Episodes

  • Bitcoin at 94K, Banks on Board: Is This the New Financial Order?

    Bitcoin at 94K, Banks on Board: Is This the New Financial Order?
    Dec 9 2025
    In this high-stakes installment of the Crypto News Rundown, the hosts unpack a week that feels like a genuine turning point for how traditional finance treats digital assets. What starts as a “quiet” stretch on the charts quickly reveals itself as a watershed moment: SEC-approved index products landing on NYSE Arca, a major U.S. bank rolling out integrated spot Bitcoin trading, and derivatives markets opening the door to tokenized collateral. Before they touch a single price chart, the hosts lay out a clear, no-nonsense disclaimer on risk, volatility, and why nothing in the episode should ever be taken as investment advice. From there, the episode dives into the institutional wave. The Bitwise 10 Crypto Index Fund (BITW) wins approval to trade as an ETP on NYSE Arca, giving pensions, endowments, and family offices a familiar, regulated way to access a diversified basket of top-10 crypto assets. PNC Bank then steals the spotlight as the first major U.S. bank to offer direct spot Bitcoin trading to private banking clients via its own app, powered on the back end by Coinbase’s infrastructure. The hosts connect these moves to a broader shift in portfolio thinking as banks quietly talk about low-single-digit allocations to digital assets. The “market plumbing” story gets just as much attention. The CFTC launches a pilot allowing futures commission merchants to accept tokenized Bitcoin, Ethereum, and USDC as margin collateral, backed by a new legal framework for non-security digital assets. The discussion expands into tokenized treasuries and real-world assets, highlighting fresh guidance around custody, segregation, and valuation that brings on-chain assets into the heart of regulated futures markets. In parallel, Hong Kong’s HashKey pursues an IPO and launches a fully on-chain tokenized security, underscoring Asia’s aggressive push to build a compliant crypto hub. On the price action front, Bitcoin rips back above $94,000 on heavy spot volume just ahead of an expected Fed rate cut, while Michael Saylor’s Strategy doubles down with nearly a billion-dollar BTC purchase funded largely by stock sales. The hosts weigh the bullish “digital gold” narrative against sobering data from Bitfinex on ETF outflows, negative cumulative volume delta, and millions of coins sitting at an unrealized loss, arguing that Bitcoin often behaves more like a high-octane tech asset than a safe haven. They stress that sizing, not prediction, is what really matters and repeat the old rule: only invest what you can afford to lose. Ethereum gets its own deep dive after an 8% short-squeezing rally back above key technical levels and the 200-day EMA. The episode examines Bitmine Immersion Technologies’ huge ETH accumulation, the billions in unrealized losses on its balance sheet, and how that makes the company both a conviction play and a high-wire act. The hosts then cover BlackRock’s twin ETH products – a plain spot ETF and a staked ETF designed to capture yield – along with Robinhood’s rollout of ETH and SOL staking to U.S. users, including in tightly regulated New York. The spotlight then shifts to XRP and Solana. XRP enjoys a breakout week in Asia with new HKD trading pairs on a licensed Hong Kong exchange and an expanded payments license for Ripple in Singapore, while U.S. spot XRP ETFs race past $1 billion in AUM. Analysts’ “coiled spring” thesis is explained in plain language. Solana, meanwhile, holds key Fibonacci support and heads toward a critical resistance zone, all while its social media team ignites tribal drama by tweeting the culturally loaded “589” meme and a castle graphic that puts SOL above BTC and XRP, sparking huge engagement across crypto Twitter. In the altcoin lightning round, listeners get quick but nuanced takes on Cardano’s mysterious $21 million ADA transfer and the launch of the privacy-focused Midnight token, BNB’s stability amid Binance’s regulatory win in Abu Dhabi, and Zcash’s stunning 13x rebound on renewed interest in privacy tech. The hosts also cover Hyperliquid’s HYPE token and a controversial presale called Deep Snitch AI, using it as a case study to explain red flags around 100x marketing promises, weak tokenomics, and anonymous teams. The episode closes by zooming out. From PNC’s spot Bitcoin offering and CFTC pilots to HashKey’s IPO and global regulatory moves for Tether, Binance, Bybit, Circle, and Robinhood, the institutional rails are being laid at full speed. Yet underneath that progress, the market remains brutally volatile and structurally fragile for everyday investors. The hosts leave listeners with one final, uncomfortable question: as corporations raise capital from the public to accumulate vast crypto treasuries, what does this accelerating centralization mean for the long-promised decentralized ethos of the industry? As always, they sign off with a reminder to stay safe, stay skeptical, and keep learning.Become a supporter of this...
