The Wolf Of All Streets - HUGE Political Support For Bitcoin: Next Bull Run Incoming?

Starting point is 00:00:00 The tailwinds in the United States politically are favorable for Bitcoin and only getting better. Donald Trump just officially announced to be speaking at the Bitcoin conference in Nashville in two weeks. I can tell you that Kennedy will also likely be involved. I can tell you that Joe Biden definitely won't be there. But I think it's clear that in the United States, things are getting better for Bitcoin and crypto. Could the political environment, which was so bad for our industry, actually be the catalyst for the next bull run? I'm going to discuss this and a lot more with Tom Dunleavy. Let's go.

Starting point is 00:00:54 What is up, everybody? I'm Scott Melker, also known as the Wolf of Wall Street. Before we get started, please subscribe to the channel and hit that like button. Going to jump into it right now with Tom. Good morning, good morning, GMGM. How are you? Good, good. That intro will never fail to get me hyped. I do it for the guests,

Starting point is 00:01:16 because I know that the people who hear it every day hate it at this point, but you guys who hear it once every couple weeks, it's better. So listen, let's start here. You can see my shiny face there. Actually, we reported this, we knew, and it was on embargo, myself and Mario. So we recorded a video for the street announcing that Trump was going to be speaking at the Bitcoin conference and what it meant. And we waited, obviously, until Bitcoin Magazine, who hosts the conference, got the

Starting point is 00:01:42 chance to share it first, but it's happening. there was a lot of speculation a few weeks ago i think nashville now is going to be the shit show of all shit shows obviously because the bitcoin conference may become a trump rally um but what do you think this is crazy this is wild do you know the format of how is it just gonna be like a 30 minute talk and he's out or is it like meet and greet inside events? So I think the announcement officially there was conjecture would be like a fireside with David Bailey from the Bitcoin conference. But I think he's going to keynote 20, 30 minutes, something like that. That's what I'm hearing. I cannot confirm that. And then a conjecture I heard before the official announcement, he was only he would only show up if there was a fundraiser and there was a base fee guarantee, which is why, but this is nothing unique to Trump. It's not

Starting point is 00:02:29 a negative for anyone who's listening to how politics work. Politicians come to events, they speak, and then they do some sort of fundraiser on the side. And it's like, we need to guarantee 500 grand or whatever for me to show up. So I'm imagining for him, it's in the millions. Yeah, I think it's fantastic. I mean, it just shows how much influence we have in politics now as an industry, right? We have Fair Shake, which I think is the third largest pack after Biden and Trump's packs. Then you have the Sentinel pack that the multi-coin guys just launched, or Sentinel Alliance, whatever it is, but incentivizing crypto voter support. So I mean, it's a real issue now that people are taking seriously. And if you look at prediction markets, like we all have, like, you know, Trump is favored to win the

Starting point is 00:03:08 presidency. Republicans are favored to win the Senate. So, you know, just seeing them actually active in the space and at these big events is great. Now, if this is the best event to represent the industry, I'm not sure. I've never been to one of the Bitcoin events. I know they're very kind of retail focused, a little bit crazy. So hopefully people are- It is. And there's the ironic Bitcoin only thing. I don't know, you've never been to the Bitcoin conference. That's unbelievable. But you're not allowed to mention any other token or chain on stage, period. You cannot say the word Ethereum on stage at the Bitcoin conference or you will never be invited back. But you can go out on the like lobby floor and there's like 7,000 NFT

Starting point is 00:03:47 projects advertising. Weird sort of like they'll take the money. There's not going to put you on stage and like endorse it. But yeah, we obviously, we all know where Trump stands. He's going to be there. I think it's taken the shine off RFK for better or for worse,

Starting point is 00:04:02 right? Nobody is, even the people who are like advising RFK on crypto policy have seemingly switched to the Trump camp. But this is sort of putting a lot of pressure on the Biden administration, whether it's going to be the Biden running or not. The Chamber of Progress saying basically, Biden, get your head out of your ass and make a statement on crypto that's favorable and you might get some of these votes back. I have my doubt that's going to happen. But then, of course, we have this that's been in the national news, Ro Khanna, the Democratic congressman from

