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The Wolf Of All Streets
Bitcoin Frenzy: Why Everyone Is Rushing to Buy NOW
00:54:36
Bitcoin Frenzy: Why Everyone Is Rushing to Buy NOW
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- [00:00]
Scott Melker
2025 is expected to be an absolutely huge year for bitcoin and for crypto. According to Fidelity, this will be the year that we see multiple nation states and central banks buying bitcoin. The game theory of the United States proposing a strategic reserve should all play out massively in favor of our beloved asset. But it also leaves many people wondering, when alt season, when are we going to see the rest of the market start to catch up? Well, we have a perfect guest to discuss those very topics today. We've got Alice Liu, who is the research lead at CoinMarketCap. She has all the data to show us exactly where the money is heading and likely to head in 2025. Of course, Texas West Capital with the charts on the back half. You guys don't want to miss this amazing show. Let's go.
- [00:48]
Alice Liu
Let's do.
- [01:04]
Scott Melker
What is up up, everybody? I'm Scott Melker, also known as the Wolf of Wall Streets. Before we get started, please subscribe to the channel and hit that like button. Going to go ahead and bring on Alice now. Good morning or good evening, I guess in your case.
- [01:20]
Alice Liu
Good morning, Scott. Yes, it's evening time for me.
- [01:23]
Scott Melker
Yeah, I get the good morning, you get the good evening. So let's, let's first start with sort of the headline story here, why everyone is rushing to buy bit now. Nation states and central banks are expected to buy Bitcoin in 2025. Fidelity says. I think we can also add to this that we'll likely see more corporate adoption and sovereign wealth and a long list of the huge wall of money that we've anticipated coming into bitcoin for a very long time. It seems that the United States finally leading the way here is going to put a lot of pressure on the rest of the world. So we obviously were just trading over $100,000. We have this dip. It's terrifying. A lot of people, in your opinion, like, how do you frame all of this and where we're at in the market cycle.
- [02:06]
Alice Liu
Yeah, sure. So I agree with you that 2025 is going to be the year we're saying BTC goes mainstream and together with the nation space adoption. And I think that trend in general is agreed across the, the whole industry, really. But in January alone, we're having a few of the key events coming up. So it's not surprising to me that we're having a bit of a dip. Two things like the headline themes for January, which is number one is Trump's inauguration on the 20th. And then we have the fat meeting coming up on the 29th of January. But before that, as you mentioned, if we look back at 2024, we will really see that as the year everything changed because BTC went mainstream with a spot etf. And then we saw over the sheer amount of institutional monies that we were able to onboard via the ETFs that gives legitimate, really legitimize BTC for us. And as a result, seeing BTC potentially getting incorporated into the different treasury books for companies as well as reserve assets for countries is going to be a trend. So where we are in the market cycle right now, I think that's a very interesting point because people were so bullish. It was so bullish for us in December and towards the beginning of December that we introduced a index called CMC100 which tracks the top 100 coins and their price levels performance. So it gives us a really good way to quantify where we are in the market. We launched it on the 29th, we had the peak of it in mid December. Sorry, we launched it on the 9th of December and we had the peak of that index in mid December and now it's sort of dipped back. So what we can see, where we are in the market cycle is definitely just a small pullback off a very strong bull run that we're having.
- [04:04]
Scott Melker
That's the key point. Very strong bull run we're having. There seem to be a lot of people who think that we could have potentially topped that. Whatever's happening in global events and macro could drag bitcoin down with it if we see some sort of black swan or we finally see the recession that many people are calling for. But when you look at the amount of demand and buying pressure there should theoretically be. That doesn't seem to really hold much water for me. I think 2025 should be absolutely huge. And even one of these things, a major nation adopting it should be a catalyst that sends bitcoin absolutely flying regardless of what's happening.
- [04:42]
Alice Liu
Exactly. I think the talk was definitely very strong when Trump started is this point of using BTC as reserve assets when he talked about it in Nashville Bitcoin conference. And then later on we're seeing a lot of the other sort of nation states following suite here Last week we started to see a Hong Kong legislation legislature proposing potentially using BTC as a reserve assets as well. So definitely that's the trend we're going to see. And if we say one trillion. Well right now, what's the total market cap for BTC? Right now it's just like the total market cap for crypto in January is 3.3. Right. And BTC dominance is still very strong. 56.7% with something just like shy of $2 trillion market cap for BTC, it's a lot. It's 1 billion is a lot for an individual, but it's nothing for a corporate. But 1 trillion is a lot for a company, but it's nothing for a nation state. So when we are talking about opening BTC up to be used as reserve assets, then the potential is really big here. If we look total 2 trillion market cap, it's nothing compared with the reserve assets magnitude that we're seeing out there. So definitely agree.
- [06:02]
Scott Melker
Yeah. If the United States makes bitcoin a strategic reserve asset, we should be at 500,000 in a matter of months.
- [06:10]
Alice Liu
I feel the past few episodes you were having 200k seems to be a very, very.
- [06:16]
Scott Melker
I think that's conservative. I think it's 200k if we just get a normal cycle and none of this happens. Right. But I think if the United States actually passes a strategic reserve bill or something, then every country has to add it and I mean it's just too much demand for the supply in my opinion. I've been wrong before, so I wouldn't be surprised. But I think it leaves people, as I said, sort of in the intro asking when alt season. Right. So I think that we've had this sort of strange barbell so far in this cycle where it's been bitcoin going up like crazy and then the most speculative degenerate side of crypto like the pump fum meme, coins going nuts for 24 hours at a time and most of the things in the middle underperforming the real utility, the layer ones. I mean yes, we've seen a lot of the new ones, aptos and sui and all of these have their big moments, but we have not seen anything like 2021 yet.
