The Wolf Of All Streets - Market Bloodbath! $758M Liquidated as BTC Hits $108K | CryptoTownHall

Episode Date: August 26, 2025

Bitcoin is holding strong around $110,000, yet sentiment feels oddly negative as some traders grow restless waiting for a new all-time high. Despite the frustration, the backdrop remains highly bullish with powerful tailwinds and growing industry momentum. The recent pullback from $124K is seen less as a setback and more as a seasonal lull, with long-term buyers viewing current levels as attractive entry points.

$110,000 Bitcoin on a lovely Tuesday morning. Welcome to Crypto Town Hall every day here on Spaces at 1015 AM Eastern Standard Time. I guess it's a bit repetitive to say the same thing, but 110,000 is a lot of money for a Bitcoin. I don't see why this is so depressing to people. But every day that passes that we're not at a new all-time high, are seemingly losing their minds. Meanwhile, the news couldn't be more bullish. We still have just incredible tailwinds coming from every direction. And the industry seems to just be ramping up right now. So I chalk this up to the doldrums of summer, the end of August. And frankly,

I don't care if we were at 124 a couple weeks ago, and now we're at 110. I'm happily buying at every single price at the moment, personally. Joe, I have the idea here that sentiment is lower than it should be at 120K, but you have the data. What's Lunar Crush saying about where we stand right now with Bitcoin sentiment? Because I could just be wrong. I slightly missed the intro, but I'm assuming you talked about the title of it being a bloodbath right now.

That's a little hyperbolic, frankly, but the sentiment does seem that way. yeah i think it's yeah a little overreactive on bloodbath um you know we're i just think we're at a little bit of a lower liquidity moment in the market uh i think people are are finally kind of coming back from from summer vacations and seeing where things are at you know there's also you know i would say some weakness it feels in the in the stock market and equity market and that's also playing into this um you're just seeing some you're just seeing some of taking is the piece here. Also, you know, the, you know, someone's selling off a couple billion dollars in like a fat finger market sale or whatever it was the other day, also kind

of playing just into the volatility and people are trying to take advantage of that, I would say. Overall, I think you're actually seeing the Ethereum and some of the other L-1s holding up nicely in comparison to what's been happening, right? Like they should be down way more than they are based on some of this stuff. And Ethereum is still up 5% of the week. So not, I wouldn't say too worrisome. You were seeing, you know, obviously, you know, some like Bitcoin dominance going down. And I think that was, you know, the ETH effect, I would call it.

Of just Tom Lee and everything happening in the public markets and, you know, people kind of picking winners over there. And so that's been a big piece of kind of what we've seen. and then, you know, the actual social dominance for Bitcoin hasn't really changed. Like retail, I would say, still not completely here yet or maybe not returning ever in the same way. That's something to kind of to look at. But, you know, if you look, you know, even a couple months ago compared to now, like what we call, like people call market dominance. It's what we call social dominance. So what percentage share of all of the mentions, at least within crypto,

does bitcoin have and it was kind of maxing out at like 23 24 percent in social dominance and now it's sitting at 17 percent um so you know it's not anything huge but it's definitely a little bit less people talking about bitcoin a little bit more people talking about other things um and i think that's kind of like the eth effect the salon effect and and everything else l1 yeah that's really interesting i think six percent down from those kind of highs is meaningful and aligns well with what you basically just see in bitcoin dominance it probably looks like a very a very familiar chart right i mean a very similar yeah yeah it's like it social is always this kind of like reinforcing metric right it's another thing for you to look at when you know you're looking at

other things in the chart you're looking at technicals or you're looking at fundamentals of a business and then you go and you look at social and it's telling you the exact same thing um it's a really nice so it just broke up for me i don't know about you guys but uh well Joe, you there? Yeah, you broke up for a second and then showed your mic go off. Yeah, you're good. Yeah, no, I was just saying, you know, social as a metric is a nice metric to, it's a reinforcing metric to look at, you know, if the fundamentals of a business are telling you one thing, if the charts are telling you the same thing. And then you also, you know, have social, which is like you're saying, like a little bit less people talking about Bitcoin right now.

