The Wolf Of All Streets - Is Bitcoin Stuck At $106K? What Is Elon Musk’s Mysterious X Money?

Episode Date: June 20, 2025

Bitcoin is holding strong above $100K despite rising geopolitical tensions, and some analysts say it’s becoming the new baseline. On today’s Friday Five, I am joined by Nathaniel Whittemore to break down what’s driving Bitcoin’s resilience, why Elon Musk’s X Money could shake up the financial world, and how the GENIUS Act just changed the stablecoin game. Nathaniel Whittemore: https://twitter.com/nlw ►► 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 #Investments 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 currently seems to be stuck around 105 or $106,000 per coin. But while that's happening, there's a ton happening in the background. Obviously, we have geopolitical strife between Israel and Iran with questions as to how the United States will engage in the conflict, if they will at all. Elon Musk announcing that there will be payments and trading on X and of course stable coin Palooza Luckily, we've got NLW here to unpack it all on the Friday 5. Let's go This is one of those normal summer weeks where there's not any huge stories that are impacting price but still worth discussing and unpacking everything that's going on. We're back.

Last week, you were keynoting. You were busy keynoting. Gallivanting around Europe. I mean, just it's like your priorities are all off. You know, you could have been here talking about all this important news and you were out keynoting. But I think we'll start here with, that's the wrong story. Analysts say Bitcoin's 100,000 levels being cemented as the base price for investors. So I guess

generally here, we can just talk about price action, the fact that Bitcoin seems to be effectively glued in this range in the low hundred thousands. But even with all the dips we've seen across markets and all the uncertainty, it just doesn't break below a hundred thousand. Yeah. I mean, I think that certainly we are, you know, we're tracking Bitcoin, I think, for a couple of different reasons. One, it's always a leading indicator of what's going to sort of

happen next in public markets, especially when, you know, a lot of the macro things that have been shaping potential market action have happened overnight, you know, in various regions. So that's sort of one reason to look at it. But I think that it's absolutely the case that the longer that it hangs out at this level, the more it creates kind of the psychological, you know, attachment we already had, we had a psychological attachment to 100k on the upside for so long. It sort of makes sense that we're sort of forming that on the downside as well. Yeah, I mean, from a psychological level perspective, there's no more impactful number than 100,000. Right? It literally

was talked about for years to your point. So you've got to imagine there's a lot of people are like, I'm just gonna buy it every time it gets anywhere close to that. Yeah, I'm surprised we haven't even seen 99,980 or anything. It really has held entirely above 100,000. Yep. Now it's it's it's extremely notable. I mean, again, it's one of those it's a self reinforcing sortinforcing sort of prophecy. So I hope that it continues to hang out here and this becomes the reset forever. Yeah, that'd be amazing.

It was, it's Selkis that always used to tweet, I can't believe this is the last time we'll see Bitcoin under X, right? So maybe we can jinx it by tweeting that, but generally it does seem like it's been really, really strong. And that's obviously, while we still have a lot of geopolitical uncertainty, Trump

hints he'll hold off Iran strike give diplomacy time. I think this is what a lot of people are watching at this point. Yeah, it's incredible how quickly we absorb what's happening in the world and markets seem to shrug it off. I mean, the very fact that Iran and Israel are lobbying missiles at each other on a daily basis seems like it would have had a greater impact on markets, but it hasn't. And immediately markets just basically moved on to what would the United States do?

Well, it seems like we're still sort of in a holding pattern on that. Yeah, markets faded this as a thing that they had to care about really, really quickly, rightly or wrongly. I mean, basically, you know, the when when it started happening, that was the debate on Twitter was World War Three or nothing burger and markets voted You know not nothing burger in terms of people's lives But in terms of what they were going to care about very very quickly doesn't mean they're right But that's certainly there's pretty clear consensus now

I think that you're right that a lot of this has to do with The various signals that Trump and the administration are giving it any given time. And it certainly doesn't seem like we're cascading towards inevitable, you know, US involvement right now. So I think that that gives markets a reason to be a little bit more calm about it. But it's a fascinating one for sure. Yeah. And sort of the last topic, I think here that's relevant when talking about price action and what's happening with the market in general is that we continue to see these relatively historic inflows

into the Bitcoin ETFs, Ethereum ETFs as well, by the way. But 2.4 billion in eight days, a pretty astounding number considering price isn't moving. Yeah, yeah, it's, there's a lot of movement over here for not clear reasons why. Yeah, you would think that if you have 2.4, 2.5 billion in just over a week in buying on the ETF side that you would see spot price reflecting that.

People were one of the sources of, or one of the discourses around this is whether we're seeing some of that flight to safety behavior show up there rather than in actual price. Is that an indicator of that? Or is it something else entirely hard to tell? Obviously, it's you know, thank God because otherwise people like us wouldn't have the ability to create content speculating on things.