Starting point is 00:04:33 California, I believe from Silicon Valley. He's doing a roundtable with execs from across the industry. I know like I think Cuban's going to be there, Scaramucci, a lot of these guys to basically advise the White House on how to go forward. So the Democrats are trying to react. I can say Ro Khanna. I interviewed him for the podcast two years ago, I think. And he was trying to put this together two years ago. So this is not a politics thing for him. He's been trying to do it. But now the White House is really interested. Yeah, I think that was yesterday, actually, right? Because Silkas was outside. Yeah, I think that was yesterday, actually, right? Because Silkas was outside. Yeah, I think they did it yesterday.

Starting point is 00:05:07 And Cuban showed up in, like, Sandbank Manfred and, like, sneaks and a T-shirt. And actually said, from what I understand, that directly that they should, he said, you know, you should fire Gary Gensler to Biden's advisor, who I guess was there for about an hour or so. And he said, quote me on that. So, you know, at least he has our back there. But yeah, apparently, you know, they're at least trying. So I guess they have to at this point, because they're seeing how much headway the Republicans are making. I think there's gonna be a piece coming out from one of the insiders who was there about the detail. We haven't seen it yet, but it was yesterday. Yeah, you're right. It was yesterday

Starting point is 00:05:45 shows how on top of on top of things I was here. But it seems like we had the biggest and best of the industry sort of represented there, even some who were pretty aggressively supporting Trump. I think that we see the industry wisely is they're going to play both sides. Right. I mean, whoever wins, we want a seat at the table. So they're going to play both sides, right? I mean, they, whoever wins, we want a seat at the table. So they're going to go advise, I think, uh, generally to both for most people, obviously your old boss Selkis is not playing both sides. He's, uh, he's definitely not. Um, that's for sure. He's, we need some aggressive people out there advocating for us and he's been at the forefront of it. So it's definitely

Starting point is 00:06:25 good. We need to move the Overton window in the right direction and he's definitely helping there. But to me, so it's interesting though that price has not moved, right? I mean, I think we can go now into the cycle and talk about the market a bit, but like a year ago, two, three, any time in that past presidential candidates making Bitcoin part of their political platform, you'd think that we'd go up like 70% in a day. And we're just doing nothing here market-wise, right? Yeah. So it's, I mean, it's really been... So broadly in risk assets, you have very thin liquidity in the summer.

Starting point is 00:06:59 And you can look at the order book depth. You can look at the exchange volumes, which actually we still have not even come close to the exchange volumes we reached in 2021. Things that may have not moved the markets when there's more liquidity move the markets very precipitously in these thin liquidity environments. So everyone's heard about the German government selling. They're basically just market selling Bitcoin on TWAP orders. They're sending a few hundred Bitcoin a day to exchanges and liquidating that. Now, if they continue at the current pace, they're going to be done essentially by the end of next week. So that's going to be a seller out of the market. Obviously, at the margins of some of the

Starting point is 00:07:34 Mt. Gox coins, which will continue to be sold, then you have the US government that's done a bunch of sales as well. So it's basically just a bunch of sell pressure into a thin market. Now, if we turn to the back half of the year as kind of this pressure subsides, we have all the things that you talked about, right? So political tailwinds, which are really important. FTX, you directly to their accounts. Not in coins. In the ring. Not in coins. People should be clear on that because some of the other ones like Voyager, I got tokens back, right?

