Trump nudges CLARITY Act, bitcoin surges in response

This episode of “The Daily Wolf with Scott Melker” explores Trump urging Congress to pass the CLARITY Act at White House summit, bitcoin (BTC-USD) hitting $70,000 and ethereum’s (ETH-USD) latest upgrade.

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Bitcoin had a monster day yesterday, rising from the range that it’s been trading in and breaking well above $70,000, leaving many wondering what possibly happened. I’m going to break that down for you today and cover all the news that’s driving crypto prices up. Let’s go.

What is up everybody? Welcome to the Daily Wolf on Yahoo Finance. I’m your host Scott Melker, also known as The Wolf of All Streets and it feels like it’s been 87 years. I don’t know how many years the Titanic lady says. 84 years, 82, 87. It’s been a long time since we’ve actually been able to talk about bullish price action and Bitcoin, but here we are. Now, first, before we dive into exactly what happened, you may know, I’ll take a very slight victory lap even though, uh, it’s it’s premature. But that’s a thing.

I’ve been saying that Bitcoin is likely bottoming and likely to make a move to the upside, literally since February, but certainly all summer as we’ve been here in the doldrums. I’ve done full shows here on it. I literally did an entire YouTube show on it on my 9:00 a.m. show, talking about all the signals that we had for a bottom. Now, I I’ve listed them all before, obviously. Technical analysis showed that a likely bottom was here. Sentiment showed that a likely bottom, sailor selling, that a likely bottom. We had things across the board. I mean Monday we talked about massive open interest with price flat and all the reasons that we were going to see volatility returning. Now, as I was on my show this morning, my team sent me a video that someone made of me doing all those bottom calls, which I’ll show you right here.

bottom signal, bottom signal, you bottom, bottom signal, bottom signal, bottom signal to me. Bitcoin trading around $62,000 and that is that more than 50% of all Bitcoin purchased is now at a loss. that. I don’t know how they believe we get to $82,000 with no flows, but I would bet that that trend massively turns around and them declaring that right now is yet another absolute massive bottom. periods of extreme fear or fear, those are more bottom signals than top signals. Take a look at hash rate, right? can’t really even buy right now and that’s also not affecting the price. To me, that’s more of a bottom signal.

Yeah, bottom signal. So, you guys have been watching me say it here, obviously. I mean, these are the same things that we’ve seen towards the end of every single bear market, right? I even wrote a newsletter the other day talking about the fact that we didn’t necessarily need an FTX blow up because we had had the demolitions of 2022 and here in 2026, we were just kind of seeing the lights go off in the entire neighborhood and the vacancy. We’ve had all the collapses, all the exchange insolvencies, all the things that we’ve had in the past, it just hasn’t been as loud. So, let’s just cook through what actually happened here. Bearish crypto bets lose record 3 billion as Bitcoin tops $71,000. Almost 3 billion now, USD in shorts got liquidated in the past 24 hours. 2.98 billion. This is the largest short liquidation event in history, which is crazy when you put it in context. Now, the market’s much bigger. So, to some degree that makes sense. I can’t say it’s the highest percentage, but we saw that open interest that we talked about absolutely wiped out. To put this in perspective, the last daily Bitcoin closed this large was in February. And that was just the rebound from the 14-day down day before it. This one had no crash to bounce off, against its own 30-day volatility. It was a 5.8 sigma move, the largest to the upside since October of 2023. This was a massive move on real volume. And now I have to mention, we are trading above the 200 uh moving average on the daily for the first time since the bear market began, and that kind of break has been the signal of the end of every bear market in the past. Obviously, this was supported by massive ETF flows. Spot Bitcoin ETFs report 517 million in net inflows largest in 3.5 months. But uh you know, obviously, we also had other signals like the most seller exhaustion literally ever. So, I wrote a newsletter this morning about what actually happened because I’ve seen some pretty bad takes. So, I covered what was happening with Treasury yesterday, so I don’t want to be redundant, although it is fun to show the debt clock. 40 trillion we surpassed yesterday. So maybe that’s part of the signal. But I wrote this newsletter which you can subscribe to for free, The Wolf Den newsletter. I wrote this newsletter about what happened. So, price hadn’t really made the massive move when we recorded this show yesterday, but we did have the news that the Treasury was going to start buying back long-dated bonds, right? So, you knew all about that.