It's a nice reinforcing metric to look at, to understand, okay, this is actually the direction of where the market is going. You know, if I was going to tell you that, you know, suddenly more people are now talking about Bitcoin than we were, you know, two or three weeks ago when we were a little bit closer to all-time highs, you know, that might be another thing to look at to say, hmm, maybe there's going to be kind of a more of a jagged or volatile turnaround here. So it's just a, it's another great metric to kind of keep an eye on. Go ahead. Yeah, I would concur about the Ethereum effect. There was an article in Bloomberg today pointing that I. and they said that in August, there were about $1 billion in outflows from Bitcoin, ETS, compared to $3.3 billion in Ethereum inflows.

So there's definitely a trend here. I'm not sure to what extent and for how long of a bit of rotation or maybe Bitcoin getting less attention and if getting more attention. And that's a factor. When you look at the options so far, it's slightly more bearish for Bitcoin than it is for Ethereum. Ethereum, the put-to-call ratios is more in favor of bullishness. The put-to-call ratios is well below one on Ethereum so far. So that's something to keep in mind as to what might happen on Friday.

And we have to remember that Ethereum touched its all-time high twice in the last few days only. And it's going to bump against that high, maybe a third time before it breaks through it. Everybody's been expecting that. And obviously, you can expect next week to be filled. with a number of news items as everybody comes back from Labor Day. And I'm not saying that the news will come only from Ethereum, obviously. The news will come from multiple sources, but everybody's gearing up for that. Yeah, listen, it's not, I think, to what Joe's seeing with the decrease in talk about Bitcoin

relative to the rest of the market is obviously not just ETH-centric, all. although I tend to agree that if, as you would see in any cycle, is the first sort of hint that there is an alt-season or more interest in the rest of the market beyond Bitcoin. And that's not unique just to Eith at this point. I mean, I don't know if you guys have seen, but there were three sizable Salana Treasury company announcements in the past 24 hours. Sharp's technology was just a reverse merger into an old medical company, which we've seen this playbook, about 400 million, but Pintera Capital, not a small player

announcing a 1.25 billion raise for a Salon of Treasury. And then, who is it, multi-coin? What was the other one? Somebody might know, I don't have it pulled up, but another billion one with Cantor Fitzgerald, multi-coin, and a couple huge other players. I think it was jump, crypto, someone else. But I mean, these are, you know, this is a huge uptake for the Salana side. So, yeah, I mean, not just EIF, clearly, William. Yeah, yeah, I mean, but, I mean, Solana is kind of following what ETH has been doing the last few months. Obviously, to a lesser extent, though, this is all intent at this point, obviously.

I'm not totally knocking that down, but I would say Ethereum is, still ahead in those efforts. And the point is not to just buy the currency, it's what to do with it in terms of yields. And the story with Ethereum is really about defy and what you can do with the yields. So we'll have to see what happens with those Solana announcements. Anyone else on something? Is it Galaxy? Yeah, what's with Galaxy?

Was it Galaxy to announce something with Solana? Maybe it was. Yeah, I mean, I think it was Galaxy Jump. Is it Galaxy Jump and Multi-Coyne? Is that what it was? I was trying. Yeah, if I was trying, I was missing the third one. But, yeah, I mean, these are not, like, throw in Tampara.

Like, these are the biggest incumbent crypto funds. And the bankers, Cantor Fitzgerald on that one, who's been focused, to my knowledge, exclusively on Bitcoin previously. It just seems like a. wild world we're living in right now where it's these companies like you said like they found like a random medical device company and you know somehow got those people to sell right or you know just some sort of takeover gave them equity and then you know you've got a bunch of you know crypto pros out there just like taking these companies public and then you've got someone that kind of operates and understands

like our market and then someone that's operating and understanding the public markets and you know there's filings that they have to do and a lot more accounting that needs to be done you know like ultimately you do kind of wonder you know having been in this industry for a long time like where this is actually all going and you know is it like sure I guess they're going to set up a bunch of like Solana infrastructure and that's that's probably great for Solana but ultimately like is the is the utility there to maintain the fees right like Like, if number don't go up forever, like, these things start to get in some kind of deep, deep trouble. But I don't know.

