Transcript
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Bitcoin is primed for a breakout on tailwinds that we've never seen before in this industry. Obviously that alludes to institutional and government adoption. And of course the Fed definitely cutting rates tomorrow and likely more times into 2025. We got a bunch of new ETFs that launched over the past couple of days. Spoiler, they've been really successful. And and of course we have stablecoin news across the board. And we'll discuss my interview with Michael Sailor. Let's go.
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Let's go.
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Good morning everybody and welcome to YouTube. If you have not liked the video, you should go ahead and do that. If you have not subscribed to the channel, you should also go ahead and do that. In case you missed it, I was in Las Vegas to interview Michael Saylor. I also interviewed Ivan Soto Wright, the CEO of Moonpay, randomly went on Sin City Crypto, did a couple other things while I was out there and of course had a delayed flight, landed at 1:30 in the morning, went to bed at 2, woke up at 4:30. So if you're wondering why my brain seems scattered and I'm a little tired, it's because I've probably gotten as much sleep as most people get in one night in the last three days. But let's dive into the show right now. And first I think it's worthy to talk about the conversation that I have with Sailor. We will be releasing this on my channels on Sunday as a podcast. Maybe Saturday. Saturday or Sunday as a podcast. So you can either watch it on Sailors X right here or you can wait and listen to it on my channels. We'll also be obviously editing in some of the other amazing footage from that conference and my thoughts. But here's what Taylor had to say about it. In my discussion yesterday at Money20 20 with Scott Melker, I explained why digital credit instruments like stm, trk, strf, strd, STRC are two to four times more efficient than traditional credit and how strategy has become the world's most scalable tax efficient generator of fixed income. So I'm going to give you a few takeaways from this conversation if you didn't watch it. And I can give you some inside baseball on the very brief prep that we did for this call. And prep for this call meant that today Taylor pretty much we sat down on Friday virtually and he shared a couple decks and said these are the general kind of ideas that I would like to go with, especially for this audience. So what I really noticed and what struck me in our conversations. And here, because we did actually just wing it, there was obviously no slide decks or anything. And I just asked him. The questions I wanted to ask was that this was a rare time when Saylor and myself, as a fireside chat, were headlining a conference that was not really a crypto conference at all. Money 2020 is a FinTech and payments conference, the biggest in the world. Really, really trad fi, really, really tech and really, really generally not crypto. But in this case, when you walked into the conference floor, the first booth you saw on the right was Ripple. There was a huge circle booth, there was a huge fireblocks booth. As I said, there were quite a few speakers. And on every stage when I walked past, the word that I heard over and over and over again was stablecoins. But when Sailor and I decided what we were going to do about this conversation and then when we got up on stage, it was very clear that right now he doesn't have much interest in talking about strategy stock and very minimal interest actually in talking about Bitcoin itself. The narrative now is all of the financial instruments and all the products that can be built on top of of Bitcoin and really finding new and innovative ways to create better products for institutional and retail investors that don't exist. So this talk was mostly about wildly over collateralized fixed income products that they're creating, like STRC. You know, you get 10% yield on STRC versus a 2 or 3%, maybe in a money market or in your bank account even sub 1% subtitle sometimes how safe that is, where that yield comes from. And when you actually, you know, adjust for taxes, it's like 17%. And why wouldn't people want products like that? And this was really, really engaging for the audience. I think they expected him to go up there and just scream about buying bitcoin. The other funny takeaway was that he was talking about maybe. It was three hours before our talk. We were in the press room. I was not with him. And I, you know, I saw him over talking to MacKenzie from CNBC. I just went over to say hi and she said, hey, are you going to roast Sailor today? You're going to roast him? I was like, no, I don't think I'm going to roast him. She said, well, you got to ask him tough questions. And I said, all right, I'm just going to make the entire interview about xrp. That's what I said. He laughed, she laughed. And then he said to me something really interesting. He said, scott, we should do it. But I think if we had a conversation right now about altcoins and the rest of the market, you would find my opinion has changed and that it would be very constructive. So