Starting point is 00:08:14 Which was great because it went up. It wasn't great that it's like 5% of the value, but people who bought cash and want crypto back are going to have to buy. Exactly. And they're going to get it back at a much lower level. So they'd probably prefer the tokens, but unfortunately it's not how the bankruptcy works in the US. So that's 12 to 14, $15 billion, depending on the liquidation process. Now, what percentage of that repurchases into crypto I think remains to be seen. I think it's a pretty safe bet at least half does, probably more. A lot of these claims were sold over time and the people who bought those, I think are probably longer term holders. But even so, my estimate is probably only 10% of

Starting point is 00:08:58 the claims in aggregate were sold. So even if they were sold to a trad fi, distressed debt funds or something, it doesn't really matter. There's a lot of buy pressure that's going to come just from that event. Back at the year, a lot of other positive catalysts as well. So we have the global liquidity picture ticking up. So that's not only interest rate cuts. Citi has projected eight interest rate cuts over the next 12 months. I think market projects two by the end of the year. Great. You have the Fed that took in all these tax receipts. It's going to be using

Starting point is 00:09:31 that to stimulate the economy into the back half of the year, winding down that TGA you hear so much about. You also have seasonality trends with the election cycle. So if you look at four-year cycles for elections, so year one, year two, year three, year four, year four, you see a 10% increase in government spending over the last 100 years. So it's not just a rumor that people want to spend around elections or politicians want to spend around elections. It's actually borne out in the data as well. So a lot of positive catalysts into the back half of the year, as we're seeing

Starting point is 00:10:05 reduction in that sell pressure from all of these overhangs. And in aggregate, all of those overhangs in terms of sell pressure. So US government, German government, Mt. Gox is about 22 billion. You can't assume all that's going to be sold, but say half of it's sold. I think most of it won't be sold, to be honest yeah i think most of those people understand the cycle and think the same thing we do is that they're gonna get their coins back they're gonna go up parabolically at the end of 24 through 25 then they'll sell them exactly exactly so listen where we at in the market we obviously had sort of that drop on bitcoin below 55-ish now we're back up at, 643. I personally think we could have likely

Starting point is 00:10:46 bottomed based on technicals, at least for now. This is an indicator crypto speculation index slide suggests Bitcoin bull market reset. This indicator is now below 10%. Every time it's done that, it's been the spark of sort of the next bull run in the next few months, which aligns with where we're at right now. And then of course, Bitcoin waits for guidance from US inflation data, bond market. No, it doesn't. That's ridiculous. We're not in a point anymore. Yeah. Well, we had the inflation print this morning, which came in very lower than expectations. So inflation is moving down and you actually saw Bitcoin and Ethereum spike. And that has been, as you mentioned, decorrelated in the past, but at least as of this morning, things are moving in that direction again. Yeah, you see that right move.

Starting point is 00:11:26 Yeah. Now, if we look at other indicators, so MVRV, which I think folks on the show are pretty familiar with, very popular ratio of the realized value of Bitcoin to the market cap. So are people sort of in profit or underwater? That ratio, when it's around one one has been a clear market buy signal in the past. I think of the charts, Scott, if you want to pop that up. Yeah, sure. If you could share, go share your screen. So you guys do this live. Should I play the intro music for y'all guys while we're waiting? I know you love it.

Starting point is 00:12:06 Does that pop up? We have like five people. Yeah, just as if you zoom in on that slide. Go ahead. Yeah. Cool. Guys, we do this. It's real.

Starting point is 00:12:14 It's real life. There you go. So this is MVRV ratio here. And you can see this is Bitcoin price in the top. And when it spikes above 6, 7, it's a clear sell signal. When it gets down here, this is clear buy. So you can see below here, spike, below here, spike in Bitcoin price, below here, spike in Bitcoin price. You get the picture. So we're nearing that right now. This is actually at about 1.5 today. And it's going to continue, I think, down a bit as we see a choppy summer. And it's

Starting point is 00:12:48 been a clear accumulation zone for a number of years and probably the most reliable indicator I've seen besides the rainbow chart or stock to flow rate. Just kidding. So those are, yeah, yeah, yeah. So this is a pretty clear buy signal on Bitcoin. So, you know, unfortunately, it's just a choppy, boring summer. And, you know, it's a good time to look at your favorite assets. The one thing that I, and this is a slideshow that I'm presenting at our offsite next week. So I apologize for the presentation format. But if we look at kind of past cycles, this smaller chart here, I could blow it up. Bear with me. We are this black line right here. So this is previous cycles.

