely different paradigm now.
Yeah, that makes perfect sense.
But moving on, we do know that certain altcoins
have been moving like crazy and that is Ethereum namely,
but as well also, but Bitmine Immersions ETH stash
doubles to more than 2 billion
in corporate Ethereum treasury race.
I had Matt Hogan on yesterday.
He talked at length about this demand shock.
Clearly there's something going on with Ethereum here.
I mostly attribute it to Tom Lee
and the increasing interest.
It just finally got the catalyst it needed
to trade at a reasonable price.
Yeah, I mean, look, so there is a lot of like, catch up that's be that's going on right now,
which is important to note. Secondly, you know, you and I have talked about how, how it's sort of
it's been surprising to some extent, ETH underperformance for for the last period of time, just because it seemed
like there was such a clear opportunity for it to be Bitcoin is the exposure to store
a value, ETH is this exposure to everything else in crypto.
But for whatever reason it's taken this amount of time to get here, I think that there's
a confluence of narrative and real factors
that are helping shape this.
The fact that people are pointing to Ethereum
in sort of mainstream financial analysis
as a beneficiary of the stable coin regime passing,
like creates a little bit of a tailwind for them, right?
And then you pointed out,
larger analysts like Tom Lee talking about it,
that's another tailwind. The fact that there's now these corporate treasury structures, which creates a,
you know, a kind of a run back the playbook type of thing for people who have watched the Bitcoin
gains and wonder if it could just happen again, all of these things add up. And then you you slap
them into the fact that relatively speaking, it has underperformed looks like a good trade.
Yeah, I think it's gonna keep going. Personally, it's been interesting actually to watch today. I haven't checked in the last hour or so but Bitcoin
had a nice little correction, kind of traded down to the bottom of the rage and Ethereum continued
up. And so we don't even have that thing where Ethereum falls a little more than Bitcoin because
there's a slight panic in Bitcoin. It clearly is untethered to some degree. Yeah, you know, I think,
Bitcoin, it clearly is untethered to some degree.
Yeah. You know, I think, again, a theory I'm recapturing its place
as sort of dominant number two, and represent and representing sort of something different for an investor makes sense to me. I
think again, the thing to watch is how far down the alt spectrum
does it go? You know, does it extend to Solana? Does it
extend, you know, even beyond that, right?
Yeah, absolutely.
We're gonna see.
Time will tell, certainly.
And this kind of brings us into treasury companies in general,
one of the big stories of the week.
David Bailey's fund is up 640%
after converting Trump on crypto.
But the real story here is that what the fund does,
this is effectively Nakamoto, to my understanding, 210k capital, but they're a treasury company that not only buys Bitcoin, but invest in other
treasury companies. Yeah. So I think that the story here that people have been interested in is,
well, let me take a step back. Everyone is looking for signs that treasury companies could ruin the
party for everyone. That's where that's where everyone is, right is, are these things going to be our big blow up of this cycle. And, and so what this what this sort of the story has attracted attention is around ownership
concentration, right, because ownership concentration is the type of thing that that, you know, can transmute wobbles and problems in one company to, you know, to a larger sort of industry
phenomenon. There continues to be I think, for people who are
looking for, you know, for people who are looking for the
negative signs, it's obviously a fairly hyped narrative. And,
you know, it's hard to imagine that, you know, company number
300 can really do well. I mean, even these guys are talking about how many deals they're still seeing, you know, company number 300 can really do well. I mean, even these guys are talking
about how many deals they're still seeing, you know, it's just insane. The flip side is, you know,
leverage these things aren't super levered, you know, like it's, it doesn't have some of the
hallmarks of previous, you know, kind of blow ups where, you know, two different hedge funds were
just trading back and forth with one another. But you know, famous last words. But I think that that's the reason that people are interested is
that they everyone has their super spidey senses on, you
know, or not to say PTSD, you have to know who the next main
character of the collapse is going to be and what's going to
do it. And listen, I have said exactly what you did. Company 300
is going to be bad. Question is whether that actually matters
for the crypto market or just for the shareholders
that were dumb enough to buy company 300.
The scary thing is that the catalyst that rips us down very rarely comes from the most
predictable place.
It's like, what is there to look at that's not a treasury company is probably a more
fruitful discussion.
We certainly didn't see SBF really coming.
So point well taken.
But what we have seen coming is the institutions.
JP Morgan Chase explores lending secured
by clients, cryptocurrencies.
This came coincidentally, I'm sure,
right on the back of Schwab saying
they were basically gonna do the same thing
three days before, but this isn't the only sign
of a massive bank and institution coming in in a different way
than maybe we had seen announced Goldman Sachs, BNY,
to record money market funds on blockchain,
obviously behind BlackRock and Franklin Templeton at all,
who have been tokenizing treasuries here for a while.
But it's pretty clear the biggest banks,
the biggest financial institutions,
Wall Street is coming and they're coming to participate in every single part of this.
Yeah.
I mean, we've fully tipped into this is just
the norm at this point.
All of the cracks of available products are getting filled in.
