Bitcoin nears $80,000, posts best weekly gain in 3 years

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Scott Melker discusses the latest crypto-related headlines.

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Bitcoin is currently having its best week since 2023, giving even higher conviction in the market that the bottom may be in. Bulls are euphoric, bears are licking their wounds. We’re going to talk about all the news that’s driving the market right now on the Daily Wolf. Let’s go.

What is up everybody? Happy Friday and welcome to the Daily Wolf on Yahoo Finance. I’m your host Scott Melker, also known as the Wolf of All Streets. You can find me on X at Scott Melker. Find me on YouTube at Scott Melker. I had an incredible YouTube show this morning for those of you who missed it. Had both Matt Hogan and going parabolic Jason Williams on as guests, helping me to unpack this maybe early iteration of a Bitcoin bull market that we’re starting to see.

So we can’t talk about the news today without talking about the price. So let’s just show you what’s going on. Bearish crypto bets lose record 3 billion as Bitcoin tops 71,000. That was yesterday, and then I woke up and it was up to almost 80,000 Bitcoin and that 3 billion in liquidated shorts had become almost 4 billion.

So what we have here is Bitcoin up roughly 24% this week. Once again, the strongest week since 2023. Bitcoin ETFs added $606 million just Thursday after over 500 million on Wednesday. Ether ETFs also added 221 million, which they sizable number relative to total inflows into ETFs. Now, more than 4 billion as I said in crypto shorts liquidated over two days, giving us much more evidence that maybe the bottom is in.

So I’m going to just re very quickly go through the mechanics of what happened. We had the news from Scott Bessent. That was the trigger. Then we had massive liquidations of shorts, which sent price higher. Then we had the White House coming in and saying bullish things about crypto. That sent price up into the 70s. But waking up this morning and seeing price almost 80,000 cannot be explained by any of the three of those. This is real buying. We’re seeing it through institutions on the ETFs.

We’re seeing it through retail. I’ll tell you about that a little bit later. This is real buying, there is real confidence in the market. Now, I don’t want to steal the words of my friend Matt Hogan from this morning, but he made the point that he does not think this is impulsive buyers that are buying Bitcoin at 72,000 to sell at 76.

He thinks that there has been a lot of sentiment that once Bitcoin gets going, we are once again entering three years of a bull market in the four-year cycle and people are starting to position for that time. So he believes and I tend to agree that a lot of the buying we’re seeing right now is buyers that want to hold this asset to new all-time highs beyond 126,000, up into 150, 200, 250,000 if this market does what we think it can.

Now, I’ve been telling you literally for months that I thought the bottom was in. This is giving me a bit more confidence that may be true. We could go right back down. You know how Bitcoin is. But this is a real move on real volume with real catalysts that are sending it upwards. Interestingly, nothing’s really changed for Bitcoin, except for the price. At 60,000, the fundamentals were just as strong as they are at 80,000, but we know that people love to buy in.

Now, my my question for you as the audience, to others, there’s a lot of people on the sidelines that have been waiting for Bitcoin to go down to 45 or 50,000. I was recently on the When Shift Happens podcast and I said that there’s no more dangerous sentiment in markets than I’m going to sell to buy back lower. And a lot of people have been waiting to buy back lower. I’m curious if they’re going to buy here at, you know, 75, 80, 85 or if they’re still waiting for Bitcoin to head down to 45 or 50,000 to put in those bids.

So, you know, the bears were waiting here for a FTX event to send price lower and instead, they got liquidated. Now, we have some bullish news on the regulatory side. US CFTC chief puts staff on notice to create crypto regulations if clarity Act fails.

CFTC Commissioner Mike Seelig told the inaugural gathering of the Innovation Advisory Committee that his agency won’t sit idle. This is the same series of meetings and people that we’ve been reporting on from the White House all week. But it’s been a very, very interesting week because clearly we’re in the summer doldrums here waiting for Congress to come back and potentially act on clarity. But we know that clarity is very unlikely to happen.