Starting point is 00:13:39 You've seen, you know, 2011, you know, I argue these earlier cycles were not really analogous to what we're seeing today. But if you look at, you know, 2018 cycle, 2015 cycle, we're right on track for the previous cycles. And the back half of the year for each of these has been fairly parabolic. This is an access that says, you know, how many multiples you get from the start of the cycle. So this is, you know, 20x multiple by, you know, May of 2025 for, you know, both start of the cycle. So this is a 20X multiple by May of 2025 for both of the previous cycles, if we're following the same sort of trend that you've seen in the past. So all this to say, I think we just got to kind of hold on, be a little bit patient. The thing that is a bit different than previous cycles, I'm going to blow this chart up here.

Starting point is 00:14:25 I'm going to do this one. Altcoins. Yeah. Is it altcoin season again, right? Do we want to rotate into altcoins? This is the Bitcoin dominance chart. So what percentage? Obviously, in 2017, it was basically 100%. But you saw this shoot way down in 2018 to 40%.

Starting point is 00:14:41 So this is how many altcoins are dominating the know, dominating sort of the market cap of crypto. We saw the same thing in 2021, you know, it fell off from whatever, almost 80% down to 40%. We have not seen that this cycle, and this has been in really year one or year two of those rallies. So the open question is, you know, do we, are we waiting for that altcoin season, or is it not going to happen the same way kind of this cycle? You know, the interesting thing this cycle is you have a larger amount of tokens and a larger dispersion of these assets. So in 2021, we had 400,000 coins, which is still a shit ton. This time around, we have almost 4 million and are making 50K plus tokens a day.

Starting point is 00:15:28 A lot of that is meme coins, of course. But a lot of that is legitimate projects that you've seen from previous cycles that have just delayed their token launches because of FTX saga, weren't ready to launch in 2021. And then all of a sudden this bull market comes out of nowhere and they're like, oh God, we got to launch. So will we see the same altcoin season? I'm skeptical. I think asset selection, this cycle is actually going to be immensely important and spray and pray is just not going to have the same effectiveness as it did in the past.

Starting point is 00:15:58 So you think that a lot of these alts don't move because there's just not enough money with that quantity of tokens? There is a couple billion dollars in aggregate supply coming in the back half of the year, not only through token unlocks, but also through token generation events. So who is the net new capital who is purchasing those tokens? I'm not sure because a lot of those things are on chain. They're mostly not listed on major exchanges and buyers of crypto today, probably if they want to be crypto curious, they're just going to buy the Bitcoin or ETH. So I think asset selection at the long tail of all coins, anything out of the top 30 is going to be immensely important going forward. And that has implications, obviously for Liquid, but also for venture too. I don't think you can just say, hey,

Starting point is 00:16:43 I'm going to write checks to equal weight in each one of these protocols and hopefully one hits. I think it's really paramount, actually having a thesis and understanding like, hey, here's the sectors that I like going forward. And here's why, because you need capital to be interested in this stuff and you need them to actually go and facilitate a purchase on chain. So it's a bit of a tricky environment. No more spray and pray, which has been the really pinnacle of strategy for crypto VCs and investors. Like you said, buy, put 10 grand if you can, and as a VC into 50 pre-sales and one of them pulls the 2000X and whatever. Who cares?