even our most ardent bitcoin maxi and you've seen it, you know, he praising Tom Lee and talking about what's happening in the treasury space even beyond Bitcoin, a little more open minded and certainly starting to evolve. So that's a conversation I would actually look forward to having in the future. But moving on to the market and from Michael Saylor we've got the S and P is 100 points away from 7,000 and everyone is fearful apparently. Really just a sign of the times right now. You can look, this is the SPX chart. Oh look, I got some alerts from buying a salon on Ethereum using Arch Public this morning, but take a look. 6,890. It topped at over 6,900 yesterday, making new all time highs every single day. And apparently we are living in fear, which absolutely blows and boggles my mind. But I think and if you watch Macro Monday you would know this. I think that people are very confused. Half of the investors in the world think we're in the fourth turning and going into a Great Depression, while the other half think that recessions have been made illegal and we can only go up in price. But according, of course a lot of this has to do with the Fed FOMC decision at 2pm look at him. Is it that way? Hard to do it with the mirror? Yeah, we have an FOMC decision at 2. Are you bullish or bearish? I think that this is wildly priced in. Personally, we all know that the Fed's gonna probably cut a few more times this year. That was a terrible link. But here you go. Markets are pricing in a 99.5% chance of a Fed rate cut to 3.754% at tomorrow's FOMC meeting. CME FedWatch data shows 99.5. Let's one in a. What was all that one in a million talk. So you're saying there's a chance. Do I have any dumb and dumber fans out there? So yeah, there's a, there's a, you know, 50 bips. You sound smarter when you say bips instead of percentages chance that the Fed doesn't cut. So I think that once again it's not going to be about what the Fed decision does. Everybody knows exactly what they're going to do. What it's actually going to be is whether he coughs in the wrong direction or if he rubs his nose or gives a single signal, much like the illegal gambling ring that everybody's apparently been busted for of late. But it's going to be if he's hawkish or if he's dovish, or if he talks about future cuts, or if he says that we're being data dependent or all of the stupid word salad that we're so used to from Jerome Powell to make sure that he gives us no clear direction about anything that's coming, period, even when we want it. But this will be the big thing today and you can expect maybe some volatility. Although imagine, I would imagine, you know, we go like up a half a percent percent, down a half percent, end up at the same price and then nothing happens. But meanwhile, we do know there's going to be a lot of liquidity coming in. We've seen the reports that QT is ending this week, which means qe. And every indication that we have is that the Fed is about to go on a massive mission of money printing, make sure that they can send that national debt at least 40 trillion. Because like what's 38? It's not even a round number. Gotta get that national debt up. And all of those things should be very, very good for bitcoin. Honestly, I think I saw a tweet. I don't know if we brought it up, but this is I think the third time in history that the Fed has ever cut into an all time high stock market. And every time that that's happened, the market's been up 10 to 15% by a year later. So generally if you're zoomed out and looking at this, you can expect that assets are probably going to go up. But maybe the biggest news in the crypto space right now is that we got a whole bunch of new ETFs, right? So new crypto ETFs launch in crowded field despite SEC shutdown. We don't need the government to start trading ETFs in crypto. That's ridiculous. I wonder when they're going to end that whole government shutdown thing. Anecdotally, I can tell you that I was in the Las Vegas airport yesterday. Didn't seem like there were many people working at TSA. It is, is at least the 14th circle of hell in that place. It's just absolutely horrid and they need to unshut down the government. Actually, you know what has nothing to do with the government shut down. Vegas is just one of the worst places on earth. At least in the Vegas airport. But we got B sold a Bitwise Solana staking etf, which is a big deal because we've been waiting for staking inside ETFs and we still don't have an Ethereum staking ETF. We also got an Ethereum HBAR ETF, which I know everybody was very, very excited about. I saw the HBAR price had gone up like 16%. But yeah, man, we're, we're starting to see it. I think we're getting the grayscale Solana ETF launching today. And listen, we were wondering, hey, will there be any hunger for these? Will anybody want these Things? B SOL ETF sees 69.5 million in net inflows on its first day. It's a big number. You don't think that's a big number? Because we always talk about Bitcoin spot ETF numbers, but holy hell, the Bitwise Invest Salana ETF set a new New York Stock Exchange record today. Number one in trading volume across all 850 ETF debuts in 2025. So yes, we remember how successful the