← CRYPTO 101
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- [00:00]
A
Foreign. Welcome back to the Crypto 101 rundown presented by Gemini. Your bridge to the future of money and man. We are so glad that all of you are here with us today. This is going to be a very special end of year episode. We have a full house over here. We got Bryce, we got TiVo, we got myself. We're going to be talking about not only everything that happened this year, but what 2026 looks like as we move into this whole new year, this whole new era of the crypto market. So there's a lot to discuss and as per usual, we want to go everything from the fundamentals in the news, to the technicals on the charts, to the different regulatory stuff that we've seen this year, to the on chain data. We're going to be breaking down everything that you need to know about this year that is yet to come. Because guess what, if you, if you thought this year was spicy, we think next year is going to be just as action packed. In fact, maybe even more so. We think that there's so much that's going on, next year could be an even more wild year than what we've experienced so far. So we want to make sure that all of you are as up to date and in the know as possible. So with that being said, gentlemen, welcome. Bryce, good to have you. Everyone. Almost New Year. Hope everyone had a good Christmas. Good to see you guys.
- [01:19]
B
Yeah, I'm stoked to be here, guys, for your, for your end of year rundown. Look, I am, I'm just blown away by what 2025 brought. I mean, the volatility cut both directions, but the policy and the institutional adoption was singular direction and it was just up. Right. I mean, we started the year where basically we had, you know, I mean, we'll go through month by month, everything that happened, but we just started the year with a new president, a new administration that said one of their main objectives was to completely, you know, re architect the guidelines for this industry, which had been completely stymied by the prior administration. So they were laying the groundwork. We've got incredible momentum on the policy front. We even had the very first law enshrined for crypto through the Genius Act. I thought that was really cool. So there was a lot of stuff, but it wasn't without its pitfalls. I mean, we had some hacks, we had some massive liquidations, we had all sorts of crazy stuff. But 2026 is shaping up to be, in my opinion, a year that's continuing on with strong policy it's going to be a rebuild year this year. You know, it was tough, right? You know, everybody I think was on the the side of the, the trade where we all thought markets were just gonna continue to rip through all time highs all the way through the end of the year. And the four year having cycle kind of struck right on cue where the market topped in, in October, the year after the having. But we just never got that blow off top. We never got like sort of that really, really, really strong retail mania. And so it seems like this might, you know, in my opinion, kind of maybe the last year that the four year having cycle ever comes to bear on the market. But we're gonna have a lot of predictions, we're gonna have a lot of fun. And so yeah, let's get into it. Lots to talk about.
- [03:14]
A
Yeah, you know, I was going to say I actually have a prediction on that which we're going to have a little bit later on. And just for all the listeners out there, again we're going to have different visuals that are on the screen. So if you want to see all those visuals, make sure that you go over to our YouTube channel. It's the Crypto 101 podcast on YouTube. For all of you Apple podcasts, Spotify Audible listeners out there, we want to see you over there. And so a brief summary of how this is going to go, because it's a little bit different from our normal episode, is that we're going to be going through kind of a year in review. We're going to talk about all the different things that happened because one of the biggest, I guess, misunderstandings is that there was so much positive adoption and news and catalyst that happened this year and we just want to kind of go through everything and digest it. And then towards the end we're going to get into our predictions, we're going to talk about what we're expecting for 2026 moving forward that could be industry related, it could be price related, it could just be things that are happening around and related to the crypto market. And we also want to give you all some really, really interesting stats about what was successful, what wasn't, so that we can kind of just know what is working and what isn't as this year comes to an end. So, Bryce, take us away here and let's kick things off with January, a.
- [04:25]
C
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- [05:49]
B
Well, January, it started with what seemed like, you know, a lot of positive momentum in the first couple weeks of January. Everybody was excited. We were riding that high from a new president who was saying he was going to make crypto capital of the world here in America. He was going to do a bitcoin strategic stockpile and everything was feeling really good. And then, I don't know, it was probably like the second or third week of January. It was like the, I think it was the weekend before he became actually inaugurated and he launched the meme coin to end all meme coins. And that was kind of the top of the meme coin cycle. The Trump coin launched. It went from like a zero dollar price to like, I don't know, like a sixty dollar price. Like overnight it seemed like. And you know, it got a lot of people really excited, got a lot of people upset. And it was a very polarizing moment. You know, you could take it both ways. You could say, well, you know, it's good for the industry, it's bad for the industry, it brings notoriety in a bad way or it brings, you know, attention in a good way. And so I won't opine. But I thought that was a, a historic moment. And I'm pretty sure it was like the day after or the week after there was the Melania token, which was also another huge moment when the first lady launched her crypto token. So for, for me, that's what I remember. January of this year, like just complete insanity. But again, that reaffirmation of, of making, you know, self custody and making crypto a national priority. But I feel like also that month we had a lot of lawsuits that started to get dropped from the sec. Like the coinbase, like the Kraken lawsuits. There were many, many, many other, you know, I think in the Biden administration there was like two dozen crypto, you know, securities lawsuits and a lot of those started getting dropped in January. So that was what I remember.
- [07:54]
A
What do I was going to say the same thing. It was the end of the meme coin mania. And that went on for months and months and months. As we kind of went into the second half of 2024, especially that end stretch the last couple of months, it was all about meme coins. And we saw it finally start to top out in January. And I remember after, like Trump and Melania and all these other tokens, it was like, all right, how do we one up the President and his wife, the President of the United States doing a meme coin? It's hard to one up that and go above that. And it was, I would say, arguably the greatest meme coin rally ever in history. And you had pumped up fun kind of being the backbone of that and all these different groups that tried to run off of that. And so I remember that very, very vividly. But the other thing that I remember is kind of leaning into this idea of the SEC was the end of Gary Gensler, like you said, I mean.
- [08:48]
B
Dozens of reign of Gensler comes to an end.
- [08:52]
A
I mean, so many different lawsuits, so many different things. And what we've seen this year is that begin to go back to a normal place. And a lot of these crypto companies are able to grow and we've seen the innov, like the innovative side of things from crypto just blossom, right? We see all these different exchanges adding new features, whether it's leverage, whether it's stocks, whether it's tokenized products, whether it's new ETFs and altcoins and leveraged ETFs and you name it. Like we, the door was open to do a lot of this because of that. But I think the end of Gensler and then the End of Meme Coin Mania were iron. Isn't it ironic that Gary Gensler and Meme Coin Mania ended at the same time? It would be opposite.
- [09:36]
B
But fate loves irony. And a lot of those great things that kind of started to happen, I feel like, didn't really come until, like, midway through the year or the back half of the year, because, man, February was littered with dead bodies. I mean, it was absolutely. In my opinion, it was. It was a crazy, horrible month because that's what I remember, the Bybit hack happening. I think it was like the largest hack, if I remember, was about a billion five, one and a half billion dollars that was hacked. And it wasn't anything other than a developer for Bybit who was compromised and had their Gnosis Safe wallet kind of hacked, essentially. And it was basically the. If I remember it correctly, it was like the developer signed a transaction that looked like it was a real transaction, but underneath the hood, there was like, some fancy engineering that redirected the transaction from where he was intending it to go all the way to North Korea. And so that was a really bad one. It set the industry back a little bit. It got people who were thinking about the institutional adoption a little bit, a little bit skittish. But Bybit came out and they said, hey, we're gonna make, you know, we're. We're, you know, your funds are safe. You know, people who were affected. We're gonna do what's right. We've got, you know, insurance and. And, you know, reserves in order to make sure that this doesn't wipe out our business. Hey, which is like, hey, good for Bybit. The fact that they could bounce back from a billion five just completely evaporating, that showed, you know, a little bit of strength for the industry in a sense. But I think a lot of people realize we needed to clean up our act.