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    33 mins
  • Fusaka, ETFs and Fed Shifts: The Perfect Storm for Crypto Rallies

    Fusaka, ETFs and Fed Shifts: The Perfect Storm for Crypto Rallies
    Dec 4 2025
    In this episode, we break down a pivotal moment for digital assets where market momentum, regulation, and Wall Street finally collide. We start with the charts, unpacking Bitcoin’s powerful rebound back toward the $100,000 level after a bruising stretch of volatility. You’ll hear how sentiment flipped from fear to cautious optimism, what’s driving renewed risk appetite, and whether this rally looks like the start of a new leg higher—or just another bear market trap. From there, we zoom in on the institutional front, where long-awaited shifts are finally materializing. We discuss Vanguard’s move to open its doors to crypto ETFs on its platform and what that means for mainstream adoption, retirement accounts, and long-term capital flows. We also look at major US banks running stablecoin and crypto pilot programs in partnership with Coinbase, signaling that traditional finance is no longer sitting on the sidelines. On the technology and altcoin side, we cover the successful Ethereum Fusaka upgrade and how its scalability improvements could change user experience, DeFi, and on-chain activity. We then dissect the flood of capital into Spot XRP ETFs, which are racing toward the $1 billion inflow mark, and explore why institutional investors are suddenly paying attention to XRP’s narrative again. But it’s not all winners. The episode also examines MicroStrategy’s financial challenges in the wake of the recent correction, including the pressure on its share price and the risk of being removed from the MSCI index. We explore what that means for its bold Bitcoin-as-treasury strategy and for other corporates considering similar moves. Finally, we connect the macro dots. With the UK formally recognizing digital assets as property in new legislation, we look at how legal clarity might shape global crypto regulation. And we break down the US Federal Reserve’s quiet end to Quantitative Tightening (QT), discussing how liquidity, interest rates, and central bank policy are feeding into the latest crypto rally. If you want a clear, big-picture walkthrough of why crypto is suddenly back in the spotlight—and what might come next—this episode has you covered.
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    54 mins
  • Bitcoin at 91K, Texas Buys the Dip: Inside Crypto’s Institutional Pivot

    Bitcoin at 91K, Texas Buys the Dip: Inside Crypto’s Institutional Pivot
    Nov 27 2025
    This week on Crypto News Rundown, we unpack one of the most revealing weeks of the cycle so far – a moment where brutal volatility, meme-coin fatigue, and security shocks collide with some of the strongest signals of long-term institutional conviction the crypto market has ever seen.The episode opens with Bitcoin’s Thanksgiving “miss”: a rally to $91,000 that failed to break the 2024 high, triggering fresh retail fear and headlines about “lost momentum.” The hosts zoom out to show why this rare year-over-year holiday dip looks more like a structural reset than a collapse, digging into footprint charts, higher-low formations, RSI recovery, and a persistent bid below $90,000 that screams institutional accumulation rather than capitulation.From there, the focus shifts to the flows that really matter. You’ll hear how BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) has clawed its way back into multi-billion-dollar profit, why it’s still the only spot Bitcoin ETF with net positive inflows in 2025, and what it means that NASDAQ is proposing “Mag 7–level” options limits for IBIT. The hosts tie this directly to macro tailwinds — falling yields, rising odds of a Fed rate cut — and to a historic milestone: Texas becoming the first U.S. state to buy Bitcoin via a spot ETF for its public treasury, potentially opening the door for other states and pension funds to follow.On the corporate side, the episode contrasts two very different treasury strategies. Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy) showcases a deeply conservative, long-run playbook with a 71-year debt runway and a market premium on its BTC holdings, while Japan’s MetaPlanet sits on leveraged underwater bags and faces a December “do or die” vote that could trigger margin-call risk. SpaceX’s move to Coinbase Prime is framed as a case study in how large private firms are professionalizing Bitcoin custody without selling a sat.Security takes center stage with the Upbit hack — a $36.9 million Solana-ecosystem hotwallet breach that lands just as its parent company announces a huge deal and U.S. IPO plans. The hosts walk through what likely went wrong, why the timing has people whispering about sophisticated repeat attackers, and why Upbit’s immediate promise to fully reimburse users marks a big cultural shift from the Mt. Gox / FTX era. At the same time, the incident shines an unforgiving spotlight on Solana token security across the industry.Altcoin ETFs get their own “report card.” XRP stands out as the clear winner thanks to regulatory clarity and relentless ETF inflows, with shrinking exchange supply and a big regulatory win for Ripple’s RLUSD stablecoin in Abu Dhabi. In sharp contrast, Grayscale’s Dogecoin ETF launch flops, exposing just how little appetite institutions have for pure meme exposure, while Solana funds see mixed fortunes as profit-taking in some products is offset by inflows into staking ETFs that offer real yield. Meme coins fare poorly overall, with on-chain data showing massive inflows back to exchanges and charts signaling bearish continuation rather than genuine reversals.The episode then goes global, showing how stablecoins are quietly becoming the financial rails of both high finance and crisis economies. You’ll hear how Visa and major European market operators are integrating USDC and euro-pegged stablecoins into real settlement systems, even as S&P downgrades Tether’s USDT and spooks parts of China’s gray crypto market. At the same time, hyperinflation in Bolivia, Venezuela, Argentina and high inflation in Turkey are pushing citizens and businesses to treat stablecoins as de facto legal tender — or to chase risky altcoin gains just to outrun collapsing purchasing power.
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    36 mins
  • Trump’s Crypto Fortune Melts Down as Bitcoin Breaks the $80K Line

    Trump’s Crypto Fortune Melts Down as Bitcoin Breaks the $80K Line
    Nov 24 2025
    Bitcoin just erased an entire year’s worth of gains—and took a chunk of the Trump family’s fortune with it. In this episode, recorded Monday, November 24th, 2025, we walk straight into one of the most violent phases of the current crypto cycle and unpack what real capitulation looks like when leverage, politics, and AI hype all collide.We start with Bitcoin’s historic rout. After spending 2025 grinding higher on institutional optimism and spot ETF euphoria, BTC has crashed from an October peak near $126,000 to a terrifying low around $80,548. That breakdown doesn’t just sting; it retroactively wipes out the entire 2025 bull thesis and pushes year-to-date returns negative. We explain why the break of the “new floor” at $97,000 mattered so much, how the $80,000 support level became the final line of defense, and why a deeply oversold RSI reading of 26 is both a potential bounce signal and a warning that a structural bear market could still be ahead. You’ll hear how a failure to hold $80,000 could, in some of the more extreme technical models, open the door to 60% more downside toward the $32,000 zone.From there, we lift the hood on the mechanics of the crash. This isn’t just “people selling”; it’s a leverage-driven cascade. We break down more than a billion dollars in liquidations, with over half a billion in Bitcoin alone, and explain in plain language how margin calls, forced selling, and derivatives positioning can create a self-feeding downward spiral. You’ll learn how negative funding rates, collapsing futures open interest, and a heavily skewed options market—with traders paying rich premiums for puts—signal an extreme risk-off environment. We also walk through how delta hedging by options dealers turns fear into actual spot selling, effectively turning protective puts into gasoline poured on the fire around the key $90,000 and $93,000 levels.Then we follow the money into the ETF arena and institutional flows. The same U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs that powered the 2025 bull run are now bleeding. We look at sustained multi-billion-dollar outflows, including BlackRock’s transfers of thousands of BTC and tens of thousands of ETH to Coinbase Prime and roughly $2.5 billion in redemptions from their products alone. Combined with other issuers, spot ETFs have seen about $3.5 billion pulled in November, making it one of the worst months since launch. We frame this not as simple profit-taking but as institutional capitulation and mandated de-risking in a macro environment where the Federal Reserve may delay rate cuts and global liquidity is thinning.That brutal macro meets a very specific story: the Trump family’s crypto-linked wealth. We outline how a highly concentrated ecosystem—Trump Media & Technology Group (DJT), Trump-branded meme coins, World Liberty Financial, and mining stakes—has seen more than a billion dollars in paper wealth evaporate since early September. You’ll hear how DJT stock cratered from post-merger highs above $43 to around $10, erasing roughly $800 million from Donald Trump’s stake, and why a company with under a million dollars in quarterly revenue was ever valued in the billions. We look at the crashes in Trumpy and WLFI tokens, the drawdown in American Bitcoin Corporation, and how this all showcases the dangers of tying political brand, speculative tokens, and leveraged mining to a single “crypto always goes up” narrative—even as Eric Trump publicly insists this is a “great buying opportunity.”
