← CRYPTO 101
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- [00:00]
Brendan
Foreign welcome back, everyone, to the crypto market rundown, where we talk about everything that's going on in the great world of cryptocurrency, from the fundamentals in the news to the technicals on the charts. We spend the time doing hours of research so that you all don't have to. And here we are, quite a wild, and I would say arguably successful 2025 so far. TiVo. We're seeing a lot of changes, and I think that's going to be one of the big highlights of today's, or rather this week's crypto market rundown is the changes in crypto infrastructure. We have a lot of conversation about not only kind of the prices moving around a lot, but also when it comes to regulatory changes and adoption. The way that that's happening is, I think, the most intriguing part about all of this, because what that really does is it sets the infrastructure for our next move. And, you know, maybe a little bit of a sneak peek here, maybe a little bit of a hint, but it's looking like it's going to be a pretty freaking bullish move. So we're going to talk about some of these regulatory changes, some of the stuff that's actually happening in the background, why there was a pullback across the board, and not only bitcoin, but the altcoin market. We're going to talk about all sorts of regulation that is happening at a federal and state level and of course, break it all down for you and even take a look at some of the stuff that the US has already kind of has stockpiled when it comes to cryptocurrencies, because the US Already owns quite a few and, you know, they're looking at quite a few more. So there's a lot of interesting topics that we want to talk about in today's crypto market rundown. And all that we ask here is that if you really do like the content, you know, give us a. Like, give us a subscribe and. And if you really like the content, then check us out on some of our other sources. You can go over to our YouTube and subscribe there, or if you're watching on Audible or Apple Podcasts or on Spotify, then you can leave us a review over there and a quick reminder that we're going to have all sorts of videos and charts and articles on the screen today. And if you want to watch that, you got to go over to our YouTube because that's where all the visuals for these podcasts kind of live. But with that being said, Tiva we are off to quite a big week over here. It's a big week for both the crypto market and the traditional markets because we have our first FOMC under the new administration. We also have the first major earnings week under the new administration.
- [02:41]
TiVo
Yeah. And there's never a dull moment, it seems, in just life in general, but specifically the markets for sure. Obviously, you know, you know, we covered two episodes last week, a general one with us, and then we did a deep dive on the Trump, you know, meme coin saga. And then, you know, just as you thought maybe this week would be a commer week, we had, you know, deep sea. I drop a bomb on everybody, it seemed. And so we're going to cover that and yeah, earnings Fed and oh man, I mean we're going to dive into it all. But the. I got PTSD from the last time the Fed came on in December. Oh man. But yeah, a lot to talk about, as always. And you're in the right place.
- [03:23]
Brendan
Yeah, I mean, if you don't have PTSD after the last Fed meeting, then you have nerves of steel. You have a will of steel. And I for one commend you because I don't get shaken up easily. TiVo. You know, I've been doing this for forever now and you know, you're pretty, you know, seasoned guy when it comes to all sorts of emotions and activity. And I mean you've worked in and everywhere from, you know, just high energy environments to the volatility of the crypto market. And both of us were kind of like just shaken up by what jpow and the Fed decided to talk about in the last meeting. So it was a wild ride. You know, veterans from all across the board I think were taken back a little bit by how the last one went. And so now we're looking at this one, the first Fed meeting under the new administration. And everyone's kind of like taking a step back. Everyone's like, okay, you know, like, what are we preparing ourselves for here this week? And rightfully so. But you know, with that being said, I want to kind of just kick us off and talk about what's been happening with prices because that's arguably the thing that most people care about. Right. People want to know, hey, how are my investments doing? You know, are things going up? Are they going down? They go and left. Right. You know, what's kind of happening here? And when we look at bitcoin, well, we are coming off of an all time high. Right. And we've talked about this with bitcoin pushing up to a new all time high of just over $109,000. But since it has done this, we've kind of been retracing back down and you can see when this move started to really speed up to the downside. This was all mainly due to the deep sea drama. And we're going to get into that in just a moment. But now what we're seeing on bitcoin is a couple of things. Number one, you know, we talked about a new zone on bitcoin last week where we could see bitcoin maybe consolidating from 90k to 100k to a new zone being of 100k is the floor and 110k roughly as the ceiling. And so that would look something like this. And I think we can kind of divide this up into two quadrants where we have like this previous zone over in here where it was, you know, roughly 100 to 100 and, excuse me, 100 to 90K, which was one zone. And I think now we're moving gradually towards the upside and we're already seeing that with the chart TiVo. You know, we're seeing that as bitcoin's price has been retracing, the buyers have been really comfortable at 100k and that's a good thing to see. That's what buyers want to see.