Starting point is 00:17:26 Exactly. I don't think it's going to work as well as it did in previous cycles. And if you look at just the price appreciation of crypto as we mature as an asset class, I mean, you saw the first round, Bitcoin did 1000X and then the next cycle it did 500X, the next cycle it did 50X. Yeah. So we do three four or whatever i mean you can't expect the long tail even if you just assume some sort of beta to have that same asymmetric upside that you did in the past but there would be an argument that is basically not valid because of etf but there would be an argument that if the expectation is that bitcoin gains will be less each time then the community might be more likely to

Starting point is 00:18:05 pour into altcoins to search for those higher gains. But the problem is there's too many of them. There's too many of them. So the dispersion of assets is way too wide. And I don't think there's enough folks who are actually searching those out. It's basically like the hot ball of crypto money that's been moving around. And we need more net new people to come in on chain. So what does that like? Great. You know, base is getting 50 K plus users a day. You know, Solana is helping onboard people through saga and other things. I just talked to Anatoly the other day, they're launching the saga to Q2 25, and hopefully we'll have a demo at breakpoint which will be cool but that's going to onboard another you know 500k plus people but these are like we

Starting point is 00:18:51 need people on chain to actually purchase all these like other things or have ways to do it which is the challenge yeah it's a huge challenge. Do you think that Polymarket could have a meaningful effect on that? I mean, I hear it now literally on every podcast. I'm seeing it referenced on anything and you happen to use crypto to make those bets. But if we consider that a crypto native site, I mean, and it goes that wildly viral, could that be the thing that brings all these people on chain? I mean, if you look, I think Vitalik even tweeted about it. He's like, it's not easy to fund polymarket still. You have to like go on a polygon wallet or something. I mean, it's not easy. Yeah. It's a bit trickier than it should be, but it abstracts away a lot of the crypto pieces that we sort of fumble around with. And the numbers are borne it out. So I think there's been 5,000 daily active users. They did 50 million in aggregate trading volume on PolyMarket. So that's pretty sizable and that's

Starting point is 00:20:04 ticked up pretty precipitously since... And PolyMarket's been around for like three years. Poly takes that off, right? Yeah. For sure. For sure. So I mean, that's like... So I guess it's more broadly like what is actually getting adoption today. So PolyMarket is one thing that's actually getting adoption today. I think the biggest use case is still stable coins, how boring that is, right? But billions of dollars transferred every day, censorship resistant,

Starting point is 00:20:34 all the things around that are really attractive, production fees, blah, blah, blah. That's still a real use case. Meme coins, while kind of a joke, have actually attracted a ton of volume, whether they've brought in net new users to the space, I'm not sure. But $50 million a day on Solana in terms of aggregate fees just generated from meme coins in the last few weeks. $50 million a day. 50 million a day, which is crazy. And this is all speculation, right? So is that capital sticky? Maybe, maybe not. But for me, and I've talked about it many times in the shows, deep end is really the thing that I think provides clear token incentives to both sides of the

Starting point is 00:21:21 equation, has clear product market fit, solves the cold start problem, like does everything you want in a token. And you've seen success from, you know, Helium has 100,000 plus users using their $20 a month plan. Hive mappers map 21% of the globe with 150,000 users. Demo, which is like an insurance, you know, kind of like product, like a progressive kind of product in your car is, you know, 50,000 drivers. Ionet decentralized compute is making 500K a day. It's like all of these protocols in Deepin, I think are real world use cases. And I think we're just going to continue to see that in the next cycle. And there's like more esoteric stuff like energy and whatever, you know, that are going to get interest. But, you know, I think that's a vertical that's clearly growing and I think is not just like, oh, hype on crypto Twitter,

Starting point is 00:22:12 just going to fizzle out. I think there's real adoption there. Yeah. Do you think that we see any of the sort of narratives from previous cycles that were supposed to happen then happen now? Metaverse, dofts pop again you know or is it were those kind of it happened didn't work and we move on seems like deep in rwa are the things now right we had the news i think yesterday goldman is gonna offer three tokenized products this year goldman sachs right so i mean that's clearly happening to some degree

