Unchained - Bits + Bips: Is Bitcoin Finally Being Priced on Fundamentals?

Episode Date: September 23, 2026

📢 Bits + Bips has its own channel now — full episodes here: https://www.youtube.com/@Bitsandbips Quick favor: We're deciding what Unchained does next; new shows, stream times, what's worth paying for. Our listener survey takes five minutes, it's anonymous, and I read the write-in answers myself. Everyone who takes it can enter a drawing for a free year of Unchained Premium or Bits + Bips Premium. Open through Sunday, October 18. — Laura  When the Clarity Act stalled in Congress, the shorts expected Bitcoin to break. It dipped to $75,000 and stopped. Then came the surprise that the bill might pass after all, and Bitcoin closed its first weekly candle above its 50-week moving average in 45 weeks. Ram Ahluwalia calls it a short squeeze, and says that doesn't make it illegitimate. Chris Perkins sees a regime change, with institutions now underwriting crypto on fundamentals. Austin Campbell asks what happens if US retail, still missing from the Coinbase premium, shows up too. Hosts: Austin Campbell - Host of Bits + Bips, Founder of Zero Knowledge Group, and Adjunct Professor at NYU Stern - https://x.com/austincampbell Ram Ahluwalia - Co-host of Bits + Bips and CEO of Lumida - https://x.com/ramahluwalia Chris Perkins - Co-host of Bits + Bips and Head of Franklin Crypto - https://x.com/perkinscr97 This segment is from a longer conversation on Bitcoin, the Fed, a $30 trillion debt pile, and Meta's new AI agent. Full episode here: https://youtu.be/r2Z9ooMTcZ0?si=-mncR-xhm7kUM507  We go live every Monday - subscribe to catch it live. 👉 Visit 1inch to swap tokenized securities, crypto and more. Simple. Secure. Self-custodial. Whatever asset you’re buying - swap it at http://unchainedcrypto.com/go/1inch-sn    Chapters: 📊 00:34 Bitcoin's 50-week reclaim: the bull case and the bear case laid out 🐻 03:51 Why Ram thinks it's a short squeeze, and why that doesn't make it illegitimate 🔄 05:14 Why Chris thinks this is a regime change toward fundamentals ⚖️ 07:31 Austin on how Clarity's failure invalidated the short case 👀 12:26 Why retail hasn't shown up yet, and what happens if it does Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you're hearing this, you're listening to a bits and bibs segment on the unchained feed, but not for much longer. On Monday, September 28th, all bits and bits and bits content leaves this feed for good. Full episodes already moved to this show's own channels, and now the segments are going to. No more bits and bips on unchained at all. So don't wait and don't lose us. Search Bits plus sign bips wherever you're listening. Hit subscribe and you'll never miss an episode. That's Bits plus sign Bips, spelled BIPS, all on its own channel.

starting September 28th. Let's start with Bitcoin because this is interesting in the context of the world. First weekly candle to close above its 50-week moving average for 45-ish weeks. That line is marked the end of past bear markets and obviously it continues to run. There's a debate going as to whether this is short covering or real buyers out there, but I'm going to remind everybody, every trade has two sides. You always have a buyer and a seller. So in early September, we couldn't get this far.

And now we closed the weekly average at 81,160. Monday has added another leg. Galaxy Digital and Alex Thorne are noting the 50 week is the bear market ceiling. And you have to reclaim that. Quote, in four of the five completed bear markets, once the 50 week moving average was first broken to the upside, the bear market bottom was definitely in. Benjamin Cowan said a rally to a higher high and weekly closes above the 50-week SMA would materially weaken the bear case. And Jury and Timor at Fidelity

