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- [00:01]
A
Bitcoin made a new all time high yesterday and continued up over 118,000American dollars for one single bitcoin. With ethereum temporarily breaking $3,000. Of course that means everybody's saying what the hell is going on? What is the catalyst? What could possibly be the narrative that's pushing price up? Good news is we have NLW here to talk about all of the news and narratives from the past week. On the Friday five. Let's go. That's dope. Let's dope. Woke up, checked coin market cap, saw the price, said good price. I was on a stream yesterday with Gary Cardone and It was like 113 and we were celebrating and I was like I'm gonna wake up, it's gonna be like 118, no big deal. It was there. So basically I'm a profit. There it is. Nailed it, nailed it. Who could have seen a 3 or 4% bitcoin move coming? The thing is it's a big deal that we're obviously making a new all time high after ranging for a couple months. But relatively it's not even a huge move for Bitcoin. Up 6% is really a nice day, but it's nothing crazy. I don't know why people are so shocked, but this is the big first story of the day. Obviously we can take a look at coin market cap, everything pretty much up here. And then once again bitcoin hits new all time high at 116. We can change that to almost 119. Nearly a billion shorts get liquidated of course and Ethereum reclaims 3,000 as BlackRock spot Ethereum ETF, not just 300 million in record daily inflows. So let's talk price action first.
- [01:42]
B
Yeah, I mean so let's talk about what we can comfortably say that it's not about. And it's pretty clear that this is not some exogenous crypto specific catalyst. Right? No big new statement, no big new announcement. In fact, to the extent that there has been any sort of policy stuff this week, it's been, you know, contentious. So it's clearly not just a crypto specific phenomenon. I think that it's, it feels like it's connected to a broader sort of risk on move in markets in general.
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A
Right.
- [02:15]
B
You had Nvidia Rough Touch 4000 earlier this week. You know, sort of some amount of relative strength in, in traditional markets. Even though there are kind of like, you know, warning signs on the horizon or concerns around, you know, tariff round 18 or whatever coming up in August. But people Seem comfortable, kind of fading that for now, generally speaking, there has been a not dramatic but very clear, slow, steady shift in the sort of broader investor mindset I think driven by IPOs. You see SPACs coming back. It's just this whole. All these things all together are clearly pointing in a particular direction. And you know, again, we could probably spend, you know, multiple shows getting into, you know, exactly the psychology there. But it feels like this is bitcoin and the rest of crypto coming along with, you know, and participating in a broader market market move that's just pointed now in a more positive direction.
- [03:14]
A
That's interesting because I would have just simply said, clearly there's more buyers than sellers right now. Right. I think we had the whale wallets that we know have been selling very transparently online. Probably just get tired of selling. They sold what they wanted to sell. We see the treasury company demand, we see the ETF demand. As I showed there, it just seems like there's a lot of people that are slowly entering this market, not coming in with any crazy amounts. And slowly more people that couldn't get in are becoming unlocked, whether their platform eventually opens up or their RIA becomes more crypto friendly and we just have a lot of buyers. I don't think that's an indefinite thing. I agree it's happening in the right environment. It just feels like there's a hell of a lot more demand than there is supply, at least on Bitcoin and now seemingly on eth, since we have popular Ethereum treasury companies coming out and a clear turnaround here in inflows on those ETFs.
- [04:11]
B
Yeah, I mean, look, I think that the, maybe taking a step back, there is an argument to be made that Bitcoin has felt low, relatively speaking, relative to all of those forces that you, that you just articulated. And so to some extent this could be simply explained by, you know, it cut catching up with itself, basically. But I will say that, you know, I am hearing reports of people's books, barbers and taxi drivers asking them about Bitcoin treasury companies again and stuff like that. And, and, and again, I think that, you know, a couple of successful IPOs, the rest of the market racing into IPOs. It's not full on animal spirits. There's still caution, I think there's still a, a real hesitance around, you know, h policy headwinds. But we've now had so many sort of moments of volatility that, you know, 20 to 30 days later have been nothing burgers that I think that it's allowing people to mostly just orient towards where they want to be, which is bullish and optimistic. And you know, that combined with all of those forces that you just described, which is sort of structurally pushing demand for bitcoin and other crypto assets, you know, is leading to this, you know, not so slow and steady grind up right now, but compared to, you know, previous cycles, certainly more of a grind up than what we've seen.