I mean, I've, I'm still obviously bullish on the fact that, like, more people are getting involved in, like, more interesting ways. And I didn't think we would be able to suck up this much public market capital to shoot into our industry in that way. And I think it is great for different offshoots. I think it's great for Bitcoin, you know, ultimately. But it does kind of make you wonder, like, where does it stop? Like, can we all just launch some sort of public vehicle and go raise this capital? Like, where is all this capital coming from? It's like, it just seems endless.

Sorry, my mic. It's more of just a brain, a brain fart, like, just trying to figure out what's going on. Yeah, like, where is it coming from and where does this end? Well, where do you think we are in this treasury company cycle? I think it's a valid conversation to have right now in context of all this. It's been quieter on the Bitcoin treasury front, honestly. Yeah, I think people are still out there trying to gear up and they're trying to, you know, there will be more, right?

Like, I think there's going to be a thousand of these things by the Bitcoin conference next year, close to, who knows. But yeah, you're seeing people just look at the same play across different layers. I mean, I'm not sure if like what's Garamucci launched the other day was a, it wasn't a pubco with Avalanche, but it was something, you know, it's another $300 million just getting shoved into another chain, you know, and that really hasn't moved too much because of some of these announcements, which is also kind of crazy to see that there's not as much upside in these announcements as there was before, which does maybe think that, make me think that it is cooling

off. William? Yeah, I was just looking up the volume of Bitcoin treasuries. just so we can compare the Ethereum number right now is sitting at about $20 billion. And the Solana number is sitting at about $1.5 billion. So just to give you an idea, I have the number here. I'm just looking up the number for the Bitcoin.

Bitcoin is still the highest. It's really hard. There's close to 100,000, 100,000. a thousand you see uh i'll come back to that number but bitcoin is is way way higher so maybe that is the top end um and you can follow what might happen by looking at the ratio basically if bitcoin has reached the top uh let's see where ethereum is let's see where so long i can go and that can give you an idea uh on a relative basis perhaps Are you interested, like as an investor, are you as interested in buying a treasury company as you would be in buying, say, the underlying asset?

Well, I'm interested in learning more and seeing what these companies are going to do with the underlying asset and whether what they do with it is going to generate more yield than just holding the asset itself. In a time where everybody is bullish, you could say, yeah, hold the asset and you get returns there. But let's see what happens when times are not so bullish, and let's see how creative these companies will get in terms of making the asset productive itself. And right now, there are high expectations from the Ethereum treasury companies about how they would make ETH productive, because ETH is the largest part of DFI. So I'm waiting to see what companies, like the Ether machine, for example,

who has been setting high expectations as to how they will make ETH productive and how they will make that reflect on their balance sheet and the return to their shareholders. So it's not just like a loan-driven strategy, like what strategy does. I mean, they keep selling and buying loans and almost like, I don't want to say the word Ponzi, but it is kind of a Ponzi of a sort because they keep selling loans to the next taker and hoping that Bitcoin keeps going up. Whereas Ethereum is not just the number go up, it's more, let's make ETH productive, let's do staking, re-staking, maybe some loops, maybe entering liquidity pools. It's really about exploiting the yield aspects of ETH, whether it's another 10 or 15% in addition to the traditional 3% that's talked about.

And that, I think, is going to be a more balanced strategy to look for. Godless. I think, like, you know, alt-coin treasury companies are, they've noticed a quirk with the, with Bitcoin treasury companies. And that is, there's, you've got to match supply and demand. And there's a heck of a lot of supply right now from early entrance into, let's say, Bitcoin or Solana or Ethereum or whatever. They have huge, huge positions, obviously, because of how much the price has changed higher.

And if they want to be able to sell that, well, it needs to be matched by the demand. And the demand side, there's plenty of people that have been reading about altcoins but haven't wanted to invest in them directly or haven't had the means to invest them directly and want to invest in them in equity format. And what the Bitcoin Treasury, sorry, what an altcoin treasury company does is that sort of matches that supply with the demand, it can take very large positions off of early holders and it can transfer it to equity preferred folks and really, you know, match the two together.