- [07:08]
Alice Liu
Or I agree it is a barbell as you said, heavy on both sides. But my. The point that I want to make, I think not many people are realizing that which is the bar is not as thin as people thought it is. And why I mentioned that. So everything in between, right. It is your defi, it is your AI agents, it is your actual like infrastructures, NFT gaming, et cetera. We can still say them having huge potentials and the speed, the power of them making a comeback that we saw in the past two months is very strong. So why. And what did we realize? Backtrack it a little bit towards the end of December with, for example, the Hyper liquid airdrop with the Paddy Penguin Group. Airdrop, right. We saw how quickly a theme can come back into the picture again and be so celebrated by its community. So Paddy's airdrop definitely brought back the NFT community again. And we saw the strong, the power of that. And then together with the things that happened, the defi, the pump, which is, you know, with Trump Takes the administration, we think it's going to give a boost to the defi sector again. So I know, I know it's been for a long time that Ethereum is on the download, but when Defi makes a comeback, which we see a huge potential defi as a sector 5x at. At a. At. At a very conservative level, that is going to bring Ethereum back into the picture again. I know Meme coin has been a huge thing for us throughout the summer, and we had another pump of that in October, November time. Things quieted down a little bit recently, but mem coins are still a very strong part of it. It is still the number one sector on CMC by page view and community engagement.
- [08:59]
Scott Melker
So it's interesting that you brought up Pudgy Penguins. I actually interviewed Luca, the head of Pudgy Penguins, yesterday for podcasts. It's recorded and will come out. And it really blew my mind what they've pulled off in context of how bad NFTs have been and how successful they've been as this one standalone project. But I do agree that I think that could be the catalyst to bring that sector back. Even in past alt seasons, we have these sector by sector moments. Defi, summer, metaverse, fall, NFTs go crazy. It's kind of one bubble after another. Right now it feels like maybe that's memes and AI agents just, you know, I'm not really so deeply active in it. But you actually have the data as to what people are engaging with and looking at. So right now, what's there? You know, what. What are people really, really interested in? And I guess what will the bull market likely look like or be the catalyst for a true alt season where it's kind of everything.
- [09:53]
Alice Liu
Yeah. So altcoin season, I know people talk about it, but how do you quantify that? How do you confidently say that we're in al on cmc, we have a CMC Altcoin Season index. So the way we measure it is the top 100. It's the 100 projects their performance versus BTC. And if 75% of that outperforms BTC, then we're like Firmly in altcoin season. Right now on a scale of 1 to 100, we're 46. We hit 87 as the highest in December. On the 9th of December we hit 87. So that was like a full on off season. And if you remember what happened in week one of December, you can sort of feel that if you try to remember that that's what an altcoin system feels like. Okay, so right now we're 40, 46. We tripped back a little bit, but we definitely saw the power of what a full on altcoin season could be. To your question of what is going to pump in this altcoin season. Now coming back to the point, how we measure it, the top 100 performance tokens and if you look at them, the amount of returns they've printed for the past 90 days, which is the time frame that we track over 90 days. Rolling basis number one is virtual. So that's of course that's AI agent. That's actually up 58, 5800% for the past 90 days. And then number two, we have Farcoin, you guys.
- [11:30]
Scott Melker
I mean we kind of laughed there's been a dip in meme coins, but that's because all the meme coin money has gone into Fartcoin at a 2 billion dollar market cap or whatever.
- [11:38]
Alice Liu
Feels like that. Yeah, it feels like that. But again, remember, right. You mentioned about pump fun and the meme coin season we are having in this year, especially towards the end of last year compared with the meme coin season we had at the beginning of last year. There's a huge difference. And the difference is it's a lot more decentralized, community driven. Back then it was mostly Elon's tweet, just pump stuff. But now people, it's the people, it's the community. People want to pump what they want to pump and you can see that very strong trend and wave and how quickly things can catch up. We see that started with SPX 6900. We saw that with all the AI 16Z and all of those related things so far. Coin is just one of the most recent success stories of how quickly a meme project can catch trend and become so big. So that's number two. Number three is penguin. Number four is hyper liquid. So those are the top performing coins in the altcoin season we are seeing for the past 90 days. Now coming back to the point that both you and I were making, it's like a barbell market, Bitcoin on one side, meme coin degen Stuff on the other and everything else in the middle. AI agents, decentralized finance, decentralized science, rwa, what you name it. But the bars are not as thin as people think. So when the altcoin season comes, we're actually going to see this bar bell structure to be a more solid foundation.
- [13:12]
Scott Melker
Yeah, it'll look more like the ones of the past I guess. The question is, you mentioned obviously that your index went flying in December. It was up in the 80s, right back in the 40s, but you still look at a lot of the sort of darlings of previous cycles and they kind of did nothing. Listen, I have a sizable position still in MATIC or Poll now right from before. It's done literally nothing for God knows how long. I'm sure that when Ethereum catches a bid, all the Ethereum layer twos and such will as well. But even when you said it's a full on alt season, it's not the everything alt season of the past but probably because there's just so many tokens.
- [13:50]
Alice Liu
XRP pumped and then XRP ADA HBAR.
- [13:54]
Scott Melker
There was that moment where those things were like 5, 6, 7X. That was crazy.
- [13:59]
Alice Liu
Yeah, so interesting you mentioned that because we definitely saw the strong trend of that in mid November where it triggered us to think the previous cycle retail investors came back because the, the dinosaur category, which we call them dino category, which are all the top tokens in the 2017, 2018 out season. And if you look at their performance, a lot of them actually had quite positive performance get the pump this time as well. So that's why we thought the previous cycle retail investors came back because these are the names that they are familiar with, like you know, like all the sui tons, everything that we were talking about in this market cycle, they were not familiar with it. So still in that dinosaur category some of them did have a very good, very strong performance like XRP did. This week we saw stellar XLM pumped like what, almost like 15% still 15% up for the past seven days. So you just need to buy, just allocate your eggs in different baskets.
