Transcription
What is your outlook for Bitcoin if we're in a bull market?
Today I sit down with Scott Melker, host and founder of the Wolf of Wall Street's podcast. You are a Bitcoin investor. You're holding it cuz you hope it goes up. You also hold some high conviction altcoins. Can you just give us the three or four high conviction altcoins? Maybe you've named them, but please expand, as he shares his strategies on the best ways to make money in crypto this year. I want one real tip, real piece of advice you would give your own brother or your dad. What's the best way to make money in crypto? Watch today's whole video if you want an edge investing in crypto. You do not want to miss this alpha.
If something were to like really bring the markets down again, what would that be, do you think? Like what would be the reason that happened? What should we be looking for? Like the video right now. Support me. Let's get started.
Scott Melker has millions of followers online. He's the host of the Wolf of All Streets podcast and Crypto Town Hall and the author of the Wolf Den newsletter. Scott, you've been on before. It's great to have you back. How are you doing today?
It's great. I miss having our weekly conversations that we were having there for quite a while. So, it's great to be back on camera with you.
For sure. We used to collab almost on a weekly basis talking about the crypto market and we're back here today. Now, let's just jump right in, Scott. And guys, smash the like button if you uh like us bringing on different guests. Bitcoin is booming in 2025, it seems. I mean, a month or two ago, it was it was on shaky grounds, but it seems Bitcoin's back. Very volatile, of course. I mean, it's broken all-time highs, very volatile. But kind of what has been your take on the market so far and what's kind of your outlook this year?
I I think we're in the midst of a Bitcoin bull market. There's no question about that. I think that we know what the catalysts are. We've had tremendous tailwinds, endless positive stories, the kind of stories that get missed now in the news cycle that would have changed the entire market if it was 2 years ago. And they seemingly happen on a day-to-day basis. Now, what that means for altcoins, I think, is still yet to be determined. A lot of people would have expected that in the first quarter of 2025, we'd have a mass massive alt season, right? Four-year cycle. Bitcoin goes up, consolidates sideways. We were hanging out there in the low hundreds or mid 90s for a long time. You would have expected massive moves in the altcoin market that just haven't panned out across the board as of yet, although we have seen hints of it. So, I think a lot of people still questioning what the new cycles, if we have them, are going to look like. But regardless, seeing Bitcoin doing what it's doing amidst all of this global uncertainty and shaky markets otherwise and yields rising, it's been really encouraging because it's very clearly an uncorrelated asset that's helping people's portfolios.
Uncorrelated asset that's helping people's portfolios. That's what, you know, outside investors love to hear. And so you mentioned we're in a bull market. Good to hear. And you mentioned we had all these kind of news things that you know some seems like some people have registered, some people haven't. I'm going to present you with like four big uh fundamental catalysts that we've seen over the past year or so and you tell me which one you think is the most significant for adoption and price impact. So the four big kind of things we've seen in the crypto space which are so different compared to anytime else is about a year ago Black Rock and Wall Street got in the ETFs. Uh the US is becoming crypto friendly. Uh multiple companies announcing Bitcoin treasury strategies and number four uh Middle East and general sovereign wealth funds are now investing in Bitcoin. Out of those four things, what do you think has the biggest impact on price and adoption?