- [11:19]
A
Yeah. And I think you're right. It showed that the industry had changed in the sense that we could tank something like that and still be okay. But it was around the time of February where we were coming off that almost failed breakout attempt. From the end of 2024, we came up. We're really not able to get through 110. And in February, after these events, we started to really start seeing price come back down. Things started to escalate as we'll continue on here in the future months. But this is where the turbulence really started to accelerate. And that's one of the things that I noticed.
- [11:52]
B
We also had the, The. The really nail in the coffin for the meme coin stuff was when Javier Milei launched the Libra token, which I feel like at some point he also claimed he had no, like, association with. It was just an absolute cluster. Who was the guy? I think Hayden. I forget who it was. Hayden something was like, part of, like, this whole meme coin pump and dump culture and apparently said that he was, like, involved with Malay launched this token. It went up again, billions and billions of dollars. And then Insiders extracted almost $200 million from that. Almost 90% of the investors in that coin lost money. And it was just, you know, a pretty. A pretty dark moment for the industry when you realize, you know what, there's just bad people out there doing bad things with this really cool technology. And so, you know, it just goes to show, don't chase the pumps, don't chase the celebrity meme coin stuff. A lot of that just ended really, really badly.
- [12:58]
C
Yeah, yeah. The another thing that was the. The top signal for the meme coin was when Dave Portnoy got involved. So presidente they did. He backed jail stool, which he didn't even start somebody else because they wanted to send Dave to jail. His jail still went wild. And then Dave started and launched, like, greed, greed 2. And the people wanted greed 3. And it was just pure, just absolute mania of like, launching a coin from a, you know, a celebrity on X. And then it goes up and then completely gets, you know, rugged right away. So there was. The streets were hot. The streets were hot.
- [13:35]
B
It's a good reminder that, like, the time to be a seller is during those times, like, we could all learn lessons from the market and reading sentiment and all that kind of stuff, when everybody is excited about it and it makes mainstream news and it starts to leak over into other industries. Like, you know, that's probably a good time to be a seller when everybody's getting hyped up about it. And guess when the good time to be a buyer is right the heck now. December 31, 2025. You heard it here first. Okay? This is the time to be a buyer because this is when people have completely wrote off our industry. People have said, this is an industry that is doomed to failure because look at all the dead bodies in 2025. Look at the failures. You got Peter Schiff talking smack on Michael Saylor's, you know, 50% down year on micro strategy of every tradfi person laughing and pointing fingers. You know, you just got to zoom out and say, this is the time.
- [14:34]
A
Right?
- [14:34]
B
People have proclaimed bitcoin has died 446 times. In the past, and that's just on public, mainstream news media. There's hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions of more proclamations of bitcoin and crypto's death, but it is not true. Okay? And so the time to be a buyer is when everybody is calling this a dead industry, like they are now. When prices are down, when we're beaten, we're downtrodden, we are feeling sick to our stomach. When we look at our portfolios, we. We're harvesting tax losses everywhere we could find them. That is the time to be a buyer. And So I think 2026 is going to be marked by an incredible, incredible run in crypto, especially considering typically Q4 is the best performing quarter for crypto, for bitcoin, particularly. And October, November, December was just like that scene from Family Guy when he just falls off a cliff for, like 10 minutes. It's like you just think. You think the falling is gonna end, and then it just picks back up, picks back up. And you think, okay, he's done falling, and then boom, boom, boom. He just keeps falling. But guess what? Peter Griffin gets back up at the end of that scene, and the show goes on. So that's where we're at right now. We are at the end of the fall.
- [15:59]
A
And, you know, the show did go on. It went on. We continued in the march, and that's.
- [16:04]
B
Where we got some big news.
- [16:05]
A
It wasn't fully the market turnaround that we were hoping quite yet, but we saw ourselves spill into the lows and out of the depths of the market, out of the depths of falling continuously off the cliff for months on end. We saw Trump. He came out and he signed the executive order establishing a strategic bitcoin reserve and a US Digital asset stockpile. And, man, that was a really big point in time because people were frustrated. I know. We talked about this. We saw people yapping about it online. They were saying, why isn't it happening right off the. Right out the gate? Why isn't that his first decision? And one of the things we were saying is, like, guys, he's President of the United States. We love crypto over here. Trust me, we really, really do. But even we understand there's probably other things that would cut first in line other than getting a strategic crypto reserve. And we were so. We were trying to say, hey, it's coming, it's coming. Just be patient. It's definitely up there on the to do list. And we finally got it in March. And I remember that being just this. This huge point where it's like, hey, he came true on his promise. He said he was going to do something like this and he did. And it was, I mean, yeah, it was huge.
- [17:15]
C
Yeah. A little teaser for later in the show. We might have some predictions on why, what might come next from the Oval Office.
- [17:22]
B
Oh, why don't you take us there, TiVo, why don't you take us there?
- [17:27]
C
We'll do a first prediction now, I think so. I, I've been saying this on the rundown that I think the blow off top for Bitcoin would be that first disclosed purchase. And I think the interesting thing is, you know, are purchased for, you know, the United States adding to the reserve than what they already have. And they've been trying to figure out how they want to do it in all these, you know, no cost to the taxpayer way. So whether it was the, the golden, you know, visas for immigration that Howard Lutnick's trying to sell or some type of, you know, tax refund plan so it doesn't burden the taxpayer, I think that 2026 could be the year that we see some adding to the reserve via a. Not a way that won't affect the taxpayer because I think it'll be tied to the 2026 midterms. So as the midterms come, it's a, you know, that's, that's a big two year cycle for the political voting process of trying to keep the House, you know, and the Senate in favor of, of the administration. You know, there's, it's basically another campaign trail. So that's going to heat up on the back end of 26. And I think they really targeted the crypto space for votes for the election. And you know, I'm not going to sit here and say that the crypto reason is the reason he won the election, but it certainly was a big base that I think, you know, had a lot of momentum for him into the election that, that he won this time. So I think kind of like what we said where he came in March and gave us the, the reserve after we waited a little bit and we were like, hey, what about us? We voted for you. What about us? I feel like, I know the Clarity Act's moving through at a good pace, but I just think that at the back end of the year, I think the crypto people are going to say, hey, what, what about us? You want us to come to the polls for the midterms? You know, what are you going to, what have you done for us lately? Especially when it comes to price action because this show has been consistently, the fundamentals have been there. We do this show once or twice a week and there's so much positive stuff to, to talk about, but definitely in the most recent months, the price action has not followed. So I think that could be a, you know, a loud, a loud clamoring from our group here.