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A
Yeah. I didn't necessarily intend to talk about treasury companies, but it has been really interesting and I have also in the matter of a month, because this wasn't even on my radar so massively until two months ago, of course, right. When Kanter and Tether and they all launched 21. Then we had Nakamoto obviously, who's almost like a fund of funds for treasury companies. And now they're just everywhere. But now we've got Ethereum treasury companies and people are starting to talk about it because of stocks like this. This is bmnr. I've showed it quite a few times. This is Tom Lee saying Ethereum is the new Bitcoin. This went up 3,800%. Like Ethereum will never go up 3,800% probably. And a company stating that they're going to buy ethereum went up 3,800%, but it's now down 73% from the top. I mean, this is alt season insanity FOMO happening on the stock market in these treasury companies. And of course this kind of volatility and upside, even if temporary, is going to capture the zeitgeist even of the mainstream. Tom Lee is a huge. This isn't some random crypto kol farm animal avatar talking to his audience about a small cap altcoin and seeing it go up, you know, 30x. This is one of the most notable names on Wall Street. I mean, put it this way, our new influencers are pumping the stock market and they're Donald Trump and Tom Lee.
- [06:58]
B
Yeah, I mean, listen, I think that one of the things that's interesting is it is a very powerful combination to have meme coin style. Investors feel like they can play their games but with an asset like Bitcoin underneath. And that's sort of what bitcoin treasury companies are doing for at least some portion of of the audience.
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A
Right.
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B
Like they're very clever financial instruments that like have a lot of. They have a very strong thesis behind them. Whether you agree with it or not, it's not hard to understand why some people would get excited about it. Basically all you have to Believe for, you know, treasury, the bitcoin treasury company phenomenon to be interesting, at least theoretically, is that bitcoin is going, you know, that bitcoin is not even close to where it's going to end up right now.
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A
Right?
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B
Like that's the arbitrage event is that you still know and that too few people still know where bitcoin is headed. That's really the, the entire basis of these bitcoin treasury companies now. Tons of details that could, you know, whack you off the face of the planet in terms of how these deals are actually structured and what type of debt you're getting. You know, like all these sort of, you know, a lot of conditionals and contingencies here. However, it doesn't take a lot of, you know, it's, it's, it's an interesting thesis, right? It has been. So you've got that phenomenon and, and it reinforces the sort of centrality of bitcoin. Everyone's on board now at this point with the idea of bitcoin as a, as an incredible sort of asset that, that underlies this. Holding aside the sort of, the leftovers of previous movements, this is now a mainstream point of view. It has always felt like Ethereum's natural opportunity in this equation was Bitcoin is the store of value, you know, king king S of F mountain kind of asset in this space. And Ethereum represents everything else.
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A
Right.
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B
So if you are just not really paying attention, you're not really caring and you want exposure to store of value, you know, sound money, crypto, you get Bitcoin and then if you want exposure to everything else, DEFY and NFTs and everything, you just buy Ethereum.
- [09:03]
A
Right?
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B
That's actually like, yeah, that is a decent, a decent approach. Now Solana really came in and kind of screwed with that narrative for, for Ethereum, but Solana isn't really available in full bore yet on Wall Street. And so I think Ethereum does have a moment right now where it could try to really sort of grab that we represent everything else in crypto space and I don't know how much this is that versus it's just run over demand from Bitcoin. But it feels natural, I guess is the point. It's like, it feels coherent to me. It doesn't feel like mania, even if there's questions around some of the underlying structures.
- [09:44]
A
Absolutely. And pivoting back slightly to macro, Fed minutes show policymakers split on how tariffs might impact inflation. Basically the Fed and inflation here are our second topic. It seems that There's a lot of confusion even among the Fed governors as to their belief in how tariffs will impact inflation, of course, and even what the tariffs will be. Right. So you have to guess at what the tariffs will be, when they'll happen, if they'll continue to get delayed. But then there's also these fundamental sort of cracks in the facade here with them disagreeing if they're inflationary or not, which then leads to the conversation of when the Fed is likely to cut again, if they are.
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B
Yep. But here was the bullish take, I think, which was maybe the predominant view coming off of these minutes. When we just had the Fed decision before, it looked like a pretty split decision. Right. There was, there was a lot of, you know, some number of the, of Fed governors had suggested they had increased their anticipated number of cuts, and some, you know, there was still a fair number that thought it was going to be zero this year. Well, what we got with the minutes, and this is an example of, you know, sometimes minutes don't matter at all. Sometimes minutes are actually quite useful. In this case, they were quite useful because what it made it clear is that pretty much everyone in there agrees that holding aside tariffs, it is probably appropriate to cut from where we are now.