Well, I think it's a nuanced question. I can say which one I think has had the biggest effect and then we could talk about which ones may potentially have the biggest effect. So, I think that unquestionably everything changed the day that the Bitcoin spot ETFs were approved. But maybe even more specifically when Larry Frink apparently got completely orange pill and the CEO of the largest asset manager in the world started going on a road show sounding like Satoshi Nakamoto, which he has, right? I think when you start to hear Larry Frink talk about the dollar exploding and Bitcoin becoming the global reserve asset, he's talking to every registered investment advisor and every hedge fund and every private equity firm in the world and they're listening because he's the most powerful voice. So I think the conversion of Larry Frink has been the biggest change that we've seen and that's reflected very clearly in the performance of the Bitcoin spot ETFs, right? IBIT itself, not even counting the other, what are there nine now or or more, IBIT itself is a top five ETF by flows, I think gold is 13, right? Just to give people an idea of how successful those products will be because I think that effectively turned around the bare market and turned Bitcoin into a bull market. Even at that point, we were only in the 40s, right? And now we're we're trading well into the hundreds generally and have made new all-time highs as you said before. That's number one. I would say that that continues. we're going to see new ETF products, but for Bitcoin, I don't see those flows stopping. Number two is obviously Donald Trump going full, you know, crypto believer that the day that he started answering questions about NFTs and started realizing that if he talked about this crypto thing, he was going to get an outsized amount of marketing dollars uh marketing attention and dollars uh to his campaign. and then him speaking in Vegas. I think those were massive catalysts almost even more than what he's done since he's been president, right? I think there's massively encouraging what's happened at the SEC and all the regulators and what they've done. But from him, I think it was realizing that there was going to be a president who was going to be participating in this industry and who was going to I guess clear the sins of the past four years was huge. Now, the others that you talked about, I think are huge catalysts moving forward. When you talk about something like sovereign wealth coming in, we're just seeing the first iterations of that. 400 million here, 500 million there. When those start becoming 1% allocations of every sovereign wealth fund or central banks adding strategic Bitcoin reserves because the United States does, I think those are unmistakably just massive, massive walls of money for an asset that has limited supply and would just have increasing demand. So the corporate side I think aligns more with that. I I think that strategy and what Michael Sailor did had a much larger effect early. I think he kind of ended that last bare market in 2020 in August whenever it was when he started with that strategy and Tesla and Square followed. That was sort of the catalyst for that bull market. Now having them all come on board is massively helpful. It'll create tremendous demand. But that story has been played to some degree.
Definitely. So as we continue to kind of try and you know predict as uh investors you have to kind of have an outlook for the future and still talking about this cycle in 2025 or maybe very beginning 2026. What is your outlook for Bitcoin if we're in a bull market?
Mid 100s I think is the conservative and safe guess. I would love to say 230, 250, 300. That's kind of what really is in my mind. But I want to be fair and say that the last bull market I said 230 or 250 or 300 and we went back under 20. So I I you know it's important to know what you don't know and the future is one of those things. But I could definitely see it happening.
Right. Listen, as we trade, we've already traded into the 110s. We'll see where it is when this is published. But to go to 130 or 150 is a rounding error at this point for Bitcoin. I also, as kind of mentioned before, I have my doubts about the cycle. You know, I I'm not saying that we go into a super cycle and it's up only or anything like that, but I don't know that we're going to have, you know, six to months to a year of great price action then three years of misery repeated over and over and over again. Altcoins have already broken the four-year cycle, as I said before. Doesn't mean they won't have their run. I I do think they will, but I just don't think we can predictably say we're going to get 85% draw downs and then we're going to go back up 10 times and 80% draw downs. I I think those days are over. I think there's more of a sustained bid. That might also mean less volatility to the upside, you know, so as it becomes a more institutionalized asset.
You're saying you kind of just generally I mean I don't like kind of like what Matt Hogan of Bitwise says for the next 5 years there's just going to be so much uh demand for a limited supply. Are you kind of saying you think we're gonna just grind up?
Yeah, we grind up and go down 30% and grind up and go down 30% and grind up. But I don't think, you know, we drop 80% and then go up 20 times and drop 80% and go up 20 times. I think the volatility has already actually been reduced. It doesn't trade so much more volatile than your average tech stock or mo even the S&P or the Q's at this point, right? So I think that uh we get the benefit of nice volatility to the upside, but of late actually Bitcoin's downside has been more capped than stocks. I think that's what has really been interesting especially since liberation day is that we've seen Bitcoin did have its quick drop to 74. But generally Bitcoin traded around the low 80s as everything else massively dumped. And if you thought that it was high, you know, high beta and three times of altitude of stocks, Bitcoin should have gone down to 40, you know, at that time. and it just had one wick down and stayed. And now as stocks kind of come back to even and wobble, Bitcoin's up 25 30% from the price it was there. Clearly not correlated. You know, markets are all over the place. And I think that that's what's going to really start to get investors attention and keep them steadily buying. I also think that the money coming in through the ETFs is stickier, right? I don't think your average ETF person is checking price on the hourly chart every day, right? I think they rebalance quarterly and say, "Wow, this Bitcoin thing did pretty good. Maybe I'll buy more.
