The Wolf Of All Streets - The Fed Could Blow Up Bitcoin’s Breakout Today

Episode Date: August 28, 2026

Bitcoin is back near $80K as markets brace for Kevin Warsh’s Jackson Hole speech, with U.S. demand strengthening and ETF inflows continuing. Elsewhere, Ethena is overhauling ENA tokenomics with aggressive buybacks, Solana is moving toward lower inflation and higher burns, and Charles Schwab is expanding direct crypto trading to SOL, AVAX and LINK. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Fed could blow up Bitcoin's breakout today. I, for one, am extremely excited to hear Kevin Warsh say absolutely nothing in Jackson Hole. The world is waiting with bated breath to see what he will say, but they should probably be waiting for to see what he won't say. Yeah, we're going to talk about that today. We've got a big show. We've got a lot of guests. We have Jason and Santu here at the beginning.

We got Arian at the end. And, of course, the weekly reckoning. So three guests, a summary of the week, and me, while woefully, underprepared. Let's go. Good morning, everybody. And welcome to the show. That was the second worst intro that I've done in the last six months. The worst was yesterday when I misquoted the price and then froze completely for 15 seconds.

I'm not going to say that Bitcoin going up has broken my brain, but something certainly has this week. And I'm really glad it's Friday. And I'm really glad that I have two amazing guests here to talk instead of me. morning gentlemen you know it's one of those weeks I'm having one of those weeks I miss that intro music man yeah yesterday I hit it with I was like

Bitcoin breaks 100K and then I was like no no it did it what am I talking about like you're taking maybe it's a simulation you're taking us into the future a little bit man that's right I mean let's talk about it so I mean first of all we've got you know the headlines every single day is like

Bitcoin gains 80K Bitcoin loses 80K Bitcoin's near 80K Bitcoin smells 80K so apparently Bitcoin has lost 80K. I haven't even checked the price today. Yeah, 79s, but coming into Jackson Hole, I know you guys are probably looking at this. My opinion, as you probably heard sarcastically in the beginning is that Warsh won't say much, or he'll say as little as humanly possible. But, you know, there seems to be a sentiment that today could actually be pretty meaningful

for markets. Either one of you can jump in. Go ahead. Sont, do you want to take that? Yeah, yeah. I think it's important to put the context here because you've had a record earning season, you know, basically 86% of the companies in the S&P beat earnings estimates, and then they beat it by 11%. So that's monumental. And I think we're coming into earning seasons thinking, gosh, maybe the AI trade is overblown. It's too hot. So we're, inviddy obviously reporting earnings this week. So that's the context that we're, you know, that I think is going to be part of the discussion in Jackson Hole. And obviously, that bodes really well for crypto. So I don't know. For me, I felt for a while that,

invidia's earnings are far more important that what happens in jackson hole to me that's the thing that if you're putting on risk in your portfolio that's the most important thing like what is what is capex guidance uh and and what is invidia reported because if those two things fall apart then it doesn't matter what everything else happens in in markets in the economy in my opinion yeah i kind of agree i kind of agree with santiago i mean i think santi you said this several months back you said invidia earnings are more important than you know what the fed does and I think that still holds true today. Actually, I think it's more important than ever, right?

The CAPEX is driving. The AI trade is driving everything. And by the way, Scott, I think that's why, you know, we should talk. You said, you know, we're above 80K, we're below 80K, we're above 80K, we're below 80K. But that is a, I mean, that's like a five or six day phenomenon here. We should, you know, get like, I think this is a, it is very interesting to see crypto break out of whatever. You know, I think it's a, you know, pretty confirmed, you know, year plus long bear market here. And I think the big question, at least on my mind, is there's two sides of the industry.

There's one that says, look, this was the biggest short squeeze in crypto history. It was a $2.7 billion short squeeze. This was just a short squeeze and prices come right back down and, you know, find the trough again. And then there's another side that says this is the beginning of a bear market, or excuse me, beginning of a bull market. And I think Santi and I might be on different sides of that coin. Okay, well, let's talk about it. I want to fight like Brett.

Yeah, if I like friends, I mean, you assume that we're friends. That's the, no, I think, okay, so like if we had to be people who were perceived to be friends on camera. If we, if we gave the 30 second overview on what happened, right, like the trigger here was macro. So, you know, even though Santi says, Nvidia earnings matter more than everything, the trigger, the trigger was macro, right? So, you know, what is it? August 28th, nine days ago, Treasury doubles the, you know, size of the long end liquidity support buybacks from, you know, $2 billion to, to what was it, $4 billion, I think it was. Bitcoin touches, I think it was like 80, $80, $1K. And that's kind of where we're flirting around today.

So after that, so that was like step number one. Step number two was there's this huge short squeeze, right? There's a $2.7 billion short squeeze. The important thing that happened after that that I don't think people have talked enough about is that mainstream financial media, Reuters, the journal, financial times, the three of us and crypto Twitter might say these folks don't matter. But the large hedge funds and large capital allocators are reading them every single morning. The financial media started to put Bitcoin back into the story.

And it wasn't just a story about prices. It was a story about the debasement trade. Right. So I think that is like a woefully underdiscust story is that Bitcoin as a debasement trade is completely back on the table after not having been in the conversation for, you know, let's call it a year and a half. And so alongside of that, you have two other huge triggers. One is that Washington has completely changed their stance on crypto.

right. August 8th, Senate leadership takes this big procedural step to set up a clarity act. You know, 10 days later, August 18th, it becomes pretty clear that clarity has completely stalled out. But then, you know, the SEC and CFTC take matters into their own hands and they move forward with agency level policy. We all saw the video of, you know, Trump talking about, you know, hyperliquid, and we saw, you know, the SEC rollout regulation project crypto. And then the backdrop along all of this, Scott, that I know you've been talking a lot about is like, the on-chain economy, never really had a bear market, right? Peak to trough for stable coins. The last cycle was like a 30% drawdown.

Peaked to trough for stable coins in this cycle was a 4% drawdown. So you've got this like on-chain economy booming. You've got Washington completely changing their tune. And you've got this macro fuse that just, I think, lit this like, you know, box of Tinder. And so I think my take here is this is the very beginning of a bull market. Okay. I don't tell us are going to 40. No, look, admittedly, I was very wrong in that.