- [05:50]
TiVo
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- [07:50]
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- [08:21]
Brendan
So we've come down over to 100k. We bounced off of this, we came down again, bounced off of it, came down again, held above this and you can see that, you know, yeah, we're having some candle wicks to the downside, but all of these candle body closings are above 100k since the initial breakout. So not only are we holding above 100k which is a previous resistance level in a psychological level, we're also breaking out of two other crucial levels. The first one being this falling resistance line that we have on the screen here from these previous highs. We saw three separate rejections around December 17th, another one around January 7th, and then the third and last one around January 16th. Now when we broke out here, we can see that not only did we break out of this resistance level of previous highs, we also broke above the moving averages, like the 20 and 50 day moving averages here. And then now kind of fast forwarding in time after this breakout, we have turned both that previous resistance level and the moving averages into newfound areas of support. And that's an overall bullish thing in my book. You know, we're seeing previous areas of resistance be conquered and converted into bullish territory. And that's really what we want to see for any kind of like long term to midterm infrastructure for really just the, the next upside move. So I like what we're seeing over here. Again, can we get volatility, can we maybe get bitcoin, you know, flashing back down over in here and you know, making some moves? I think so. It's going to be high volatile or just a high volatility market, especially in the coming weeks. You know, we mentioned that we have FOMC this week. We have earnings calls, we have all sorts of stuff that's going on in the world besides that. So I think that we can continue to get some volatility and some choppy price action. However, I am still looking at this for a mid to long term picture saying how can you not be bullish? A lot of that stuff is still there. You know, I know it's frustrating to be like, why haven't we broken out and skyrocketed to a new all time high since really, you know, the start of this year, even in the last two months? And I think just we have to understand that we need to give this time. You know, we go back and this is just typical bitcoin movements and I'm going to really zoom us out here. But going all the way back to the 22 lows, we have bitcoin kind of moving up, consolidating for a bit. Moving up, consolidating for a bit. Now we moved up and guess what, we're just consolidating for a bit over here again. So, you know, yeah, can we get a little bit of volatility to both the up and the downside? Yes, but I think that the, the trend is still very much our friend and that is pointed up and to the right. So that's kind of what I'm seeing on the, on the charts here, TiVo and you know, I guess we can kind of work this into why we pulled back a little bit more than maybe expected below 100k. And that has to do with the deep seek AI drama. And for people who aren't aware, you know, you've probably heard about this already, but basically what happened was there was a Chinese artificial intelligence that came out and it was supposedly not only better than what we had made in the US it was supposed to be, you know, more sophisticated, sophisticated, complex, better, but also drastically cheaper. So they were able to create a better AI at a fraction of the cost and a fraction of the kind of energy and hardware requirements. And what that did was it kind of crashed the tech sector and a lot of the risk assets that were associated with tech, one of those again, kind of being the crypto market, were affected. And so that's why we saw a little bit of a steeper pullback here and why we saw things accelerate towards the weekend and even going into the beginning of this week, because it's all centered around that. And I know people are going to look at this TiVo and they're going to say, hey, this is kind of silly, right? This is frustrating that we're looking at artificial intelligence warfare news between how the US and China is doing, like, why in the world does this affect my crypto? And they're not wrong. Right. You know, I think the only real reason that we can correlate these two is just saying, hey, these are risk assets associated with the tech market. And if we had the pool, bitcoin into anything, right, we're not going to throw it into brick and mortar or retail or like construction or banking, you know, we're going to throw it into the tech bucket. And so I think that's just the only real reason why we're seeing a little bit more downside here recently. But it's a crazy situation.
- [12:58]
TiVo
Yeah, a couple got a couple hot takes maybe. Yeah. If you wanted to throw on, if you want to go to the kitchen and grab your tin foil and wrap it around your head, maybe make a hat. My one take out of this is that I, I'm not. The tech's good. So everybody confirms that the tech is good. It's open source, which is exciting and, you know, different than ChatGPT for people that obviously know that name. That's closed source tech. This is open source. I got a problem with the numbers. Like when, when a Chinese company comes out and says that they're making this, you know, at 1, you know, 5% of the cost of chat GPT, like obviously it can be done cheaper over time and that makes sense. And I'm not disagreeing. With that over time. But to have the discrepancy of that big of, of a price tag, you gotta question it because it's coming, it's coming from China. And you know, you talk to any tradfi person that wants to invest in, whether it's Kweb or Alibaba, you know, Alibaba got in trouble many years ago for basically, you know, cooking its books. And you know, these companies that are in China, you know, they go through the CCP and you know, sure, maybe the company, and it could even be true, like, maybe the company did only put like a couple million dollars in, but then they got, you know, a billion dollars from the government, for example. I find it hard to believe two things. Number one, that the finances, the finances of this are the truth. And again, that's my opinion. Maybe a little tinfoil Hattie, but there's plenty of examples of that over the course of time with Chinese businesses. And then number two, I mean, we're such a world that's tied together in the global economy. You're telling me that Tim Cook, Elon Musk, Google, Microsoft, the list goes on, that these guys had no idea about this? No clue. I'm just, I'm not buying it. I'm not buying it. And, and I think, you know, the shakeout was what it was. I mean, Nvidia was down like 18% on the day. At some point, that was, that was the worst day for Nvidia since the pandemic, since 2020. So, you know, again, never financial advice for anybody, but, you know, do you wish you bought Nvidia on a pandemic dip? You know, I know, I know I did, but that's what I'm getting out of it. And then I think when you tie it into specifically to crypto, if anything, the notion that there's another model out there that we can use that may or may not be cheaper, but is open source and is growing, if anything, to me, I'd love to hear your opinion. That's bullish for crypto because that means AI is now cheaper to build, AI models, AI apps on top of this stuff, and it becomes cheaper to use and to scale, which is bullish for software and a bunch of other companies, crypto included. And, you know, nothing for bitcoin. I think just, you know, just bitcoin goes on as usual.
- [15:48]
Brendan
So, Tiva, you're telling me that you don't trust what the CCP says at face value?
- [15:53]
TiVo
I don't, I don't, I don't. But big fan, like you know, I love. No, no hate against China. I mean, I just, I'm just trying. I call it like I see it. You know, I call it like I see it.