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    32 mins
  • Bitcoin as Digital Gold, Ethereum on the Edge

    Bitcoin as Digital Gold, Ethereum on the Edge
    Nov 19 2025
    If watching the crypto charts lately has given you motion sickness, this episode is your seatbelt and your barf bag in one. The hosts dig into a market that has shed more than a trillion dollars in value in just six weeks, with Bitcoin crashing from an early-October peak above $126,000 to briefly slipping under the psychologically crucial $90,000 line. They unpack why this correction was not only brutal in size, but frightening in speed—and how that compressed 42-day sell-off has magnified every ounce of fear in the system.From there, the episode zooms in on the institutions. On one side, you have sovereign wealth conviction: Abu Dhabi’s funds quietly tripling their stake in BlackRock’s IBIT ETF and openly classifying Bitcoin as “digital gold,” a long-term reserve asset instead of a speculative toy. On the other side, you have fragile commitment: a billion-dollar Ethereum Digital Asset Trust, fully capitalized and ready to launch, abruptly canceled after a single sharp sell-off, and Sharplink Gaming staring down roughly half a billion dollars in unrealized ETH losses as it moves tens of millions to Galaxy Digital in what looks like a de-risking pivot.The hosts then step back from price and examine the financial plumbing being built underneath the chaos. Kraken has confidentially filed for a blockbuster IPO after a funding round valuing the exchange at around $20 billion, backed not by crypto VCs but by Wall Street titans like Citadel Securities and Jane Street. Meanwhile Bullish, already public and newly profitable with surging revenues, is watching its stock trade below its IPO price even as it doubles down on real-world asset tokenization and seeks SEC approval to act as a transfer agent for U.S. securities. It is a paradoxical moment where the fundamentals are strengthening but the market refuses to reward them.Altcoins get their own whirlwind tour. You’ll hear how the first XRP ETF launch turned into a textbook “buy the rumor, sell the news” event, why Dave Portnoy is calling XRP his 10x bet as he plows over $2 million back into the market, and how Zcash has stunned traders with a 1,000% rally powered by a roaring privacy narrative. In stark contrast, Shiba Inu is dissected as an object lesson in failed tokenomics, with burn mechanics that barely dent a supply still sitting in the hundreds of trillions and a price increasingly driven by inertia rather than genuine scarcity or utility.Then the episode accelerates into the tech revolution that is marching forward as if price doesn’t matter. The hosts break down Bitrue’s bold experiment plugging a roster of cutting-edge AI models directly into copy trading, letting users hand a slice of their portfolios to automated machine decision-making. They explore the GNOT biometric hardware wallet that tries to kill the seed phrase once and for all with finger-vein scanning and zero-knowledge proofs, as well as Falcon Finance’s DeFi staking vaults that offer double-digit yields in a synthetic dollar with strict lockups designed to prevent DeFi-style bank runs.Real-world utility takes center stage with Minipay, a Celo-based stablecoin wallet from Opera that now lets users in Latin America spend digital dollars directly through dominant local rails like PIX in Brazil and Mercado Pago in Argentina. Suddenly, stablecoins are not just speculative instruments; they are rent, groceries, and everyday commerce in two huge economies.But every leap forward comes with a darker shadow. The episode highlights a stealthy cryptojacking campaign, Iron Urn 440, hijacking Ray clusters—the same distributed compute infrastructure that powers much of the AI boom—to mine coins in the background. Attackers use AI-generated payloads and carefully throttle CPU usage to avoid detection, turning high-end AI infrastructure into an invisible money-printing machine.