It's like water flooding over a topography.
Everything that could be a product
is gonna become a product.
I think to some extent,
kind of extending this from the conversation
that we were just having
about where blowups are gonna come,
all we really need to avoid with this cycle
is some insane blowup that makes people
sort of wanna run away from crypto forever.
And look, the best down cycle that we can imagine is one where, you
know, retail never fully gets in this time, and, you know, gets a little bit bored again, because things get boring. And,
you know, what we're left with is every institution in the world offering every type of crypto product, and it's just as
normal as can be. And that's sort of where things are headed right now is just the complete and utter boring
normalization of every everything.
Yeah, exactly where we're headed.
But this isn't boring perpetual futures have arrived in the US on Coinbase.
I mean, this is crazy.
This is a humongous story that would have been the biggest story ever if it didn't happen
among all these other stories.
But the fact that you can go full bitmex now on Coinbase as an American is just massive. Well, you can go a
10th of BitMEX, right? I think 10x leverage, 10x leverage, by the way, is still like very, very high
for relative speaking. But look, you know, perps are one of the more interesting actual kind of
financial or, you know, market vehicle innovations that the crypto industry has had. There's really interesting benefits that they have over other types of structures. This, I think, is emblematic of another piece of the institutionalization story,
which isn't just banks and traditional financiers offering crypto products,
but Wall Street taking cues from the way that crypto does things and actually
starting to integrate them into the digital world.
And so, you know, that's financiers offering crypto products, but Wall Street taking cues from the way that crypto does things and
actually starting to integrate them into the mainstream system.
There are, you know, again, hold aside like the exact leverage
numbers, there are really interesting reasons to like perps
as an available instrument, you know, from a market liquidity
perspective. So I don't know, I think that it's a fairly
positive thing, you know, again, not speaking to the
leverage piece of it, but just having this instrument as an
available tool alongside everything else. It feels
inevitable to me, I guess.
Yeah, I agree. I've just had a glitch over here one second. And
finally, this was kind of a honorable mention story, but
pretty big. Chris Christie's offers 1 billion in luxury real estate
to buyers paying with crypto, basically, the auction house
slash real estate, creating an entire new part of the business
here to specifically sell real estate to buyers that are
willing to pay with crypto. This is one of those things that has
happened a little bit, but still a huge story. And once again, we'll get completely forgotten. Yeah, I mean, look, I think that one of the things that has happened a little bit, but still a huge story. And once again, we'll get completely forgotten.
Yeah, I mean, look, I think that one of the things that's pretty clear is, although retail hasn't moved back in fully, although, you
know, again, we talked about last week, how there are some signs of it coming back to life. There's a lot of a lot of the products that these companies are building for and a lot of the sort of feeling of force driving them into this space is high net worth crypto buyers, you know, which represent a big juicy market that they want to get access to.
And this is sort of further result of that. So, you know, I think we're going to see more of this. And I think it's going to be less and less about novelty
and capturing a headline, which is what all of this stuff
was about three, four years ago when you saw it,
and more about there are these extremely valuable niche
markets of crypto holders that are worth developing products
for.
Hey, we're done.
But did you see the most awkward moment in TV history yesterday that I will
say could be the new best new sitcom? Yes, ever. I did not. I would want I would watch this show
day in and day out. I don't know if the odd couple or Dumb and Dumber perfect strangers.
But oh my god, the only Trump media that I saw yesterday was was South Park. And that was a I didn't see it. So speaking of awkward. I mean, Trump shows up at the fed building, Powell, as if he's like the contractor or
something.
Yeah.
It's not like, do you think that this is maybe below Powell's pay grade to be in a hard hat
down there explaining the expenses of a construction project?
Tim Scott's not even wearing a helmet.
So the two of them are wearing a helmet completely.
And I think that's the only thing that's going to be happening.
And I think that's the only thing that's grade to be in a hard hat down there explaining the expenses of a construction project. Tim Scott's not even wearing a helmet.
So the two of them are wearing a helmet completely for show.
Trump pulls out a document. It's like, this is up to 3.1 billion. Powell says,
that's for a building we did five years ago, man. I mean,
this was pure insanity and comedy.
I don't know where we're at in the simulation if we're 99% through and things are about to get bad, but it is wild.
Yeah, it's it's something all right. You know, Scott, I think we've finally had our first
true summer week this week. When I was when we were looking through and preparing this,
I was like, man, this is this is actually a summer week.
It's a summer week relative to a 2025 spring week, but relative to a previous
fall week, it's still more action than we would ever have.
Yeah, I guess that's true. It's just we are jaded and bored. If
we don't have the I mean, these stories are massive.
Whatever. I'm just saying everyone needs to touch some
grass.
I agree. Go touch grass. Thank you. I'll tell you we'll be
back next week. Guys, check out the breakdown. That's where I
get all the ideas now for my show.
So yeah, just go hey see he talked about on the breakdown breakdown again.
Awesome show and awesome follow.
We'll see you guys next week.
Thanks, man. Let's go.