Easy. New all-time highs were made in May. Possibly that carries into June, but the summer is coming up. And there's this saying, Scott, in uh risk assets, in equities, really in traditional finance, sell in May and go away. As during the summers, risk assets historically go into kind of a consolidation mode until Q4. Do you think that happens this year?
It could. Uh I I I wouldn't be surprised at all. you know, we've had our fair amount of euphoria. I think, you know, the Bitcoin starts to enter into that overbought phase. We know that there's still a lot of uncertainty in global markets. It doesn't mean you should sell in May and go away. I would say actually buy in May and buy in June and buy in July and hope that there was a dip that you were dollar cost averaging into and that that might be the uh more sensible approach. But I do think that it's possible that we would see some draw down during the summer. Even listen, we we talk about the 4-year cycle and how incredible 2021 was. In a matter of weeks, we went from 65,000 to under 30,000 in Bitcoin into that summer. Yes, it made a new all-time high of 69,000 the next November, late October, early November. Can't remember the exact date. Then we had this sort of Ethereum alt season into January. And then we had bare market, right? So even in the best year, the one that we think of as the greatest bull market ever, price went from 65 to under 30 in the summer.
And you mentioned, you know, there is still uncertainty. Just a month or so ago, everybody was talking about lower lows, you know, deep recession. Now, you know, today things are back up and, you know, obviously that has a lot to do with uh Trump tweaking his policies and just, you know, obviously tons of different things happening in the world. You know, if something were to like really bring the markets down again, what would that be, do you think? Like what would be the reason that happened? What should we be looking for?
I think a credit event. I think what we've seen that is concerning to most economists or people who've been watching markets for a long time is what's been happening with yields, right? The bond market clearly does not believe that the economy is strong. It doesn't believe that the stock market should be high. When you see the long bond heading to 5.1%, you know, over 5%. You see 10-year yields rising, which obviously a lot of these are benchmarks for people's mortgages and lending. When you see those things just absolutely ripping to the upside alongside stocks, it doesn't really make much sense. It says that the bond vigilantes out there are really believing that uh the United States debt is not as strong as it once was. We saw a Moody downgrade, Moody's downgrade for the first time in history. Not the biggest event, but you know, credit credit default swap spreads are absolutely flying, which is meaning that people are pricing in the risk of United States credit default. There's just a lot of uncertainty in the market. I think a lot of that has to do with tariffs. A lot of that has to do with tax cuts, right? I mean, we came into this administration with Doge being the headline every day. They're cutting a trillion dollars, $2 trillion. Now, we're talking about massive tax cuts across the board and we're seeing negotiations out of tariffs. So, I just think there's a lot of uncertainty and we know that markets hate uncertainty. So, listen, if something blows up in the credit markets, I think that would be a huge catalyst. If we see a massive dump in stocks, maybe the Fed starts cutting and that would be a catalyst. But right now, I think the Fed is kind of between a rock and a hard place and nobody knows what they're going to do. Nobody knows how the bond auctions are going to go. Just a lot of uncertainty.
Speaking about being between a rock and a hard place, let's talk about altcoins. You've briefly mentioned it your thoughts on alt season already. You know, alt season back in the day was there wasn't that many altcoins and so they all kind of ran up when uh retail came into the markets. Now there's way too many altcoins for them all to go up. So what are your kind of thoughts on alt season or you know Bitcoin losing market dominance and altcoins going up? What are your thoughts on this? Does alt season happen this year? If so, how?