- [19:25]
B
Yeah. And two, like on that point, two of the three or two of the top five, let's call it largest super PACs in America right now are Fair Shake and Fellowship. Okay, Fair Shake and Fellowship Super PAC each are about $100 million plus of political action money from crypto donors. And so all of these crypto donors from the likes of, you know, the CEOs of Coinbase and you know, again, all of the people who've basically made big money, probably the Winklevoss twins and all that kind of stuff, you know, they have money, duh, Captain obvious. But they're putting that money to work. They're not just sitting on their laurels and saying, oh well, we made it rich. Now we're going to go sit on a yacht in St. Barts. Or, you know, maybe they do that, you know, for a couple weeks out of the year. But they're, they're hitting the, they're the ground running each and every day by looking for, you know, Congressman and senator conversations to say, how are we going to protect this industry? How are we going to make. I mean, they really do believe that they are like, you know, the, the Carnegie's of this, you know, the, the steel magnates, the railroad magnates, the folks who were like, you know, godfathers of, you know, America's industrial revolution. I really do think they have that sort of belief. A lot of these crypto, you know, founders and CEOs believe that they're building the next generation of, you know, digital infrastructure, you know, secure infrastructure for, you know, the digital age. And you know, crypto is a huge part of that. And obviously, you know, folks in Congress and, you know, Washington, they see that as well. And so the innovators are coming out and they're putting their money where their mouth is and they're saying, hey, we're going to vote and we're going to get, get the votes and really educate Washington. Because a lot of these people in Washington, you know, they're a little older than us three. Let's just say they're not as steeped in culture. Let's just say digital, you know, Gen Z and millennial culture. They're, they've got other things that they're worrying about no fault of their own. It's just a generational gap. But the future is being, you know, you know, defined and innovated and plowed forward by folks like the Winklevoss twins. And I'm not just saying that because they're a sponsor of the show. I'm saying that because I genuinely believe it. Okay. I genuinely think that these guys and a lot of these other guys we look up to are doing incredible work through a lot of these political action committees to protect our industry and to make sure that it grows. And so that's kind of what I think. But if we get back to kind of what was going on in March, not, not to have a hard shift here. March was pretty wild. What'd you see in March, Brendan?
- [22:25]
A
Yeah, I mean, well, we, we also had the, the XRP or the ripple lawsuit ending after years see of litigation. Shout out to the XRP army. Love them, are hate them.
- [22:35]
B
They're doing crypto's groundwork.
- [22:38]
A
They. They are. And that's the thing we were saying is like, hey, we are not particularly huge fans of, of XRP over here. We don't hate it, but we're not huge fans of it. But we want them to win the lawsuit because a win for them is a win for all of crypto and we are rooting for them and they won't, regardless of what's going on. And man, we are so happy to see them when we know lots of you are XRP fans too. And so that was a big win. And then of course, CME Group launching the Solana Futures and yeah, so opened up all sorts of institutional derivatives access.
- [23:12]
B
That was really big. That was really big. You know, March wasn't great for price action. We went into April and man, I remember April, that first week of April, like it was freaking yesterday. Get the sign TiVo, get the sign of Trump holding up the tariff calculations. The market just completely nuked right as Trump was holding up that sign. We were like, what kind of calculation is this? This just seems insane. Did you guys just chat GPT these tariff calculations? There was all sorts of hustle bustle and nobody knew how to price this in, so people just went risk off. People just sold everything that wasn't nailed to the floor. And it was a, I think it was a, a peak to trough 20% draw down in SPX. Let me spy from the top was, you know, the, the, the beginning of February, the second week of February. Yeah, all the way down to April 8th. It was a 22% drop. Pretty much. And guys, crypto obviously dropped quite a bit more. There's the sign we, you know, sorry, if you guys have TDS and everything that we're showing you in the first three months as a at a picture of Trump. And if that's triggering you, then, you know, so be it. But, you know, he's been a main character this, this year, this, this chapter, this season. He's been a main character. There's just no other way to say it. But for better or for worse, that absolutely destroyed the markets and they quickly walked things back and the whole taco meme happened. Trump always chickens out because all these tariffs, you know, he used it as a really big leverage point, as a big pressure point. Got control, right? Caused chaos, grabbed control in the midst of the chaos. He's the art of the dealer, the master negotiator. He set the table, he set the terms. And he said, you guys come to me and you negotiate with me because here's we've got the power, we've got the U. S. Military, we've got the world's reserve currency, we've got the best, you know, capital markets, we've got the most innovation. So if you want to come to talk to us, come talk to us. And it's going to be under these terms. Even if those weren't the real terms, it was under the guise of those terms. So he really was a master. It was a great buying opportunity. I thought it was an incredible moment in time. I'll never forget it. I'll be telling my son about that. What'd you guys think? Yields went crazy. It was just historic. But it was a great buying opportunity and that's what I remember most about April.
- [25:31]
C
I would say great time to pull up the charts. Brennan or Bryce, if you want to show, because we obviously did a ton of episodes, ton of Brendan. Brendan and I talked on air and Bren and I talked off air about, like, what we wanted to do. Fortunately, we were on the right side of history. And if you tuned into the rundown and the Crypto 101 podcast during, you know, the volatility to the downside, I thought you got some, you know, it's never personal financial advice on the show, but you got some good guidance of, you know, just two guys talking crypto and trying to talk out this situation.
- [26:00]
B
So, yeah, and a lot of us, a lot of our paid subscribers at crypt nation and altcoin alert folks got a lot of great, you know, even more detailed info in our, our private coaching calls and stuff. So if you guys want to check that out, go ahead and click one of those links below. You could get access to some of our private coaching calls.
- [26:18]
C
Yeah, and more, more immediate too, right? Like the VIP coaching calls and all that, which, you know, we, we've kind of done cycles of what we advertise on the show, but I'll be sure to put the, the VIP link in this episode for heading into 2026.
- [26:33]
B
Little, little new Year's treat for you guys. Don't typically drop those.
- [26:39]
A
Guys. April was a fiery month. It's. I mean, Bryce, it's like you said, we kicked off April with just this gnarly move to the downside. 74,000ish for Bitcoin. And then the, the historic bottom on April 7th hit. We hit. Then we came up, we kind of came back down into this zone of 74 again. But that was it. I mean, that was the bottom of the market. And one of the things that we had looked at over here is a couple of things. You know, one of the metrics that we like to look at and the reason why we look at the charts is because we like to get an idea of what bitcoin has historically done so that we can at least get an idea of what it could do moving forward. And we understand that it's not always going to be a perfect repeat. But kind of since the turnaround over here, we saw bitcoin rally up, shop sideways, break below that 200, and then we saw it come back, kind of do this again over here and then rally up. Then we saw it come back and do it again over here. And with this time we came back into our prior all time highs. I'm going to move this guy out of the way. Came into this area, tapped and bounced off of our prior all time highs. And then we started coming up around April 7th to April 9th, and then that was the turning point. And from that moment onwards, I mean, it was an acceleration mode. Bitcoin went on to run about 4, 50% in the next month and a half. And then over the next couple of months, you know, maybe, you know, the next several months from April to August, bitcoin ended up running almost 70% to the upside as it continued to actually run through October. Even so, April was that turnaround point and bitcoin saw new all time highs. It ran 70%. But it wasn't just bitcoin. I mean, altcoins here too. If you go back to April 7th, this is a huge turnaround point for a lot of altcoins all kind of.
- [28:26]
B
Ran harder during this period if I remember correctly.
- [28:29]
A
Yeah, I mean yeah, all coins ran really hard off these, these lows. I mean Ethereum was up to 50, 250%. It's crazy. Look at Solana over here running off these lows. What did it do? Did about 170% almost. You could see XRP which was coming and actually shot to new all time highs during the same period. It ran about 128%. You know the list goes on. There's all sorts of other altcoins that we can look at. But you saw the crypto market have a just a historic bottom then and it rallied back up.
- [29:03]
C
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A
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C
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A
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D
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- [30:17]
B
Yeah, no, that was a, that was a great time to be in the markets and you know it would have been great to be selling at the exact top. Mistimed it a little bit. Not gonna not gonna sit here and lie to you guys. Didn't didn't nail every single top.