But it's, it's certainly it's notable for some reason or other. Yeah, talk about the real flight to safety around the world. It's obviously stable coins, right? And I think that's our next topic. In general, Senate passes genius stable coins, right? And I think that's our next topic in general, Senate passes genius stable coin bill, giving crypto industry first major legislative win. This obviously has now passed the Senate

with tremendous bipartisan support, I believe 68 votes in favor. That does not happen in the Senate for anything, much less a crypto related bill. So that's astounding. I spoke to Hagerty actually randomly on Wednesday, the day after this happened, we'd had it on the books for months and I just kind of got impeccable timing.

But he said he doesn't think there'll be many impediments in the House that they're already obviously speaking with their counterparts there and the stable act that was proposed in the House is not far different from the genius act. And obviously Trump is pounding the pavement on this to get it done. Right. He's on truth social saying this is one of his priorities. So it seems like this is going to happen. This is our first of many stable coin stories. But let's stop here for the moment and talk about the genius act. Yeah. I mean, after all the bluster and all the last minute is this, you know, are things changing? Is there a resurgence of the anti crypto army? Like all of these considerations push comes to shove, the bill actually addressed

a lot of the concerns and had large bipartisan consensus. It's actually very encouraging to see that, that as much as things got sort of loud towards the last minute, it appears to be cascading ahead. Now the one sort of like poison pill question in the house is whether, you know, there's, there are a large group of people, including many people that, you know, we tend to agree with on these issues that are really intent on getting the market structure bill combined, Warren Davidson among them. And I don't, I don't exactly see the logic as it so clearly is not going to happen, but, you know, there's that, that's the, that's the, the sort of one wrinkle that I'm keeping track of in the House debate.

I don't think there's issues with the reconciliation of two just stablecoin bills. It's a question of whether the market structure bill can find its way in there too. That would be a disaster. Market structure is so much more complicated than legislating on stablecoins. This is so clearly important for the US dollar, for the United States. These already exist, they're already successful. Wrapping in market structure, which is gonna have to dictate what's a security

and what's a commodity, how exchanges can operate, who can custody, whether it can be the same broker and custodian, market structure is literally everything else. Wrapping these together, that goes through the House, gets complicated, goes back to the Senate, back to the House, back to the Senate. That's no way that gets done by August if they do that.

Yeah, it's so complicated, in fact, that there are basically backup bills that were introduced by Amer and others to deal with just parts of the market structure bill, specifically the securities versus commodity designation. They rip that part out as, if we can't get market structure done, at least let's have that clarity, because that's such a big thorny issue,

we can kind of focus that in. So given that people are trying to rip pieces out of the market structure bill to try to get, you know, individual pieces past, it seems unlikely to me that we're going to be able to graph that whole thing onto another piece of legislation, which, you know, while bipartisan was still not an easy, you know, road to hoe to get it to where it is. So, you know, we'll see. It could also just be talk. It could be political strategy to get the debate. So who knows? Yeah. And as we talk about that, clearly we had impeccable timing as we've talked about from Circle with their IPO. Circle stock nears $200 per share, rises over 500% two weeks after going public. So they nailed this right before the Genius act obviously was passed, but they caught this perfect moment in time, where there was this heavy, heavy thirst for a

way to invest in stable coins. And there really wasn't. And now you could obviously buy circle and Coinbase stock obviously flying at the same. Take a look. It's trading up 14.5% free market up another $29 right now. So it's gonna be opening around 230. Yeah, I mean, I thought you were gonna put up a picture of Jeremy O'Leary's Scrooge McDuck swimming in his pool of gold after this one. But no, I mean, you know, we talked about this

before, but it is it is very clear that all the market cared about was exposure to stable coin thesis. And all of the details around, and all of the details around, well, all the details just didn't matter ultimately, you know. But this is, this is, you know, even more than, you know, stock price is always reflexive in the sense that it goes up and people pay more attention, and it gets stronger. And that creates more opportunities for it to actually

get stronger, right? There's always that sort of reflexivity. But in this case, I think it's even more important given that circle remains at the moment the sort of stable, you know, legitimate, or at least regulated stable coin infrastructure in the US. And the more that it goes up, the more that institutions get involved and decide to pick this horse rather than betting on whatever sort of, you know, bank stable coin is going to come next. The more that circle has the ability to compete when those bank stable coins inevitably show up. Yeah, it's just absolutely wild to see how successful this has been. And with all the missteps and bad launches that we've seen in crypto, it's just nice to see one get a massive, massive win. And following on the heels of this, it's gonna be private stablecoins left and right.