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    42 mins
  • The Crypto Currents: XRP, BTC, and Market Dynamics

    The Crypto Currents: XRP, BTC, and Market Dynamics
    Nov 15 2025
    If the crypto market feels like trying to read a tide chart in the middle of a hurricane, this episode is for you. In this Deep Dive, we unpack the paradox of record-breaking institutional milestones colliding with extreme fear and brutal volatility across Bitcoin, XRP, and the broader altcoin market.We start with XRP, where a staggering $336 million vanished from centralized exchanges in a single day. You’ll hear what that kind of rapid outflow usually signals, why analysts see it as a high-conviction, “smart money” move rather than panic, and how it ties into Ripple’s own strategic positioning. From there, we break down Ripple’s fresh security warnings about sophisticated scams: fake livestreams, deepfake executives, and giveaway cons that specifically target XRP holders when excitement is at its peak.Then we zoom in on the ETF story that’s quietly changing the entire narrative. You’ll learn what’s known about a major institution’s XRP ETF application, why ISO 20022 compliance matters so much for global banking rails, and how one new product – the Canary XRP ETF – pulled in roughly $245 million on day one. We walk through the math behind extreme price models that imagine XRP at $700–$1,000 under a scenario of sustained multi-ETF inflows, and we make it very clear what’s hard data, what’s assumption, and what remains pure modeling rather than prediction.From there, we widen the lens to the whole market mood. The crypto Fear & Greed Index has cratered to 16, deep in “extreme fear,” even as Bitcoin revisits key support and tens of millions in leveraged longs are wiped out in a single move. We contrast that retail panic with institutional behavior: Bitcoin ETFs seeing outflows on one side, while players like Harvard’s endowment reportedly ramp up their BTC exposure on the other. You’ll hear how some analysts interpret this as a tactical rotation into future Ethereum and altcoin ETFs rather than a simple “risk off” exit.We also check in on Ethereum’s relative strength near key support, HBAR’s possible “bear trap” setup, and worrying signs from Shibarium as daily transactions plunge more than 50% overnight. Along the way, we revisit the old but intensifying debate over privacy and transparency via Zcash’s breakout and its ideological clash with Bitcoin maximalists.In the final act, we connect crypto to the broader transformation of global finance and enforcement. You’ll learn how Tether is morphing from stablecoin issuer into venture investor with a possible €1 billion robotics deal funded by USDT liquidity, and how BlackRock’s tokenized treasury fund BUIDL, now expanded to BNB Chain and accepted as collateral on Binance, hints at a future where tokenized real-world assets sit at the heart of crypto markets.We end with the security front: the FBI’s Operation Endgame hitting malware rings targeting crypto wallets, Indian and Thai police disrupting international scam networks, and a major exchange CEO putting up a 10 BTC bounty to hunt down attackers. All of it feeds into one core question we leave you with: What matters more for the long-term stability of this asset class—successful tokenization by giants like BlackRock, or the ability of global law enforcement to keep up with cybercrime?Throughout the episode, we act as your impartial guide through complex data, narratives, and numbers. Nothing here is financial advice—just the context you need to understand how fear, utility, and institutional capital are colliding in real time.
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    31 mins