Bitcoin Spot ETF launches were. This pales in comparison obviously to those. And then even ETH A I think was larger than this, but those were in 2024. So in 2025, of all 850 ETFs that have debuted, the Solana ETF was the most successful. So I would think that's an indication that there's been an appetite for these things. I honestly, I didn't think there was going to be so much excitement about these because we have so many Solana treasury companies already and that kind of pre the ETF approval, but very clear that there is still a thirst for this. And we're also, if you're wondering why we could be primed for a breakout here, I brought this up the other day. Spooky season. Bitcoin options worth record 31 billion set to expire on Halloween. We tend to see some volatility when I, when we have the expiry. But you also kind of see price suppression very often in the week leading up to it. I would say we're trading in a very tight range right now and then things tend to go up. And another indication, Bitcoin funding, binance funding rates turn positive. Is a new rally beginning. Love that we have to have these questions when Bitcoin's like 115 grand or 112 or 113, like it's a really high price. People think we're in a bear Market it's crazy. Finance funding rates turn positive is a new rally beginning since October 22, 2025 the metric has stayed positive suggesting renewed support for binance bitcoins. I literally can't even read the words bitcoin and binance right now. I'm so tired. Recovery on both spot and derivatives markets. But you can see that price tends to follow when we have this metric going positive. And that is the case right now. I would say a lot of this obviously when you look at binance also has to do with people re entering after everybody was liquidated. Now we have a lot of news here on stablecoins. With 135 billion of U S treasuries, Tether is now the 17th largest holder of U S debt, passing also South Korea soon in Brazil. Watch out Brazil, we're coming for you. Yeah, I think it's fair to say after being at Money20 20 that stable coins are the killer app for crypto technology. And if only there was some guy who shows up on YouTube and has literally been saying that for like five years. This guy what has two thumbs and is and talking about stablecoins? This guy. But yeah, man, stable coins are eating the financial system. I showed you that stat the other day. That StableCoin volumes was 46 trillion. I think last year 46, 48 somewhere in that ballpark. Three times the Visa network and over half of ACH and the literal like world financial system. And that was before the genius act and before people even knew what stablecoins were. Tether is going to absolutely explode and they will end up being one of the probably top five largest holders of US debt stable coins for better or for worse. And no matter what bitcoiners want to believe they are hyper fiat, hyper dollarization of the world. It's kind of like the antithesis of bitcoin to be honest. The good news is that Paolo is a bitcoiner and tether buys a whole lot of bitcoin and mines a whole lot of bitcoin. And they really love bitcoin. But make no mistakes, stable coins are helping the fiat that bitcoin is meant to rage against. And in other stablecoin news I did not see on my bingo card literally ever Western Union to launch USDPT. You're down with USDPT. You know me, stablecoin on Solana in 2026. So first of all, like western union I'm pretty sure still is the pony express. Like they guys on horses and carriages just run on down to run on down to the next Town and deliver your money. But Western Union's been around for 4,792 years. Don't quote me on that, but Western Union is like the oldest predatory middleman payments company on the planet. They charge you like 10, 15 to send your money remittances. This is a very, very popular service, obviously, mostly unfortunately for people who can't afford to pay those absolutely ridiculous fees. And why would you, in a world where there's stablecoins. But they're launching a stablecoin, which means they saw what happened to Kodak and Blockbuster and they don't want to be those guys, but they're doing it on Solana. If ever. You finally wanted an indication that maybe the Solana thing isn't just meme coins and nonsense and. And speculation and traders. This is the part that wasn't on my bingo coin because we've seen everybody talk about eth for decisions like this and announcements. A Western Union stablecoin on Solana. This is about as big of a signal, I think, for the stablecoin space and world that you can possibly get this actually broke. I think at Money20 20, the Western Union CEO said this while we were there. The thing is, I. I actually don't care about conferences or what people are saying at them. I kind of hate them a little bit. I was only convinced to go, obviously, because Sailor asked and that seemed like a really cool opportunity and something to do. But, like, I don't know how people just like, sit in the audience of conferences when every piece of information you're seeing is readily available on the Internet and you can sit there in your underwear and like, listen to podcasts, which is like, these are live podcasts that are