- [30:33]
C
It's a zoomed in example of when bitcoin and crypto is dead is, you know, if you're it's not really the time to be selling when Everything's dying because the, those, those snapbacks to the, the highs and the runs that some of these projects go on is, is like neck breaking speed when it comes off the bottom. And then you're like, oh, well, that's cool that it went up, you know, 20, 30, 50, 100%. It'll, it'll come back down. I'll buy it then. And then, you know, it goes up 150% for ETH. You're like, all right, I guess I'll start buying now. And then the momentum changes and the fundamentals change and then I'm going to pile, I'm going to go all in. And then you get caught, you know, at the top kind of the narrative shifts. So again, that's kind of what I know you preach of just, you know, being involved in doing the research and having the community that, you know, we've built to, to, you know, try to see these things as they come instead of being left behind.
- [31:26]
B
Yeah, no, it's hard, it's hard to nail every top and bottom, especially with how volatile the crypto market is. But, you know, I feel like we're getting better as a team, you know, day in and day out. So, yeah, that was April. A lot of, a lot of volatility tariffs, but we were followed by May. May had some, a little bit of a semblance of stability, I guess. And just like, it felt like the, the flowers were coming out. There was a breath of fresh air. People realized, oh my God, we're all looking around like, has the world ended yet? Like, everybody was thinking the world was going to end with these terrorists, that there was going to be war breaking out and the trade war was going to get crazy and it kind of just all subsided a little bit, it felt like. And so we had some good stuff with, with Ethereum in terms of just a couple network upgrades. I remember that was the month that Petra upgraded, which was one of the big improvements for essentially, to boil it down, the stability of Ethereum as a network. So that was something that I thought, you know, kind of went a little bit under the radar. I don't know. Do you guys remember anything else from May?
- [32:36]
A
Yeah, I was going to say along the lines of the Ethereum upgrade. We actually had one of the lead Ethereum developers on to talk about it and that was a huge turning point for me is having him on because at this point in time, there was so much fun fud around Ethereum. You guys probably remember this. I mean, it was, yeah, we were coming off Solana Hitting new all time highs at the start of the year. Bitcoin hitting new all time highs. Ethereum failing to do so, coming back down, not seeing the same level of bids. Everyone's still talking about Meme Coin Mania on Solana. That just happened and everyone is ragging on Ethereum. Well, we had one of the, the lead Ethereum developers on and he laid it all out for me. He said, here's what we've been doing, here's why we have been doing it, here's the reasoning behind it, and here's our approach moving forward. And that was the single moment that convinced me, like Ethereum is undervalued. We need to start looking at this thing again. And TiVo, I think, you know, we went back and forth some and we talked about this and we ended up, you know, creating different positions in Ethereum. But that was a huge turning point for me. And I say that not to just be like, oh, we have these cool people on, but we make this publicly available for free for all of you to listen to. And to anyone that listened to that episode, I would think that you probably came to a fairly similar conclusion. Yeah. But if you're not, just tune into these, you know, again, me and myself And Bryce and TiVo, we do these every single week completely for free. And we love doing it because it's so fascinating to hear what, what these different leaders have to say. Yeah.
- [34:02]
B
Actually what, what also happened with that upgrade? I remember there was account abstraction which made not only like, like that had nothing to do with the network, that had everything to do with like making wallets more usable and you know, more compatible cross chain and all that kind of stuff. So I think that really helped like scale the retail side of things. But I think that was also the month that XRP had Futures launch on the CME which kind of laid the groundwork for XRP ETFs. That was a big one. And that was also the month the SEC had the crypto task force that was having those public roundtable discussions. I don't remember, I don't know if you guys remember like all these different pictures and stuff. I think there was one of Michael Saylor with, you know, sitting around. The Gemini twins were there. Brian Armstrong was there. Brian, you know, he, Michael Saylor had the big orange ties like in the White House and stuff. But that was like when all these round table discussions were happening with, with crypto in Washington and how Tradfi and Defi were going to play nice together. And that was also the month that FTX had a big round of repayments from their bankruptcy claims and their bankruptcy stuff to the, the folks who like, you know, lost a bunch of money on ftx. So those folks who lost a bunch of money on FDX started getting their money back. They started to pile back into crypto because you never learned your lesson the first time. And they started piling back in and that pushed prices to new highs as well. So, you know, May was, you know, starting to show signs of, of recovery with, with, in many ways. But I think you guys have a lot to talk about with, with June. I, I think you guys had.
- [35:49]
C
Sorry.
- [35:50]
B
I think you guys had quite an intimate moment in June.
- [35:55]
C
Yeah, it was, it was, it wasn't just Circle. So I'll tee it up for Brennan. You could take the Circle, but it was, there was a ton going on in the tradfi markets with stocks that were linked to crypto. And so we saw a lot of momentum in the altcoins in the spring, like we mentioned earlier. And that's kind of where I thought, you know, we were kind of waiting for that blow off top. It was like, all right, here we go. This could, this could be it. And what we found, or at least what I saw on the show, I mentioned on the show, was like, guys, some of these crypto stocks are flying out of the gates. So we'll talk about Circle in a second. But I don't want to forget about like Weble. So like we bull came out of the gate and went up like 300% just because it was like, oh yeah, they sell crypto. It's like we bull like there's people on there that sell and buy crypto and went up 300% and now it's down like 50% on the year from its high. I think it's down like 80%. And so people are just throwing money at anything that was crypto specific that was coming out on, on, on the traditional stock market. And you see, you know, obviously Coinbase had a run, Robinhood had a great run, but anything new, people are just gobbling up. And you know, I have some theories mostly because, you know, I probably a lot of these big time fund managers can't go onto Coinbase and buy Altcoins specifically. And they were just begging to get exposure. And it felt like Circle, Brennan was, was the first one to really have a legitimacy backing with stablecoins.
- [37:18]
A
Yeah, it was. I mean, Circle, when this thing IPO'd everyone, it IPO'd around 30 bucks and it ran from 30 bucks immediately on the first day opened up, ran 200, almost 40%, up to 100 bucks, continued to run something like 8 or 900% to almost $300 per share. And this is huge because everyone was talking about stablecoins. There is no way to get exposure to it. And then this thing launched up and it's not, let me just say it's really rare for something the IPO and run like 900% just like instantly right off the bat, like that stuff that happens in crypto, we're used to it, it might be normal for small caps and micro caps. It's very rare in the, in the TRADFI and in the stock market. And so that was a monumental point in history. And what that did is that showed a lot of people who looked at things just from the traditional financial side, from the equity side, from the stock market side, the people who just looked at crypto from that outside lens, they saw this happen. And the only reasonable answer was, holy cow, there is so much pent up demand for this stuff that the moment the first real form of exposure, exposure comes onto the market, it explodes. And that again was just something that was shocking from a lot of the people who were just much more zoomed in on, on only what equities were doing. And so there's a huge point in time and again, you saw anything that was crypto related here. The people who were doubling down on different forms of crypto and stable coins and tokenization and just trying to get more access to crypto, they were all being the winners. You know, you saw it happen. This happened a little bit later on, but Gemini IPO'd a little bit later on, you know, and that was a huge mark. We saw a lot of other companies go public, but during that same time period, I mean, Robin hood as well, TiVo going on just this crazy run. And you kept seeing that their crypto, all of their crypto activity and revenue and all these different metrics were exploding and doing better than expected and they were growing. And we saw like a reflection of this in a lot of those, like different earnings calls and quarterly reports. But I mean, yeah, I mean, listen, it continued on here. I don't want to beat a dead horse too much, but I mean, you had the Senate pass the Genius act with bipartisan support, which is, I mean, yeah, I mean, just stuff that you could never have made up a year ago and you know, bipartisan support on, on crypto legislation and then X stocks, you know, launching tokenized US equities on Salana and it was just like one thing after another. And this is where you really started to feel the euphoria in June.