Gold moved, Bitcoin moved massively, risk assets moved, Ethereum and other cryptos even moved more. But it was the first spark was Treasury blinking, right? I think the joke that I made yesterday on the Daily Wolf was that the bond vigilantes came knocking at the door and Scott Besent uh showed up with his checkbook when he opened the door. Right? So now the market knows that there is a pain threshold that the Treasury department is not willing to surpass and likely we have found it and they are going to intervene. This is what Bitcoin was built for. By the way. So not a surprise that we saw the spark. But it would be disingenuous to pretend that Bitcoin went from the, you know, low to mid 60s all the way to 72,000 just on that. The reality is, as I just showed you, there was massive open interest, meaning a ton of leverage in the market when there was no volatility and a violent move was almost inevitable, whether that was going to be to the upside or the downside. When you see 3 billion in shorts liquidated, that’s what sent price even higher for Bitcoin, right? So, I can show you this was the image from my newsletter. It’s pretty good. I made that. I drew it. Bitcoin to the moon, Scott Besant, right? He sent Bitcoin, but that was just the little spark. The gasoline was the leverage that sent price higher. So we have to be careful here because that leverage will now be wiped out and we have to see some real follow through to know that that we’re going to continue up further into a bull market. But,

so the first story here is that Besant lit the spark, leverage sent it and then we had another catalyst that we do have to discuss, which is the next story right here. Trump calls for Congress to pass crypto bill at White House event. Instead of telling you about some of the things he said, we have about a two-minute video that summarizes most of it. Go ahead and hit the video.

We launched Project Crypto to modernize rules so that our financial markets can move into blockchain technology. I established the United States strategic Bitcoin Reserve, making Bitcoin a permanent asset of the United States Treasury, which has turned out incredibly well. I also created the United States digital asset stockpile to hold custody of all other digital assets, and that’s exactly what it’s done. It’s been amazing. One year ago this summer, I signed landmark legislation known as the Genius Act. I named it after myself. I didn’t want anyone to I didn’t want to use my name so I just call it the Genius Act. paving the way for widespread adoption of dollar backed stable coins. And that’s worked out very well. Every single American benefits enormously from our country’s status as the financial center of the world and we want to keep it that way. We’re leading by leaps and bounds. We’ve gained so much in the last 16 months like nobody can believe actually. Uh not only that, but we have more money being invested in the United States than any country at any time in history. Money’s coming in by the trillions. Our nation’s economic dominance drives trillions of dollars of investments, creates millions of jobs and expands access credit and capital so that every citizen has a chance to achieve what we now hear a lot about the American dream. Uh young people are looking for the American dream, they weren’t thinking about that two years ago. New financial technologies are extending this American dominance into the 21st century and that’s why we’re focused on creating a clear regulatory framework for pioneers and builders like the people that are with me here so that they can do business with confidence on American soil. They don’t have to go to other countries to do their business. We’re ensuring that America remains the undisputed leader not only in Bitcoin and crypto, but also technologies like prediction markets, artificial intelligence and much more.

I mean he also said that uh Mike Seylig from the CFTC was looking at bringing Hyperliquid into the regulatory framework of the United States. So Hyperliquid went up 25, 30%. Didn’t have the president saying Hyperliquid on my bingo card. He also said that the United States should be looking at, and this is something he’s reiterating after not saying it for years, would be looking at Bitcoin as a strategic reserve asset and buying a lot of Bitcoin, but this was supposed to be him uh calling himself a genius. You’re the genius. You, you’re the genius. Yeah. So obviously strategic uh Bitcoin reserve and pushed very hard for the clarity Act once again. Now, I think we all know that the odds of the Clarity Act passing are very low, but when you have Mike Seylig and Paul Atkins standing next to you, you have regulation, uh Reg crypto that was just proposed by the SEC and you have the CFTC pushing very hard, you can see very clearly that they’re not going to wait for Congress to act. They’re going to push very hard on the regulatory side. So, will we, I mean, we’re not going to get a law passed on a strategic Bitcoin reserve, but we do have an executive order and we do have regulators who can help push it. So, when we’re talking about what happened yesterday with crypto price just to to summarize very quickly, we had a very fundamental reason for Bitcoin to catch a spark, which is exactly what Bitcoin is built for, which is nonsense in the bond market and fiscal and monetary policy. Then you had leverage providing the gasoline for that spark. and then you had Trump coming over the top rope and providing even more fuel for the fire. So we’ll see where it goes uh from here. I think everybody’s happy to see Bitcoin above $70,000. Many uh think that it’s too early because it’s August and it’s not October and the four year cycle and blah, blah, blah, blah. But even now the more pessimistic people that I’m seeing think, if we go lower, we go lower briefly and then still head up into the coming years. I would say that we’ve got a lot of good news right now and we just want to see some massive follow through. Speaking of good news for stable coins, Elon Musk’s X X.

