ROLLUP: Are Record Inflows Good For ETH? | New Crypto & AI Czar | Record Liquidations | Where To Next?

So, David, did you see this? Donald Trump was asked by Jim Kramer about uh crypto this week. Should we just play the clip?

You're embraced in crypto, very different from the previous administration. Strategic petroleum reserve like for crypto?

Yeah, I think so. I we're gonna do something great with crypto because we don't want China or anybody else, and not just China, but others are embracing it and we want to be the head. Uh we're gonna be ahead of AI, we're gonna be way ahead of AI, and we've got to produce tremendous amounts of electricity. You know that it's uh unbelievable when you think that we need more than twice what we already have. If you think that's pretty for a specific industry, but we'll be able to do it. We have uh Lee Zeldon in charge of the environment. He's gonna be giving us very strong approvals, I think, and he's gonna make sure everything's good and clean and proper, but he's gonna give us very fast approvals. Yeah.

Donald Trump saying uh he will be doing something great.

Great full sense. It's for for him. Donald Trump tot I don't even know if he knows what accelerationism is, but he's embodying it. Oh, that's exactly what I was gonna say. He it's just full. Let's turn turn it up to eleven.

Yeah, it's uh accelerationist kind of like what are the accelerationist tactics? AI, energy, and crypto. Boom, all three. We're gonna be great. We're gonna exceed China. Uh that that's his message today. So

It is it I will admit it is pretty refreshing.

wow. Okay. Well, we are in the second week of December. It is time for the Bankless weekly roll up.

In the world of politics, uh, crypto and AI has gotten a czar. Who is he? And will he be all in on crypto? Figure that that out. You have heard him on this podcast before. We have clipped some of his content before. Also, liquidation Thursday, right after we finished recording the weekly roll-up last Thursday. Crypto prices tanked. Uh record liquidations in crypto as leverage washes out of the market. But we're back. Leverage is back on the menu. The DGENs are gambling. This and we're not stopping here. Uh, Ethereum is getting record ETF flows. So we'll talk about that, uh, painted in some pretty big numbers. And then also is the Ethereum layer one finally getting a scaling upgrade. There are some murmurings in the EF camp and then the uh L1 capacity world. We're gonna talk about that. A bunch of tokens launches this week. Move, M E, Magic Eden, and Pengu, and MicroStrategy is expected to enter the QQQ. And how will that change crypto's market structure? These are the subjects, but there's like 20 more that we're gonna get into as well throughout this episode. But first, before we get to all of those, a message from our friends and sponsors.

Market price this week, we got Bitcoin and another week, not an all-time high. Can't say that, but we are above a hundred K, aren't we, David? What are the numbers on the week?

Even with the nuking that we all experienced last week, Bitcoin is up 0.2% on the week. We are still

Not too

Not two, not two, point two. We are green on the week. All right. Fault flat. Start of the week 101,400. Ending of the week 101,600. Actually it's up a hundred dollars since I brought these numbers. It's maybe we're up.

actually this feels really good because uh on Thursday, as you mentioned, we got a massive liquidation. This was a sell-off. Some people were saying it was over, David. At that point, not me.

First first cycler.

Not me. I think it's a lot of the um, you know, uh people that are no like looking in on crypto. We're like, huh, see, I told you you hit 120, told you it's a scared down to 20. You got scared.

Always crashes, idiots.

Anyway, that's a pretty steep candle here. Look at this. We did we go from a hundred and two K

To 92. To 92. And then we wicked back up. Yeah. That's like a 2K drop. Do you remember April, May, May of 2021, after ETH ran from 1,000 to 4,000, Bitcoin did something similar. Yeah. Liquidity just dropped out of the market. And ETH crashed from like $4,100 down to like $2,300. And liquidity just ran away from the market. The floor just fell out of the entire market. Now, was that the fair price for Ether? Was that a justified crash? Well, in the time, in the narrow time frames, yes, liquidity couldn't enter the market that fast. In the zoomed out time frames, no, because ETH just went back up to $4,000. Took it half a year to do that. But it just reminder liquidity can just flee this market so fast. And this is why we can go and drop. This is a this is a small drop in the grand scheme of things, but it is a reminder that how fast liquidity can change in this market. And you can make very big movements very, very quickly, which is why so many people got liquidated.

Yeah, it's healthy too. I mean this kind of thing needs to happen. We're kind of like, you know, cleaning up all the scraps here. But it's like I guess uh I was expecting after that kind of a liquidation a 10k drop in Bitcoin price, and the rest of the market, of course, followed suit. I was expecting a longer duration. The fact that we are fully recovered now, David, tells you that we are in a bull market.

We are bullishing.

Mega bull market.

That kind of liquidation doesn't tend to recover so quickly. But give us the stats on the liquidation. Look at this chart we're looking at.