Starting point is 00:22:42 how big they'll get, I have no idea. I think it happened probably in a different way. So, like, one thing that's been getting a ton of adoption recently is Telegram's, I don't know if it's, it's not directly affiliated. They're endorsing out of the ton chain. You know, they have 500 or 900,000 monthly active users on Telegram that they have access to. The TVL there is now almost a billion dollars and a lot of that is in these silly little like tapping games right like not coin hamster combat um and there's other mini apps that are being built that i think have like uh almost like wechat like we don't see it much in America, but in WeChat in China, they have all these built in apps that you play and are making, you know, real revenue. I

Starting point is 00:23:31 think there's probably a lot of traction there. And it's going to where the user is rather than saying like, hey, come play this like silly thing on chain. And you know, experience all these frictions. I think that, you know, we see the instantiation of a lot of those previous trends there. In terms of NFTs, dude, I don't know. I still have the APE that I bought. It's around break-even price. I'm just playing it as a leverage beta play. I think it consolidates. They were like 8.5 and ETH was down, but I had this line in the sand. I drew last cycle 25 grand. I think they got down to like 27. And I said last time it was the peak and i was like i was on twitter spaces and i was like if apes there were 300 000 or 250 was the floor i was like if they go to 25 grand when they

Starting point is 00:24:15 go to 25 grand i think i said i'll buy one glad they didn't know yeah you gotta be right you gotta be you don't just have to to buy it for 25 grand. Exactly. Exactly. So I don't know if we see a comeback arc with NFTs and stuff. I still think it's a bit early for all the things people wanted to use NFTs for like, oh, we're going to put my deed to my house or mortgage as an NFT, like movie tickets are going to be NFTs, like plane tickets, whatever. I think it's probably a next cycle thing as we get more users on chain. But PFPs, I don't know, Ben. Tough space to be in right now. I have my doubts.

Starting point is 00:24:51 I think punks will always hold their value. Apes have a fighting chance and maybe one or two others. The rest of them are dead and dusted. All right, guys, everybody can follow him at Dunleavy89. I know you got another commitment in one minute so i'm gonna let tom go thank you man i always appreciate your insight have a good one of course

Starting point is 00:25:11 good to be here good to see you in nashville and uh oh i don't know i i was going to i looked at nashville um and actually kind of what you were talking about earlier i looked at the agenda for the conference and it was literally nothing. I would be remotely interested. So not that you see many of the topics. You don't want to hear 70 hours of Bitcoin digital gold. Yeah, I would encourage people to take a look at the agenda and try not to laugh. It's like ridiculous.

Starting point is 00:25:39 I go to the conferences, but I don't go to the conferences, if that makes any sense. Yeah, for sure. I hang out around the conferences. All right, man. Thank you very much. any sense. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. I go hang out around the conferences. All right, man. Thank you very much. I'll see you next time.

Starting point is 00:25:47 Talk soon. I'll be there. Bye-bye. He's going to be in Nashville. Everybody's going to be in Nashville. So we just had actually kind of some breaking news here. Interestingly, we got MicroStrategy sets 10 for 1 stock split four months after Bitcoin peak.

Starting point is 00:26:01 So stock up about 5%. This matters because if it's trading at like 1300 bucks now, your average person has to have $1,300 to buy one share of MicroStrategy now to be able to buy a share of MicroStrategy for $130. So I think that is actually quite bullish for MicroStrategy. Yet another huge move by Zalit, which is pretty sweet. Anyways, guys, Dan's not here. Chris wasn't here yesterday. It's like we don't have any trading to talk about, just fundamentals and stuff.

Starting point is 00:26:34 Bitcoin looking pretty good. I'll show you what I've been showing you guys. We had that bullish divergence, double bullish divergence. That was about as gratuitous of a daily bottom, at least for now, that I can hope for. I tweeted about it. I screamed hope for. I tweeted about it. I screamed about it. I yelled about it. People made fun of me.

Starting point is 00:26:49 It's fun. But dude, Bullish Divergence with oversold RSI is where you want to be. Guys, that's all I got for you today. I will see you on the morrow with Nathaniel Whittemore for Z Friday. Five later.

The Wolf Of All Streets - HUGE Political Support For Bitcoin: Next Bull Run Incoming?

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