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A
Right.
- [11:07]
B
That, that, that if there were no tariffs, if that was not part of the conversation, we'd be cutting now, how much we'd be cutting is, is maybe the sort of not so good news that, that market observers aren't paying as much attention to. There's also a fairly strong sense that we, you know, it's only a couple of cuts to get us to the neutral rate. However, the, what was clear is that there is, there is pretty strong consensus that cuts are the next move and that holding aside tariffs, that's, that's the, the right place to be. It's just that there's this fog of war around the tariffs, and that's really the, the big disagreement is just how much to care about, pay attention, to, focus on that versus kind of, you know, deal with every other factor. So I think what the market interpreted with that is like, got it. Okay. So the, the contingency here is tariffs. Beyond that, we're in cut mode.
- [11:52]
A
Right. It's interesting because the Fed generally makes their decision by looking back at data. I don't really recall another time in the past where I was paying attention that they were concerned about a theoretical in the future for policy decisions.
- [12:07]
B
Totally. Yeah. I mean, you know, it's a, it's, it's a weird moment for them. I, I think that, you know, sometimes, especially with the Powell Fed, his tendency of course, is to, to go slower than anyone really wants and to sort of be more data driven and, and hold your horses.
- [12:24]
A
Right.
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B
As a general position. But I think that in this case it's a lot more understandable that, you know, when he throws up his arms, you know, know, drops the shrug emoji in the chat and says, God damn, we have no idea what's going to happen with tariffs. Like, it's more credible in this case than it is in some of the other times that he's sort of had a similar posture.
- [12:42]
A
Absolutely. And in a sort of crypto related conversation, we have Elon Musk saying his new political party will support bitcoin. Fiat is hopeless. But obviously we have the America Party, which is the bigger story. Him saying effectively because of the big beautiful bill and the money printing and the inflation and the fiscal and economic problems it's going to cause, that he wants to launch a no nonsense third party that actually cares about things like the national debt. And of course, we have Trump pushing back rages against train wreck. Elon Musk predicts ridiculous America Party will falter. It's a good day when we can reference the New York Post. And here's the long post that's from On Truth Social. So I guess we're unpacking the America Party itself. Trump's reaction and Musk saying that the American, the America Party will effectively support crypto and bitcoin.
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B
Look, so the, when Trump says that third parties don't have a great track record in America, obviously he's just factually correct. The, the, the question though is whether that is predetermined and whether there are changes that would make that not the case. And boy, if there's ever been a time where it feels like there is an open space, it's now, right? You have both parties who are, whether they acknowledge it or not, in some form of civil war. The Democrats are in, you know, they, they have to decide whether they're going to go with sort of the, the full liberal wing, you know, or the full sort of, you know, populist AOC Mamdani kind of part of the party, the democratic socialist side of the party, or reconstitute something that's not that. The reason that it's not more of an outright battle is that there's not really anything competing, like there's no vision for that party, you know, outside of that, that group right now. But tell you what, as the, the next sort of cycle comes around, there is going to be a competition for what the core narrative of the Democratic Party should be. Meanwhile, the Republicans in the GOP look super solid, but that's because Trump's still at the helm of it and Trump has whipped everyone around him. In the vacuum that comes after Trump, there are going to be massive, massive competitions for what the identity of the GOP and Republicans should be. And I'm not drawing any value judgments. I'm not making any predictions about what's going to win. That is just factually the reality. You know, like there was a, there was a, I mean, you know, Obama at this point, I think, you know, as, as charismatic as he was, as, as central to the Democratic Party as he was, there was a vacuum after him. And he's nothing compared to Trump when it comes to the hole that he will leave, you know, in his party. So the, the interesting thing about that is that if there were ever a time when a sort of a third party could, if not carve out a big spot for itself, but at least influence those two conversations, that's the right sort of cauldron for that to happen. Secondly, you already have independence, I think, as the most registered party right now. So there is clearly some, some sort of middle space that Americans are looking towards that's not represented in mainstream political discourse. Third, whatever you think of the man, like the, the over time, the aphorism or sort of, you know, conventional wisdom to not fade, Elon, you know, just gets stronger and stronger and stronger. You know, we're having this conversation in a week when he dropped Grock 4, which the latest comer to the, to the LLM party, that's outperforming everything else on the benchmarks. That doesn't mean it's the best model necessarily, but it certainly is a reflection of the fact that it's very dangerous to just assume buffoonery entirely.