I mean, I've been very surprised and publicly said last week, look, if you were to tell me that micro strategy breaking its sacred promise of not selling Bitcoin, I would have told you, yeah, Bitcoin's going to 50 for you. It's going to get ugly because there's no catalyst. And I think I very much agree with Jason. There is a catalyst now because of debate. Like, Bitcoin has always been a digital gold, right? Gold is up 33% in the year, also rallyed this month.

I think it's up 13%. It's off its highs, but, you know, Bitcoin and gold are, you know, are the same thing, in my opinion. Obviously, everyone's looking at Bitcoin as a fraction of gold and it says, look, it's an interesting thing having your portfolio. I think, like, that's been true for the last five years. I think for better or for worse, you know, micro strategy and Sailor just commanded so much of the attention of what Bitcoin truly is supposed to be. And I'm glad that that has sort of taking less of an important.

important role here because I think like since, you know, ETFs came around, it has just been too much attention of what micro strategy is doing or not. And I'm glad in many ways that we're having more of these fundamental like Austrian economic discussions because that's what Bitcoin really is like the only reason where you're going to have it in your portfolio is you think it's going to do something like gold and it has a bit more asymmetry than gold because it's starting off from a way lower base and there's still people that are at zero. So I don't disagree with any of that, to be honest. I just struggled to have it in my portfolio for a whole variety of other reasons, which is, you know, the market's at an all-time high. Yes, we're having a really strong

earning season. But I want to position my portfolio in a way that there's likely higher probability of the market going down than up. That's just my view. And so if that's the case, and I run that simulation, I just don't think Bitcoin or anything in crypto is going to perform. You know, it's down 80%. And I just, I've lived enough in, in, in cryptocurrency, those cycles that I want to avoid an 80% drawdown on my entire network. It's a good time. Highly recommend. Three times now.

Next time will be the time that you sell the top. Next time. I see both of those views. I definitely more, I think, agree with Jason here. Just because at 60,000 Bitcoin, there's nothing, no asset I can. look at and say I'd rather buy it at this price than that one. I don't want to buy AI where it is right now versus Bitcoin at 60 when I look at the future potential. And I would like to say, as for the catalyst thing, first of all, we had a months now of terrible news and Bitcoin either

floating up or not going down, which to me was a huge signal that the market was bottoming. Saylor, obviously the market went down when he sold 32 Bitcoin, but when he was selling thousands of them, Bitcoin was actually going up. So I think the market was pricing him out as main character to your point, which I think was really important. But like cold card and the data hacks and, you know, BitMart and all of these things, we've had quietly almost the same level of disaster as 2022. They just have, we just haven't had names like Machinsky and SBF on top of them or Doquan, right? But I mean, there's been a lot of destruction here and the market ceased going down.

And I think that people, you know, don't really look back at the last cycle and understand the catalyst. To me, the cycle catalyst in 2023, after all that was actually Silicon Valley Bank, which was a fundamental reason that Bitcoin went up. A bank collapsed. People sold their USDC. I did, bought Bitcoin, and then the entire narrative, you know, Bitcoin went 19 to 25, and the entire narrative around Bitcoin changed. Once again, you know, there was not a catalyst that we could foresee. And I feel like this treasury thing, because everybody knows that the actual liquidity they're adding is a rounding error, but the signal of it is the same kind of signal as SVB to me. Maybe I'm too optimistic, but I think people don't look back at 23 and say SVB started

the last bull market. But if you look, Bitcoin jumped from like 19 to 25 and never really looked back. And I feel like the similar, you know, yes, I think we're going to go back into low 70s or something. But I, you know, I think we're going to put in a higher low and keep going. Yeah, I mean, I would, I would actually argue that the catalyst here is a catalyst that we've never had, which is the healthiest catalyst in the 15 years of crypto, which is that we've, finally have real companies. We finally have real on-chain crypto companies who have tokens. And they are interested in making those tokens valuable. And this is such a simple, simple idea, but it's the first time in history that this has happened. Right. So, you know, let's use a

couple examples here. Hyperliquid. Hyperliquid just had back-to-back quarters of 150 million, $150 million revenue quarters back-to-back, right? $300 million in the first half of 2026, $600 million annualized. It's a 13-person company that's three years old. If there's a 13-person company that was three years old doing 600 million in annualized revenue, I promise you, Scott, it'd be the hottest company in all of Silicon Valley. Hugging Face just got acquired by Nvidia for, what was that? I think $12.9 billion. $13 billion on $150 million of revenue. Pumped out fun. You know, maybe I can, I don't know if I'm able to share my screen on this thing here, Scott. But, you know, I just shared my screen.

I don't know if you guys can add it. Pump. Blockwork's data. Blockworks data, baby. So, you know, Pump. Dot Fun is doing, what are these numbers? $100 million in revenue, quarterly revenue, $122 million in quarterly revenue, $90 million in quarterly revenue.

This thing is, this would be one of the hottest fintech apps in the world if this thing was not a crypto company. So all it takes right now is for founders to reposition their company and their capital, capital stack to say we are driving the value of our business back to the token. And if you look at what this company or this protocol Athena did and the founder, the founder guy, they're completely repositioning the company to make it clear to the market that the value accrues to the token. And I think that's actually the catalyst got. I think the treasury thing is important. But I think founders saying that the tokens have value is actually a way greater

catalyst than a treasury move could ever be. Interesting. So I think maybe there's a differentiation there between what sparks a Bitcoin bull market and what sparks the rest of crypto to follow or not follow, right? Because I think in the last one, we had SVB as a catalyst, then we had the ETFs and all coins just didn't participate. So we had basically a Bitcoin cycle and market, but all coins to know great degree participated.

I 100% agree with you. I would love, Sonti, your take, that all coins that move this cycle are going to be the ones that you can intellectually value like a stock. You can look at a cut, look at it like a company and understand where the money comes from how the value goes, you know, accrues back to the token, etc. I'm sure there are plenty of meme coins and outliers. Yeah. Look, 100%. I've been talking about this since late last year. I'm going to invest from a lot of these protocols, Athena, pump. And I was calling the same thing. It's like I got crucified in the timeline for being a P guy. It's like, well, I come from a world of investing in fundamental.

those in cash flow. And to Jason's point, look, crypto is matured as an industry. 2017, you were throwing narratives on the wall. And if it's stuck, like the market believe that because you're talking about a huge tam. You're like, let's replace Wall Street and let's, you know, the internet's super highway. And that, you know, is a $300 billion narrative that Ethereum still commands. But it's gotten much harder to make money in crypto. Like if you were invested in Solana three years ago, you vastly underperformed and lost money. And this cycle, it's been pump, and it's been hyperliquid. And yeah, and so like, and that's a good thing, by the way.