- [16:04]
Brendan
No, I think you're right. I think a lot of those are all valid concerns and all thoughts that I'm having myself here is, you know, are the numbers being fudged? Are they being exaggerated? I think we can agree that what they've done is exceptional. I think it's the time horizon that they've done it is in question. And I would probably disagree with, you know, how long did it take them to make this point, number one? Number two, how much did it actually cost them to make this? Something I disagree with as well. And then number three, what are these software requirements and what kind of hardware do they have? I guess is a better way to put it in the background kind of as the infrastructure. Another thing, you know, they're not running this thing on, on MacBooks and laptops and Dells. Like it's. I think it's a little bit. Just a lot of the information is exaggerated or fudged in some way and I think we're already starting to see more information come out around that. It's like, hey, you know, is this an incredible piece of technology? Yes. Is it probably overhyped and exaggerated also? Yes. I think also when we look at it and how it compares to more complex or large tasks, I think we are already starting to see that it is a little bit inferior. So when you look at it on, and I don't want to spend too much time on this, you know, I'm starting to rant. But the point that I'm trying to make here is that I agree TiVo, you know, when we look at this and how it relates to crypto, if anything, the betterment of artificial intelligence, the betterment of technology in either direction, it benefits the crypto markets, it benefits everyone. We're able to get cheaper stuff, we're able to get stuff faster, we're able to make more complex pieces of technology. And ultimately this kind of competition inspires innovation and that has to be a good thing at the end of the day. If anything, use it as a wake up call for all these US tech companies because they probably are spending more. I'm not saying that they didn't spend more, but you know, if anything, use this as a wake up call and let's all create a lot better technology kind of moving forward and I think we can learn from it. So, you know, for anyone that was looking at this over the weekend saying, what in the world happened? That's the main story. You know, that's the main, the main thing that happened alongside FOMC and earnings this week and people just getting a little bit nervous about just all the potential uncertainties that could happen. There's just a little bit of FUD in the air.
- [18:20]
TiVo
And then today, just this morning, Alibaba announced that it just released a new AI and says it's better than Meta OpenAI and Deep Seek. So that's, that's some, a little tidbit that literally just dropped this morning. And it's, it's going to keep coming. Obviously it's starting to go at a breakneck speed and I think, you know, the, the innovation around it will create, you know, things that we need to research and figure out. But it, I think more certainty than not is the quickest thing that's going to come is regulation. Because if the government has a problem with TikTok, I mean, they have to have a problem with an AI that in their terms of service, I don't know if you saw it, but like, you know, Deep Sea terms of service, very similar. Like you sign up for this Deep Seq AI and put it on your phone, it has access to your texting, all your messages, it signs in through your Gmail, it has access to all your Gmails, your drive, et cetera, et cetera. So, you know, there's going to be some regulation questions about this as well, if they're worried about.
- [19:15]
Brendan
And it's already started. It started, yeah, I believe yesterday slash this morning, we've already started to see that happen. So it's, it's there and it's 11 and it's alive and I think it's worth keeping an eye on. But we'll go ahead and kind of, you know, move on from that and talk about, I guess, the news that's more closely correlated or impacting the crypto market from a, from a regulatory standpoint, and that is SAB121 is officially repealed. TiVo. Now, this was something that we talked about on the podcast before, and essentially what SAB121 is, is this was a law that dictated how institutions could hold or manage crypto. And so, in short, it said, hey, we are labeling crypto as a liability. So if you are in an institution that wants to hold it, then you are going to have to hold 100% of cash equivalents as well as whatever you hold in crypto. So in simple terms, if you want to hold a million dollars worth of bitcoin, you also have to add $1 million worth of cash to your balance sheet. If you want to hold $500,000 worth of Bitcoin, well, when you add that, you also have to add $500,000 worth of cash to your balance sheet. It needs to be a one to one ratio of however much crypto you're adding. You also have to add that same amount of cash equivalents. Now, it should go without saying not everyone wants to invest $2 million for wanting to buy $1 million worth of an asset, right? A lot of the time, could you imagine if every time TiVo, you wanted to buy a stock, you had to buy twice as much, you had to put twice as much money down. You wanted to go buy a cryptocurrency, you had to put twice as much money down. It's just sometimes if you want to buy a thousand dollars worth of bitcoin, you don't want to have to spend 2,000 bucks to do it. And so it really deterred a lot of institutions from bringing bitcoin onto their balance sheet or holding it because it would just be costly at the end of the day. So now what we've seen is that this, this bill, this act has been removed and this is a big deal moving forward because now we're not certain, I think, like, how exactly we're going to get crypto in the way that it's going to be seen. You know, we're still waiting to get a lot of the regulatory information, but this is a positive thing moving forward. And I think the new administration came in here and said, that doesn't make any sense. You shouldn't have to have $2 million for every $1 million of Bitcoin that you want to hold. And we're going to have to see what it is moving forward. But I can't imagine it being, you know, anywhere near what it was previously. So that's a massive move forward for crypto and also just banking of digital assets in general, which I know that you came across something actually in relation to that.