- [16:16]
A
Right.
- [16:17]
B
So, you know, all of those things add up to. When it comes back to our part of the conversation that we care about with, with bitcoin and crypto, to the extent that they care about, you know, values that are aligned with bitcoin and crypto, it's going to be an interesting, it could be an interesting political force in the coming years.
- [16:34]
A
Yeah, it's hard to unpack how successful they'll be in the future. But the one thing we do know, regardless of the roller coaster that the crypto industry has been on, obviously with Elon Musk, which I would argue is just the crypto industry's emotions and not Fact. But the roller coaster we've been on is that he was early to bitcoin. He understood the meme side. Tesla literally bought bitcoin and has largely held it. And he's raging against the machine on the issues that are generally most important to bitcoiners. If you believe that the Fed and the United States government are irresponsible and that we have a uni party when it comes to money printing and the belief that we can grow and inflation is the effectively part of the economy, then you support this party because that's the singular thing that drove him to create it. I mean, Elon Musk is literally saying like inflation, money printing, debt. These are the problems we need solved by a political party. Oh, and by the way, bitcoin and crypto will be a part of it. I don't know how that doesn't get everybody's kind of motor going.
- [17:37]
B
Yeah, I mean, I think, I think it's, you know, maybe for some people it's not full throated enough.
- [17:43]
A
Right.
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B
It came as a response to a comment or to a question on Twitter, but I think there's an argument that like the, of course, like this, you know, we literally plucked some of these principles from, you know, bitcoin. Twitter is pretty, pretty strong in its own right.
- [17:58]
A
There's no question like, yeah, people may not like the way the message was delivered, but he's shown it through his actions for years. So I don't think that anybody should really question it. The next story here, mysterious bitcoin whale moves 8 billion in largest daily transfer of old bitcoin in history. What a crazy story. I believe that this bitcoin hasn't moved in 14 years and it was just 10,000 Bitcoin clips sending these things around. What's going on here?
- [18:29]
B
I don't know, man. This is, this is so crazy. I mean, I think if you're like one of the more fun, you know, crypto archaeology stories we've had for some time. So much that was weird about this, the fact that they stored that they had it in these 10,000, you know, wallet clips all the way back then is insane. And so out of sync with how people were doing things back then. It's so weird. They also, this was a shoot straight from the hip. No test transactions, just fire it off like the, the, the brass, whatever.
- [19:01]
A
I mean, that's like $1.18 billion a clip, huh?
- [19:07]
B
No.
- [19:07]
A
Even if you got, you know, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80,000, a billion bucks is still worth the five minutes to send A text test transaction. Yeah, right. From an old wallet. From an old wallet that hasn't been touched. I mean, we're 14 years ago, 2011. Well, I don't know the wallet technology because I was not there. But like, his faith that those are.
- [19:26]
B
It's like it's a DAT file that sits on your desktop. I mean, the fact that this, like that, this wallet, they still had access to it that long ago, that's so crazy. You know, like, let's, let's put it this way. For anyone who's like, ah, it's not that long ago. Do you have a computer in your house from 2018, much less 2011, that you could actually fire up and have it work? You know, like just the, the actual hardware itself, you know, it's wild.
- [19:51]
A
Wow. Yeah. Incredible. Also, it's. I think there's the underlying part, which is it was done really cheap and fast. Billions of dollars, you know, good luck sending billions of dollars from one bank to another and getting that through without any third party middleman flagging your transaction.
- [20:08]
B
He wrote a note to himself, or they wrote a note to themselves about this bitcoin on their iPhone 4. Anyways, look, I think that there are two really interesting things about this, about this. One is it certainly reinforces the fact that we don't really know who this is or, or who did this certainly reinforces the view that pseudonymous that, that. That bitcoin not being fully private, still can abstract at a very strong level who's. Who's moving these transactions.
- [20:44]
A
Right.
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B
You know, this is the most interesting, like I said, bitcoin archaeology story we've had for a while, with everyone kind of trying to hone in on things. I know best best guess, I guess crypto Twitter has decided maybe it's Roger Ver, but there's a million reasons why that doesn't make sense too. Like, we just don't know.