- [15:07]
Scott Melker
See that's logical to me kind of early in the cycle and we've seen that before. But I mean I think it might literally be as simple because I know this anecdotally even to talking to my friends who gave up on crypto, you know, years ago, who were just kind of passive investors, they log into Coinbase, they see that bitcoin's gone way up, then they just remember the names that they remembered before and they look at those. And they're holding a little bit and it's up and they just start buying. I've literally had friends who were like, wow, man, you know, like I'm crypto seems interesting again, like, should I buy Cardano? It was so big last time and they don't even know these new things exist. Right. They're still stuck in those years ago. So that makes sense as the first kind of pump. I think we're just waiting to see now. When do those people find out about AI agents, you know?
- [15:51]
Alice Liu
Right, yeah.
- [15:52]
Scott Melker
How do they access them?
- [15:54]
Alice Liu
Exactly. So that's why I think things like your podcast and also things like what we do as researchers are going to be quite crucial right now at this point in the market, because it's literally for us to translate those messages. And what is the new development into a digestible type of information? Because as you mentioned, AI agents right now, et cetera, like all this also quantum resistant tokens, et cetera, all this concept tokens, it's complicated even as a concept for as crypto people. And imagine trying to translate that and make it into something actionable, investable, understandable for the outsiders is going to be quite crucial.
- [16:35]
Scott Melker
Okay, so how do you see this cycle then in context of past cycles, beyond what pumps and when and all those things? Do you think it's another situation where we have six months of craziness until the summer, boring summer, one more pump in the fall and then we're just depressed for two years? Or do you think that we have more of a chance of things sustaining into 2026, 2027 as the space, I would love to say as the space matures, but like when fart coin is the thing that's pumping on the other side of bitcoin, I don't know that we've really matured that much.
- [17:11]
Alice Liu
But you need to let people do what they want to do. And there are two sides to crypto, right? One side is actually the solid use cases infrastructure, the, the actual utilities of blockchain and decentralization. The other side, we have to acknowledge that there is a casino side of the gambling side of the industry as well. And rightfully, if people want that arena, they should be able to have that arena if needed. Now to your point of how this market cycle is going to be different. So I don't know there. Okay, so people have, some of them have agreed to this point that BTC halving is a main driver for how we are experiencing the four year cycle. But given now the players at the table are different, vastly different compared with what we had back then. We have institutions that they are increasingly treating Bitcoin as just a financial instrument. So the, the halving impact is definitely toned down. So if, if I'm able to take BTC out of this discussion here. So what I think BTC is going to do is to be treated increasingly like a financial instrument and that would be impacted more on the macroeconomics, the, the global economy, etc. That will be one of the major, more sort of influential impacts here. On the other hand though, for crypto, on the other side of the spectrum, as you said, the meme coins, the casino coins, less so even for the meme coins. Because meme coins, you need a community behind it. They're what we were seeing during the summertime. It's literally just gambling. It's new projects getting launched on pump fun. I'm insured on all of these platforms that people just chase. They buy in with the mentality of 5x7x100x instead of what means in a day. Yeah, some did, some did, some did. Instead of, you know, buying because you want to be part of the community, be part of the. Like that's your, that's what you think. It's a nice, nice joke. You want to be part of it. So those casino coins, they would still exist and they would still have their arena to attract the people that have the needs to. But everything in the middle, if a. We are seeing, especially now with the trend of AI agents, with the trend of actually the combination of decentralization and AI, if we're able to see some really solid use cases of how blockchain and crypto can help solve the AI issue in traditional AI. Traditional AI industry. If we actually have those use cases, those will be very solid projects and narratives that will, regardless of where we are in the market cycle, will stay and grow and just more taking on the tech cycle as opposed to the crypto cycle in that case.
- [20:05]
Scott Melker
Yeah. My skeptical guess is that every single time we get really excited about something and then it has this massive pump and then a bubble and then the next cycle we see the real winners come out and actual building and iteration. I keep talking about it, but off the grid for gaming, right from Godzilla, that's a real AAA game in crypto. We were supposed to have those four years ago. It never happened. Here we are. Whether that sparks gaming or not, we'll see. But we do have a legitimate AAA game now that is blockchain based. Right. So I think AI will be like a 20, 20, 28 thing, right? Maybe I'm wrong and maybe it'll be a faster adoption and I think that we'll see some really good price action in it. But I'm just always skeptical that the hottest narrative, I think never seems to play out immediately in our cycles.
- [20:57]
Alice Liu
The only difference is gaming is such a special sector that you do need downtime. You need people to be on the download to build AAA games, they need to be really solid. Whereas AI as an industry, even regardless of crypto, it's so fast with this like the different generations of updates. So maybe we'll have it quicker, the rinse and repeat cycle.
- [21:25]
Scott Melker
Yeah, you talked about something that piqued my interest earlier. You mentioned Ethereum, obviously, like you probably don't know, but I've been a long time believer that Ethereum will have its moment again. And I think that there's an extreme doom and gloom around Ethereum that's unwarranted personally. And you kind of did allude to the fact that, you think that, you know, Defi and Ethereum and Layer Twos will have their moment again. I'd like to hear more about that, maybe even just for my own to make myself feel better. But I really, I strongly believe that Ethereum is going to catch a serious bid this year.