planned. But I digress. But yeah, this was announced at that conference. And of course Visa to expand stablecoin support across four blockchains. Another company that is pretty screwed when it comes to stablecoins. As I told you, stablecoins last year, 3x the Visa network already. But Visa has been a bit ahead of the curve for quite a while here trying to adopt this technology, knowing that it's going to disrupt their whole shit. These companies are so screwed unless they use Stable Coins. And Stable Coins are so easy to integrate. And we're seeing different ways for everybody to integrate them. Right? Like Circle is building their own Layer one arc to do it. Stripe is building their own layer one to do stablecoins. And every one of these companies is now needing a stablecoin plan because why the hell would you ever, like, use ach Or Swift when I can send you five bucks with no fees. Right now, a good luck wiring five bucks to your buddy in Tanzania through the banking system. That is not going to work. Visa getting on board. Staying on board here. Now we got to talk about a little bit of politics. Senate Democrats are butthurt. No, that's not what I'm saying. Says Senate Democrats are butthurt. No. Moving to condemn Trump's pardon of cz. Like, how do you move to do it? They say a crypto industry executive getting a free pass after a guilty plea sends the wrong signal. I didn't even look who signed it. Like, what's the point? We know it's all Elizabeth Warren one way or another. You can have your feelings on CZ and his pardon, but, like, at the end of the day, the dude literally pled guilty to a violation of the Bank Secrecy act by not putting the proper precautions in place for Binance to deal with money laundering. Nobody's ever gone to jail for something like that before. J.P. morgan and Wells Fargo have paid tens of billions of dollars in penalties for doing much worse stuff within the Bank Secrecy act for, I don't know, being Epstein's banker, and for wild violations, and for laundering money, literally, for cartels and criminals all around the world. But, yeah, it's a big deal that CZ didn't run Binance in a way that they thought was appropriate in a world where the laws to do it for Binance didn't even exist. And, oh, by the way, the dude is not American. But anyways, they're super butthurt about cz, obviously. And you may have seen this tweet from Elizabeth Warren. I'll start there. CZ pleaded guilty to a criminal money laundering charge and was sentenced to prison. But then he financed President Trump's stablecoin and lobbied for a pardon. Today he got it. If Congress does not stop this kind of corruption, it owns it. Okay, cool story, bro. You might notice there's a little community note down there. And if you're wondering how that community note happened is because I posted this. Well, this part of it. I posted this tweet that went wildly viral, and then I submitted it to our people at Twitter. For a community note, maybe. Shame on you. Senator CZ Binance did not plead guilty to money laundering. He pled guilty for causing Binance to violate the Bank Secrecy act by failing to implement an effective anti money laundering program. Ocean of difference between the two. She's such a disingenuous butthole. She's so unlikable. But she can't even make a point by telling the truth. It's not what happened. And you can be mad about it. And to be honest, like, I can see if people look at it and there is a relationship with Trump, and I think the timing was bad. I don't think the optics of this are great for Trump. I think they make things more difficult for the industry. But let's not lie about what the dude did or what he got punished for. And once again, yes, he's getting pardoned, but he already went to jail and. And they already paid all of the fines. So in the comments, we had a lot of people being like, hey, cz, you should, should. You know, you should maybe sue or something. Binance founder CZ to file defamation lawsuit against anti crypto US Senator Elizabeth Warren if she does not retract her false statements. Listen, I was. I'm only taking very minimal credit for this. Obviously, I might have pushed him a little bit, but, like, getting fire Gary Gensler trending for months and having any little bit of making Elizabeth Warren have a bad day, maybe, like, outside of marriage and having children, the greatest accomplishments of my very long career here in life and in crypto. But it would be absolutely just astoundingly amazing if this actually happens. I don't care if he wins. I just want her to have to deal with it. I want to know that she woke up this morning and was like, God damn it, I should not have sent that tweet. I'm so stupid. Why'd I do that? I knew I was lying. Right? Like, doesn't it just like. And I'm not someone who, like, takes joy in other people's unhappiness. Unless those other people are Elizabeth Warren and Gary Gensler. And I know that Gary Gensler would wake up some morning and be like, damn it, get this hashtag out of here. Oh, man, this woman out of control. Okay, moving on from a. Lizzie. Lizzie. Justin. Germany's second largest party afd. Yeah, you know me. Introduced a motion to build a bitcoin reserve. Sweet. Listen, I