Like, it's just the game gets harder as the industry grows, rightfully so. So it's really impressive when to me, I definitely agree with Jason's point. I'm looking at what is the earnings power of these protocols. And if it's been very impressive to see a protocol like pump, and people have all kinds opinions about meme coins. The reality is people, you know, markets are becoming, traditional markets are becoming more like crypto, not crypto becoming more like traditional markets in the sense that you have, you know, people obsessing about options, you have people liking trading and it's very social.

And so naturally, crypto catches a bid because that's reflected in the earnings of pump. You know, pumped, even if you could have sat there for the last couple of months saying, gosh, it's a terrible environment to be an investor in crypto. Like no one wants to touch these things. But the reality is pumped just the earnings of pump and the fees that have been generated by the activity on meme coins has been pretty consistent. It's sort of flatlined at like $100, $120 million. In hyper liquid, obviously a different animal because with HIP3,

you're now able to trade commodities and AI and memory stocks on the weekend. And I think that is going to be probably the biggest catalyst of this cycle because markets just and investors want that, right? It's almost ludicrous to think there and say, gosh, like, why is it that we have to trade only like Monday to Friday and Friday, to five. I want to be trading catalyst and I want to be trading what's on the timeline all the time. And let's not even get into discussion on what agents will want to do. But that's also super exciting. Right. And I think that's, you know, this cycle is not going to be just throw everything

and everything goes up. That might be true on the margin, but I think there would be clear, clear outliers. And it's likely going to be those protocols that are printing cash and those, you know, are the ones that Jason mentioned. I mean, hype made, you know, all time high as the last two weeks. That's the chart right there. It's pretty absurd, right? Agents are obviously going to want to trade preanthropic on hyperliquid with Athena, their base layer, right? It's impressive, right? I mean, like, crypto touches on some of the more fundamental issues that we have, right? You have the affordability crisis, which means people like going to the casino more doing a bear market than a bull market, because you want to do the, you know, it's like, I don't want to compound for 20 years to get to a million.

I want to get to a million now and I want 100x and I want to, you know, that's pump, right? And then hype, I think, is attracting a totally different cohort that ETFs likely didn't attract. That's didn't attract. It's like hedge funds that. Holy shit, I have a ton of exposure to Anthropic in the private markets or Cerebrus is going to price on Monday. And I also have a lot of exposure. Let me hedge this on hype. And that is like a really novel instrument to do.

And I think that's what pulls in up. You always want to understand where a flow is going to come from. And I think hyperliquid is doing that, probably more so than Bitcoin, to be honest. I mean, look at the, Scott, if you could pull up that chart that I'm showing again, this is a different one. This is hyperliquid. This is far more important than the price of hyperliquid in my opinion, in my opinion, is where the notional volume is coming from.

So, you know, if you think about like, you know, Scott, we've been working, you know, we've known each other for a very long time, even before I met Santiago. the original idea, I think that we, you know, one of the original ideas we got excited about is like, you know, someday all financial markets might move on chain, right? Stocks, bonds, currencies, it's all moving onto public blockchains. And I think Hyperliquid is the first real evidence we have that this is actually happening. Right. So what you're looking at here is, you know, on August 26th, two days ago, Hyperliquid did $9.6 billion

of Perps volume. 2.75 billion of that. So 29% of their volume is in markets that. Lockworks tags as real world assets, right? So if you look at the RWA tagged volume, you know, there's 1.8 billion of stock of equities. There's, you know, what else do we have here? We have that include pre-IPO, by the way, like, uh, nope, doesn't even include pre-IPO. So there's, okay, so 1.77 billion in equities, 590 million in equity indices like the S&P, 370 million in commodities. And then there's smaller markets around, you know, FX, which we,

FX is not even a thing in crypto probably will become a thing, just like payments have become a narrative. FX will definitely become a narrative pre-IPO markets and the bond markets. And so 29% of hyperliquids volume is now non-crypto. And I think that's why people like when you take this to D1 Capital, you take it to, you know, Stanley, Druck and Miller. They get excited about, you know, they're obviously buying per the hyperliquid strategies, DAT because they can't hold, you know, the hype token. But I think I think this is a very, very interesting story to, to, to truly. traditional capital allocators. Yeah, as I think that as you're talking about it and I think through it, this seems like, you know, listen, I think we all intellectually, honestly can say that, you know,

most of price action in crypto has been on speculation, right? It's been a huge casino historically. And Hyperliquid, obviously, I think the story there was that people learned that they could use crypto rails and crypto traders, then learn they could follow the hot ball of money, whether it was in crypto or not, and then everybody joined them, right? So as I'm thinking through this, Hyperliquid seems to actually be the purest play. on human degeneracy and speculation that you can buy in crypto right now, and you used to only be able to speculate on people doing that in crypto, and now you can speculate on the entire breadth of potential speculation.

I'm going to say how many times I can say speculate. I mean, here's where I think this market goes and, like, you know, what is the play, basically, Scott? So I think I actually believe that AI is going through the moment, what happened to crypto in 2021, where we saw. everything caught a bid. You know, celebrities are launching, not only NFTs, but celebrities are launching their own chain. If you put blockchain in the word of your company, you know, you could raise around. That's happening with AI right now. We are in that moment of AI. There

will be a reckoning, I promise you. And then in a couple of years, the best companies in AI will be a hundred times larger than they are today. But there has to be the reckoning. We just had the reckoning in crypto. There will be some amazing companies to buy in crypto. I think Bitcoin will do extremely well. I think hype will do well. I, you know, a lot of my portfolio is still Solana. Like, I think a lot of, I think there are some really, really, really good companies that will do well and come out of this reckoning. But it won't be one big trade like it was last time. Yeah. But let me push back on that. If I'm a, like, I want to talk about Salada. Go ahead. Yep. Like, we're all drinking the Kool-Aid. And I was looking back like, we're talking about

earnings here. And like, I think like, we're making broad categorization, script. in AI, like there are wild valuations in AI companies across, across the assembly line. Like if you look at, you know, memory versus some of the frontier models versus open source. Like, it's just not one trade. And crypto is not just one trade, right? Crypto used to be one trade. Like Bitcoin rallies 10%. Everything else catches a bit after.