What's this? $1.1 billion in liquidations across centralized exchanges. That's the largest daily crypto liquidation since December of 2021, which is when the market started to turn. $815 million liquidations came from long positions. 280 million came from short positions, which I don't know how they did that.

I don't know. I don't know why anyone would short crypto. I do not know. And with that market turbulence behind us, people are still very bullish. Not just crypto people, but also Tom Lee. Tom Lee went on CNBC earlier this week predicting $250,000 Bitcoin. Let's go ahead and listen to Tom Lee.

How much of what we're seeing, maybe even a little bit today, is there's been such a regulatory overhang on a lot of these names under the current administration. Now you have a new FTC uh chairperson. Is that playing a role in any respect to this? Because Dan Eyes put out a note today said Christmas comes early with the new head of the FTC for tech.

It's probably the best way to sort of measure this is what Bitcoin's doing, because Bitcoin faced enormous regulatory burdens over the last few years. And now we have a White House that's embracing digital assets, a new SEC chairman, FTC chairman, uh

a new commerce secretary. I think these are actually being viewed as pro business, reviving animal spirits, but I think a good proxy is watching Bitcoin.

All right, now I'm gonna have to pin you to a target again on Bitcoin because I mean you've been among the most optimistic and outspoken about it for years, to be quite honest. So here we are above a hundred thousand. What's a legit target for 2025 for Bitcoin?

We think it's p it's gonna follow a similar halving cycle that we've seen in the past that would imply something around two hundred fifty thousand for Bitcoin in twenty twenty-five. Uh and on top of that we have a Trump put because Bitcoin is potentially a strategic reserve asset for the

There it is. Uh 250K is his base target, plus the Trump put on top of that. I gotta say, Tom Lee has totally called this in the back half uh the back the last half part of the year. We had him on in August. You remember this was right after the kind of the yen uh like trade kind of dip where the stock market like plunged and everyone was talking about recession worries and all of these things. And he was like, not a recession. We're still in a bull market. You're gonna see higher highs in NASDAQ, SP, and then also also, and most especially crypto. Uh so Tom's been right on in kind of the last quarter of this year. On the other side of that, though, is the Microsoft board. You'll recall, David, we're talking about the last couple of weeks. They had the opportunity to vote, uh, shareholders that is, of Microsoft on whether to add Bitcoin to their balance sheet. So

Obviously, they did it, right? Why wouldn't they do it? They totally what what was the vote? Well, they put it on the balance sheet, right?

Big company, a lot of cash reserves. What are you gonna do with all that cash? Like, would you buy big shares? Or are you but you do what Michael Saylor's doing? It's working for him. Uh that vote got turned down, and not just by a little bit, only less than one percent of sh Microsoft shareholders actually voted yes on that one. So over two

Too early in this market cycle to say have fun staying poor.

yeah, I mean they don't have to buy Bitcoin. They're like Microsoft shareholders are doing okay this cycle, all right?

Fun staying poor.

Microsoft shareholders.

Wow, wow. I don't know. I mean they don't have to buy Bitcoin. It's just like um in fact, I I think it's kind of silly sometimes for like uh you know big balance sheet corporations to kind of like they should be investing in their business. It's

Yeah, what are they doing with it instead?

dividends.

Now all I

Give me dividends. Give me div I'm I don't know. I'm a dividend maxi. Give it back to shareholders. If you if you don't have anything to do with it, like don't try to run a you know, a fund or something like that or keeping cash. Don't do a Michael

Sailor.

Yeah. I don't know if that's old school or what that is, but tell me about ETH price, David.

ETH price. 3,925 is where we started, up 1% to 3,942. ETH price during the big wick went from like 3,900 down to 3,500. Has since bounced back. But it recovered slightly more than Bitcoin did. Still below that $4,000 mark. So we did get across $4,000 last week, which is pretty cool. Which is also been recorded.

For for

It's like something like $4,813 or $50. Um but like I I'm gonna it's real all time high will happen like around $4,900. That's like true all time high. That that counts, but it's really $5,000 is the number to beat.

I think we could be all time high ETH in December.

Oh, I totally agree. For sure. That's totally within reason.

All time high December.

All time all time highs. Yeah. ETH could paint a thousand dollar like weekly candle for sure.

It's all discovery. Like when we're getting this 4K range and above, you could just see it just wants to punch through, it wants to punch through.

So Ryan, I right after this weekly roll up, I hop on a flight back to the Patagonia to go walk around some mountains. I'm out. No cell service, no Wi-Fi

Oh.

for like eight days, nine days.

Can't check.

Which is an entire weekly candle of price act.

You don't have like Starlink or something you can just like dial in and check

I'm not backpacking. No, no, no, no. So uh we'll see. We'll see what happens when I get back. But I'm gonna be like, it's just gonna be one price when I leave and a completely different price when I get back.

so