I mean, we've got stablecoin adoption by corporates poised to grow after US Senate passes key bill. You got Walmart and Amazon publicly saying they're gonna do this. Meta, obviously already floating the idea of bringing back Libra or some form of that. And of course, you move over from the technologists and corporates to the banks.

As we know, JPMorgan pushes JPMD pilot on base says deposit tokens, beat stable coins. So this is not exactly a stable coin, but something similar. And I do definitely- Don't you dare use the word stable coin to describe their thing, which is a stable coin, but not exactly a stable coin.

Yeah, how dare you? An algorithmic, non algorithmic, sometimes stable coin, but not exactly a stable coin. Yeah, how dare you an algorithmic non algorithmic, sometimes stable coin, but on base, like I did not have on my bingo card that JP Morgan would be going to like the degenerate layer two world to start testing things. Certainly the most that is absolutely the most notable part of that announcement. JP Morgan has been messing around with private and their own blockchains forever. And you know, obviously, those things are connected sort of vaguely to existing infrastructure. But this is the sort of, you know, the move to a public infrastructure like this is very, very different play for them. And I think shows just, you know, where the world

is headed. Yeah, it should be noted. Also, we saw announcements from Bank of America that they're working on this society general, I don't speak French. So, you know, pardon my horrible Pepe Le Pew accent there. But this is coming every I mean, stable coin coming to every institution near you. There's going to be a fog, sort of a bit of a fog too, that is already being exploited politically, where companies are going to talk about adopting stable coins and that'll be it'll be unclear or at least made to feel unclear whether that means they're going to adopt stable coins as a tool you know or a payment that they accept versus creating their own stable

coin if you ask the anti-crypto army right now every company that is announcing that they're going to interact with stable coins is going and trying to create their own stable coin, which is obviously not what's actually happening. But you know, that's it. They won't be interoperable. They'll just you know, I think the market the free market will decide and we'll probably end up with a few incumbents and maybe a few of these larger ones using them for their own private purposes like a JP Morgan and everyone else will probably get washed out. Yep.

That's my next story here. Is that Musk's X to launch trading and payments and push toward everything act report. We've been hearing about this for a very long time. Of course, we were already supposed to have Doge taking over the world as the base payment for the planet starting on X, but it seems like this is a real announcement that they're going to be pushing

towards open trading and payments. Interestingly, I remember they kind of had to deal with the toro there for a while, kind of never heard about it again. But I know they had sort of a trading or at least you would get the stock ticker price, honestly, I don't even remember and payments they've been talking about forever. And that's his background. Yeah, I mean, you know, look, the both of these things are theoretically

interesting and are going to be practically interesting based entirely on how much people actually want to use this for that, you know, it's, it's a very hard thing to go from where Twitter slash x is now to the everything app that he envisions. You know, when it comes, when it comes to trading, it's like, who is the audience that is going to trade on x, you kind of have to like, it doesn't seem like it's going to be existing established traders. So you have to think that it's maybe like new people who haven't come in yet, which is totally plausible, I guess,

theoretically, but I don't know, it's, it's interesting. But I would, I would not put my, I'm not particularly bullish on the likelihood of success. I 100% agree with that. It's not like your average Robin Hood client is gonna just flip over and say I want to trade on X. Yeah but I also listen if like if the idea of an everything app for you know, an English-speaking market is compelling to some people. Having Elon do it, who has the ability to do things that don't work for a very long time until maybe they do work, is a good place for it to happen, right?

Elon, if he does this, he's not gonna turn around and turn it off six months later because it wasn't performing. It's gonna beat that thing into the ground until it potentially works. So, you know, we'll see. Okay, so you and I have had a lot of conversations about Bitcoin, Treasury companies and what those look like in context

of the greater markets. It's clearly becoming more obvious that these are the altcoins of this of this cycle to some degree. But we've started to see obviously XRP Treasury companies and Solana XRP companies. Now we got the first report was that TRX was going public, that Tron was going public in a reverse merger. Now the story I guess has been clarified a bit. Justin Sun linked firm plans to go public in US with TRX acquisition strategy. I believe they also had in the original announcement that Eric Trump was an advisor and then he said, No, I'm just his buddy, but I'm not an advisor. But the

topic we had was, is this putting in the top for crypto treasury companies? I mean, I hate calling tops, but boy, if you're going to be comfortable calling a calling a top, you know, I don't know, look, there's clearly still room to run in terms of market demand for Bitcoin treasury companies. That's pretty inarguable at this point. And so the, the big issue is that even if this is the top, it could be a very long time before the market realizes it was the top. And that's, you know, the in-between intervening part is where it all gets chaotic. But I don't know, I will only say this. I know a bunch of people

who are sort of outside crypto, who have been invigorated by the return of the SPAC structure as a tool, not because they want to chamoth it. But because getting certain types of vehicles public faster is actually like a useful thing to have access to. And boy, is actually like a useful thing to have access to. And boy, are they like crypto is going to screw it up again for us. After they heard this announcement, and it's hard to say. Whether it's him or not, I already said that when it wasn't TRX to be fair. But it is pretty crazy. I guess it was Dan from chart guys who was on yesterday.