Now it's very different. And so I think, look, you can always find gems in a bull in a bear market. And I think it will serve as well. Like in crypto, I think there's clear outliers. Like we talked about hyperliquid and pump and maybe Solana because of powers pump and maybe other applications. But some of the other stuff is still down 90%. And I don't think it recovers.

Oh, yeah. It is not going to start to grow everything. Give you an example. Ethereum, I can't like when you have the opportunity to buy hype, but like what is it, $8 billion market cap, it's not real 40 because of the, you know, of, you know, how much the founders will or whatever. So it's like an $8 billion protocol. Pump is a, what is it, a $3, $4 billion protocol, not even.

Ethereum's like $300. So I don't necessarily need to believe that flows come in from Bitcoin. I'm like, there's like, help me rationalize why there's a $300 billion. Like flows can come from Ethereum into hyperliquid because in my opinion, hyperliquid is what Ethereum wanted to be. You know, Ethereum was, Ethereum was cranking out like $40 million of revenue a day during the NFT, D-Fi summer days. That's like $18 billion of annualized run rate revenue, if you will.

Of course, you should never run rate, and that's like the reckoning that probably Jason talks about. But now it's like down less, Ethereum is going to make less money this year than hyperliquid and bomb. And it's like 50 to 100 times larger. I don't think they're in the same category at all. I think hyperliquid is trying to build in everything exchange. I think hyperliquid in Solana.

I see them as more directly competitive. I don't think the Ethereum crowd, I think the Ethereum crowd is genuinely trying to build a credible, credibly neutral platform, truly decentralized, almost like operating system that people can build financial applications on top of it. I get it, but it's always the opportunity cost, right? I mean, I think my point is you have to look at the multiples here. And I think the smart money and eventually just markets in general catch up to how widely over-

much easier to value than Ethereum. Much easier to value. And the point I'm trying to make is it is increasingly harder to hold an asset that is purely narrative and doesn't back it up with numbers like Ethereum. When you have something like hyperliquid that is putting numbers of the dashboard, like that, that's just there's when you think about who's going to buy Ethereum, they're going to consider hyperliquid more so than probably anything else. Yeah, an issue that I've had actually with, sorry to interrupt with pre, you know, with how to value previous layer ones is because once again, if we admit that most of it was priced. by speculation in the casino and not on fundamentals. What is the accurate price for these things if you repriced them based on fundamentals and not on the speculation of the past 10 years?

I don't know how we get there on that. I don't think it'll matter per se. I don't think we need to reprice these down 90% because of their fees. But I just think to your point that people coming in will have a very easy bifurcation of things they can value and things that they can. I do want to talk about the Salana's new proposal to cut. I don't know if you guys saw this, but basically to become more deflationary. Salana double disinflation, but this would massively, I think, reduce the yields for staking.

Interesting. And apparently it's likely to pass. Yeah. I've talked to a lot of institutions about like staking. There used to be a time where we talked about what's a staking yield. And that's like, you know, the, effectively the Fed funds rate for layer ones. It doesn't really matter. Like a lot of institutions are not putting on this trade.

thinking, yeah, I'm going to clip 8%. It's like, no, can I make a 10x on my money? Because it still carries a lot of risk. Look, I think the point you made, Scott, I just want to go quickly back to what you were saying. I think that we've tried so many different experiments at this point that I think we're converging on, look, blockchins are really good for their asset ledgers and transfers. And it's going to be speculation. Wall Street is all speculation too. And that's not a problem. It's a massive, massive market, bigger than Bitcoin. Sorry, bigger than gold. And so So the real question is, can hyper liquid become what Ethereum is and then larger? I think there's a credible way to like, you know, if it comes to the U.S., if you get more flows,

there's a really interesting like asymmetry there that I don't think is currently priced in. It will take a while to unfold. But I do think that, you know, what you're seeing, Robin Hood and some of these institutions, like people are waking up more and more that like blockchains just allow you to capture the flow and to really capitalize on 24-7-365 markets. And the TAMP for hyperliquid just went up dramatically with HIP3, and it's larger than Ethereum, and I think larger than Bitcoin, will it get there?

TBD, right? Because there's many competing forces in that that are trying to buy for that revenue pot. Jason, it's a lot of all of that, I guess. Yeah, I mean, so the vote, like, so it's like SimD, what is it, 0550 or something? something, right? It's proposed, is that the one we're talking about here? It proposes doubling the, uh, the annual, the annual disinflation rate, I think, from like 15% to 30% and it's, it kind of accelerates the, uh, the timeline to their, you know, goal inflation. By the way, what I'd say about this is, it's funny that we're, we're, there's so much

conversation about like, what should the U.S.'s inflation be? It's cool to think that we've created these economies on chain where we're talking about the terminal inflation. I just like that concept. But, um, I would, it seems that there's a, disconnect between the people building in Solana and then some of the people making these decisions. Like maybe some of the big stakers, I haven't looked into it too deeply. What I would say if I was guiding here is always trust the founders. Always, always, always trust the founders building in your network. Because if you lose those people, you will lose everyone else.

And so I think I've seen a lot of founders who are, you know, saying one side of the, you know, who have all one opinion. I haven't looked into it too deeply, Scott, but I would just, I would trust those founders. Yeah. Yeah. And there's clearly a bid right now regardless. So you got Salon ETFs continue to surge. US spot slot LATFs recorded 60.9 million inflows yesterday.

So obviously I think this is a part of a greater trend of Bitcoin and Ethereum leading, right? Because the Bitcoin and Ethereum numbers are much larger. So I don't think you can look at this in a vacuum. But I do find it interesting that, you know, other things besides Bitcoin are participating or even outperforming in this rally. That's not something we've seen in a very long time. if we want to go back to the likelihood that we're seeing a new bull market, I find it interesting that there flows elsewhere.

