Loading summary
Transcript5 lines
- [00:01]
NLW
Bitcoin to hit $1 million. Mike Novogratz thinks so, and we've obviously seen many pundits and analysts say the same Cathie Wood, Michael Saylor and others over the years. I'm going to tell you why he's saying we're headed to a million bucks. But also today, more importantly, is the Friday 5 where I review the biggest stories of the week. No NLW today. So you're stuck with just little ol me. Let us go. That's dope. Let's do. It's Friday, you ain't got no job and you ain't got to do. That's not my words. That is the words of Chris Tucker from the movie aptly named Friday. And that is also the case for my co host nlw, who apparently is off gallivanting around the world and does not have the time to grace us with his presence. Just kidding. We love him, he's a legend and it's always great to have him reviewing the news because he does it every single day on the Breakdown and digs far more deeply into these stories than I generally do. But we're going to go ahead and start and make do with just myself here. Let's go the first story obviously here. Bitcoin Sinks Israel Escalates Iran Standoff with Airstrikes as everybody knows, we are on the brink of war in the Middle east with Israel attacking Iran, Iran retaliating. We're not going to dig into politics and the geopolitical nature, but of course we generally see markets react when we have geopolitical strife. In this case we have gold soaring, we have oil way, way up. But strangely we had bitcoin down. Obviously I don't think bitcoin is a correlated asset. Doesn't bother me at all. But many will say that this is a risk off environment and bitcoin will be trading like a tech stock in this environment. To them I say let's look at the chart. Oh yes, great article. But bitcoin dipped right down to the 50mA. All the way back up to 104,800 as we are talking in my mind a bit of a nothing burger. Not the geopolitical part of it, the bitcoin price action part of it. I think there's really nothing to see here thus far. As for our title story here, Galaxy's Novogratz Suggest Bitcoin hits 1 million if adoption trend persists. Listen, this was in an interview that he recently gave. Nothing new here. Basically saying that it's current rate of adoption, bitcoin will reach parity with gold if not surpass gold with a superior digital version. And what does that mean? Well apparently that means, you know, a market cap of $21 trillion which would be about a 10x, you know, at a million bucks. Do some Math. Carry the 0 with a 121 million coins. Right. So that would basically equal the market cap of gold right now. Obviously he also believes that the younger generation is going to continue buying bitcoin. We have the institutional bid, the Wall street bid, the sovereign bid, the literally everybody on the planet bid right now coming into bitcoin and that should mean nothing but up for our beloved asset. A million dollars is a hyperbolic prediction for sure, but he's not saying that it happens tomorrow. The the next story we have here outside of the price action is stablecoins. Of course it's stablecoin time guys is what we're doing. Oh look, I'm glitching great. Back in the glitch today it's showing really bad wireless even though I have great wireless. Streamyard is officially tripping day two Crypto industry backed stablecoin bill advances in US Senate as we know the Genius act to be voted on early next week, likely on Monday and we think it will pass. There was a lot of controversy in the early days of this bill. Obviously everybody thought that it was a layup and then all of a sudden we had this situation where Democrats basically blocked cloture, which is a word that I'm convinced they made up just for this to make themselves sound smart. But then all those things got resolved and now we have 65 plus votes in the Senate which is unheard of for literally anything. A bipartisan effort to get the stablecoin bill passed which we will likely see on Monday or Tuesday which means it goes to the House where it will also pass and then it goes to the president's desk. Well, it will also pass. There is a heavy thirst for stablecoin action here in the United States and it's a coming and we got a lot of other stablecoin news to support this story. We have Scott Besant. Great name. Scott says 2 trillion reasonable for dollar stable coin market. I believe he says this by 2028 actually I don't think he's crazy on this. A 10x and stable coins once we get legislation on the books and the rules of the road are clearly laid out. Nothing surprising there. I don't think that anybody doubts that could happen especially with the proliferation of new stable coins from the likes of. I don't know Amazon and Walmart who are weighing issuing their own stable coins. We saw news this week as well that Meta was going to run it back with the old Libra project that was originally so unpopular on Capitol Hill. Elizabeth Warren literally had her head explode again this week when she heard that Meta, Facebook slash Meta, Facebook slash face meta, whatever it's called. I don't know what's the Insta Face Snap book, nobody does. But it is provocative. Yeah, Elizabeth Warner head exploding once again that we could possibly be getting these private stable coins. And in the meantime, Shopify teams up with Coinbase and Stripe in USDC Stablecoin payments push. This is on base pretty crazy. Shopify, this is in team with Stripe who already uses USDC Stripe actually have been long proponents of stable coins adopted it much earlier than people realize. And if you want to use Stripe and make payments and they do it internally, all the things they do weekends and nights, they've been using Stablecoins here actually for quite a long time. So it's actually not surprising that Shopify will be teaming up with the two of them to do this. But we're looking at them using Base, which is of course Coinbase's layer 2 and 34 countries to be able to pay for items on Shopify using USDC Wild. I don't know if you guys saw this next story, but we have the world's most famous short seller, Jim Chanos, going at it with our own demigod of Bitcoin buying, Mr. Michael Sailor. As you can see, I am struggling here with the Internet. So Sailor said below here on Bloomberg tv I explained strk strf strd the risk of shorting Microstrategy the rise of Bitcoin treasury companies are 100 Bitcoin strategy debunk Quantum FUD and show why AI is bullish for Bitcoin. That is a lot. Jim Chano says. This is of course complete financial gibberish. Mr. Sailor wants you to value his business based not only on the net value of his Bitcoin holdings, nav and market, but additionally with a multiple on the change in that navigation. Basically now he can leverage his balance sheet. We've got a clip here about two minutes long of Chanos speaking directly on.