- [22:00]
Alice Liu
Yeah, yeah, it does feel oversold because I was looking, it's more towards May, December. I was just looking through the market to see, okay, what else is cheap to buy because at that point everything was so pumped. The K, the magic number was 200. So literally 200%. 200% since the 6th of November where the election news to that point where when I was looking, everything seems pumped around 200%. Ethereum was only 87% at that point. So it is definitely on discount. Like is your Black Friday sales still going on? It feels like that now. There are a few reasons contributing to that. Number one is yes, Ethereum had ETF approved, but we didn't see that inflows into it, not that much. So again, without the institutions coming, it's very hard to pump the price up. The same magnitude that we're seeing with BTC. Number two is to do with the L2s now a lot of the transactions fees, et cetera on them. So Ethereum is sort of taking a bit of shine away from that. And then number three is just Defi people seem to forget about it because Meme coin was the number one thing. But if you look at how the real, you know, when crypto regulation gets a lot more friendlier in some of the major markets, which we are saying already, for example, in Europe, Mica just Netherlands last week just approved four licenses for crypto companies to give them mica lessons as digital asset service providers. Now think how tough U.S. regulation has been on crypto. Right. If Trump's taking the office is going to give us a more justified, friendlier version of crypto regulation that will open the door up for so many use cases of defi. And defi as a sector is very much dominant on Ethereum SCL1. So again, to me, I feel ether is right now is definitely sort of a sleeping giant waiting to be woken up. So fingers crossed.
- [24:11]
Scott Melker
I mean, I think that's where the institutional money is going to go first when it leaves Bitcoin. It's not going to jump to Solana to do pump fund. If they're going to tokenize things, they're going to do it on Ethereum first because that's where the money is and that's where Larry Fink is. Right. It just seems very obvious to me and I think we do have this optimism about the Trump administration. Some, though, are saying that we should still be a bit cautious. Right. Trump Admin may ease crypto banking ties, but caution remains. Basically saying here, this is from td, which is one of the major banks, that they still think that a lot of banks are not going to want the risk of dealing with crypto. So maybe we don't have operation choke point 2.0 and the banks actively, you know, are the Fed actively looking to an FDIC to cut banking rails? But a lot of banks may still be very slow to adopt and have a problem with the industry. So maybe there's a middle ground of, like, we're going to get everything our way that we think we're going to get with Trump to something kind of more in between what we've had before and, you know, in that.
- [25:07]
Alice Liu
Good point. Yes.
- [25:10]
Scott Melker
So, you know, I don't know that Trump's going to, in his first hundred days make, you know, everything we want to do completely legal and easy, but I guess we will. We'll see what happens. So, outside of what we've mentioned, I know we've only got a couple, a couple minutes left. I mean, what's exciting you the most about 2025? Like, if you were just someone watching this show, what's something you'd be looking really hard at to consider, you know, maybe investing in or getting excited about that might see some real meaningful adoption or even just some meaningful price action.
- [25:42]
Alice Liu
Yeah. So number One thing is going to be rwa. I know this was so popular last year, but sort of quieted down now because some of the other narratives are more of a shiny concept. But RWA is the number one use case that we are saying together with the trend of institutional onboarding. Right. So we are very likely to say the first one billion dollar fund in RWA very soon because the, the top two ones, like for example the BlackRock build fund, they are close to 800 million USD. So it's within the spin of a few months. So it's very strong demand and we're going to see that sectors do play. And remember, this is the sector where you have a solid revenue business model. So these are the people, these are the projects that can generate operational revenue out of it. So to me I think this is still a very much prominent sector and narrative. And number two would be all these things related to decentralized science, decentralized AI. AI agents, DeFi, but with the AI. So I think a lot of these are very new shining concepts. I would love to see where they are developing. Number three is I will not give up on meme coins. I have to admit I got through the whole. I got wrecked so many times on, pumped off on. I was like in the weeds.
- [27:08]
Scott Melker
I haven't even, I haven't even tested it. But you're, you're a braver person than me.
- [27:13]
Alice Liu
You missed out a lot.
- [27:15]
Scott Melker
I know we all have our thing that's not mine. But to be fair, what you're probably about to say, I was very anti. I just thought it was kind of bad for the industry. But I've come around, I agree with you that people should be able to do whatever they want. As you said before. So that first just not for me. But I think whether you like it or not, whether you're Bitcoin maxi, they're here to stay and they're going to find some value.
- [27:39]
Alice Liu
Yeah. And to that point is people again like people learn from the process. Like the mistakes that Pump Farm made, the controversies that they got into as a result of it. We're seeing improved, newer generation of fair launch products. We're seeing like better business models for meme coins and people are more like smarter now in terms of what kind of meme coins they participate in. So those are the things that we also say and also because from CMC's side, right, we are crypto's number one traffic. We have about 400 million visits per month. So we collect a lot of data on what people are Looking at how, what projects they are engaging with. Meme Coin has been by far the number one sector on CMC last year and this year. And that trend is not going away. So with the engagement scores that we are seeing, the trends that we're seeing, Meme Coin is here to stay. Fortunately, unfortunately doesn't matter. But Meme Coin also as an, as a subsector is getting more mature as well. Where you have the blue chip, you also have, you know, the, the middle sort of community support ones. You also have on the other side of the spectrum, the gambling coins, et cetera. So it's a full subsector game in itself. So that's the number three thing. Number four thing is I do see bitcoin having very strong potential this year and even in January a lot. I think everyone knows that 20th of January, the inauguration is. Inauguration is going to give us a pump, hopefully. And the fat decisions coming later in the month, we are generally expecting a bit of pullback around that time as well. So there are.
- [29:22]
Scott Melker
Yeah, I would expect a lot of volatility both ways. Yeah.