And this isn't just Bitcoin rallying onto basement. People are clearly excited about something here. Yeah, I mean, people forget how much we have done in the last couple of years. Like, even just look at the credit space, right? We have like $70 billion of deposits, $25 billion of loans. Like, I mean, Scott, you know this better than most, unfortunately. Like, remember how much fraud was in the borrow lens space in 2022? Like think about all those companies that went belly up, Genesis, Celsius,

BlocFi. We all know those stories. And I mean, even just the on-chain credit space has improved drastically. So I think, yeah, I think the space is pretty prime for what looks like a very healthy bull market here. I mean, yeah, I just want to circle back really quick before I let you guys go. Santi, why is your base premise that markets have effectively topped or that down is more likely than up? I know you said it kind of in passing, but it's a pretty big. statement. I think in probability, Scott, there's a very, like I'm very excited what's happening

in AI. It truly is transformational. If you're using it, the model of three months ago is very different than the model of today. You have like basically agents that are employees with their own computer with Grockbot. The world still thinks that AI is like a chatbot. So I'm, I'm incredibly encouraged by that. I think there's like a lot of productivity gains. A lot of traditional companies are going to start using AI. Like really exciting stuff, like moderna using AI to like try to cure skin cancer. Like everything, it's like how much of that's priced in. What are the expectations baked in? I still think that there's a lot of concerns around AI and the circularity, like go read of Michael Murray's argument like Nvidia and how it's financing, a lot of

these companies. Probabilistically, I think we're still in an environment where there's a lot of walls of worry that we climb as it relates to AI and how it's going to be regulated and data center approvals. So I think that that is liking. I've been long enough in crypto to probably be more cautious around like how regulation can really impact flows. And I think we're heading into a midterm election where the biggest concern is not going to be crypto is going to be AI and the unevenness of that concentration of wealth. I think there's a very, I think there's, there's, there's, there's a high probability that that derails, like the AI train and, and long term, I'm super bullish. I think the trend is up into the right. And the, but I think, you know, markets are kind of pricing that expectation to continue to be true. And so if there's a slowdown in that deployment and implementation of AI, I think markets will react really negatively. So I don't know. I'm cautiously optimistic in the medium to long term.

I'm super bullish in the long term, both AI and certain pockets of crypto. But, you know, I have to be mindful of the near-term forces that can get in the way of that bullcase really manifesting itself. Makes sense. Yeah, any takes on that before I let you guys go? I think this will probably be the time. I think we'll look back at this in, you know, 10 years and say that where we are today is where, you know, the dot-com bubble was after a burst. and there was a huge reckoning, and there were a couple good things to pick. And I think this is a time not to be a trader.

I think this is just a time to buy a couple of good things that you like and sit on them for the next 10 years and wake up in 10 years. And I don't think that's ever actually existed in crypto except for owning Bitcoin. I think Bitcoin is the only asset that you could have done that with. And for the first time in history, I think that now exists. Love it. Well, thank you gentlemen for both joining this morning. It was really great having you that 30 minutes flew by very, very fast.

So hopefully I'll have you both back very, very soon. Thanks, guys. Scott, great to see you, man. You too. Thanks, Scott. Take care of it. Awesome, awesome insight from them. I love the Blockworks research.

I need to get, you know, back on and get access to all of that so I can start showing it on my show. It's really useful and helpful, and I want access. You can hear me in the back. I want access. You guys hear me back there. So listen, before I bring on the next guess, I just want to cover one or two things very, very quickly because there's some other meaningful news that's been hitting the

market that I just want to make sure we we highlight this is the biggest one to me Charles Schwab to Salana avalanche and chain link to crypto trading platform so you guys obviously remember that it was big news when Chuck Chuckie Schwab he's a little redheaded terror terrorist Chuck Chuckie Charles Schwab who by the way Charles Schwab is still alive which I think is great for him because I didn't know that for a very long time he's like in his 90s but Charles Schwab adding Solana avalanche and chain link to crypto trading platform Interesting that we can have a conversation like we just did and that this is Solana Avalanche and Chainlink and not something more like Salana Hyper Liquid Zcash and pump. But it shows you where the traditional institutions still are.

But I find it pretty bullish for the space that we have some of the largest institutions on the planet slowly rolling out access to more crypto assets than just the ones that we have become familiar with. I remember the days when the only assets with regulatory clarity were Bitcoin Ethereum, and then you would see this long tale of Bitcoin Cash, Lightcoin would all be added. And those days are clearly over. I have not dug deeply into why they chose Avalanche and Chain Link here, but I'm here for it. And I think that this is great news and definitely worth highlighting. At the end of the show, I'm actually going to kind of cook through all the big news of the week. on the weekly reckoning. So right now I'm going to go ahead and bring on to Arian to discuss

some things actually that we were just talking about before. How are you, man? Good. Thank you for having me, Scott. Hopefully I pronounced it. Okay. Perfectly, actually. Thank you. Aryan, Ariane. Like, there's so many. I've had a Ryan before as well. That's good. You are A Ryan. That's like, not the Ryan, but you're A Ryan. Is you the other skit A-A-A-A-A-R-N? A-A-R-N.

So listen, there's a few things I want to talk to you about. So first, you know, I hate to be repetitive. But broadly, I would love your views on the market. It's where we need to start with every guest. Obviously, we've had this massive move up. I think altcoins have either at least participated or outperformed. And I find that to be an interesting and unique environment that we haven't seen for quite a while. And obviously, you know, you're the head of research at CMT Digital.

You're looking very deeply at these things, I would imagine, on a daily basis. Yeah, I think it's a story about optimism, but I think what happens in the next few weeks is really important for the long-term trend and the sustainability of this move. If we see ETF flows reclaiming some all-time highs or at least showing interest in the volumes that they're bringing to the market, then I think there could be some, you know, long-term narrative building here. Otherwise, I do tend to agree with Santiago that we could see a bit of a sideways market or a reclaiming of kind of the lower bounds if that momentum doesn't continue. We have seen that ETF flow follow the short squeeze, which I've found encouraging. But I 100%

agree with you that there needs to be follow through, right? I've been here long enough to know that we can report on these massive inflow streaks and they turn into 10-day outflow streaks. And so it's hard to find signal in the noise. But here, the Bitcoin ETFs are on a solid inflow streak with another 884 million inflows so far this week. But I assume that's supposed to say ETH ETFs and not ETFs are stronger with a whopping 488 million in inflows this week. Over 50% of the flows at less than 20% of the market cap.