- [22:07]
TiVo
Yeah, I mean, the first one is just last week there was a big, you know, conference in Davos in Switzerland is a big, like, you know, financial conference. And all the big players were there and, you know, this topic was brought up and, you know, multiple ones. So here's. Let me pull this up. Let's see. We got bank of America. So their CEO Brian Moynan just, you know, flat out said like, oh, well, if, you know, if this regulation allows it the financial industry will jump, jump into crypto payments. And, you know, and then I think also it would allow, you know, just the holding, the custody of it as well. And Goldman Sachs said the same thing. So, you know, they're, they're, they're lined up and, and, and I think, you know, again, this is a little bit of, kind of an opinion again on my part, but when, when innovation like this is happening and, you know, you kind of know where the puck's going. And even, even Jamie Dimon, our good friend of the program who, you know, always says, bitcoin's a pet rock. Don't touch bitcoin. But he also says, but we love blockchain technology. Blockchain technology is the future. Blockchain's great. So, you know, when you hear those words, you know, these big companies, they've, in my, my thought, they've already invested a ton of money into building out, you know, this type of, of, you know, product and offering and technology. And it's kind of just like, you know, Capex, right, When you invest in, in AI and these companies are investing in Nvidia chips at, you know, billions of dollars, thinking that their product is still three, five, eight years down the line of profitability. I think that's similar to this, you know, crypto blockchain intersection where once the regulation goes, I think a switch could get flipped. Where bank of America, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, all of a sudden, overnight, they're going to have these offerings out because they've actually been building them all along. So I think that's, that's the most exciting thing about the regulation around. It is kind of, as we know, in Washington, D.C. it takes a long time. Even, even with executive orders like that happened last week, we kind of saw, especially in the crypto industry, it's like, okay, the framework is now there, which is our next topic. But our framework is now there to, you know, get this stuff done. But it's still, you know, moving at maybe a snail or tortoises pace. But then once it goes through, you know, these companies have their lobbyists and insiders and they know where the puck's going. And once it's through again, it turns into kind of that breakneck speed that we talk about all the time in crypto.
- [24:29]
Brendan
Yeah, it does. And these people know. I think that's a great point. These people know the direction that things are moving. And we've already started to see a list of states, Right. We've talked about the bitcoin strategic reserve on a federal level, but One thing that we haven't talked about as much is how this could also happen at a state level as well. So we could be seeing kind of a two sided approach here. And the list of states that are looking into some form of bitcoin or crypto reserve is growing. And so since November of last year, November of 2024, we've seen about 10 different states already come forth with proposals about exactly that. So I wanted to just walk through the list with everyone and again, all these are a little bit different in nature, so you can go and do your own research. It would take a lot of time to say, hey, the bills were introduced by this person to this state. This is the way that they would go about it. And it would end up taking just a gigantic part of the segment. But what I want to do here is just say, hey, you know, roughly in chronological order here, I want to talk about these different states that have put something forth like this. So we have Texas, we have Pennsylvania, we have Ohio, we have New Hampshire, we have North Dakota, Arizona, Wyoming, Massachusetts, Oklahoma and Utah that have all put forth a crypto reserve bill of some kind saying, hey, we should adopt bitcoin or just the crypto markets in general. And this ranges from, you know, maybe allocating 3% of the states like pension funds and stuff like that. Some even get more bullish and they're saying, hey, we should do 10%. And that's actually a pretty large number. You know, I think when we expect allocation into a bitcoin reserve, I think it's a lot more normal to see, you know, 1, 2, 3, maybe 5%. But there was actually several states in there saying, hey, we should do 10% and maybe even look at scaling this in the future. And then there were some that were saying, hey, we should just adopt bitcoin. Some were saying, hey, we should make it more all encompassing of looking at bitcoin and altcoins, you know, that could, you know, maybe be Ethereum or other large cap altcoins as well. And that's just a massive piece of adoption. And again, this isn't something that we've really seen talked about too much before the last couple of months. And now what we're seeing is that all these states and this again, those are 10 states just in the last three months. TiVo, you know, what is that list going to look like by the end of this year? What is that going to look like in the next four years? You know, could we see that list double from 10 states to 20, from 10 to 40 from 10 to every state in the US plus countries elsewhere. Because that's kind of the way that this, this topic is very, very quickly moving towards is this idea that, hey, the US is thinking about adopting this on a federal level. And then the domino effect of this is, okay, well now states are talking about it now, other nations are talking about it now. Banks all over the world, financial institutions, now private companies are all doing this as well. So, you know, I even saw that a, I believe it's a Japanese company called Meta Planet has adopted a near identical approach to MicroStrategy. And their goal has just been to accumulate as much Bitcoin as possible. And the way that they go about this is again, nearly identical to the way that MicroStrategy and Michael Saylor are doing business because they looked at it and they said, hey, this is working really, really well for them. We're going to do the same thing. And it's been working out really, really well for them too. So again, just crazy amounts of adoption is happening everywhere. On an international level, on a national level, on a state level, federal level, you know, you name it. Retail, institutional, it's. There's so much to cover here and I wish we had like five hours to just sit here and go through everything in depth, but we are restricted on time. So. You know, the other thing that, that I've kind of seen floating around here, TiVo, is that there's been this debate, right, of is this going to be a bitcoin only reserve or is this going to be a US crypto stockpile that could be maybe a little bit more all encompassing for alts looking to.