Not Twitter. X. You didn’t just mispronounce that. X is exploring stable coins to pay influencers and content providers. Conversations with X are ongoing according to a person who also works with other social media platforms testing stable coins to pay influencers. Okay, so we’ve already seen this on YouTube. It’s not necessarily big news, but the big news is that X Money launched and there was no crypto in it, right? We know that Elon Musk likes Bitcoin, we know that Elon Musk loves dogecoin, and we know that the future of payments is blockchain and stable coins uh integrated with AI agents, which we’ll get into a bit more. But if that was all true, why didn’t X Money have anything to do with stable coins? Well, this is not X money, but it would be people getting their creator payments all over the world in a much easier way via stable coins, which can be sent 24 7, 365, very fast and very cheap and it makes a lot of sense. So, a lot of speculation as what this will mean for X money or the future of ways that X will integrate crypto assets. We don’t really know, but to me it is a meaningful step to finally see crypto mentioned in the conversation of what Elon Musk and X will do with X money. Now we have a total nerd story right here. Ethereum Glamsterdam upgrade activates by 24th of August 2026. Uh could be as soon as today. Ethereum’s Plataburget. they make these names up. right? Testnet is scheduled to activate the Glamsterdam upgrade today. This is an early public test, not an Ethereum main net upgrade yet. Uh but what this does, Glamsterdam cha changes how Ethereum blocks are built and validated bringing proposer builder separation directly into the protocol. Listen, this is going to have to do with gas fees. It’s an upgrade, but it’s notable that while this is happening and the market is moving, Ethereum wildly outperformed Bitcoin to the upside yesterday. So listen, we’ve seen tons of upgrades as Ethereum has gone from proof of work to proof of stake and continue to innovate. It’s really important because there are a lot of faster and cheaper blockchains than Ethereum and every major step they make and every time it’s successful is one step towards directly competing with those while still maintaining the massive TVL and infrastructural lead that Ethereum has had here since the beginning. So, I, you know, they’re testing the infrastructure required here to support significantly more activity and to do it cheaper and they have proven the ability to make massive upgrades like the merge when they went from proof of work to proof of stake. And final story today, Stripe to buy open router as Fintech expands deeper into AI. $7.8 billion dollar deal. Stripe is just printing money and spending it like crazy. So you may ask why is this a crypto story? Well, first it’s an AI story. So Open router allows developers to access and route requests among competing AI models. Stripe says 88% of the Forbes AI 50 already build on its platform.

Stripe’s revenue from AI and crypto companies has more than doubled over the past year. and most notably, they had a unicorn acquisition of bridge that you all know about. They’ve announced their own stable coins, their own blockchains. They are going all in on stable coins as a part of payments and we know that the future which they have said is the singularity where AI agents come together, they eventually need to purchase uh services and provide services and transact and they are going to do that in stable coins. So they’re spending $8 billion dollars here on AI infrastructure that eventually will also allow AI agents to transact in stable coins and they’ve already bought the platforms on the stable coin side and are building their own stable coins to be able to do that. Pretty massive uh innovation here and that is what’s coming. So listen, we can’t call the uh I I did that bottoming segment, which means that Bitcoin will probably go to like $40,000 tomorrow, right? Because the market has a tendency to make you look stupid, but I’ve been very consistent since February that it looked like Bitcoin was likely bottoming and this is one of the first signals that we’ve had that they may actually be true. That may actually be true. We just need to see some serious follow through, but we had major volume and a major move. Enjoy it while it last. I’ll see you tomorrow. Peace.

Source: finance.yahoo.com