And this is sort of, you know, we showed that there was, I think, 60 million inflows to Solana as well in a different time frame. But once again, you know, to see ETH relatively outperform, Obviously, it's not a bigger number, but relative to market cap outperforming does give us some encouragement. But I think you're right, though. We need to see the follow through. Yeah, and I think it's exciting in the sense that a lot of the investors or the retail investors entering the ecosystem are looking at an eth that is very different to the eth that existed back in 2021, 2022.

And there's really economic activity. We're seeing stable coin volumes move through the ecosystem. And they're partnering and working with, you know, legacy, I don't want to say legacy, but institutions that they're familiar with. And so we see that with the Charles Schwab announcement as well. And I think there's just far more for an investor to grasp in today's market than the market that existed about two, three years ago. Yeah, I agree.

So I want to pivot. They actually brought it up early. So I threw this up on the screen. But this is what I very specifically wanted to talk to you about, which is Athena. So I believe CMT, you guys are investors in Athena, Athena, correct? That's correct. We're invested. Yeah. Athena Foundation proposes fee switch for ENA token buybacks, among other updates.

So this is a doorway into the larger conversation of how do we value all coins and which should perform and which should not and improve tokenomics. But maybe you can walk us through what's happening here, why this has been received so well by the market. Obviously, the token has flown. walk us through what's happening here with Athena. Yeah. Just a disclaimer, so we are investors. Nothing I say it's financial advice with regards to Athena or any other asset here. But it's really a structure story.

And I think that we'll see many other altcoin projects follow suit here. Last year, Coliseum came up with a proposal called the Stamp proposal. And it was proposing among other things, you know, decentralizing token holders or giving more rights to token holders. And I think that this is really an answer to the tension that we've seen between equity and token holders in the past. And so more projects are being very specific and very, you know, they want to ensure that there's a clear story about what the equity holders have rights to and what the token holders have rights to. And so here we've seen Athena moving towards, you know, revenue linkage, cleaning up these unlock overhangs. and moving the economy associated with the project to the token holders, or to the foundation from the Labs entity,

I think that looks very similar to what we saw with the Stamp Proza or with Coliseum. And I think if we think about what we've seen from Ethereum and Solana, there's a narrative there that's similar in terms of clearing up the token story, actually making it clear what the token has rights to and what the token is a beneficiary of. Yeah. So do you think that this becomes an inspiration for other projects that are trying to figure out how to move forward, that they're going to need to make some sort of change to tokenomics or, you know, some signal to the market that they can be valued like, you know, customers are to follow? I think there's a big signal and I think it follows the conversation we were having about the hipes and the pumps that are kind of newer tokens designed differently that, you know, a normal investor can understand how to value. 100%. And I think that it provides a playbook for other projects to follow. Is it going to look exactly the same as this? No, because the other projects are going to be, you know, proponents or beneficiaries of different structures. And so they need to structure their tokenomics to reflect that.

But I do think that it's a good step forward and a good early mover in selling the playbook. It's interesting because I feel like Athena was non-consensus for a while because they were the first to poke their heads out in the algorithmic stable coin world after the Luna blowup, right? Because I remember having the conversation with Guy Adam on the podcast. I spoke to Arthur extensively about it. And obviously they were kind of trying to change the vernacular. I don't remember. We can't call ourselves a stable coin, but we're definitely not an algorithmic stable coin, something else. But it seems that they were early and right, and that's been sticky. Yeah. And, you know, I would describe them as a bit of a structured product. And I think that there's a

room for a wide array of different structured products in the space. And it's a product that really does have a right to exist on its own separate to a centralized company and scale independently of that as a protocol. And I think that's why we're seeing Athena make the decisions that they are such that it can scale as a decentralized entity as opposed to a centrally coordinated structured product. So if Athena was a non-consensus bet for you before, do you have any non-consensus? census bets that you're looking at now for the future or the next cycle? Well, I do think there's a lot of opportunity. I mean, we're invested in the space.

So I would be worried if we didn't think so. But, you know, Ethereum and Solana and other ecosystems like Hyperliquid are proving that protocols and tokenomics based protocols can compete with the traditional structure product world. And I think that we see that in HIP3, for example, on hyperliquid. We see that in HIP4 markets, with prediction markets, and polymarket and Kalshi. We see things that are only possible as a function of blockchain technology. And so I think that that story is going to continue and we're going to see more and more exotic products built on these sort of substrates like hyperliquid HIP3 markets. And so we're spending a lot of time there thinking about, you know, what can this ecosystem provide

that the traditional world just doesn't have access to, but demands. Any specific ideas that we can take notes on and write down and fold the view for the future? Well, I think that framework is a good one of thinking, you know, what could the traditional financial world benefit from having access to, whether that's more cleanly, a representation of a trade that's just structured more cleanly, or whether that's an actual exotic product that couldn't have been possible without this substrate. And I think that there's a whole world of opportunities in that.

I mean, just think of all the things that you have to structure products for that just aren't representative more cleanly. I think HIP3 is perfect for that type of asset. You guys do early stage venture, but also liquid, right? So you're looking at what's happening in the market right now, but also seeing deal flow on the ideas for the next sort of a few years. Yeah, we spend most of our time on the early stage venture. We do look at Liquid where it provides a venture-style opportunity for us. But our core focus is really early-stage venture. Interesting. So do you concern yourself with short-term moves and the short-term news cycle and things like, you know, this guy talking today, here's why Warses Jackson Hole Speech is a major event for Bitcoin and Gold. I'm in this interesting place where, you know, intellectually I don't want to think about any of it, but I have to cover it all every day. So, you know, I I talk about it and try to get other people's takes.

I think he'll be like purposely dismissive as he has been. I think he'll continue. But I do think where this is interesting and it's not a conversation that I had with Santi and Jason is that it's on the back of what just happened with Treasury, which is the catalyst that sent Bitcoin. So I can see that it would be important if he tips his hat either way that he will, you know, basically that Fed and Treasury will work together to continue this sort of operation or whether he says that has nothing to do with us.