- [39:51]
B
No, yeah, yeah, totally. And I think also around this same time was when we got Sharplink Gaming, which kind of kicked off the DATs. Right. And so we had the, the CIO of sharply gone recently, but all the digital asset treasury went live this week, actually.
- [40:08]
C
Just went live this week.
- [40:09]
B
Yeah, that was a great episode. I thought that kid was really smart. Yep. And I say kid, but just, you know, I call everybody kid, no matter if they're like 70 years old or whatever. But, but that guy was sharp and man. So the whole DAT mania, digital asset treasury mania just blew the doors open off what was possible. You saw a lot of these, you know, companies coming in announcing that they're raising a billion, 2 billion, $3 billion or whatever just to buy crypto, just to buy, you know, Ethereum, buy Solana, buy Bitcoin or whatever, stake it, earn yield on it, contribute it to Defi. And so that was a pretty interesting phase. I would say it stopped as quickly as it started. You know, things peaked out like within a month and then just have been bleeding ever since. There was a huge supply demand imbalance. But I don't think they're dead forever. I do know that the msci, which is a big popular index company, is having a review of all these DATs and seeing if they're, you know, if they're going to be allowed to stay in their indexes like Microstrategy or will they have to get removed from their indexes. So stay tuned on that. There could be some more info second or third week of January as this kind of discussion pops up. But that was a really, really, really big moment. This, this summer was the birth of the DATs.
- [41:30]
C
Yeah. And if you zoom out on the Ethereum DATs specifically, I thought it was interesting timing. So Robinhood had that big Brennan, I remember me and you watched it live. It was that announcement of tokenizing stocks on Arbitrum Ethereum, the Ethereum layer two. Right. And so it's kind of a vote for Ethereum. And then basically I think a week or two after that sharply came out with their announcement at the end of June. And then three weeks after that bit, mine started and started buying eth. And then a couple weeks after that it was announced Tom Lee, who is a, you know, longtime bitcoin bull from, you know, being on TV from when Bitcoin was at, you know, $5,000 a coin, talking about it on CNBC you know, became involved with Bit Mine. And so even though it was at kind of like we said, the top area for the, for the year, it felt like the momentum was at an all time high. And I don't know, I, we always like to say like these, these big dogs like Tom Lee, they don't get involved just to, just to quit if it doesn't go their way in the first, you know, couple rounds of the fight. So I thought that was an interesting timeline of Robinhood saying, hey, we're tokenizing stocks, we're doing it on Arbitrum via eth. Right? And then. Okay, okay. Sharplink Gaming Eth Treasury, Bit Mine Eth Treasury. Tom Lee, chairman of Bit Mine. It was like, it all happened. An interesting timeline if you zoom out.
- [42:49]
B
Yeah, totally.
- [42:50]
A
Yeah.
- [42:51]
B
I mean guys like Tom Lee, who I think we're all individually like fans of, you know, they're not just short term guys. They think long term, they've been in the markets for, you know, 30 plus years, run, you know, firms, all sorts of stuff. They're, they're very public figures. So they're not just in it for a quick buck. Okay. They're in it for the long term. They've got their reputation at stake. And so obviously Tom's behind Bit Mine immersion, which in July kind of, you know, moving on to July. They were, they were the big, big talk of the town. And I remember actually it was over the summer, late summer, it was like August, but I was having conversations with some financial advisors and they were asking me about Bit Mine and they were asking me about all these other digital asset treasury companies and like, what do you think? And I'm like, I'm here, you know, kind of like, you know, not, that wasn't the premise of the conversation, but they were like, they couldn't wait to ask about crypto stocks. And so it really did take the world by storm. And again, I don't, I don't think that this story is done being written. But also July was Crypto Week. If you guys remember the SEC and Congress primarily. Yeah, this was actually Congress. They, they dubbed it crypto week. And July 14, July 18, they were doing a big, you know, educational sort of thing in, in D.C. where all the, you know, again, all the, the knights of the round table, the, the crypto CEOs and founders were going through Congress and talking to everybody and let it, and catching everybody up to speed because the genius act was, had just been signed into law right in, in July, I think the first week of July. Then There was the Anti CBDC Surveillance act, the Clarity act had just been passed through the House or maybe it had been passed through the Senate and then it was going to the House or vice versa, one of those. And so there was just a lot of moving parts. And so that was a really big week. And I don't know what, what else happened in July?
- [44:57]
A
Well, that was when the crypto, not even the crypto market, bitcoin was holding up. That's where altcoins started to decelerate. You saw some start to top out in July, some came in August. But this is where we started to see us reach towards the peak of, of altcoins. And then it started to turn around a little bit from there.
- [45:19]
B
Yeah, no, that. I feel like that was also the month when Ethereum hit the Ethereum ETF, the ether from BlackRock hit like $10 billion or something. There was like a new all time high in like new inflows, if I recall correctly, that month. So that was a pretty big week or a pretty big month. July. Yeah. So a lot of fun stuff. And that was also the month that Pump Fun launched. I remember that very vividly and participated in the ICO through some of our funds that I manage. And the, the Pump Fun ICO just, you know, I think they raised.
- [46:01]
A
You.
- [46:01]
B
Know, a billion bucks and they just had massive, massive hype during that period. And very quickly, Bonk, if you guys remember, Bonk Fun also quickly took market share and then Pump started all their buybacks and just, you know, there was a, you know, a ton of, I guess, financial engineering, if you will, that went into this and there was some buybacks and there were, they were, there was Project Ascend where they were boosting all the payouts to creators and they were just trying to take on Robin Hood and Twitch and Tick Tock all at once. And that was definitely the flavor of the month in July and August. That was a lot of fun.
- [46:45]
C
Yeah, we looked, we looked into it. We looked into maybe starting a pump stream, but didn't.
- [46:49]
B
Yeah, there's a lot going on there.
- [46:51]
C
There's a lot, a lot of stuff going on there.
- [46:54]
B
Yeah, there's too much going on. What do you remember about August? I have any memories from August? I was in Chicago.
- [47:05]
C
No, you go ahead, Brandon.
- [47:07]
A
No, yeah, I was just gonna say, you know, this. It was a bit of a consolidation period, as I said, depending on the altcoins. Anything that was outside the large cap started to see its peak and we started to see it come down in around July and Especially in August. And then this is where I think a lot of people were like, oh, it's just a pullback next step, you know, next stop, we're going to 2x from here. And there was still a lot of euphoria. But this is where the, the first, I guess instance of the, of, of the pullback really started hitting us. But we still continued to see a lot of buying. And that was the thing that stuck out to me is that despite starting to see the first or rather the beginning of the pullback, there was still a lot that was going on from like a fundamental and an adoption standpoint. And that really didn't slow down too much at all. I mean you saw institutions building different forms of infrastructure, especially when it came to like stablecoins and compliance and a lot of stuff on that end. I feel like this is around the time where stablecoins really started to accelerate in the conversation and they were all ready being talked about a lot this year. But you started to see just, I don't know, you, you saw just like another level of it get added around this period in time.
- [48:25]
B
Oh yeah, go for it.