And he was basically saying, I think it was him, but he was saying that all the all coin market is suffering because you can just go trade Coinbase in circle. Yeah. Well, yeah. If you get or or Nakamoto or 21 or micro strategy, like the same people who were investing in ICS and making these quick 2030 X's, if not more, are now playing in public markets where there's a hundred X the liquidity and it's a stock. I don't know, we never learned.

We'll see how it ends. We never learned. Listen, our final story is not necessarily crypto related, but everything is apparently crypto related. Fed officials hold rates again, still see two cuts by year end. I mean, these two cuts have been right there on on the horizon. Yeah the reporting on this is actually weird because so there was a this is the most divided I think that the Fed has ever been in terms of where they think things are going to land.

Not divided in terms of necessarily of you know disagreement about what should be done in the short term but divided in terms of what they're in, you know, what they believe will come next. Powell's whole conversation was about humility and having, you know, no idea how these tariffs were going to impact things and needing more time to see. And when it came to the, the cuts, I think it was, you know, there were the, by a margin of like one vote, the, the consensus was that there were going to be two. But the number of, of governors who thought that we were going to get zero cuts this year jumped from like four to six. So you got one group who's, you know, still on the two train, but you have another group that's, that's growing that thinks we're going to see no cuts. So the TLDRs that no one has any idea. And, you know, to their credit, they're saying they have no idea,

basically. And in the circumstance of having no idea,'re saying they have no idea basically, and in in the circumstance of having no idea, Powell's default is always going to be to turtle up and do nothing. Trump had some not so kind words for him again this this week, you know, he kind of backed off on the reddit for a while, what he called him, I don't know if he called him dumb or not so smart. But you know, it's like, you can tell that he's trying not to do it. And then once he starts vomiting about Powell,

just goes and goes and goes. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know if he's trying that hard. Yeah, okay. Good point. I don't think I don't think maybe it's fair. I think you love him or hate him. Donald Trump's probably gonna tell you what he thinks. Yeah, yeah. No, I listen, I the tough thing is, I don't know, there's the, this is right now, what you should do with fed policy is an area

where a lot of reasonable people actually just disagree. It's not a strong consensus. I do think that in general, people are, I'm seeing more people peel over to the side of it's time to cut, then head in the other direction. But it's hard to argue that things its time to cut, then you know, then then head in the other direction. But, you know, it's hard to argue that things are like real clear, given given just how much is up in the air. You know, we have we have real

volatility and we have self imposed volatility right now. And you know, those two things combined to a very tricky environment. Yeah, man. We nailed we cooked through that. Honestly, though, this is still way more exciting than last summer. Yes. We were doing these shows last summer, and we were like, five. Yeah. How about the Friday one and a half,

and we really don't even want to talk about the half? Seriously, let's go. Let's do the thing that they do on the top 40 countdown, where they go list last year's top five and listen to the full first top one song just to kill time. Yeah. Yeah, because they actually had good songs. Well, yeah, we had bad songs last summer in

that context. So it's glad I'm glad that we're actually talking about huge things. I think it's actually more just a function of how big news has become small news as we become mainstream and such a part of the popular narrative. Yeah, there's obviously a time when a stable coin bill passing would have filled five hours of conversation for two months. Yep. Nope. No, it's just it's deregard is just part of part of the part of the scene. I'm not sure if you're going to be able to do that. But I think that's a good point. And I think that's a good point. And I think that's a good point. And I think that's a good point. And I think that's a good point.

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And I think that's a good point. And I think that's a good point. And I think that's a good point. And I think that's a good point. And I think that's a good point. I don't know if they're new, but I've started getting them. They are we've integrated the brands, which is always kind of the intent is to sort of like bring, you know, make make make the breakdown have it have its own life. That's not just me. So excited to see that. For those who don't subscribe to the the what is the breakdown newsletter used to be the block works daily newsletter. It's, it's, it's great. It's, you know, what's some of my favorite writing in the in the crypto space.

So wait, so that is the old block works newsletter is now breaking on newsletter. Huge. Yeah. Congratulations. I didn't know I thought I was just like, honestly, I guess I should have noticed I wasn't getting the block works anymore. But the fact that it started appearing is the breakdown. I was like, yeah, that is really, really cool. Really well done. Yep. It's great. Good stuff.

All right, guys. We'll give NLW a follow and go listen to the breakdown. He does this every day. It's amazing. Thank you, buddy. See you guys next week. Bye. Let's go.