- [07:41]
Jim Chanos
This is a wonderful salesman, but that's what he is. He's a salesman and what he's selling investors is the concept that you give me your money and I'm just going to go buy Bitcoin and hopefully the value of my stock trades at a premium to the value of that Bitcoin. And so as long as I can keep doing that, I generate value. And this is, of course, I called it financial gibberish, because on top of that, he also said in your interview, he said the company should not just be valued on the basis of the bitcoin holdings, but on a multiple of the profits that accrue from when I do this financial alchemy. And I pointed out on social media, I said, well, that's akin to saying, well, my house that rose in value from 450,000 to $500,000 last year is not worth 500,000. It's worth one and a half million because it's worth the 500,000 plus a 20 multiple on the $50,000 increase. And of course that's absurd, but that's the claim he's making. And let me just interject really importantly here. I'm actually doing what he is advocating, right. I am selling MicroStrategy securities to buy Bitcoin. Let's be clear. It's a hedge trade. I don't know where Bitcoin is going to go.
- [08:59]
NLW
And it doesn't matter to you, actually?
- [09:01]
Jim Chanos
Well, it doesn't matter. The premium compressing matters to me. It's important to Understand that in 2024 and 2025, mostly at the end of 24 and 25, MicroStrategy has sold $35 billion roughly of security securities, 33 billion in common and convertible into common and 2 billion in preferred. Most recently. The market for the preferred stock that he's selling is tiny relative to common. Let's be clear about that. And in his own words that you just played back, he makes a case that you have to be crazy to buy these preferreds. Right? He's going to pay you a dividend. Maybe it's. It's not redundant, redeemable, it's perpetual. And if I don't pay the dividends, they're not cumulative. I don't have to pay the back dividends. So, you know, who in their right mind institutionally would buy these preferreds?
- [09:53]
NLW
Yeah, there's a lot there to unpack. We've seen Wall street actually attempt to make this trade before, and it said MicroStrategy absolutely flying just, I think it was last year. But interestingly, a lot of people who dug deeply into what happened in that price action back then noticed that it also caused a major dip in bitcoin. Why? Because if you're making this exact trade that he is, you're obviously buying Bitcoin and you're shorting MicroStrategy to see that compression in the premium to nav. We saw this with GBTC as well, by the way. Slightly different, but we saw this, which is a great trade until somebody short squeezes you and MicroStrategy goes flying. But if microstrategy goes flying up, what does that mean? It means those people have to sell the bitcoin that they bought and that happened in size of multiple billions last time this trade unwound. So as much as Mike Apple Sailor is, can be right here, that it is, as he is going to point out right here, a bad idea to be shorting strategy that didn't work. Bad idea to be shorting strategy because he says you'll get wrecked. And he basically says that he doesn't understand the business model, that strategy is effectively giving out novel bitcoin backed loans is what he says. Exactly. I don't think he understands what our business model is. We're actually the largest issuer of bitcoin backed credit instruments in the world, which is actually factually true. But it could actually be bad for bitcoin price if the short squeeze happens. And Chanos rashly, if it goes the way he could think it is a logical trade for him to make. But they've continued going back and forth. Michael Saylor obviously blasted him. So he doesn't understand. And then as you saw Chanos hit him back and called him a salesman. We've had a lot of people say the same. We have some more news from Capitol Hill as our next story, which is that the House Financial Services Committee follows the House Agriculture Committee and votes to advance crypto market structure. Bill so as much as we've had all the attention seemingly on stable coins, which is where the interest is, we are actually making progress on market structure as well, which is really, really important because this is how we're going to understand exactly what these assets are, what's a commodity, what's a security, what's a collectible, as they like to say for NFTs and meme coins and such. But even more importantly, what happens in market structure that nobody talks about is how exchanges can operate if they're allowed to custody your assets, if they're allowed to be brokers, if they're allowed to offer loans. If we're going to have walls like we do between those kind of entities in legacy markets, you can't, you know, custodians are not the same as the exchanges in legacy