- [48:27]
C
I was gonna say I was gonna throw up the fear and Greed index because I remember this was the first time, I believe it was August 31st. Basically we hit fear on the Fear and Greed index and bitcoin was at $108,000. I kept coming on the show and being like, I can't believe we're in Fear and Bitcoin's at six figures at like 100800 10. And obviously that, that played out for, for the fall, leading into the fall a lot. But I thought that was just basically a milestone. Even though you're in the fear and that's negative. It's like go back two years ago when we did this show in 23 or when we were making episodes Bryce with me on pizza when FTX collapsed and we were just trying to get people, you know, to stay strong and, and, and you know, don't jump ship. Like imagine being in fear and bitcoin is at 100k. Any of us two, three years ago would have taken that any day of the week. So I thought that was kind of a milestone moment for this one indicator.
- [49:27]
B
That's a, that's a good point. I think it also just goes to show there was a lot of new market entrance because it just like all that fear must mean that there was just a lot of people who were having profits that, you know, were getting eviscerated. Maybe they had bought at 120 or 115. And when prices started to come down, they just looked below and they're like, oh my God, look out below. We're at 100k. What did I do? Did I just make the stupidest financial decision of my life? Could this thing go back to a, you know, to 100? Could it go back to 90, 70, 40, 10? You know, that's where the fear gets going. People just think they're so dumb. They're like, oh my God, I just bought at an all time high, what do I do? But of course, you know, market bounced back right after that all the way up to a new all time high and then it tanked. So, you know, the story is again still being written for bitcoin and for crypto. But one of the other things I do remember about August was that was when there was the anti debanking executive order that Trump put out. And I remember he called out the bank of America CEO Brian Monahan during this period and he was like, have you been debanking conservatives? Have you been, you know, debanking people based on, you know, what they're doing and so on. And he was like, well, I don't, we gotta look into it. We would never, you know, we have, you know, these discriminatory policies that we would never do. And, and, and I just thought it was funny because he just like, just in front of everybody, just point blank asks like just an outlandish question and then he had an executive order after which basically ended operation 2.0. Sorry. Oh my Topo Chico is all out. I've already one last.
- [51:11]
A
It's Operation Choke Point coming back for you.
- [51:13]
C
Yeah, exactly.
- [51:14]
B
I'm like choking on operation choke point 2.0, getting over a little bit of a cold still as I've got a one year old who continually is on a perpetual cold, you know, day in, and then goes a month and doesn't have one. But anyhow, operation choke point 2.0 almost got me there was the end of that, the declaration that, you know, all this, you know, further looking into the FDIC and all of their practices with debanking and like you just started to have this big cohesion from the occ, the fdic, the Federal Reserve, like everybody's saying, hey, you know, crypto, we're not going to put it in the same category as a lot of these other really bad industries or whatever. We're gonna, we're gonna baby it, we're gonna, we're gonna, we're gonna right the Wrongs and we're gonna baby it. So I thought that was really interesting. But moving on to September, what do you guys remember about September?
- [52:13]
A
Well, this is where Ethereum shot up to all or yeah, basically to all time. Highs went up above $4,800. And the ETF flows here, TiVo were so wild. It was huge. I mean, Ethereum was in absolute euphoria mode. We saw it shoot up and it felt unstoppable and there was all sorts of different adoption that was happening. I mean, listen, we've talked a lot about prediction markets and stablecoins and tokenization and banks wanting to get in and we had the Ethereum developer on and all these different things and Ethereum was the show stealer for, for September and it had been for a couple of months. But then the other thing that happened. What? Talking about a show stealer, Aster comes in launching on BnB's chain with CZ backing it. And I mean, this thing did what, 10x in the first week and it was like the first, what I would say is like the first real competitor to Hyper Liquid. And although it didn't retain a lot of market share throughout the following months, at the time people were looking at it and saying, oh hey, this is like the first true competitor to Hyper Liquid, which had been going bananas all year in a really, really good way. And so that was one of the things that stuck out to me here.
- [53:34]
B
Yeah, that was a big. Oh yeah, go for it.
- [53:39]
C
No, I was just going to say the Ethereum, this was the peak of kind of like basically what we said back in June, July. The momentum of the narrative just, you know, was a snowball downhill, gaining, gaining, gaining. And this was the peak with the price action and then kind of obviously kind of leading us where we are today. But kind of like we said on the show, the fundamentals just seem still just as strong as ever. We'll cover some some more news later in the show around why we. Or at least I think that. But yeah, it was definitely kind of the peak.
- [54:11]
A
Yeah.
- [54:11]
B
September, our main character struck again. Trump marking another peak with World F Liberty or World Liberty Financial launching, which further galvanized his enemies. Everybody's saying, you know, we've got crypto corruption in the White House and so on and so forth. Look at this new token that's launched. And I feel like at some point right around there as well, he pardoned Changpeng Zhao cz, who was released from prison. He did his time, he, you know, he got out and then he was pardoned from, from any wrongdoings. And then Trump, the USD one got listed on Binance and there was just like all sorts of further things. So it's like, you know, in the sense where, you know, he was the savior in 2024 after he got elected and the markets just went wild in November and December. And this year was marked by him marking the top at several different, several different moments. So I remember, yeah, the World Fine Liberty, the World Liberty financial thing in September. Oh, and the XRP and the Doge ETF. The XRP and the Doge ETFs went live in September as well, which were pretty exciting.
- [55:32]
A
Yeah. And you know, after that it pushes us into October and this is where we start being really familiar with a lot of the topics that have happened. Right. Bitcoin hit its famous all time high, its peak of $126,000 on October 6th. And then the very next day, or no, not the very next day, the very. Within a week of that, we had the largest single day liquidation of event ever that happened. You know, the 20 bill, Friday 20.
- [56:00]
B
Bill wiped off in an hour.
- [56:03]
A
It's a lot. And that kind of just led one thing into another. We did see more crypto ETFs launched, most notably the Solana ETFs which were launching. Those were crazy because they were seeing weeks on weeks of, of continuous net inflows despite their price action moving down by double digits on a regular basis. And so I think it was something like almost, almost 20 days of consecutive net inflows despite price action falling over 30%. And you saw a similar story with the XRP ETFs as well over that same time period. But yeah, I mean, this October was the start of like what I would say is like the second or third Black Swan event of the year because we had like the beginning of the year and we had some bumpy stuff with like interest rates and deep seek and AI. And then we had the tariff crash and then we had this one and it was just like the next, the next spin on the roller coaster, I guess you could call it. But it leads us to November.
- [57:00]
B
I can't believe we forgot to mention Deep Seek in January. Remember the deep sea moment? Like everybody was just like, yeah, China's beating us in the AI race. They trained this model that's better than ChatGPT in like, you know, one second. And it does, you know, all this kind of stuff. And that really started a little bit of the, the prick of the bubble, if you will. Yeah, yeah, November.
- [57:21]
C
One question For Bryce. I have one question for Bryce on the liquidation and Brandon chiming too. If you think it's like, are we ever gonna find this dead body? Was there ever a dead body? I feel like, right. That's all everybody talked about for two weeks after this event in October, you know, and it hasn't floated.
- [57:37]
B
Yeah. So I, you know, the dead body quietly. I don't think it was one dead body, it was several. And I've been at dinners in New York and throughout here in California with several other other different founders and hedge fund managers. And we've all been talking and, and you know, people actually have been lps and funds that have set up or that have closed up shop this year. And so there were a lot of like, you know, hedge funds that basically closed down in the wake of just really, really, really bad market environments. So I don't know if it was like one collective, like, oh, one market maker like Winter Mute, like went belly up. Like we would have known by now. I think if there was like a big, big, big mark. I, I was talking with one market maker and you know, you know, there's speculation that certain competitors, smaller competitors offshore have closed down. Names that like, you know, here in America we would probably never heard of. But a lot of people who run highly leveraged, you know, market neutral strategies or highly leveraged directional strategies, a lot of those got wiped out because. And if you have most, if you had most of your capital on Binance using their perpetual futures, you definitely got wiped out because they delivered everybody at horrible prices and then their UI completely crashed and nobody could top up margin. And so I think there was just a collective amount of millions of dead bodies, if you will. But I don't think it was one big entity.