- [28:41]
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- [29:37]
TiVo
Yeah, I think we need to showcase at least on the federal level. Of how we got our executive order last week, which we talked about, and then basically the creation of this Senate Banking Subcommittee on Digital assets. And I have here. Who's on there. So our. Our chair is Cynthia Loomis from Wyoming. Obviously, she's been a huge proponent of the bitcoin strategic reserve and speaking at the conference and in my opinion, has been the face of kind of the bitcoin strategic reserve from a government level, teeing it up for Donald Trump. And the crypto community, specifically the bitcoin community is really behind her on it. And just before we dive into the debate, I think the most interesting thing of to see how this committee came together when she was elected chair, she built out this committee, it's nine people, and you have four Republicans on the left there of the graphic, and you have four Democrats on the right. And then Cynthia Loomis in the middle is also Republican. So 5, 4. But kind of like what you're saying with the states is like this, this type of conversation is bipartisan. And for being such a hot button issue, you know, since basically forever, especially the last four years in the Sam Bankman Fried era and now of, you know, the media trying to paint this crypto and bitcoin as negative. I mean, look where we are now. Now we have. We have a Senate banking subcommittee on digital assets with bipartisan support. And, you know, I think that's what needs to be noted. And so going into it, the bitcoin community was expecting maybe a bitcoin strategic reserve on day one. Cynthia Loomis specifically was always touting a bitcoin strategic reserve. And then basically, I think the executive order kind of mentioned a stockpile of digital assets. And I think that was an interesting use of words because now, I'm no lawyer, but a strategic reserve is a technical term. And we have strategic reserve for gold, for oil, whereas, like a stockpile sounds. It sounds exciting, but I think there was some wiggle room there. And we got the executive order of the creating of David Sachs and our crypto czar. And the quote was, we're going to research for our crypto stockpile. So it gives them a lot of wiggle room there of what it could be. But a crypto stock file is a lot different than a bitcoin strategic reserve. And so the timeline went nuts on it. You know, it was bitcoin or bitcoin or nothing, you know, from the bitcoin strategic reserve camp. And then obviously, there's a lot of maybe, you know, other projects like XRP and even Litecoin got a little butthurt. There's just a lot of like, oh, I want to be included into the stockpile. The stockpile's better. Know the reserves better. And then Jack Mahler's a bitcoin, a bitcoin maxi and a great influencer in the space. Made a. Made a pretty. Did you see that video, Brendan? The Jack Mallers video?
- [32:48]
Brendan
I don't think I have yet.
- [32:50]
TiVo
I was gonna clip it, but it was pretty long. It was like seven minutes. And. And it's worth listening to the whole thing because he made his argument. So I didn't want to take it out of context and try to clip it down to 30 seconds or a minute. Yeah, I didn't think that was, you know, fair to that video, but that. That blew up on the timeline. And just that debate of, like, okay, what. What happens if we have a stockpile versus a reserve? I find that interesting from a legal standpoint because I don't know what the difference is or would be, or is it a crypto reserve and it just has a bunch of different projects in it?
- [33:21]
Brendan
Yeah.
- [33:22]
TiVo
And so that. That was. That was the. That was the debate. So then. Then I thought, okay, a stockpile. Interesting. And then I was like, well, what do we have on the balance sheet now for the government? So I went and found this. So here's a look at what we currently have. So a lot of. Lot of different stuff. Obviously, you know, on the bottom there, not a ton of dollar value per se, but just an interesting. An interesting look because I. I would have never guessed that the government had, you know, link, uni, aave, ft. We still got some FTT on the balance sheet. So I thought this was an interesting place to start the discussion. And then there's just kind of, you know, the philosophical view of, do we want a stockpile of a bunch of different cryptos? Do we want a reserve? You know, I don't really know if I have the answer to that. My opinion would be, start with Bitcoin and then, you know, do the research on the others. What would yours be?
- [34:22]
Brendan
Yeah, I think so. I think we start with Bitcoin and then maybe we look at others. I think it gets a little bit more difficult. And I'm a huge altcoin advocate. Right. I've been an altcoin advocate for almost a decade now. And when we look at them, it's a harder decision to make because once you get into altcoins, you get into more centralized projects that can be biased towards a country. They can be More controlled from like a centralized standpoint. You have original owners who might own a big portion of the supply. You might have early stage investors. Like, there's a lot of variables that, that come with altcoins. Now as an investor, I am fine with that. I really like that. I think if you're a country looking for a strategic reserve in a currency, there's a lot more complications that come investing in a strategic reserve if there's all these other factors to kind of take in, especially if it's investors that hold a lot. So you know, when you're looking at, you know, even if that's Solana, right? I like Solana, I own a lot of Solana. But when you look at it, it's substantially more centralized and controlled than Bitcoin is. It just is. And that's fine. You know, when we look at what it does, it is a high performance layer one. And as an investor, I'm okay with that. But I think if you're looking at a strategic reserve for a currency of something that can be more centralized or controlled in a centralized way, I think you have to take that into account because that takes power away from the, the government and kind of the purpose of doing this and I think it makes it a little bit harder. So could we do this down the road? I think we could. Especially if they are US based companies. I could see them being added to a US strategic crypto reserve. I think that these, these projects that are probably foreign or more heavily centralized and foreign, I think those are the ones that are the least likely to be put inside of a reserve or at least just in mass. So I think you're right. We start here, we start off with Bitcoin and then I think we can kind of move up to other projects down the road. But yeah, you know, we'll see. Again, there's just a lot of complications that come from that and I'd be curious to see how they approach that. I don't think it's impossible, but I think all things start with bitcoin and then we move on from there.