- [29:27]
Alice Liu
Yes. So there's very healthy flows and volatilities around bitcoin. And also if you look at the participants, the players at the table, institutional money, et cetera, if you. For people who want to play with a different strategy, for example, like swings, whatever, it's still a very prominent, very important market and token to trade. So a lot of opportunity, even on btc.
- [29:56]
Scott Melker
Although, yeah, at the end of the day you can just buy bitcoin and probably do very well this cycle, especially if some of those catalysts happen. I just happened to open up RWA at xyz. I know I got to let you go. Which kind of shows RWA as a sector because I totally agree with you. I mean, you could just see this growth is crazy. I mean, even without stable coins, it's already at 15 billion total in value in RWA. And it's really just the beginning. But regardless of what the tokens have done, you can see that the total value has just never stopped going up. Right?
- [30:26]
Alice Liu
Yeah. That is actually a very important point, why we created CoinMarketCap 100 as an index. Because RWA, if you like, is to tokenize real world assets. And what we want to do is to tokenize crypto assets in the sense that is there any way for you to just invest in crypto as a market index fund?
- [30:48]
Scott Melker
Yeah, that's the way the human beings, like mature human beings invest. Like people have a 401k in the United States. Or they have an IRA and they just dollar cost average into some index funds, you know, every month passively without even thinking about it. Right. When I have like Matt Hogan for Bitwiser on here or others, they're doing that. They 100% say that's going to be the future. Right. You'll just have a top 10 crypto top 100. Like you have a meme coin index, a layer one index, whatever it is, that's how people are going to eventually invest. As long as that's unlocked from a regulatory perspective. But you guys tokenizing it is even more interesting.
- [31:25]
Alice Liu
Yeah, exactly. It's going to be a one stop solution.
- [31:29]
Scott Melker
Yeah. So are you gonna, I mean you, I know you have them, but will you guys eventually break them down into those subcategories as well? You know like a AI agent index and RWA index and things like that?
- [31:40]
Alice Liu
Yeah. So on cmc we already have different categories for them for people to like track and the performance of that sector and just to see what the top projects are. But indexing is a very interesting point. If the market has demand, sure. We're here to serve the whole crypto industry. That's, that's what CMC does.
- [31:59]
Scott Melker
So I would just like, you know, I've had a lot of guests and we have Alice might be his best guest ever. Alice needs to be a regular guest. This has been great. So you've been very popular with our crowd and we love that you can bring the data and the, you know, what you're seeing at CoinMarketCap more than just an opinion to the table. You're not on X. Right. I looked to try to tag you but you're at a LinkedIn. Where can people find you?
- [32:25]
Alice Liu
I have 400 followers on Twitter. It's like really nothing but it's my new year resume solution to grow it. And Scott, you have the best audiences.
- [32:33]
Scott Melker
Well, see guys, she likes you too. Well, thank you so much. We'd love to have you back very soon and love the work you guys are doing at CoinMarketCap. Have a, have a great day.
- [32:41]
Alice Liu
Thank you very much.
- [32:42]
Scott Melker
Evening for you. Have a great evening. Bye bye. All right guys, before I bring on Chris, obviously as you know we have a long term amazing sponsor which is Aptos who've been absolutely killing it. So every single Wednesday before Chris comes on, I just give you kind of a quick wrap up of what's happening with them. And if you guys watched all my content from Singapore at token 2049, they sponsored all of it. My interviews with Jeremy Allaire and Anthony Scaramucci and Brian Rose. All those was made possible that whole trip made possible by them and my review of token 2049, obviously. So really have a close relationship with them and think that they're going to be one of the big winners. When we talk about these new layer ones, I mean to put some metrics to it, everything, all time highs in December 2024 for them, 1.3 billion TVL, 10.4 million active users, 6.3 million new users, 1.3 billion billion swapped volume, 143 million transactions. When you take a look at the monthly active users, this is insane. And I'm hoping that obviously I believe aptos will be a winner. I like them, but I'm hoping that what you see here is generally a trend of mainstream adoption with crypto, not necessarily with just one chain, but if we can see this kind of growth of actual users using things in crypto on a month to month basis and a year to year basis, this is how we'll actually get to some meaningful level of adoption. I don't know if you guys have been using aptos yet, but I deeply encourage you to check it out. Of course. No ref link, no nothing like that. Just a huge supporter of what they do, they're a huge supporter of what I do. And it's a match made in heaven. So all I ask is that you guys check them out. And now the man himself, Christopher Inks of Texas West Capitol. It feels like we're in a dip every time you come on. I don't know, when are Wednesdays bad? Because, you know, I sometimes I do a show in the afternoons, occasional Wednesdays with Wick, you know, and our joke is like, why? Why is the market so hot? Then all of a sudden on Wednesdays it's like you can't find anything to look at that.
- [34:45]
C
Yeah, yeah, you know, it is what it is, right? There was a time when I was doing my, my daily lives where every day at 10am when I would come on, the market would tank. And so, you know, I. Well, I'm just kind of used to it. Right. But you know, again, for me, you know, I tend to look at the market a lot differently than most of the, you know, most of your viewers. And so, you know, I'm usually prepared for the pullbacks. I always take that bigger outlook. Right.
- [35:13]
Scott Melker
Wildly depressed every 5%. That's weird.