Right, I think last I checked, prediction markets had it at roughly 10%, even the most bullish analyst who had it at 70% before like Galaxy down to 5, 10%. I’ve told you for me since December, it’s been 5% or less that it would pass. So it seems like the regulators are operating on the assumption that it won’t pass. We know that they’ve wanted to pass pro crypto regulation and start to write rules, but I think that they were waiting on the sideline to see what happened with clarity because why waste their time and effort preempting something that could be a law and make their lives much easier.

Now with the assumption that it’s not going to go into law and having meetings here with the innovation advisory committee, we can see they’re moving forward. So what happened? Earlier this week, the SEC under one Paul Atkins went ahead and made regulation crypto. We talked about that, right? It sets rules for fundraising for Safe Harbor so that you can become sufficiently decentralized and not be named a security.

Well, here Mike Seelig who is a CFTC Commissioner of one is saying the CFTC is going to do the same thing. He said, the staff will explore a new regulated crypto asset market category. He wants rules allowing developers to legally launch and operate protocols in America. Be huge for bringing innovation back to the United States just like Seelig’s uh just like Atkin’s new proposal at the SEC.

But he went on to say this cannot fully replace clarity, much like we saw Atkin saying that we still do need laws on the book so that if we get a new regulator, these rules cannot be replaced. But uh, yeah, he he as he said, agency rules are also easier to challenge in court or reverse under a future administration. So, this is what’s happening. The regulators are moving forward. They don’t think that clarity is going to happen and they are going to make rules, which then puts the onus on the crypto industry in my mind to become too big to fail over the next two and a half years before we likely get regime change.

You may not get regime change. But if we come to a presidential election next time and the crypto industry is still, you know, fumbling about, uh, we’re going to have big problems and we could see a reversal. We need the laws to obviously submit what they’re doing, but getting favorable regulation and building to the point where nobody can stop us, that is the move that we are looking for. And there are people that are uh trying to stop us.

CMA CME CEO Terrence Duffy trades barbs with CFTC Seelig and COO over prediction market oversight. So now you’ll remember that the CME freaked out when Kalshi had uh perpetual swaps approved. We talked about that story. They said that they uh, you know, that’s gambling and perpetual futures should not be regulated by the CFTC and that they’re not really derivatives contracts blah blah blah. Now having the same kind of comments over prediction markets.

So he said the prediction markets, this is the CME CEO Terry Duffy, accused prediction markets of tolerating manipulation and insider trading. Seelig came back and said, these are fake news because the contracts are offshore. I mean nothing says regulator regulatory clarity like the regulator calling the world’s largest futures exchange fake news.

Very mature uh the United States governments here. Right? But there is still, we have the turf war between the federal government and the states over prediction markets that we’ve long reported on. Now, you also have it between the incumbents who probably want to slow these industries like crypto and prediction markets down so that they can get their piece of it, which they’re all trying to do. So we have the incumbents actually battling the regulators as well over whose turf this is and what kind of products can be uh released.

Now listen, there’s definitely some insider trading in prediction markets, right? But that doesn’t mean that prediction markets should not exist or that anything actually stops this train. But it’s a really interesting time that we’re in right now uh with the regulatory regime, the incumbents, the states, a lot of confusion as to who is going to regulate what and a lot of that comes from an overbearing regulatory regime that we had before under one President Joseph Biden.

Now, going back to crypto volumes, we have an update to a story that I told you, I don’t know, all of like yesterday or the day before. Here you go. Remember I told you that the South Koreans weren’t trading anymore, crypto volumes were down massively. They’d gone to SK Hynix and and Samsung and were using ledger leverage ETFs. Well, in the words of poltergeist, they’re back. Upbit trading volume spikes 273%. It’s in a day. Calm down.

A South Korean investors re-enter crypto. So, up its daily volume volume surge 273% to 1.84 billion. Busiest day since March. Bit thumb hum hum hum thumb. Bithum. Volume jumped 133%. Now interestingly, XRP was the most actively traded asset on both exchanges. We’ve seen this in South Korea many many times. These guys love to speculate and they go love to go a little further down the wrist curve than Bitcoin to do it.