I think that, you know, when you look at just Bitcoin, you know, in the early cities or even over this past weekend, when you've got someone that has a huge amount that they've been hoddling for a long time and they want to sell it, the only way they'd be able to sell it these days is if a Treasury company was sitting there on the bid or an institution was on the bid. If it was all retail flow like we saw, you know, five years ago, then you'd never be able to get out of these very large positions. So I think that you're going to see more and more all-coin treasury companies come into being so you can transfer. So the early investors can transfer over to institutional investors or folks that only want to invest in

equities. A hundred percent just described the playbook. I've said this a lot of times. I don't know if it's controversial, but Bitcoin treasury strategies seem very risky to me. even though Bitcoin is the only natural treasury asset because Bitcoin doesn't have a native yield, as William sort of described. And you have to do something to beat Bitcoin and justify a premium to nav. With Alcoins, I think they should just be called all coin hedge funds, not treasury companies, because no, I don't think that like you want to be holding hyperliquid in 30 years, like digital gold as a hedge against your cash in your portfolio. But something like a Solano where you can earn 9% yield

or an Ethereum that you can earn a yield, and you can go into defy and participate in Ave and get that 10, 15, 20%. If the goal of a treasury company is to beat the benchmark asset, that logically is a lot easier with an all coin than with Bitcoin. And you don't really have to take much risk to do it. So I don't think they justify as a 4 or 5x premium, but like, you know, if you're trading at a 1.5 premium or something and you're earning a significant yield, which is compounding, that makes sense. It's a whole other conversation if you want to talk about your long-term belief

in that asset going up or down, you know, and the value there. But the Bitcoin treasuries, other than just adding Bitcoin to your balance sheet with available cash, there has to be risk there. But Gary, I mean, you're a huge micro-strategy bull. I think he's different. I think Saylor has such a lead that that one makes a hell of a lot of sense to me. I agree with you over the long term, but I tell you, I'm getting a little nervous about how many, there's just too many of these projects being launched, and it's going to be, man, there's going to be, I think there's going to be a lot of people lose a shitload of money. Yeah, there's this weird sentiment that, like, they could never trade at a discount as if we've never seen that before, and I think that that's coming for most of us.

There's too many of these being launched. I mean, if you got, how many did the gentlemen say? You know, I think there's 300 public companies with some sort of crypto in their balance sheet now or something. Yeah, actually, I have the numbers for just as a, to compare, Bitcoin, about 200 companies, this is excluding ETF, just the Treasury, public, private or countries. 200 companies are holding 200 billion in dollars of Bitcoin.

So it's about 10% more or less of the Bitcoin market cap. Ethereum, it's 70 entities holding $20 billion in ETH. And Solana, a more in your entrance, 12 companies are holding $1.5 billion dollars in Solana in that treasury. So that gives you a relative kind of comparison between the top three. Yeah, I mean, I'm sure there's people just looking for broken companies, find a broken company, go to their board, approach them. They won't know the difference between Salon and Bitcoin or Ethereum. I just think it's going to be one.

I have no way to value any of these other than looking at the sponsor and going, wow, galaxies behind this or Pantera's behind this. So therefore, it must be a good deal. Uh, why do I need to pay two and 20 for this risk? Why do I need to pay two and 20 for this risk when I can buy Bitcoin? Or in fact, I can buy micro strategy through my own broker or whatever, but look, 600,000, 700,000 Bitcoin with a guy that's been doing this now four years. Uh, very different. I think people are going to get hoodwinked quite easily comparing one of these businesses

to another. And, uh, I mean, look, how many complaints have been made about some of the so-called mistakes that Sailor's already made? Imagine the fucking mistakes that are going to be made by these new companies. They have no clue with this fucking asset is, dude. None. When you and I went to Vegas, we landed and, like, I think within like three hours, we were talking about how all we had been pitched was Bitcoin Treasury companies, right? And this was at the beginning of May.

And you not discussed this. And I was saying very publicly, I was like, and there were only four of them. at the time or something or five, you know, if you really, like, as far as those trying to engineer it. And we talked about it, and I was like, dude, I'm very worried about number 30 and 40. Like, I was concerned when there were four. So it definitely, the notion that they'll never trade at a discount just blows my mind. Like, so many companies trade at a discount to the net asset value of their companies. We've had minors. I mean, Iron for a very long time was trading it less than the value literally of like their machines happens all the time that if i was sailor

right now i would just be raising money to wait to buy a bunch of uh exploded treasury companies in a few that i totally agree with dude this is going to be an m and a cycle that's going to be very interesting and if you're not holding bitcoin i think it's going to be painfully shit anyone else on the panel thoughts here i think that that's what we'll end up seeing is the well-capitalized ones buying up the ones that end up trading at a discount, even if they're themselves trading a discount. Bankers and lawyers got both sides. It's recession for each way in and out.