- [35:16]
C
No, no, not at all, not at all. I mean, let me see. Pull this chart up here. Let's start off with Bitcoin. What we're looking at here. The first thing I wanted to show you on bitcoin here was we're getting this bounce off this S1 pivot. You know, it's 1, 2, 3, 4. We're five waves up. That suggests this may be some sort of low in here. So we look for a pullback and head up. If we can get here above this 15 minute pivot on the 15 minute, if we get above that 98, 598, I think that's a pretty good indication that low is probably in. But let's kind of zoom out a bit here. Here's that four hour. You can see we've pulled back 70 and a half percent. That is my favorite. That's that institutional pullback level. It's my favorite fib level to watch when we get pullbacks. So, you know, we just kind of dip below the hourly pivot here. We'll see if we can get this break back up. This, to me looks like five. It looks like 1, 2, 3, 4, and then five up here. So, you know, potentially an ABC right here to finish off. So I'm not feeling too bad. It's low volume node. I mean, it hits where you kind of expect it to hit. We just want to see it kind of come back up, you know, through this hourly pivot area here. And then I believe, you know, we'll be off to the races. You know, we'll get like a one and a two here. And if that is a one and a two right there, five waves up off that swing low. We'll get us. Let's see here. Up there, almost around 120,000 without any kind of overextension or what, not just off this swing low. So I'm not here to complain about 120,000. You know, it feels good, it looks good. We've got, we got the new yearly pivots here that show up on the. The weekly, in the monthly. And so let me kind of clear this out here. You know, again, we're coming in sideways between the pivot and the R1. That's usually a pretty strong move. I mean, you know, even if we were to drop to 80,000 here just to. Just to push back to 80,000, I wouldn't feel like any sort of way about it. Now if we, on the weekly, if we were to get an impulsive breakdown and close to something like a larger candle spread, you know, body of the candle, some spike of volume through that, then we could maybe look at that and go, okay, maybe there's some sort of bigger term top in there or maybe even the top, but I don't think that's there. But until that, you know, any kind of movement down here doesn't have me feeling any sort of negative way. That's kind of my, my initial line in the sand. It's around 80,000 or so. But as you can see right here, there's a, there's. I don't even know if you can really see this. It's. It's because there's so little volume up here. But this is all a very large low volume node. There's like nothing in there.
- [38:04]
Scott Melker
Yeah.
- [38:04]
C
And generally speaking, for those that don't know, you'll notice this kind of flew up through that area. So usually what happens is it provides support when you come back down onto it. So if it's going to break down, it's usually not right away. Most of the time it'll hit it and bounce and hit it and bounce and maybe on the third or fourth or fifth time it'll break through. So it works as support there. If it's going to break through, a lot of times it'll just use it as support and then it'll take off. Right. And if you're coming at it from the bottom, most of the time you kind of hit it, you hit it, you hit it, you hit it here and then you break through. So you know, if you, if you have your VRVP here on your indicators. Again if you're on trading view there. VRVP visible range volume profile. And I have mine over there.
- [38:50]
Scott Melker
Yeah, I thought it was VPVR but you're doing. Yeah, the other one. Yeah, VRPV. Yep.
- [38:54]
C
Yeah, it. So I always set by just a 10 width over here. And then, because everybody always asks, and then I, my row size is 384 and I do that because it gives you a lot more, you know, blocks in here to really kind of see these low volume nodes. Look for those low volume nodes. You can see that they work as support and resistance, you know, through right here. Right. So here's support, here's resistance on the same areas. It's just the areas that the market's really not interested in. And so price, you know, especially on the first try, doesn't just like chase through it. They kind of give up when it hits that area until finally they push it through. So I mean, you know, again for me as I'm looking at this, this chart, I don't really feel any kind of negative way about it at all. You can see on the Weekly, we've already had this pullback halfway here. We haven't even moved that much. We've gone from like 108 to 91. I mean it's a seventeen thousand dollar move, not even 20%. And we've almost got a half, you know, almost reset halfway here on the stochastic RSI on the weekly. So. But the daily, I have to say the daily is kind of ugly.
- [40:00]
Scott Melker
Head and shoulder Z. We'll see.
- [40:03]
C
Well, I wasn't even talking about that. I was talking about.
- [40:06]
Scott Melker
Peter Brandt was talking about that. Yeah, it doesn't matter. Yeah, you'd have to break below basically 90, but.
- [40:12]
C
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean, not even just break, but you have to kind of close below. Right. And then, you know, keep it going there. Yeah, but you know, if it was to do that, you know, my, my initial target would be this, just blindly would be this daily S1 pivot around 86, nine and a half, 86, 950 or so. And then the next big target below that of course would be that weekly pivot there at around 80,000. But as I watch this range right here, we kind of zoom in again here. Again, you know, if we continue down further from where we are, this hourly S1 pivot is my initial target. That's right around the 78.6 retracement right there around 93 and a half. So you know, if we do continue breakdown, that's where I would look for reversal. And then if we can get that impulsive breakout and close above that hourly pivot there at around 96, 190, I think, you know, we'll be good to go to head up higher. But that's only if we do break down there and we're not already bottomed right here. So overall, you know, daily kind of looks like crap. Four hour looks pretty decent. One hour is building bullish divergence on RSI here as we're doing this overlapping price action. You can see that we are catching some more volume down here as we get to this low area. So I'm definitely interested in it. And again, as we looked in the 15 minute, if we were to rally from here, it wouldn't be a surprise. It is the 15 minute S1 pivot. We do have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 waves up right now. So we just want to see this hold and kind of break out higher and see if we can start getting this trend headed back up. So that's kind of, you know, where.
- [41:48]
Scott Melker
I am at the four hour. Yeah, I take the quick look at the four hour. And it's not quite oversold yet. So maybe one little more dip and then, you know, wait, we kind of go.
- [41:57]
C
Yeah, and it doesn't have to, of course, but it may, you know. It may.
- [42:01]
Scott Melker
Yeah, right there.