said, I'm sensing that a new four-year bull cycle is underway. There is the case that it was all shorts. IT tech said, Coinbase premium negative 166 of 168 hours. It was short covering that drove the bounce. Real U.S. buyers never showed up. Listed companies have only added 5,900 BTC against 89,000 in July 2025 and spot ETS. The whole week. Counterpoint, the case that the reclaim holds. Glass node said corporate treasury cost basis around 80K, ETF cost basis around 85K, it's all spot. And a desk note that was circulating on the street as a pure squeeze usually gives back 50 to 70% in the next session of the gain. This one did not. So, Rom, you're a markets guy. You've been watching all kinds of markets for a very long time. We've just seen Bitcoin reemerge from the dead, like sort of move up from

the rubble levels that we were seeing for a while. What are you making of the price action? Do you think it's just shorts? Is there more? It is a short squeeze, but it doesn't matter. It doesn't make it illegitimate, you know, rallies off of bottoms do find shorts offside, then they have to get involved, then that can attract momentum, and then momentum people get involved. Then the phone mob buyers show up. So that's just a classic dynamic. I don't think it invalidates anything. It's impressive.

So what causes is a surprise, a surprise being that possibly the Clarity Act passes that the Dems have move the ball and that surprise is kind of upsetting what consensus had been just the day before, which is that Clarity Act would not pass. So you had a lot of people concluding would not pass and you had this kind of deterioration in Bitcoin up until this event. So that is like a kind of a wildfire set of conditions there, right? Dry timber, offside positioning and this news impulse. So the thing you got to focus on then is the Clarity Act, will it pass or not? Right now, expectations have gone up quite a bit. So what happens here turns on the path of Congress.

Chris, what about you? What are you making of this price move? I think we're in a regime change right now. You're right, Austin. Prices go up when they're more buyers than sellers. And from the beginning of Bitcoin, there's always been this push and pull where is the asset a frontier risk asset or is it is it price movement based on its fundamentals and i think you can say that across crypto now there over the years there were some issues around fundamentals where

we couldn't embrace fundamentals because the regulators didn't allow us to if a token had a cash flow it was a security and it was left for dead now we're seeing the opposite securities are just fine we have a roadmap for them we have exemptions as well the regulators are providing that clarity so that artificial barrier to investments based on fundamentals has been removed. And what gets me excited about this is that, again, it was really acting like a frontier risk asset, very sensitive to geopolitical stresses, macro stresses. It feels like finally we're starting to look at the fundamentals instead. And I think a lot of that is because there's a regime change where retail came out.

Now it looks like retail's starting to come back, a little price action, and they come back. but the institutions are here and they're underwriting based on fundamentals. And so what I think you're going to see going forward is less of this asset class, blind frontier asset type of play more of a discrimination and a determination of value based on fundamentals. I think that's what we're, I think it's probably bigger than most people realize in the regime change that, that's happening.

We've had a lot of negative things that, you know, could have crushed Bitcoin and other. assets. We have rate hike. We have geopolitical stuff going on, oil's over 100. There's a lot of reasons for a frontier risk asset not to be performing right now. But if you look at what Bitcoin itself is on a pretty amazing store value that's maybe a little bit more transportable and has additional value, you're starting to see those fundamentals take hold. So like, I think this is, you know, I think we're entering into a bull cycle, but what makes me most excited is that differentiate now we're more and more focus on fundamentals.

I think as I've been looking at this, I also have a point related to what Rom was saying earlier that's been bouncing around in my head, which is that clarity didn't pass originally. We saw a leg down to 75K, and we saw some people dancing on graves on Twitter. A lot of people who had some hot takes like, oh, it's over for crypto, look, they can't get anything past.

The industry killed itself. and then Bitcoin did not keep going down. So if you had been a short, if you had been looking for a large leg down on the failure of clarity, if you had been thinking people were losing faith, your entire thesis on this whole thing got invalidated by that sort of price action, right? You had a gentle dip and then things resumed as they were. And I have, you know, at least some sort of intuition for the short case on some of these things. I think that probably rattled some people who had been positioned

for a clarity decision coming in negative. And so to Ram's point, short squeezes happen. You'll know it's purely a short squeeze because it gives that sort of like pinch back over the next session or two. It is something that consistently happens in markets because that is forced buyers closing out positions and then once that happens, you return to organic demand. The fact that we're not seeing this, and Chris, I think you're alluding to this, tells me people are seeing something else here.