- [20:59]
A
Right.
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B
And so I think that to the extent that, you know, there's a lot of project logic around privacy, coins and things like that, there's going to be some number of people who look at this and are like, all right, well, do we really, you know, need to go that far or is this efficient? So that's one thing that I think was interesting about this from a, from a discourse perspective. The other is this kind of calls into question some of our estimates about how much bitcoin is lost forever because there were many calculations of the, you know, the 2 to 3 kind of, you know, million lost BTC that included these wallets. And you know, now how many more of those wallets are dormant and waiting to wake up? Now I do think that these were some of the largest unidentified kind of wallets out there, you know, so, you know, who knows, Maybe it's not a meaningful shift in that, but it is, it does bring up an interesting question about what our assumptions are with, with, with, with the lost bitcoin.
- [21:57]
A
Yeah, we, we need to move on to the next stories. But Yago yesterday on this channel said, I asked him the question. I was like, listen, you were there in 2011. How many of these non Forbes list bitcoin billionaires are just laying dormant around that, you know, of kind of thought said probably two, seven, four sevens worth talking about, you know, 600, 700, 800 people that aren't on any Forbes list or list of billionaires of which there's only supposed to be 3,500 in the world, you know, that nobody knows and are just holding these wallets and they're still around and could move this money at any time. It's pretty, just wild when you see it. Yep. All right, the next story obviously is crypto week next week. Capital Agenda. It's crypto crunch time for the House. Let's just quickly, I guess unpack the agenda for crypto week, which is coming where they've basically said this is the time to get things done on Capitol Hill for this industry.
- [22:51]
B
I think, look, let's leave this in the realm of the preview because obviously we'll be talking about it next week. I think that the big takeaway or the thing that's interesting to me is that post tax bill, you know, post bbb Republicans have decided to put this as a core, core kind of agenda, like to move quickly on. And that's very encouraging. Now, we don't know, the thing that I'll be looking for is what the latest round of objections is, you know, what, what the battle lines are. Are they going to be old battle lines? Are there to be new battle lines? Is there going to look like, you know, does the market structure sort of bill, you know, look like it has actual momentum or is it, you know, not whatever we gotta, we kind of have to wait and see next week. But it is, it is very meaningfully on the agenda and not just a lip service kind of way. And I think that that's, that is in and of itself a positive sign.
- [23:38]
A
Absolutely. I agree that we should leave this one till next week because it'll probably be our main topic. Yeah, it might be all five topics depending on how many different things they do, right? God willing, yeah, yeah, that would be good. Well, let's hope we're not discussing how that really got a really bad bag, but I think I have confidence that it's going to be at least a net positive. Treasury Department drops case over Ethereum mixer Tornado Cash Months after dropping sanctions against Ethereum coin mixer Tornado Cash, the US treasury has agreed to end a related legal battle. How big is this?
- [24:11]
B
It's, it's nothing that new. It's just sort of the final, final confirmation of, of the, this, this administration backing off. What was one of the most concerning, you know, aspects of, of, of policy last time around, which was, you know, the, the, the, the sanctioning of, of Tornado Cash which had all sorts of implications for, for self custody and for you know, basically the, the sort of right to transact. I think that the, the, the, the asterisk on this story is that the prosecution of Tornado Cash's, you know, lead developer, slash founder, proceeds apace in New York. And so you know, we're not out of the woods yet when it comes to are developers liable for, for, for the, the, the code that they write. And that's the, that's the big concern. But it's still a very positive signal that at least from a broad kind of structural standpoint we're headed in the right direction.
- [25:11]
A
Yeah, I totally agree. So listen, I had the Robin Hood story queued up but we talked about it a lot and actually talked about it last Friday. So I think we'll dig into that one and see where it develops next week. I think we basically covered it all at this moment. Everybody go enjoy a weekend where Bitcoin's trading at $118,000 and Ethereum's pushing to 3,000. I mean there's nothing bearish here at all. I think it's nothing but tailwinds at the moment.
- [25:35]
B
Yep.
- [25:37]
A
All right Everybody, thank you NLW. Give a follow to NLW on X. Of course his YouTube and most importantly the breakdown where he covers all these things on a daily basis in much more depth even than we do here. Man. Have a great weekend everybody. Have a great weekend. We'll see you back for macro Monday. Let's do, let's do.