- [42:02]
C
Right, right now is not the time. If you're a trader, right now is not time to go, oh, it's definitely going to do this or that. Right now is the time to watch and to observe and to kind of, you know, see. Okay, can we get some kind of confirmation that it's going to do one thing or the other? That's what we're trying to do right now. If you're trading real quick, I've got this stock, I've got micro strategy. I've been talking about this one for a while and basically we have this what looks like an A and then B is a triangle and then C down here or a WXY. But three waves down into what becomes just beyond the 50% retracement here we get a 1, 2, 3, 4. And so coming off this looks like. Let me kind of zoom in a bit here. We're above the hourly pivot, which is great. It looks like 1, 2, could be 3, 4, we get a 5 up here. But nonetheless, you know, especially if this hourly pivot holds here at 322 and a half, we should expect this to continue higher. If we, once we break out above that 437 and 61 cents, that should indicate that that low is complete. And based on the height of, of this pullback here, we've actually got a target up here around eight, ten and a half.
- [43:17]
Scott Melker
I bought a lot of microstrategy late yesterday on the dip and I had, I bought a lot of microstrategy actually yesterday.
- [43:27]
C
Did you?
- [43:27]
Scott Melker
Yeah, for the first time in quite a while. Well, and I got faked out, by the way, because I thought there was a, I, I thought there was a breakout coming. You know, I'll show you on the breakout. I'll show you here. Yeah, so I was buying like the 360 right here kind of on that and then bought a little more when it dipped yesterday because I still have pretty high conviction. But yeah, when you pull the fibs, I mean, look at that 38.2 right there.
- [43:51]
C
Yeah, I, I like it.
- [43:54]
Scott Melker
It looks bull flaggy regardless. Okay, look. Hey look. Bull flag.
- [43:57]
C
Yeah, there you go. There you go. Yeah, yeah.
- [44:00]
Scott Melker
Pretty close.
- [44:01]
C
Yeah, I mean it looks, it looks pretty good to me. Again, I've been talking about it for a while to have further upside and that again, that's just based on the height here that target it could, you know, especially if bitcoin, you know, rallies up and does some kind of blow off top, I see no reason why we wouldn't expect microstrategy to do the same. So you know, we can see microstrategy upwards of a thousand or twelve hundred dollars even potentially by the end of this. So I, I think, I think it's a good buy area. We'll see if we can continue to, to get that push up there. But again we just kind of want to see this, this 323 area kind of hold this support as we continue up there. As you can see, we're kind of right here around the, the pivot. And I said this could be four and also, you know, 1, 2, 3, 4 could be five up there already. So we're getting a wave two pullback. But we broke out. Here's the thing. Zoom back in here again. All right, so if we look at this as a 1, 2, 3. So if we look, this is a W XY here and you know, ABC breaking out above that second wave, if three wave corrective breaking out above that second wave should confirm that that's complete there. So you know, again this, this breakout above right here adds more to this idea that it's probably complete. And you know, again we're on our way heading up there toward 800. So I really don't listen to all the nonsense about microstrategy and why it has to fail and you know, and all these other armchair economists nonsense online with that. As far as what we got here with crypto goes, I don't know that I have a whole lot of anything.
- [45:37]
Scott Melker
There's not much.
- [45:40]
C
I do have OXT USD here. This looks like 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. And then ABC pulled back just beyond 50% right to this little volume node right here. And let me zoom in a bit. And so we're getting this great candle right now after the four hour RSI and stochastic rsi, you know, reset into oversold. So I think it's looking pretty good here. We definitely want to see an impulsive breakout. And close above again the hourly pivot here at about 12 cents. We can get that. We should be good to go based on this potentially being one and a two here. That would give us three up around almost 21 cents. Five up around 24 cents and that five up there by the 24 cents. This is three waves on the pullback here on this larger move. So based on the height of that, we have a almost a 23 cent target. So that gets us right up around the same way. So I'm feeling pretty good about that at the moment. But we definitely want to see that breakout above that hourly pivot there to kind of get it going. Let me see here. XLM was another one that's looking kind of interesting to me. It does look like a one with a flat as a two here.
- [46:55]
Scott Melker
She was just talking about that.
- [46:58]
C
That's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we got three waves on the pullback here right now to the hourly pivot. I like that. Again, you know, low volume nodes sitting right below it. It's a 38.2pullback. It's our initial fourth wave target. So we're gonna see if we can get a rally here. What we're looking for is a breakout above this, this wave right here, this 44 cents. So if we can rally up and break out above that, we should be good to go. Based on the height of the pullback, we got about a 53 and a half cent target up here. And again, it could overextend on that. But that's just, you know, a pattern target based on this, the height of this pullback. If this continues to break down, we'd look for it to catch a bid right here around the 50 retracement at about 39.5 cents. And then that would up our target there for the fifth wave. Oh, probably pretty close here to about 55 cents or so on that. But again, you know, low volume node here. What I said earlier about you hit it, you hit it, you hit it before you finally break through. Well, here we go. Doing that same thing right here. So again, XLM looking interesting as well. Everybody asked about xrp. No matter how many times I show it, everybody asked about it. I do believe we have a triangle here. So A, B, C, D, E could be complete. Right here it is. Does look like three waves right there at that hourly pivot. Based on the height, again, based on the height, we've got a pattern target. $3 and 75 cents almost. We need to see a breakout above wave B here. So we need to see a breakout above. Let me see if I can get that lined up there. $2 and basically 2.72. 2.73 cents here. We can do that. That should indicate that the pattern's complete and that we're headed up there toward that $3 and 3/4, which is a new all time high, folks. Right. So Ea.
- [49:01]
Scott Melker
Quickly, we had a question.
- [49:03]
C
Yeah.
- [49:03]
Scott Melker
As well, address if hbar breaks channel, what target looks like flagpole. So I just happened to pop it up while he was saying that. So obviously on the weekly you had kind of this massive move, right. And break here. It looks like a penance here. So your target, by the way, would be massive. Right, because it's this entire flagpole. But if you zoom in on the daily. I'm just curious your perspective on this.