I mean, you expect consolidation. I mean, that's what you want. That's what you expect, right? It doesn't necessarily. I just wonder what it takes for the market for that to happen. Yeah. Right. Yeah.

But I think anything to me that is, you know, but is purely based on number go up or speculation or financial crimes is not as bullish to me as, you know, what might be adoption or what might be actual things we do moving on to crypto rails. So, you know, I think if anything, it was just a reminder that you should be taking profits on the pumps and, you know, things are going to fluctuate. Like, you know, I bought a bag of salana like 160 bucks and here we are in a big dip and I'm still feeling great. Like, you really have to zoom out a little bit, but I agree on those points about the treasury companies. And now we're already seeing some of them announcing effectively that they're doing stock buybacks. I mean, even the Tom Lee one did a stock buyback while issuing stuff. It's just very confusing to me.

Like, they sell stock to buy tokens, and then at certain points buy back the stock while also buying the coins. It just seems like these are going to get out of control. very quickly. But what do I know? Matt, you came at the perfect time. I think you're absolutely right, dude. It's going to end messy. It's going to, sorry to interrupt Matt, but there's going to be 300 of these things.

You know they're all just lining up right now to get their fees. And they're just going to be hedge funds. And they're just going to be hedge funds trying to outcompete one another, as you said, and taking on more risk. There's only one way that ends. Right, Scott. I mean, when the next time that we're in a bare market, and we are doing a diagnosis on what happened, we're going to be eyeing these treasury

companies. I understand trying to buy MSCR or a treasury company as a levered play on the underlying asset that they're accumulating. But I just see that as a medium-term trade. These companies are the antithesis of what Bitcoin is all about, right? They have C. They changed their minds every other week. There's just so many things that can go wrong. I don't understand anyone that's holding these things long term. It doesn't make sense to me. Matt, did you get caught off enough based on what you just heard?

Our favorite conversation that you and I have had so many times. That's right. Yeah, I think for years, Scott, we've been saying that the problem will be as this sort of expands and people get more and more risky. that's going to happen. I do think, I don't know what the conversation has been, sorry, I was caught up in travel, was late today. I do think, you know, generally you have to separate how the stocks will perform from whether or not they'll be forced to sell their existing holdings of crypto assets. I think the stock performance has some risk. I don't see them dumping huge amounts of

Bitcoin or eth onto the market. I still think they're going to be net buyers over the rest of the year but but uh but for sure yeah you know we we all saw this this train coming so what's going on and yeah go ahead what about over the course of three four five years uh i have less clarity about that i'd love to know what other people think um yeah i don't i don't actually my my uh my vision of what happens over the next three or four years is is is with these treasury companies is unclear so I don't know is the short answer. I just think in the short term, there's not debt-due activist efforts take a long time. I don't think many of them will want to unwind.

So I think their pace of purchasing is likely to slow significantly from where it was in Q2. But I don't think we'll see them cough up assets in the next handful of months. I could be wrong. Over three to four or three to five years, yeah, I don't know. I just, I'm fuzzy. I'd love to hear what other people think. Hey, Matt, do you see Gary here? Do you see any flows change because of all these strategic reserve place? Is it impacting your ETFs any at all?

Or can you even see into that? Yeah, it's a great question. It's a little bit hard to know. I think there's some substitution going on. I think some percentage of people who would buy ETFs or instead or have instead bought these treasury companies. You know, flows have been great. but maybe they would have been even greater without this ecosystem. So it's a good question.

I don't really know the answer. It most certainly has impacted MSTR, right? They have competition now that they didn't have 18 months ago. Yeah. Right? So I was just assuming it would impact some of your flow. You're probably right. you're probably right. I think that's right. Yeah, I think that's probably right. I think there's a

chance. Yeah, I think that's probably right. Yeah, that's an interesting question versus the ETFs because generally I know we've had some outflows here, which are predictable, but there's been a very, very steady bit on the ETFs across the board and not just Bitcoin mat. And that doesn't seem like a trend that's stopping at all. And everybody knew that that was going to take a huge bite out of micro strategy, but I don't know how that affects the other treasury companies in that sort of circle. Yeah, I would say, I mean, I expect that trend to dramatically accelerate in Q3 and Q4. The sort of institutions don't care about what's going on in the treasury space.