- [36:44]
TiVo
Yeah, couldn't agree more. And we're already seeing it, you know, between the donations and it's just going to, it turns into everything else in government, the lobbying and all that to get your crypto and project into the strategic reserve. And again, back to the banking conversation, you know, that they're ready to jump in. Again, not fact here, but my opinion would be they don't want to necessarily. Not that they don't want to custody bitcoin but they don't want to use bitcoin because they want to use a more centralized project that they could maybe get some, their hands on, right? Get some percentage of profits and whatnot. Whereas, you know, strictly with bitcoin, it'll be hard for them to do that as the banks. So the banks are going to be wanting this obviously any project, like you said, if they have an allocation to it, they'll want it. So I kind of feel for leaning towards the bitcoin only definitely for the start because that's just, it's just going to turn into the lobbying and the politics of everything. And I kind of, I think what we all love about bitcoin is kind of allowing that to be put to the side and just the democratizing of your own finances is why a lot of us came to bitcoin. So yeah, just the debate again, I think this is stuff that you got to really follow because it's the pulse of the community. And I found it really interesting as the whole bitcoin and crypto community was locked hand in hand rooting on for Trump. And then all of a sudden week one, we talked about this last week was like, all right, if we don't get what we want in the markets with executive orders and quick pace, like there could be a little bit of ruffling of some feathers and a sell off and you know, obviously deep seek AI had something to do with that, especially in the altcoin market. But now, now there's, now there's a rift because everybody wants theirs. So I think it's interesting to, you know, keep tabs on.
- [38:39]
Brendan
Yeah, couldn't agree more, man. Could not agree more. I've also, I guess kind of keeping things around the conversation of altcoins Tiva. I don't know if you saw this, but we're going to circle back to XRP Ripple, a controversial topic here on the podcast on the show. Sometimes we talk about it in good, sometimes we talk about it in a negative light. But you know, we got to talk about the positives, right? We're, we try to stay unbiased. We try to just report on what's happening. And you know, in recent weeks XRP has been crushing it. And if we can flash this up on the screen here, what we've seen is that the SEC case for, for Ripple has vanished online. And people are speculating and saying, hey, this kind of, this, this absence of the ripple related litigation from the SEC's website is just causing a lot of speculation that the case might have concluded that this thing is gone, that this thing is done and behind us. And people are getting really excited. And I think that these people are probably on the right path. I do see the XRP case going away. I think 90% of these crypto cases that were started by Gary Gensler, I think that these are going to be thrown out. I think that we're going to move on past them. I think that the new administration, again, they don't want to negatively impact crypto, especially cryptos that are founded and centralized in the US they want to keep them here. They want to incentivize them to be here. That's a big part of the goal. And with this happening, people are starting to get really, really excited and for good reason. This is a massive move for Ripple and xrp, but it's a bigger move for the entire crypto space because, again, it's re fortifying that standard that, hey, we are entering into a new era. You don't have to live in fear and you're not going to get terrorized by the sec. These series of what felt like endless Wells notices and lawsuits coming at everyone. It looks like it's coming to a conclusion. So big win for Ripple again, Price over here has been crushing it. I've actually been trading Ripple quite a. Quite a bit. TiVo. And again, you know, we talked about it for a while. Guess what? It was one of the worst performers. It just was for a couple of years. It moved sideways like a stable coin. That all changes. You know, every crypto has been through a phase like that, but when it's hot, it's hot. And you look at it now kind of since October, November, and it's been crushing it. It's been one of the highest performing cryptos since then. So. Love it, hate it. Personally, I'm not the biggest fan of its fundamentals, but guess what? It's crushing it. It has all sorts of good news at the moment. It has great price performance on the charts. And so I think that again, we try to stay unbiased, especially as traders. And what's hot is hot. And this is something that has been doing really, really well, especially as kind of the AI sector in some of these smaller market caps have been really getting hit recently.
- [41:50]
TiVo
Yeah. And their team seems to have a direct link to, to the White House and the Trumps, which I find interesting because they did donate to Kamala. I believe it was like a million dollars towards the end of the presidential run there.
- [42:06]
Brendan
Yeah.
- [42:06]
TiVo
And a quick flip, a quick flip there for, for The Ripple team.
- [42:11]
Brendan
I can't. Yeah, I mean, I. Listen, I don't want to get political, but I just, I feel like of all the crypto projects that could donate to that administration, they would be the least incentivized because they have been just battered by. Just absolutely battered with every lawsuit and negative thing that could have happened. But anyway, don't want to get political. I just, Yeah, I saw that even Trump went after them a little bit for that and was like, what the heck, guys? And either way, they flipped. It's all behind us now. And again, one of Trump's favorite things.
- [42:47]
TiVo
Is getting people to, like, bend the knee and kiss the ring. So it's like if you're in, if you can eye you up as an adversary and then flip you, it's like, I think that's actually one of his, you know, guilty pleasures. So I think he's enjoying it.
- [43:00]
Brendan
The art of the deal. The art of the deal.