- [49:24]
C
Looks like.
- [49:26]
Scott Melker
It looks like a descending triangle. Yeah, yeah. To me that looks not like bullish consolidation. This in descending triangles actually still in a bullish trend break up like 53% of the time or something. So it's not that it's bearish, but that doesn't look like a pennant to me. This looks like a bouncing ball that's putting in slightly lower highs and the flat low. So I would actually expect that. I would be careful with that personally.
- [49:48]
C
And also look at your volume down there. Look at how your volume drops off as that price continues to consolidate. That's what you want to see. You know, in a triangle I would just take, I would, you know, measure that 100 from the swing low to the swing high like I did with the XRP there. And then look at the 1618 extension. And by the way, I use log. So when you're on. I use log charts and then I use my trend based fib extension and my retracements based on log.
- [50:18]
Scott Melker
But oh my. Did you see my tweet?
- [50:21]
C
No.
- [50:22]
Scott Melker
While we were talking, because I was thinking about that because I was looking at my fibs and I also use log. I literally just while we were talking said tae experts question for you. Do you use logarithmic or linear charts? The answer should be logarithmic. This is four minutes ago. And do you change the Fibonacci levels to be based on log scale? Because I do. So I see a lot of people charting bitcoin on linear, which is by the way, nonsense. Just stupid.
- [50:45]
C
Too much moving.
- [50:46]
Scott Melker
So that's what I wanted to see. And then if you're on log, I see a lot of people using still the linear Fibonacci levels, which is like apples and oranges.
- [50:55]
C
Well, and you might remember back, I think, I think you were still over there at TWC with us when, when they, when they added that.
- [51:02]
Scott Melker
Yeah, because it wasn't a thing. So we had.
- [51:03]
C
Yeah, it took us a while. Remember? It took me about a year of, of trying it out and practicing it to make sure that it worked out all right. And it works out pretty well. So I definitely. There's a little check box for those that don't know when you have your fib, your trend based fib extensions or your. Or your retracements. Yeah. Down to the first style right there at the bottom. So if you're using log, you want to go ahead and check that.
- [51:26]
Scott Melker
Watch what happens if you take it off. So if you're on a log chart, watch where your Fibonacci levels land if you take this off.
- [51:32]
C
Yeah.
- [51:32]
Scott Melker
Totally different. Totally different for a linear chart. So just, you know, one is based on price, one's based on the absolute move once based on the percentage. You can't have one of these each.
- [51:43]
C
Yeah. And for those that, you know, that want to argue about the linear thing, especially on the big movements like bitcoin and these things that move a lot. Here's the idea, guys. When you buy in, you don't buy in thinking, oh, I want to make 50 bucks or 100 bucks. You're like, oh, I want to make 10%. And so 10% at a thousand is 100 bucks, whereas 10% at 50,000 is $5,000. And that's, that's why it works because as human beings, that's how our brains work. Right.
- [52:06]
Scott Melker
$1,000 move at 10 grand bitcoin and $100,000 bitcoin are not the same and should not be, not be reflected as the same thing in a chart. And that's what linear does.
- [52:15]
C
Exactly, exactly.
- [52:16]
Scott Melker
So 1% versus a 10 move. I mean, this is not the same thing.
- [52:20]
C
Yeah. So anyway. Yes. On H bar, that's a big move up. It's large candlesticks, it's large volume. It looks like a wave three to me. Triangle for wave four is, is exactly what makes sense. And then so we'd have a wave 5 up again pattern target the 1.618 of, of that wave 4 on that pullback.
- [52:37]
Scott Melker
Yep. I think it goes up like I said more of the time it was. But if it is descending triangle, I would just be a little careful at this like 0.234 level. If it breaks down. But then you know what. Exactly what happens. We know then you do this.
- [52:49]
C
Yeah.
- [52:49]
Scott Melker
It drops through there, bounces here and you have a perfect bull flag.
- [52:52]
Alice Liu
So.
- [52:52]
Scott Melker
Yeah, don't get scared.
- [52:54]
C
Yeah, yeah. Looks good. I mean, I like it, I like it. I can't, you know, I can't lie. So, you know, overall daily on alt is looking kind of rough still. But there is some potential, you know, reversal setting in on, you know, the one hour, the Four hour maybe. So just be a little careful. If you're jumping into alts at the moment, don't get in and say, okay, it definitely has to do A, B or C right now. It definitely, it never has to definitely do anything other than what it's going to do, but especially right now. So, you know, be a little patient, look for some sort of confirmation. Don't try to rush it because that's how you lose your money. And then I, I think we'll be good to go here. I don't, I'm not concerned about the, the, the pullback. And a lot of people freaked out. But, you know, I, I, the grand scheme of things, we're just sideways. Like on bitcoin, we're just sideways. Right. So for weeks now.
- [53:45]
Scott Melker
All right, guys, check out everything Chris got going on Texas. WestCapital.com I believe. Correct. And of course, give him a follow on TX West Capital on X Men. Always a pleasure. See you next. See you next week.
- [53:58]
C
Yes, sir.
- [53:59]
Scott Melker
All right, guys, check out Aptos, check out Chris, and we will see you tomorrow. We have another female guest tomorrow, Aya Kentorovich. Two in one week. You know, it's nice to prove that there's actually women here. She's brilliant. She's awesome. We've had her many times. So you guys definitely check back in tomorrow. And thanks to Alice for being a great guest for the first time. All right, Chris, thank you, man. See you guys later. Bye.
- [54:21]
Alice Liu
Let's go.
- [54:35]
Scott Melker
Let's do.