They don't even see this as a pullback. We think ETF flows will set a record this year. We think they'll set a record next year. I think that demand is extremely intact. So, yeah, these have probably taken some of the retail flows on the edges, but the long-term trends of institutions allocating to the space is accelerating, not decelerating. So, you know, I think ETF flows will be just fine. Yeah, I wasn't trying to suggest that it was going to eat into it,

but I was actually trying to suggest that people are chasing these new projects because of the hope of, hey, I'm going to get a bigger return, but I would think that pensions, the nation-state pensions that are investing in the ETFs, they're probably not going to do the sub-tier strategic reserves. No chance. Definitely. Norway's done a billion in the MSTR, but they're not going to go to a sub-level strategic reserve on Solano, are they?

I mean, I can't imagine them doing that, whereas they would plow into the ETF heavy, correct? I think that's right. Yeah, I think you have that right. Also, you have to wonder, I mean, Gary, you know, Microstrategy, I think there's been a lot of incredible notes that he's issued that or, you know, all of these things that he's created, these instruments that allow people different exposure, but doesn't necessarily affect the price of Micro Strategy's stock. like the most recent offering you get that 10% like we were talking about it's supposed to be trading apart 100 and it's under like that seems like a great buy but that doesn't necessarily mean that micro strategy stock needs to go up right right it's like there's some competition uh within his own you know products i would say maybe uh maybe i'm reading that wrong i mean matt do you think that that's true

i think that may be that may be true i think micro strategy is going to be fine i bet there'll be of last resort for some of these treasury companies if they traded a persistent discount. I bet that's the likely outcome for some of them. But yeah, I mean, they're going to, Microstrategy is going to slice Bitcoin into every financial slice that it can. And it may be, yeah, that there is some competition. But I generally think they're going to be fine. They're doing an interesting financial engineering service for the Bitcoin space and

people are going to find their way to some of their products. absolutely matt what else is on your radar at the moment i it's it's it's it's almost etf paloosa season i think uh you know that that's sort of on my radar both in terms of institutional interest i think is going to be extremely strong starting september i'm on week two of a nine nine consecutive weeks of going and speaking at uh tradfai conferences um and then you know there are expectations that the SEC could open the Ludgates for approval on multiple ETFs, index ETFs, et cetera. In the fall, of course, we don't know if that will happen.

I'm not guaranteeing it will happen. But I think the sort of trad-fi access to crypto market could look really dramatically different in a few months versus where it is today. So that's been on my mind. And then, of course, you know, as you covered in one of the letters, Scott, we just released, you know, our long-term capital markets assumptions for Bitcoin. So I'm excited to talk to institutions about that as well. That's been a fun project. Yeah, I read about that in my newsletter this morning. It was such a great paper, as always.

And it seems like there's a much higher demand now from institutions for your research. Well, yeah, I mean, I think the most, I appreciate the kind words about the paper, but the most important thing about the paper is that we are asked to write it by 12 different firms that, you know, managed north of $100 billion in assets and in many cases trillions of dollars of assets. And, you know, I've been doing this for eight years. No one ever asked for long-term capital markets assumptions for Bitcoin until this year. And the reason is that they're used to build model portfolios for clients. And I think what it tells you is that until this year, the big boys just weren't doing that. They were doing one-off allocations for one-off clients.

they're thinking about does this belong as an asset essentially in every portfolio so as interesting as the paper is and i think it's interesting it you know it forecasts bitcoin to be the best performing large asset in the world over the next 10 years and sort of provides receipts on why i think it's more interesting that people asked for it i mean a lot of people asked for it so we were excited to get it out in the world perfect yeah guys we're going to wrap a bit early today summer doldrums i think we've covered most of the topics that we had um appreciate all of you guys joining uh sometimes you know there's just not that much to talk about for for very long and some days it's a five-hour conversation so i appreciate all of you joining uh we will be back

tomorrow 1015 and eastern standard time thank you everybody for listening to crypto town hall we'll see what prices tomorrow bye