I do think we get alt seasons. I think that even in the past when we talk about alt season, we glorify it. It's like the ex-girlfriend that you know that you broke up with for a reason, but a year later like you're pining for her for some reason. Remember all the bad things. It's like uh Saturday Night Live. Everybody always goes, "Oh, it's so much better back in the day." No, you're just watching the best of it. It always had like stinkers, you know? That That's exactly right. So, I I think that um alt seasons even in the past would be a couple weeks to a month before alts got absolutely destroyed by Bitcoin when it would run again and then, you know, recycle and uh repeat. So, I think you have to be more selective this time, right? I think that there are things that are just dead and will remain dead. It used to be that you could blindfold yourself and throw a dart and whatever you hit, just buy it and it'll go up 3 4x. I don't think we can do that anymore. That said, just before Bitcoin made an all-time high recently, we saw Ethereum run 40% in 2 days, right? Maybe that was a technical bounce. Maybe it was Listen, I I've been too bullish on Ethereum for too long and too early. I wildly openly admit that. But we saw everything move during that roughly week period. That was reminiscent of alt seasons of old and to me was really encouraging. Give gave me a bit more belief because if everything's going up and Bitcoin was going up, that means there's new money. That's not people cycling out of Bitcoin. Bitcoin goes down as they sell and they buy more alts. That's not the old washing machine we saw before. there was enough money in the space somewhere for everything to be catching a bid at the same time. So, that's a long-winded way of saying I think we're going to see really exciting alt action. I just think it will be short and I think some things won't move. My other concern obviously, and as you know, you're an investor in this space. You see what's being pitched. You see what's being built. I can't tell you how many projects I've heard are waiting for the right time to launch for the market conditions to be correct, right? Is that going to be like some magical one-week window and then a thousand products are going to launch with billions of tokens in supply? Like I just don't know who's going to buy all these things. So that does concern me, but I do still think there's going to be winners. Like I I think you're safe in Ethereum. I think you're safe in Solana. I think if you spread your money across some of those other layer ones, maybe we'll get into the kind of more bullish tokens. I mean Sui had a hack, so we'll see how that kind of all pans out. But the names like an Aptos and a Sui and an Avax and kind of the new hot layer ones, I think you'll capture a lot of value in those places.
Yeah, let's talk about that right now. You know, please expand because not all altcoins are going to make it obviously. And you know, things are not financial advice, but you are a Bitcoin investor. You're holding it because you hope it goes up. Um, you also hold some high conviction altcoins. Sounds like maybe Ethereum is one. Can you just give us the three or four high conviction altcoins? Maybe you've named them, but please expand.
Yeah, I somewhat did. So, I I think that um I'm still a bit of a boomer, you know, and I I I still kind of my eyes just magnetic to the sort of top 50, you know, like beyond that, I love taking very small, you know, positions in very speculative things, but they're always very small positions. I think it's very hard to choose the thing that does 100x or a 1000x. And I come from a world of investing where if your whole portfolio did 10% a year, you were crushing it. You know, like before crypto and stocks, being that I'm a bit older, like you wanted 10% a year and it was amazing. Now, if we don't get 10% 5 minutes after we buy something, we're out, right? So, I think you can get really steady, strong gains from investing in the infrastructure and the pipes and the plumbing without having to choose that one thing that does the thousand x. So, you know, if some memecoin goes absolutely ballistic on Solana and pulls thousands of X and goes, you know, to 50 billion market cap and pulls a full Trump, Solana is going to go up and you're going to make 10, 20, 30% on Solana as a result of that move because people needed Solana to trade that thing. So, for me, maybe I'm boring, but I think that that's the safest way to approach it without being in it 24/7. So listen, we'll see what hashes out with some of these hacks and things like that, but I've generally been had a large position in Sui, Aptos, say, as I said, some of the bigger ones. I think there's a lot of interesting things as you go further down into the AI space. Um, a lot of my analysts are very bullish on Bit Tensor. I haven't done like a huge deep dive and I don't own much, but it's something I'm looking to probably get more exposure to. That's Tao. Uh but otherwise then it just becomes very very speculative like there's so much incredible technology being built and so many incredible ideas but in crypto you also have you have this unique situation where like you can have an amazing idea but if the tokenomics are off it doesn't work. So it's not just
Like you start a company, and you sell a bunch of things, and your price goes up, and you have PE. Like I'm very bullish on Godzilla. Uh, it's a AAA game in my mind. I own a lot of it, but they launched it, you know, like put they were trying to push a billion-dollar valuation for people to make money. And so, I mean, how high can you really go? Can you really pull 100x on something like that? You know, I love it. I love the idea, but like if they if somehow a project like that that gains real adoption had launched at 10 or 50 million, think how happy everyone would be, you know?
So, I think that you have this strange balance of tokconomics and market cap and what's fully diluted and what's been released and having to have something that people actually want to use. Yeah. I mean, and you explained your kind of thesis around altcoins perfectly in that, hey, especially if we follow the market every day, of course, we're going to dabble in these low-cap plays, but it's not exactly and you're going to make the most money on them hopefully, but they're not high conviction. And you're not a boomer by saying you like the cryptos and the L1s that are actually like building out getting bigger and better every year. Ethereum, Solana—say I don't buy memecoins. So yeah, I'm boring.