- [43:03]
TiVo
Art of the deal. Well, great transition because speaking of art of the Deal, some breaking news this morning. So, I mean, God, what doesn't the Trump family have now in the finance world? Everything from stocks to coins to NFTs. And so we covered the meme coins, We've covered the NFTs. We haven't really talked too much about DJT Media. So DJT is, is traded on the stock market, basically. It was built around Truth Social, his social media platform, but it became a meme stock, you know, during the election, obviously, and has just a crazy market cap for the underlying assets. But similar to GameStop, even though the underlying assets aren't worth as much, people want to invest in it. And it's, you know, basically voicing the support of Donald Trump via the stock market. So they announced today that they'll be moving DJT into some type of financial services, you know, financial services role or company. It was, let's see here. This literally dropped this morning. Oh, it looks like we just got Wall Street Journal subscribed. Truth Phi is what it'll be called. They're going to be, I read on it a little bit, they're going to be working through Charles Schwab. So, you know, there's your kind of hosting platform. And again, this was just announced today, but as you can see here from the headline, moving into financial services, something built within or on top of Charles Schwab's technology. So they're, they're not going to go out and build some new exchange for this type of stuff. They're going to leverage Charles Schwab. But they will be including bitcoin and crypto. Was, was the announcement this morning. And then as you can see here, These stock jumped 6 and a half percent as we're speaking right now. So you know, between this and World Liberty Phi and Meme Coins, I mean it, it, the, the Trump empire is slowly moving or not slowly warp speed moving into financial services. And again, you know, as much as you, you don't like to think this way sometimes follow the money, guys. This is, this is where the money's going. This is where the family is putting, you know, their bets on for the future of their wealth. And again, not financial advice, just an opinion, but if you think the, the sitting US President's family is, is going to overcome some roadblocks and get what they need to get their stuff going, you know, I think that's a, a pretty good bet. You know, easier to bet than the Eagles Chiefs in a couple weeks in my opinion. So something to follow. And that's, that's what we do here. We just bring up the news and try to try to give you the flow of where things are going. But great episode. Honestly. It was a lot going on just like it seems every week. So who knows what next week will bring.
- [45:56]
Brendan
Yeah, you know, we got a lot of big stuff happening. You mentioned. I got, just got to give a little shout out. I know me and TiVo are Eagles fans. So for anyone else out there who's not, you're going to lose, the Eagles are going to win and there's just no debate about it. I mean this is, it's just a given fact. I did see that. We had a couple of, of chats over here in the chat box.
- [46:18]
TiVo
Yeah, look at that, huh? Dude, east coast lobster. Our guy from Canada, he's been in Crypt Nation for two years. He said he's been chatting it up all day.
- [46:28]
Brendan
Yeah, yeah. And I saw that we have a member in there and I'm trying to find the chat box as we're talking but D&T NFT I remember he has been around since before I was even a part of crypto 101. He's been around since maybe like 20. Maybe. Correct me if I'm wrong here, if you're still there. I want to say like 2017, 2018. Like he has been around with me for forever and I just want to say shout out to him because I remember and me and him have chatted more times than I can count. So long term supporters in the chat. Yeah.
- [47:06]
TiVo
East Coast Lobster. A little question here. So when bitcoin dominance starts to pull back and alts take off, he's looking forward to Banana zone. He's been talking about it all episode. But when alts take off and bitcoin dominance pulls back, you know, is anybody selling bitcoin to inject into alts? You know, we've talked about this before, but you know, what's your take for east coast lobster here?
- [47:28]
Brendan
Yeah, I think that it's hard to say, right. If we're talking about dominance pulling back, then yeah, I think that really fuels the next leg up for altcoins. That fuels a big altcoin season. In fact, when we saw bitcoin dominance initially pull back towards and I'm pulling up a chart on my end, but when we saw bitcoin dominance initially pull back towards November and December, even the small pullback that we saw from just over 60% to around 55%, that little coins go crazy. I mean, a lot of altcoins shot up to cycle highs, new all time highs, just with around a 5 to 6 pullback in Bitcoin dominance. And you know, I think that if we see a bigger move, which I mean, we've seen in previous altcoin cycles, Bitcoin dominance fall 20%, 30% more than that. And we just haven't seen that yet. So I think you're right that, you know, if we start to see bitcoin dominance pull back, can altcoins take off? And I think the answer is yes. The other half of this is can we see people maybe taking profits on their bitcoin and putting that in the altcoins? I think the answer there can also be yes, but it's a little bit different this cycle because we have a much bigger focus on bitcoin from an institutional and a governmental kind of side of things. Right. So when we're looking at again, a lot of these governments, a lot of these institutions, there's a bigger focus on bitcoin there, especially the Bitcoin ETFs. And that kind of prohibits money from flowing as it used to from bitcoin in the altcoins. Because previously all this money that people invested in crypto, they were either doing it through their own wallet or on an exchange. And it was very easy to convert that into an altcoin. Now if you're trading through the Bitcoin ETFs or if you're a traditional asset manager, it's not as easy to switch out your bitcoin for some, you know, mid cap altcoin that you've seen if you're going through the ETF view. So I think that will maybe limit the quantity or maybe the kind of proportions that we've seen previously. However, I still think that altcoins can do well. The only caveat that I would say here is that the altcoin space has grown so much that we're at a point where not every altcoin can exceed. You go back to 20, you know, any of the previous cycles, I was going to say, like some of the early ones, you go back to any previous cycle, there's been just enough altcoins where when the market exploded, they all succeeded. I think now we're at a point of the market where it's so big, there's so many altcoin projects just, you know, tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of them out there now that not everyone can appreciate and succeed. And I think you have to be a lot more picky about the altcoins that you're choosing.
- [50:14]
TiVo
Yeah. So couldn't agree more. So hopefully that helps. East Coast Lobster, we'll see inside the community and DNT NFT Sains he's been around since 2017, so you gotta love that. Yeah, it's, you know, something to look forward to. If you're listening on the back half of the audio podcast, you know, come to the YouTube, get in the chat. You know, we try to keep these pretty consistent of, you know, recording on on Wednesday mornings around 10am but yeah, we got, we got a fun little community growing on YouTube. It's good times.