Like, ETF flows are turning positive. And if we look at some of the rest of the crypto market, it's not just Bitcoin rallying. There are a lot of other things moving, some of them on fundamental news, right? Like take a token almost nobody usually talks about, but like Avalanche is up close to 50% over the past seven days on some of the stuff

they've been announcing too. So I think you may be right about the regime change. And so what I want to press on with you there is assume clarity is fully dead. Do you think that changes anything about what's happening with price action or are we often building anyways? I think we're building, building anyways. And cautionary tale for the shorters out there, you have to be really careful. Volatility works in both directions. We've seen time and time again face ripping volatility up. And you take unlimited, you know, risk when you're shorting something. And it's just a very dangerous asset to short. So look, clarity would have been wonderful.

we would have had what we call an enshrinement. It would take an act of Congress to change things in many cases. And it would have been wonderful. I think towards the end, there's a few provisions that got inserted that people were left scratching their heads. But where are we? We're entering a phase where we're having pretty amazing regulatory clarity. What was one of the biggest challenges in the past? It was taxonomy. We didn't know what was a security and we didn't know it was a commodity. We've got great rules for both. You know, we know how they work in our current economy and financial system. But no one would tell us which one it was, and it was very difficult. Now we're going to know, and now we know, and now we have roadmaps to have successful capital formation, trading, et cetera, whether you're a security or commodity. We're going to get three years of precedent, two and a half years of precedent, whatever. And that means something, because once you have precedent, and by the way, we're operating in what we like to call the post-chevron deference world. And so these regulators, they're smart. I know, I know Chairman Sealing, he was a

very strong attorney. They understand how the law works. And that's why some people are like, why aren't they moving faster? Because they have to make sure they stay focused on the law as it stands to have regulations that have some duration to them. And I think, look, if there's a change in administration, a change to Congress, could we see some, you know, changes to regulation? Sure. I think many people in Congress wanted to wait and see how the elections went, and then maybe they'll have a better negotiating position, give it a shot in lame duck, see what happens. But I think we're fine either way. We have clarity, even in the absence of the law.

So it's very powerful for institutions. Shrymint would have been great. Federal preemption would have been great. But we move forward. We march on. So one final question, because I want to get into the investor psychology. of it when things start moving here. Rom, Coinbase premium remains negative. I think it was 166 out of 168 days, if I'm remembering my notes correctly. And that tells me that this is not a U.S.

retail bid. Do you think this is one of those things where this is purely institutional traders? Or, because I know, like, you see the RIA business, you see people who are not thinking finance 24-7, as price starts to move, is that going to get them excited and they're going to get involved again. Yeah, I don't think this is RIA driven. We can measure that through the ETF flows, which is only 6 million, right? Yeah, it's not, it's not enough. It's not enough. I think these are, you know, there's a crypto-native component. I think there's a quant component. There's a macro-trader component reacting to news flows. I think that's what it is. A lot of people can turn on the flow. What happens? Is this thing pass or not pass, right? Probability

just repriced like that in a day. Okay. So now the game just reset to see what's going to happen. What's Congress going to do here? This is event-driven. Now, that makes sense to me. And the reason I ask about the retail flows is if they're not here yet and things keep moving, there could easily be another large leg behind it if they get interested again. If you like this segment, please like, subscribe, and tune in every Monday at 4.30 p.m.

Eastern Time. I'm Austin Campbell, the host of Bips and Bills and Bills. along with my friends Rahm Alawalia and Chris Perkins and our slate of exceptional guests. Every week, we're going to discuss macro, crypto, crypto, and the collision of worlds, covering topics that move markets and shape the financial landscape. $540 million. That's how much concentrated liquidity sat idle in a given week in the first half of this year. About 30% of the Defi TVL, if you're wondering.

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