don't know if these things pass, but there's obviously some serious momentum right now around the strategic bitcoin reserve narrative in multiple countries, all over this amazing world of ours. And it's not just them. Not just them. French lawmakers to review motion to ban CBDCs and promote Bitcoin stablecoins and national crypto reserves. Could France become Europe's next crypto hub? Probably not, because France, like, from what I hear, and nothing against the French people. But I hear France just sucks right now. Most places suck right now if we're being fair. So I don't want to be unfair to France but like people I know who live in France are like this sucks. So I'm just going to take their word for it as opposed to my own. But obviously Germany and France, those are, last time I checked those are big, pretty big countries that matter. And whether these things pass or not, the fact that this is now on the docket shows exactly the Trump effect of the executive order of a strategic bitcoin reserve. And for any have not been following the United States like has a pretty big strategic bitcoin reserve right now because we're the United States and when we want to get bitcoin we just go take it from people and then we keep it. Doesn't even matter whose it is. It's amazing. We were like hey there's this Cambodian guy and he's doing a scam on people around the world. None of which are probably American. And he's also a Chinese national. We're just going to take his bitcoin. We're going to hold on to that for you forever. It's good to be the United States. It's good to be the king as, as, as we know. And Australia, which is not only a country but a continent. I learned that in middle school. Australia's financial regulator has released long awaited crypto guidance says bitcoin and some NFTs aren't financial products while stablecoins tokenized securities and staking services are. And honestly Australia news just gives us one more excuse to quote dumb and dumber as I did earlier and say put another shrimp on the barbie. Yeah. Austria, you guys have seen diamond time, right? I don't need to go any deeper into this but we have three of the largest economies in the world talking about crypto in a 24 hour period. You guys might want to get some of this stuff, you know like just in case it catches on, you might want to consider grabbing some of this stuff. And of course before we, we do have Chris today. So I'm gonna bring them out in a minute. But gotta tell you about Aptos first. Hundreds of millions flowing in over 1 billion now on chain made to move money. Everyone will learn there is no better home for stablecoins than Aptos. Top stablecoin supply changes. Aptos, the third largest for stablecoins right now on the planet. Might wanna start using these stablecoin things just in case they catch on. Pretty big deal. It's a pretty big deal. Before I bring Chris on, the one last thing I wanted to talk about. I got asked this question so many times at Money20 20, which was strange and I did do a podcast there where I was the guest and people. Actually, I'm just going to bring Chris on. We're going to talk about this really quick before we go. No, because I had, I've had a lot of people ask, you know, the four year cycle and are we still in a bull market or is this a bear market? And people very confused about sentiment. And I thought pretty deeply about this and I gave it a couple times. This has been for most people the worst bull market ever, right? So I think unless you're an expert trader, which very few people we know are, but generally if you had a plan for this cycle or you've seen Bitcoin go from 17,000 up to 126,000, unless you were simply one of those people who dollar cost averages and buys bitcoin and waited and they're just holding and have been a smart investor. Almost everybody has found a creative way to lose a shit ton of money in this bull market again. And we didn't have an FTX or a Celsius or any of those things necessarily. But it's very hard to find someone who's been around for a long time who's made money. And that's because first bitcoin went up and altcoins kind of have it right? So all the people who are waiting for their altcoin to finally make its 100x move that they' holding in 2017, that just hasn't happened. So we didn't get the alt season as of yet that many anticipated. And then we had this massive treasury company trend. And so all the like real crypto people, like I'm talking about the billionaire investors, even those guys, and I was talking to James Lavish about this, they went heavily into treasury companies, watched the stocks go way up, but by the time they actually had shares, they're all underwater. So everybody's losing money on Wall street right now too. And everybody who bought the IPOs of all of these crypto companies that have done exceptionally well in a vacuum, they're all down because they bought it like the first couple days. So everybody's getting wrecked in the stock market on crypto stocks, even though they've performed. And then we have the largest liquidation event in history, 12 times bigger than FTX. So all the crypto D gen people who were deeply in leverage and on these got liquidated on everything.