Those, I think, will be catalysts if his tone is directly in either one of those ways. Yeah, I think that's right. And I mean, I think we see Bitcoin trading as like a hedge against the basement in advance of that. And it just as a function of whether he suggests that we see more of that coordination from the Treasury and the Fed in the future. Yeah, I think they're all going to work together to pump our bags. Hopefully. Colmarsh, pump the bag. I know we kind of heading towards time here.

Anything else on your radar worth sharing? No, I think it's, I think you covered a lot. I'm looking at Ethereum and Solana moving forward and other alternatives, altcoins to follow Athena's suit. If we see economics being transferred to a labs entity, IP being transferred, to the labs entity and just generally projects caring more about that economics, namely burn and issuance. I think it's a cleaning up period for a lot of these projects ahead of this move. Yeah. Okay. Well, I agree with all that. I'm actually, I mean, my biggest positions are Bitcoin

Ethereum and Salana. So I'm pretty boring in vanilla. So I'm hoping that, you know, that we see renewed interests and all of those into this cycle. I'm going to be laughing at, A Ryan or like the rest of the week. Thank you for having me on Scott. Where can people follow you? I'm on Twitter at Ari on chain and just hit me up on telegram as well, Persian Pariah. Thank you. Look forward to have you back soon.

Take care. All right. Now, as you know, we do a review of all the big stories of the week on a Friday. But first, it's also Friday. So we're going to talk about people's reserve, Bitcoin-powered finance, build wealth, smarter. So as you guys know, there was actually a huge headline and not to talk about a competitive product, but yesterday the big headline was that Coinbase had rolled out their Bitcoin-backed mortgages, which I think is great, but structurally very different and in my opinion,

wildly inferior to what people's reserve is offering here. I mean, this is a Bitcoin-powered mortgage where you can buy real estate without selling your Bitcoin the same way as them. but the massive benefit that you get from doing it with people's reserve. I love to show you guys the calculator is wildly different than simply increasing your interest rate on your payment so that you don't have to sell your Bitcoin. Now, with the Coinbase one, obviously, you basically get a second mortgage that allows you to use your Bitcoin for the down payment. But it's at, you know, a 250,000 Bitcoin for 100,000 on the down payment for your mortgage. and you have basically that rolled into your entire mortgage with a higher interest payment.

When you do it with people's reserve, you're actually getting the benefit of the appreciation of that Bitcoin over time with the same low liquidation risk and you end up paying your mortgage much faster. I mean, you can look, a $500,000 purchase using kind of that same math. Bitcoin mortgage reserve contribution, if you do 20%, that's 100 grand, which right now is about 1.268, 1.268 Bitcoin. you're paid off entirely in year eight if Bitcoin goes up 35%. If it only goes up 20%, I love this thing. You could slide it still year 11, right, instead of your 30-year mortgage. So I'm very excited that we have products on the market that are competitive,

that are going to open the door for this. But you can do this so much easier and with so much more upside at People's Reserve. So I highly encourage you to check them out in the link. right at the bottom there. And now we're going to move on to my favorite segment. I'm going to show you the actual lead-in music instead of the funny ones that we've made because I think you're just probably over it. You know what? I lied. I'm going to show you this one. The bull and he just flies across the desk. It's so good. All right, here we go. Let's do it. And now it is time for the Weekly Reckoning where we review all of the big stories that moved markets.

this week and none is bigger than price action. Crypto roars back. Roaring as Bitcoin posted second best week since early 2021. It depends on what metric you use, you know, by percentage, I think it was this, but by absolute dollar move, it was the best week we'd ever had. I believe Bitcoin closed the week up about 20, 21%. Ethereum is high as 30%. But of course, there was a point where it was up about 25% on the week. Now, the story was the Treasury buyback announcement that really provided the spark, the gasoline, was the leverage and the massive liquidations, the largest short squeeze in the history of Bitcoin, which is just astounding. And then, of course, the White House and then ETF flows, which we spoke about earlier coming

over the top. ETF flows now on a heater, largest inflow streak, I believe, since April. It was eight days yesterday. It will be nine days as of today, which means there is real spot buying and institutional interest that's followed that short squeeze and the news from the Treasury. To me, this is renewed interest in the asset class. The hotball of money is moving. People are investing in positioning for the next three or four years as they believe the cycle downside is coming to an end. I think we are in the very early beginnings of a new bull market. The other news of the week, strategy of Monday, strategy increased U.S.D reserved to five point. $1.1 billion. Nice bank account.

Established additional USD cash of $1.59 billion. That was the real story here. So yes, they repurched another $136 million of STRC. STRC last I checked was between 97-98, almost at par. Competitors strive SATA back at par at $100. So the big story here was that they added a new cash bucket, right? The $5.1 billion used to pay off expenses, dividends, preferred, all of that. but this new cash bucket is dry powder.

They can buy Bitcoin with it. They can buy back MSTR. So they've been massively obviously diluting MSTR shareholders to do this. I'm assuming they will make that up to them in the future to get STRC back close to par. Another sign to me that we are likely going into a new bull market is that strategy effectively struggled with their strategy. No pun intended here at the bottom. We're forced to sell a lot of Bitcoin at the lows, 20% low. lower than where price is today. Unable to buy Bitcoin right now and Bitcoin has left the station

without them. It will be interesting to see at what price they start buying back to Bitcoin that they sold much lower, what they do with this new cash reserve. I have a feeling it will be to buy back more convertible notes from the past, clear out all the deck and make this structure much simpler. But I am not in the mind of Michael Saylor. I do not know what they will do. Either way, this was the big news. Sold a lot of stock, raised a lot of. of cash and created two new buckets. Next story, Zcash hits eight-year high near $850 with futures volume near $10 billion in grayscale ETF push.

So obviously Zcash had a wobble a few months ago when it broke that there was a bug that could have theoretically maybe been exploited to print unlimited Zcash. And the very fact that it was a private protocol made it impossible to know whether that was going to be the case or not. But clearly they cleared out all that fud. You should listen to my conversation yesterday with Tushar Jane about all that. He clarified it very good. Obviously, he's a Zcash bull.