Last I checked, uh, you know, I I think XRP had been trading under a buck. It was pushing $1.40-ish at one point today. So massive move there and you know, uh when the South Koreans get on something, you’re going to see more volatility and more up and downside on an asset that they choose in the short term. But we talked about all the rotation. Koreans spending, you know, spent the whole bare market chasing Samsung and SK Hynix and leverage.

Well, this is the first hint that the rotation is coming back. And this is something that we’ve been talking about over and over and over again on this show, other shows with every single guest. There’s a hot ball of money for speculation, right? And for years that was in crypto, specifically in Bitcoin and all coins. Then with the with the proliferation of derivatives and perpetual swaps on hyperliquid on other assets, that hot ball of money was able to move.

So you went from crypto to gold and silver, to oil, to pre IPO SpaceX and then all over the place. Now you can gamble on anything. You didn’t need to gamble on Bitcoin and all coins, so they became a bit out of vogue. But we kept saying there will be a time when that hop all of money returns to crypto. I think that hot ball of money is now returning to crypto and this is the first indication that that might be true. We’re seeing it in ETFs, we’re seeing it in exchange volumes in the United States and we see it even compounded with exchange volume in South Korea.

Now, also from our friends in Asia, Nomura back Laser Digital wins Japan’s first crypto approval in four years. Now, it’s not such a big deal the approval that they got. I mean they’re going to provide liquidity to domestic crypto firms. This is sort of on the institutional side and not an indication of retail volume coming back, but interestingly, Japan has been on the sidelines and has done some very, very favorable legislating and regulating of late and now we’re seeing it actually come into place.

I mean we have Asian retail and institutional infrastructure awakening at exactly the same time. I mean, you know, Japan spent four years here checking Amora’s paperwork and someone finally found the correct fax machine, I guess. Um, because, you know, yeah, regulators, governments, they’re slow. That’s that’s what that joke was. That’s what that joke was.

So in a less favorable and exciting news, I’ve been reporting obviously on the crisis in self custody. Coldcard ships firmware after 114 million Bitcoin theft says AI helped catch more bugs. But the real story here is that they came out and said, we still haven’t really fixed this.

It’s been weeks. ongoing exploit for Cold card. Most people have probably done what they need to solve this, but still a problem here in self custody, especially when you compound Safe pal and Treasure and bits of gold releasing uh hundreds of thousands in hacked information on people who bought these self- custody solutions. But this is what they said, right? They released new Cold card firmware, but they said simply installing the update does not make an effective wallet safe.

So anyone who generated a seed on a vulnerable firmware between 2021 and 2026 must create a new seed and move the Bitcoin. A new seed generation requires 65 unpredictable button presses, 50 dice rolls or 128 coin flips. Who is still doing this?

Get your money off of a cold card and to literally anywhere else. This is absolutely insane. And I mean to just to kind of compound on that, I’ve got a story here, AI adoption in crypto crime rose 40% over the past year. We know that all of this is going to become exponentially worse in a world of AI. It is time to just pick the best projects, the best security and hold and be extremely vigilant because we have our favorite segment right now that aligns very well with that a how not to invest. Hit it.

How not to invest. How not to invest. How not to invest? Mantra Blockchain halts after exploit. These guys had problems just a few months ago. This was one of the hotter projects uh just a few years ago. But here’s the story. Mantra Token plunges 18% to record low as blockchain halts after exploit. Token token touched 0.000 4126 minutes after the network stopped producing blocks.

Well later said an attacker exploited a vulnerability in software used by the chain. Once again, I don’t even need to talk so deeply about the mantra token specifically or their chain. This is just a reminder that with AI and Lazarus Group and all of the other ways for hackers and exploiters to take your money, you do not need to be invested or using chains that do not have the vigilant security, budgets or team working behind them because they will get hacked.

Harmony, Ravencoin, Mantra, we have this endless list of exploits seemingly every single day that are losing people who have not been vigilant, who are just sitting on the sidelines holding assets from previous cycles, waiting for them to go down massively. Guys, the Bitcoin bull market may be back. If you’re looking at a chart, 82,800 is the line where the market would make a higher high and kill the bear market structure. I’ll have my eyes on that all weekend and I’ll be back to discuss it with you on Monday. Peace.

Source: finance.yahoo.com