markets. We unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on how you view it in crypto, do not have those walls between. That's all going to come from market structure. And Trump has said that he wants to see this pass by August. So we are seeing progress here, likely a major priority for the White House and for Congress and the Senate to get this in before we start campaigning again for the next election. And inevitably the Republicans don't have control of everything like they have had for so long. So market structure will be next. And to be honest, if we really want to talk about a strategic bitcoin reserve, we're going to need to get stable coins and market structure out of the way. Ryan has pointed out that cloture is used all the time in Congress. I'm surprised you never heard of it before. Surprised you never heard of sarcasm before. I like to make jokes. Sometimes I just make jokes. I've heard the term many times. It's just a joke. Just a joke. Anyways, the next story that we have here is ETF Palooza, man. US spot Bitcoin ETF set to hit 1 trillion. 1 trillion. Cumulative trading volume milestone in less than 18 months since launch. This is absolutely unheard of. No ETF has ever remotely come close to doing this. We know that these are the most successful ETFs in history, backed up by the fact that BlackRock spot Bitcoin ETF becomes fastest to hit 70 billion, crushing gold's previous record. It ain't even close. These things are so successful. Here's our friend Eric Balchunas talking on this. Ibit just blew through 70 billion is now the fastest ETF to ever hit that market. Only 341 days, which is five times faster than the old record hit by GLD of 1691 days. Guys, that's just ibit. That's one of the ETFs reached 70 billion five times faster than GLD. If you add them all up, I actually have no idea. But it's a lot. It's a lot. They've done a lot better than just that. It's a lot. So that's not the only news that we have. Obviously we talked about this yesterday, but spot Ethereum ETFs pulling 240 million, beating Bitcoin ETFs 160, 64 million daily inflows. Pretty astounding here that ETF ETH ETFs are actually outperforming Bitcoin ETFs recently. Especially in context of what I just showed you. Does this mean that ETH is back, baby? That we're going to get an alt season of epic proportions? All the things that everyone is here to find out. Because let's be honest, if you were just here as you should be to just buy bitcoin and dollar cost average and go about your life, we wouldn't all be making and watching content all the time. What everyone actually wants to know is what's going to happen with the rest of the market. And this could be a harbinger of good things to come. We also know that we have seen a Solana ETF advancing. That's huge news. If that gets through, we're going to see XRP ETFs and a lot of other ETFs. I don't think we still get down to Trump and come Rocket ETFs. I asked Matt Hogan about this yesterday, but I don't think that's going to happen. But still, I do think we're going to see a major unlock coming soon with ETFs for almost everything you could possibly want. Our next story. Sec Chair Paul Atkins says the right to self custody is a foundational American value. Listen, I'm not surprised that this guy Paul Atkin is saying this. He obviously understands it. What I think is so notable is that every single person at any meaningful level of authority and power in this government gets it. So it's yeah, we know that Paul Atkins is a long time proponent of Bitcoin, but the fact that you have people across the administration all the time making the important comments, not the bitcoin should be in your portfolio or Bitcoin will probably go up. But like talking about self custody and inflation being a problem and Bitcoin can become a global reserve currency, those are things that people like Larry Fink and others even in the administration are saying. It really shows you just how seriously most of these people take this asset and how deeply they understand it. I can't necessarily say that's the case for Trump, but he's all in apparently because there's a lot of money to be made. But he's got the right people in the right places in this administration and it's really, really truly, truly impressive. Those are the major stories. I've got another cool one here. Coinbase Unveils See this? Coinbase unveils a sweet credit card powered by American Express offering up to 4% in Bitcoin rewards. Imagine spending money on a credit card and instead of getting useless airline miles or dumb rewards that you never remember to use or don't know how to Maximize, you just get 4% back in Bitcoin. That is wild, crazy, amazing. And this is going to be an insanely, insanely popular product. I think. In other news, that's actually all the news that I wanted to talk about today. But I want just since I've