- [59:06]
C
Love it. Love, just love that answer.
- [59:09]
B
Several.
- [59:10]
C
But yeah, I'll transition us into the end of the show because I know we have time frame here. We got about 15 minutes left and people want to hear Brendan's end of year numbers and they want to get the final predictions here. So let me just do a quick recap. If this wasn't enough for you for November and December, just scroll down the, the catalog. We got plenty of rundowns that covered all this stuff. November, December, here they are. Cal, she raised a $1 billion at an $11 billion valuation. I know Polymarket did a similar thing. It is the year, or at least the back end of the, the year was all prediction markets and we've talked about them on the show. I know me and Brian McNutt have done some episodes where we've even maybe called out a couple fun, you know, pure gambling bets. But it's, it's taken everything by storm. You heard it here on crypto 101. Now they're talking about it on the news and ESPN. And then in December Ethereum had its Fusaka upgrade bit mine started staking eth. Texas became the first U. S state to fund the crypto. Their crypto reserve with 5 million dollar Bitcoin purchase. Stablecoin market cap went above $300 billion. That's the genius act driving that type of growth and that, that kind of closes out for the year where we are today. So I'm going to hand it off. Brendan, we want to get your end of your numbers that you brought us and then we'll hit our predictions.
- [60:29]
A
Yeah, I mean let's just, let's speed run through these because I think it's, it's super important for people to understand here and so we can kind of get a bird's eye view of, of what was successful. So end of your numbers. Are you ready everyone? First and foremost, the total stablecoin market cap grew by approximately 49 this year in 2025. This means that it expanded from around 205 billion at time the same start of the year to around 306 billion by November. And we don't have the most up to date numbers but you get the picture. You know it's up about 50% on the year in terms of stablecoin market cap. So that area continues to see a lot of expansion and attention. Next on chain and payment volumes exploded with Stablecoins processing over $50 trillion in transactions throughout the year of 2025. This is more than double the estimated 23 trillion that happened in 2024. So we're continuing to see a lot of attention there. Next one. By the end of 2025 nearly 200 publicly traded companies held bitcoin on their balance sheets this year. And this is up significantly from around the 100 to 120 that we had at the end of 2024. More expansion. Next one the crypto or crypto products in what this essentially means is that crypto related products, ETFs etc absorbed around $46.7 billion in net inflows in 2025. It was a substantial increase from the initial launch period in 2024 where the inflows of 2024 were only around 11 to 1414 billion. Now sitting around again, 46.7 billion for net inflows for this year. So Huge, huge increase into crypto related products and ETFs. And then the final stat that I have for everyone is that the total volume for prediction markets hit 40, somewhere between 40 to $44 billion this year in 2025, which is a massive leap from $9 billion that we saw in 2024, meaning that the growth rate here was around 400%.
- [62:43]
B
Wow. Love it. That's some good stuff. Those are some big numbers. It just goes to show, you know, 2025, despite the price action, a lot of good growth. I'm curious to Hear your guys's 2026 predictions. I know this is stuff that we talk about in our group chats and we joke around about over meals and stuff. But you know, let's bring to the, to the good listeners of crypto 101 all these good wonderful crypto crusaders. Let's bring them our top predictions for 2026. Who wants to start?
- [63:20]
C
I can kick us off piling on something from last year. So if you go back to last year's end of year episode, there was all these talks. The Fed I think at one point was projected eight cuts for 2025. When we did this show last year I came on and said that's not going to happen. That's going to get reeled back in. That was when all these inflation numbers were getting crazy and you know that you miss survey was off the rocker. And you know I think we kind of talked about on the show of how like hey, that that survey is a little too one sided. They're not surveying the right people. People thought, you know, inflation was going crazy. I, you know, just kind of said like hey, I think eight's too much, it'll be less. We got, we ended up getting three. I think right now the prediction for next year is about two or three. And I think a cool storyline is going to be the Fed. I think it's unique when there's a new Fed chair getting put in. Obviously Powell's terms end Trump is going to get to put in who he wants with basically a mandate to cut at this point is what the administration wants. I think the market's going to test the Fed kind of piggybacking off of what Brendan I think is going to talk about with possible some early volatility. A lot of people are talking about that whenever there's a new Fed chair. Some of the research I've tried to been read through and maybe we can bring more specifics as we get into the year is, is the, the market always tests a new Fed. So I think that volatility is there, but I think with the mandate to cut, you know, we've been doing 25 bips. So I'm going to go over, you know, three cuts and over 75 bips. So at least a full percentage cut. And maybe that's the numbers for. Maybe it's. I think. I think it's more. It's maybe the let like three to four cuts, but more percentage points when it comes to the bips of it. And I think it's gonna be interesting to see how the market reacts. I'm not an economist, so I can't forecast it, but there's the bond vigilantes have been acting up at times. Bitcoin has acted up at times. The markets have gone both ways to fight, you know, don't fight the Fed versus sending the Fed a message. So that's one of my 20, 26 storylines. I think it's gonna be fascinating to watch, but I think you're going to get more than, you know, 75 bips than what's being priced in now. So something to watch for. And then my second one is a lot of these ETFs that have been live and are going to probably go live earlier in the year. There's going to be a ton of altcoin ETFs. There's going to be a ton of crypto leverage ETFs. I think you have to be very careful. You have to stay educated, understand what you're investing in if you decide to use them. But I think a couple of those are going to end up going belly up, and that's going to be a storyline of, you know, what's a safe and secure crypto asset versus what's truly gambling. Because we've kind of shared the research from our friends over at Bloomberg of how many of these weird, unique leverage ETFs are in the pipeline to go live. And, you know, if the market gets hot and there's some momentum, they will. They will go up at a higher rate. But you got to be careful and understand what you're investing in.