And Price has proved him correct. So Zcash here at new highs. And they had the Grayscale Zcash Trust converting over to an ETF. So now Zcash joining the very short list of assets that can be bought in an ETF wrapper by any investor here in the United States. If you believe privacy is one of the major narratives and Zcash may be a way to invest in that, I do not own any. Now, of course, I told you about the Treasury buyback plan that sent Bitcoin flying. Well, Drucken Miller, who actually happened to have been Besant and Warsh's boss, by the way, says Treasury's bond buyback plan fights the market and heightens the

danger. So listen, he made the same points that we've been making the entire time that the United States government should not have to intervene in a quote unquote ha ha ha free market. The bond market and that the bond market is doing its job and it will be much harder to see what the true market is if they intervene. Maybe the best part of this was that the op-ed he wrote about it in the Wall Street Journal was written by AI and people freaked out saying how could you write an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal and AI and he was like, bro, I use a calculator to do math too, shut up. He didn't say that. But it's kind of what he said. I think that now you're getting some of the biggest names in Wall Street and on Wall Street,

saying that they also take issue with the Treasury buyback. This is going to be fuel for the fire for the Bitcoin debasement narrative. Another story, I actually didn't cover this earlier in the week, but interesting to see Anthropic open at 1.96 trillion market cap. Rumors are roughly around $2 trillion. Expect to see this deviate quite a bit as we get closer to IPO. This is just circling back on the hyperliquid story. only place in the world to speculate on Anthropic today, all on Hyper Liquid with Martha gets

operated by Entropy I.O. Once again, this is showing why Hyper Liquid and Cryptorels are so popular because you can now speculate on the price of shares before they exist in pre-IPO on the largest IPOs in the world. We saw Hyperliquid absolutely explode on SpaceX pre-IPO, seeing follow-through there on Anthropic. I'm sure we'll get the same with OpenAI and all of the other exciting IPOs that are coming. Crypto is winning this battle for the place to speculate on pre-IPO assets. I hated this take earlier in the week and I hate it today. Crypto greed gauge hits highest since just before October's $19 billion wipeout. The Fear and Greed Index reached 74 on Tuesday after sitting at 27 less than two weeks ago showing how quickly traders have gone from caution to

chasing risks. So that is true, but you have to put this in context. We had a historic streak of fear, the longest period ever that we had ever been in it. We exited it briefly when Bitcoin went up to 82, came right back to fear. So, of course, when you see a massive move, you're going to optimism in the market and people going from fear to greed, which is settled somewhere in the 60s. But the story that I don't like is comparing it to the October wipeout at the top, because obviously then we had had historic runs of greed. When you're at a top, you've been in greed for a long time. You're at bottom, you have been at fear for a long time. So just going from fear to greed quickly is in no way like sentiment in the previous market.

We just got there. And if the bare market proved how long you can stay in fear, it should show you how long we can stay in greed if we get a renewed bull market. That could be a very long time. To me, this is a positive catalyst that things are moving in the right direction. Now, another interesting story we had this way. U.S. State Banking Associations Plan to launch their own nationwide blockchain network. The Bank Chain Alliance, Bank Chain.

You know, when I got into this crypto revolution, what I was really here for was excitement about a future bank chain. Pretty much that's actually what we were here to rage against. But here we are. Bank chain alliance is aiming for a 2027 launch and would foster stable coins, payments, and tokenized deposits inside the banking systems regulatory sphere. So basically what's happening here is that there is a middle ground where the community and low local banks are getting squeezed between the big banks and the crypto industry and they don't like it. Now, I think they're probably wrong. But they probably do need to do this. You can listen to Austin Campbell's comments on it more extensively. I had him on the show on Wednesday, but it's about 39, I think,

was the number of state banking associations already have joined this. We don't know what the technological layer will be. But it shows you there's going to be a massive fight over who controls blockchain rails specifically with the banks. Right. We saw it in the yield battle between JPMorgan and the big banks and Coinbase and Brian Armstrong that has circulated around the Clarity Act. Well, now the U.S. State Banking Association getting in on the action. They know that they're already having massive deposit flight to the big banks. We've seen that.

That's happened. That has nothing to do with crypto. And now they have stable coin companies, which are private and can make money. They're squeezing them out from the other side. This is going to be a big battle that is going to continue to rage. Meanwhile, on stablecoin land, Revolut begins phase. stable coin rollout. That's how you pronounce it. Stable coin rollout in Denmark, Poland, and Portugal, three countries that nobody was thinking about when they talked about stable coins.

But listen, this is part of mica. Basically, U.S.D.T was delisted on Revolut. USDC volume going up massively. Revolut wants to keep some of that for themselves. They're not going to launch a dollar-backed stable coin. So launching a euro-backed stable coin. We'll see if stable coins that are not backed by the dollar can become popular. But it's very interesting that we're seeing moves like this.

we saw standard charter do the same with a Hong Kong backed stable coin earlier in the week. Now, one of the bigger narratives this week was Black Rock's Mitch Nick, the guy who orange-pilled Larry Fink, says macro case for Bitcoin is strengthening after record trading in positive week. So obviously we saw this massive move on Ibit. But then BlackRots Mitch Nick, who really deeply understands Bitcoin, makes sure that everybody knows that Bitcoin went up and Ibit went up because of the debilts. basement trade, which is strengthened with the Treasury bond buybacks.

For better or for worse, whether we want the institutions and governments here or not is not our choice. What we do want them is sounding like Satoshi Nakamoto when they're talking to other institutional investors. And finally, SEC resurrecting U.S. CryptoCusty rule, the previous administration failed to land. This is now on the White House desk, but it's shrouded in secrecy. Nobody knows what it says. But we do know that it's deregulatory in opposition to what we saw from Gensler in the previous administration, who was trying to create very strict custody rules to make sure that the crypto industry was squeezed out and qualified and trusted custodians were the ones who had access to crypto assets. I don't know what this says, but I'm assuming

it's going to be very bullish for the industry when we find out. That was the weekly reckoning everything you need to know that happened in less than 10 minutes. I have no idea how It was. I felt like it was less than 10 minutes. Might have been. That's all we got for this week. I've got two amazing conversations coming out this weekend. One tomorrow with Rand Nooner that I'm recording at 11 o'clock.

And one for Sunday with Palo Arduino, the CEO of Tether, that I am recording at 12 o'clock. I work a lot, guys. You might not know that about me. Yeah, going to be here Friday, just getting it in. We'll see what the market does. We'll be back for Macro Monday on Monday. And, of course, for the Daily Wolf today. At noon. See you all later.