got you alone and I never have you alone, so I don't talk about any of the stuff that I'm doing. I don't know if you guys know this. I started an AI company. We actually got a huge award from entrepreneur in the Middle east. And I don't want to talk about that. But the other thing that's way more exciting and it's going to be cool to you. It's not even in the description here, but I'm now the proud owner of a liquor brand, right? So this amazing guy Ryan reached out to me four years ago. I think it was like Covid and it was crazy. And he said, listen, I have an idea for a liquor brand. It's called Defi Spirits. Look, I got it right here. Show you this. Defi Spirits. He's like Bitcoin bourbon, Defi Vodka. But we really talked about bitcoin bourbon. He literally sent me the initial bottle designs and we talked for years and years and years. He sent me this. I drank it. Zero ownership. Zero. Like obviously it's not a sponsorship, nothing like that. And then they won the biggest award for a bourbon in San Francisco. Gold. And it's really, really good. And eventually I was like, man, this has to go crazy viral. This has been, by the way, for years and months. I've just never really told you guys about it. But now I'm a part owner of this company, defi spirits.com. yeah. I highly recommend that you buy and try it because it's amazing. Both products are. But we're gonna start blowing this up and putting it everywhere and it's going to be awesome. And I just want to be like, you know, Clooney and, and whoever else, you know, Jay Z, right? I gotta. You gotta own a liquor brand. Gotta have. Yeah, you gotta have a piece. You know, I like your guys comments here. Liquor in the front, party in the back. Liquor. Barely even know her. Liquor in the front. I'm going to call it, start calling them spirits so that I don't have to listen to your bad liquor jokes. Do that. What about the non drinkers? I highly recommend not buying it because it would be really awful if I took a non drinker and turned them into a drinker. Like I'm not encouraging the. See, like don't promote alcohol, so don't drink it, man. Should have called one corn and copper gonna maybe steal that Howling wolf water. There you go. Yeah, I mean, I'm not. Non drinkers don't promote alcohol. Like, I don't know, just don't buy it. It's like the easiest thing ever. It's so easy. You just don't. You know, I. I happen to like an occasional alcoholic beverages loosen me up. I like the flavor of a good bourbon. And this is. Honestly, it's the best bourbon ever. So you can, you know, look@godefispirits.com. this is coming to a lot of bars and stuff, so you're gonna actually have access. People are saying, show you some of my records. There's a lot. There's too many records back there. Way too many records for me to start showing them to you. But, yeah, that's why. That's what we got. Yeah, it makes a good gift. That's right. If you're a non drinker, you definitely want to give the. The gift of alcoholism to those in your family who might also be non drinkers or encourage them to drink. I don't know, man. It's not cigarettes. It's not cigarettes. Yeah. The aged and vintage 1999 Packard bell tower cases. What we should do is age them in old Asics. Get some, like, old classic miners and pour the bourbon in there. Age it for about 10 years. But honestly, guys, I'm not kidding. This stuff is so good, and the brand is so awesome. And look at that bottle, man. Look at that bottle. Alcohol rots the soul. I don't know. I didn't know that the soul could rot. Is that like a. Is the soul like a kind of organ in my body, or is it like a rare form of wood? I don't know, man. I look for it in pa. You can buy it here. You can buy. Look, there's a. You can. Literally, this is the way to buy it right now, because we're just getting. Yes. I'm 21. Leave me alone. You can buy it. You'd buy it right here. See, right there. Buy it. It's that easy. You can buy it. I highly suggest it. Anyways, that's all I got. Cosmo the Wonder dog says it beats meth. I guess that'll be next, right? Yeah. Drink responsibly and all the things. But, guys, bitcoin bourbon. How cool is that? Seriously, man, it's awesome. Yeah, you did do a great job with those bottles, Wolfie. Listen, I just like, he did the bottle, so I'm not taking credit for anything that's happened for this brand. I just wanted to be a part of it. That he got it to a point where it's incredible that I was like, man, we got to blow this thing up. It's just too good. Too good. So when you hear me, you know, out there on my yacht with my 1 trillion dollar because of hyperinflation liquor brand, you know, I'll still be here maybe hanging out with you guys. Guys, that's all we got today. D5 spirits.com million dollar Bitcoin Jim Chanos being a. That's the Friday five. Enjoy your life. That's all we got. See you on Monday. That's dope. Let's do.