- [66:19]
B
I love it. I guess I'll go next and then, Brendan, you could kind of bring us home. So I. I got a couple bold predictions that I was thinking about. The first one is that the Clarity act will pass. And I know this is a little polarizing. A lot of people think that this is not going to be happening because the midterms are coming up and that the congressmen and women have other bigger Fish to fry that they won't be caring about crypto. And so that the whole Clarity act stuff is going to get stalled. And as you guys may or may not know, listeners, this is the act that will enshrine more legislation for crypto to say, okay, who's going to be in charge of crypto securities versus crypto commodities? You know, how do we define a crypto security and a commodity? You know, where could these things trade? Who could, you know, interact with them? And once this passes and once it becomes law, we anticipate, you know, big banks, you know, big institutions will get even more involved on many more levels. It will allow fiduciaries to just get deeper and deeper in crypto. So I, I think this will happen because crypto, like TiVo alluded to, is a big policy point. And two of the top, largest super PACs, like we said, are crypto focused, that are pushing for nothing other than, you know, economic boost to this industry because we want to outpace, you know, adversarial nations in this. It's a key piece of technology. It's no coincidence that, you know, the president named a crypto and a czar in David Sacks, right? One of the, you know, a billionaire, sort of super famous investor. He is not just the czar of AI, it's the crypto and AI czar, which, you know, just goes to show how important this is. So I think Clarity act is going to get passed. And I think on that news, we'll see bitcoin breakout above, certainly above 100,000. Again, I'm not going to say certainly, because as you guys know, nothing's certain in markets and you know, we're not financial advisors and all that good stuff. But I think bitcoin will overshoot on that sort of lead up and people realizing, oh my gosh, this is going to pass. And then it does pass. And then you start to see, you know, all these big names take large positions and roll out products and SERP products and services for Bitcoin and Ethereum and Solana. So I think that'll take bitcoin to above $200,000 next year. And so, yes, you guys are probably looking at the charts. You're like, hold on, that's like over a 100% return. This guy's nuts. Yes, I do think that next year bitcoin will see an over 100% return. This year we should have gotten a big year and we simply didn't. I think it's a coiled spring. I think we're gonna see a Big pop. And then on the other side of that, I think that we're gonna see some of these digital asset treasury companies get into hot water. I think we will see some mergers, some acquisitions, some hostile takeovers or some flat out bankruptcies in the digital asset treasury world. And I'm not saying that there's going to be, you know, the top five that are, are going to go under. I think the top five like MicroStrategy and Bit Mine and Sharp Link, you know, maybe even Forward Industries, I'll put them in there, led by, I think, Kyle Samani from Multicoin Capital. Right. There's a, there's a few that are, you know, really stand apart groups. But I think that down the long tail of those digital asset treasury companies, you're going to see some really, really, really troublesome price action. So those are, those are three for you guys.
- [70:05]
A
All right, well, I have a couple and some of them lean into some of the ideas that you guys talked about. But my first one here is I think we're going to have a turbulent and volatile first half of the year. And you're probably saying, brendan, we've already had a turbulent and volatile passion.
- [70:21]
B
These are supposed to be bold predictions.
- [70:26]
A
But listen, I do think that there's a lot of catalysts and potential uncertainties. You have the potential tariff ruling that's going to be coming up next year. You have the new fed chair, like TiVo said. You have the clarity act, like Bryce said, you have the DAT stuff that could be playing a role. There's a lot of stuff going on and I wouldn't be surprised to really see kind of a roller coaster of a time. And that means, hey, we could see some more down moves, we could certainly see some up moves off of this stuff. But because there's all these different catalysts happening again, mainly I would say in the first half of the year is when I expect a lot of this to happen and then be resolved because after that you're heading in the midterm. So I just say buckle up for the first half of next year. We have, I think, a lot of both really good and potentially really bad stuff happening. And so that's my first prediction is a lot of potential turbulence. The next one is I think we're going to see more places doing kind of this all in one model. We've seen this become increasingly more of the standard where places are saying, hey, you can trade crypto here, you can trade options here, you can trade futures and perpetuals and prediction markets and equities alongside this and metals. And you can trade everything kind of from this all in one platform to the point now where you're even seeing some banks offer stuff like this. And fintech's trying to play into this as well. And so I think that we're going to see more places try to do this all in one environment where you can get again increasingly more plugged into crypto and be able to get more access to it in a lot of these industries that are growing, like stable coins and pro prediction markets and tokenization and they're going to be factored in there as well. The next one is kind of feeding into this again. I think B banks are going to continue to adopt here. You know, I don't know if this is a super bold prediction, but I think banks are going to continue to adopt crypto at a crazy rate. And we saw this really heat up in the last portions of, of 2025. I think also stablecoins are going to continue to grow. I think that the wave that is the stablecoin adoption is really hard to fight. Whether you're looking at it as them as a huge and becoming a huge buyer of U.S. treasuries and U.S. debt, I think that that gives them a very good incentive from both sides of the political aisle to stay actively buying. If they stay actively buying and they become big buyers of debt, then they're going to want to, you know, everyone's going to want them to stick around and I think that they can continue to accelerate, especially with the Clarity act and a lot of the other stuff that we've seen. My next one here is that I think we're going to put the nail in the coffin of the four year having cycle and this one's going to ruffle a lot of people's feathers. But I think that by the standards that we've seen so far, we've already started to see the end of the four year having cycle. I think anyone who believes in this, you should have looked at 2025 and said, hey, this is the year after the having cycle. This should have been the year for, for, for bitcoin to see massive acceleration to the upside. And the year following the having cycle, you would expect bitcoin to be pretty substantially green and not anywhere in the red, let alone double digits in the red. So I think that we're already starting to divert away from the four year having cycle. And I think next year is going to be the final nail in the coffin where everyone's, you know, kind of crying for this horrible bear market and everything's going to get destroyed, like way worse than we saw this year. And I don't really see that being a full reality. So there's that. And then the final ones here is that I think the tradfi markets are going to move towards a crypto centric or a crypto styled model. What I mean by that is crypto has always been 24 7. You can trade it anytime, anywhere, any place, you know, weekends, holidays, doesn't matter. And we, we've started to see some very early indications of this from Robin Hood and Nasdaq and has talked about this a little bit in other groups. But I think that the tradfi markets are going to move to try to mimic what crypto has done and what crypto has already been doing for years. So I think we're going to see a bigger shift towards the way that crypto has acted. And then the final one here is that I think crypto is going to recover. I really, really do. I think that crypto has the potential to see a lot of volatility, a lot of roller coaster like price action. But I think that crypto will recover. And that doesn't mean every single altcoin coin or your favorite meme coin or whatever it is. But I'm saying crypto as a whole here, well, for the most part I think it has the potential to recover here and do a lot of great things and still be fine at the end of the day. And so, I mean gents, that's what I'm looking for here. I know we're coming up.
- [75:03]
C
We need your bitcoin price target, Brandon. We need your bitcoin BTC number.
- [75:08]
A
We need it. Oh man, have it. You know, it's always, it's always, it's near impossible coming in a year in advance and doing this stuff. But I'll say this, I would be pretty surprised if we're not back above a hundred thousand next year. So I'll leave it at that and say I'm expecting bitcoin to be back over six figures. I think new all time highs for bitcoin are on the table. I think new all time highs for Ethereum are on the table. I think once you start getting outside those other ones, I would say they're on the table, but I become a little bit less confident. Confident because there can be such vast swings in altcoins. Right. And so some, a lot of altcoins are going to go to new all time highs. A lot aren't. But I would say with Bitcoin and Ethereum. I think again, I'd be surprised if we don't hit new all time highs next year. Love it.
- [75:53]
C
I'm going with Bitcoin188. Bitcoin188. And I say that Ethereum is going to outperform Bitcoin. That's a bold one. There's a bold one. Okay, I got bold for you, but.
- [76:07]
A
Now I feel like I have to get a number on it. I'm gonna go 177.
- [76:12]
C
All right. 177. 188. I like it.
- [76:15]
B
Mine was 200. It's a nice round, even number.
- [76:19]
C
There we go. Hopefully we fall in the middle there. 177 to 200. We'll take 192 any day if we fall in the middle. Right. Well, I'll wrap it up. Bryce. Thank you guys. Bryce, thank you for joining us. Brendan always appreciate doing the rundowns with you. End of year, I'm going to put this out on New Year's Day. So happy New Year to everybody. I've said it many times. We really appreciate everybody who tunes in. The audience has really grown a lot over the last couple years, which has been super, super fun. Check the links below to get more involved. If you want more of Bryce, more of Brendan, more the entire team that you hear in this program, there's always links down there for you guys to click and get more of the team. But I hope you everybody has a great new year and we're going to see you all in January. But that's all for now. Bye bye everybody.
- [77:11]
D
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- [77:41]
E
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