- [50:43]
Brendan
Yeah, I agree. And tiva, you know, maybe I'm out of line, but I got to defend my integrity here a little bit. I saw someone say, Brendan, XRP is some of the best fundamentals in crypto. It should be in your 2025 list. Well, let me just clarify here and say, guess what? I bought XRP in 2017, I bought it in 2018, I bought it in 2025. It's on my balance sheet, I own it. But as someone who is been around basically since its inception, I think it's hard to say that it has the best fundamentals when the first 32,000 blocks of XRP chain were, are missing and gone. And it's like, how does that happen to a blockchain which is supposed to be so credible when it comes to block information? I think that's a big issue. How. I think if you look at how much its executives have sold, you look at Chris Larson selling at bare minimum $450 million of XRP onto The market you see the opposite of a lot of other foundations you look at like Radium and Jupiter doing buybacks of their tokens. When you know you have XRP's team doing the opposite and selling off $450 million worth from 2016 to 2020. You have Brad Garlinghouse, the CEO, doing the same thing from 2016 to 2020, selling $164 million worth of his own token onto the market. You've, you know, had them get in trouble with the sec. And I think you can throw that out the window because most of that's bogus. And guess what, that's okay. Like things happen, right? I own it. I've owned it for, you know, almost a decade ago when this thing came out. I still have exposure to of it today. I've done a lot of buying and selling in between. But to say that it has some of the best fundamentals as someone who has owned it for forever, now it doesn't. But guess what, that's okay. I can still own it, I can still trade it. We like it, we talk about it a lot positive here. They're freaking crushing it. I think that they have one of the best marketing teams in crypto and that's undeniable. They really, really do. I think also they're probably going to get an ETF this year. We've talked to a lot of the ETF providers, we've talked to hedge fund managers. There's a really high likelihood that XRP gets an etf. I think that's great. Again, there's all these positive catalysts that I think we can look towards for the future of xrp. But you know, it's not perfect and I think it's hard to find a perfect project. Right? And you don't have to be perfect. So I would just say for everyone that's out there and you like xrp, that's awesome. I think we just need to look at things level headed. There's pros and cons of everything. You know, I think that people make the same argument about Ethereum and Solana. They'd say, hey, Ethereum is slower and more expensive than Solana and it might not have the scalability, but it's a bit more decentralized. I think you can look at Solana and say, hey, it is a little bit more complex, it has more activity now. That's where people want to be. However, it is more centralized. You know, we saw them have issues even with the launch of the Trump and Melania token. And so that's not something that we see happen nearly as much with Ethereum. You know, the gas fees might go up a lot, but we don't really see people not being able to get transactions through. And so you look at every blockchain, you can even look at Bitcoin and say, hey, there's all these benefits of decentralization but you can't do the things that you can do on Solana or you can't do the things that you can do with a lot of these other tokens. You know, XRP drastically cheaper and faster than Bitcoin. Does that make it better? No, they do two separate things. And I think again that's totally okay. Just as like the stock market has all these companies that have different sets of pros and cons and benefits and all these things, the crypto market's the same way. And so I like to look at things as a little bit more of a level headed approach even with the things that I own. So I don't like to bat a blind eye to the weaknesses because I think that's how you get yourself in trouble. I think a lot of people did that with Terra Luna and with FTX and Alameda and you know, a lot of these tokens in the past and they bat an eyes to the weakness. So that when those weaknesses, I guess another current one is what's happening with Thor, Chain and Rune, people like to bat an upline eye to a lot of the weaknesses and then when things start escalating towards some of those, those gray areas, they're like no, it can't, it can't happen that way, like it can't go south. And I think that you just need to keep a level head because you need to know what those weaknesses are so you can proper manage risk kind of moving forward. So just that's Brendan's rant as we round this out. TiVo because I think it's important, especially as we're entering this stage of the market cycle, things are hitting all time highs. XRP is no exception to that. It's less than 10% away from its all time high. That's vastly better than the majority of other altcoins that are down 30, 40, 50, 60% from our from their all time highs. So it's not a knock to say that don't own this thing, it's bad. I've had exposure in the past, I have exposure now. It's one of the best charts out there at the moment as someone who loves to trade, but I like having this level headed approach to the markets. So I don't want that to ever be, you know, conceived the wrong way as bearish. And you know, I want all these projects to, to, to really succeed here. But embrace debate.
- [55:52]
TiVo
Embrace debate.
- [55:54]
Brendan
Embrace it, Embrace it all. And you know, the cool thing is we got a lot of stuff coming. We got a lot of stuff coming. I think 2025 is going to be an absolutely killer year for cryptocurrency across the board. You look at bitcoin, you look at a lot of these altcoins, I think we got a lot of awesome stuff coming our way and man, we could not be more excited to have a lot of conversations just like this one for everyone to listen to completely for free. So again, if you like these, these episodes, you like these podcasts, you like all the videos that we put out, consider hitting that like and subscribe button. Check us out on YouTube if you're listening somewhere else at the Crypto101 podcast on YouTube. And of course, if you really like us, check out some of our communities. We got Crypt Nation which is floating around with thousands and thousands of members and like minded individuals that you can go over there, get plugged in, talk about your, your ideas, talk about the coins that you like and you don't like and you get to hear both sides of the story over there. You can talk about trade ideas and everything else and I think it's a good place to, to stay connected. And of course you get to see me over there. I'm one of the lead analysts. You get to see TiVo, who's the producer behind the scenes of all content for Crypt Nation and we have a plethora of other guys as well, such as the legendary Bryce Paul and we got Rohit and everyone else. So we're do appreciate everyone watching if you did like all the content then again check us out on those other sources. But until next time, we'll see all of you at the same time, same place next week.
- [57:35]
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