Yeah, not boring at all. Not boring to this audience, cuz you know obviously your audience is smarter than the average YouTube audience. I think I like to think mine is. So let's really talk about like how there's plenty of ways to make money in crypto. There's trading, there's investing, there's uh, you know, selling the picks and shovels. But like I want one real tip, real piece of advice you would give your own brother or your dad. What's the best way to make money in crypto?
I do give my brother and dad advice on the best way. They're the only people I'm willing to give financial advice to because they can't hate me forever. They have to love me. They're my family. Um, dollar-cost average into Bitcoin. I think I've said it on this channel every time. How many people do you know in the altcoin space who maybe haven't built something or launched something have actually beat Bitcoin over time? Uh, unless you know there's the rare exceptions, but most people don't. I mean, you can think you if you started buying Bitcoin weekly—there's a calculator online. I would love to revisit it. I haven't. But at 69,000 dead top of the last bull market and you bought weekly all the way through because you got to remember that even at 69,000 you were just there for like a week or two, right? And then you've made so much money if you just continued buying all the way down below 20,000 and all the way back up, and you're still way up on your first buys which were the all-time high.
Mhm. Just mathematically, just slowly buying Bitcoin and holding it for a really long time and not panicking and selling. You're going to just be very, very, very hard-pressed to beat that. Now from these levels, maybe you add dollar-cost averaging some Ethereum. Maybe I'm crazy. I don't know. Maybe I just love abuse. But I bought a lot of Ethereum when it was down at 1400 at the 2018 highs. I was like, listen, it's either zero or I'm going to just absolutely make a killing on this, and I don't think it's going to zero, right? And and those other ones that I mentioned kind of like strong conviction plays, but I really think right now with Bitcoin, it's time in the market. You if you just are patient and give it time to grow, this thing's going to a million bucks. Like if you 10x your stack on Bitcoin in the next 7 to 10 years, that's an incredible investment. Incredible, incredible investment. And I really think that's like almost a given, especially if you continue dollar-cost averaging into the dips that we know will come.
And yeah, I mean, it makes sense if you've been if you've been through one full cycle. What you're saying makes total sense in retrospect because people don't think about this when it's their first cycle. Back last cycle and during the bear market when Bitcoin was trying to get above 65k and it was at 50k and 60k forever. I was like, I don't want to buy Bitcoin at 60k. Now I wish I did, you know. I wish I bought more always. That's the o that's very few things in my life I really am like, man, I should have just bought more and more and more, and I buy and I buy it. You know what I mean? It's uh I don't have that FOMO about any altcoin at this point in 2025. There were times when I did, and if I had done that, I'd probably be in really bad shape. So, I think that uh if you're talking to your dad or your brother and someone that you want to actually uh love you, if you tell them, you know, you got 10 years on this, don't judge me in 6 months if this thing goes down 40%. Just keep buying it. And uh you know, I'd love to I have just two questions as we wrap up. And guys, everybody go follow Scott Melker. I'll link his stuff below, but you know, I'd love to get your kind of thoughts on Ethereum and maybe Solana, whatever you want to, maybe just Ethereum, like where do you see Ethereum going? What's your what's your outlook for that?
Once again, I said 10 grand last cycle. So, 10 grand. Um, you know, I think there's a really reasonable place for Ethereum to sort of land at at the top of a cycle. It's a nice round number, and I think a 4x from, you know, this 4ishx from the general area that we've been trading at is very reasonable. Listen, they still have the most developers. They still have the most TVL. You still have ETFs in existence already for Ethereum. You still have Larry Fink literally tokenizing billions of dollars of assets on Ethereum. That's where the institutions are taking their next step beyond Bitcoin. They had their FUD. They had a lot of the like the foundation is falling apart. They're too woke. Vitalik's losing his mind. I heard all that stuff. I also bought a lot of Tesla when Elon Musk went on Joe Rogan and smoked weed, right? Because he's still Elon Musk, and I still thought Teslas were cool cars and that they were going to sell a lot of them, right? And it was a great thesis. And when I start hearing people tell me something's going to zero that has that much TVL and interest still in it, it's time to buy. And we're still hearing that Ethereum is going to zero.
Yeah. And I mean you're you're totally right as far as like institutional what BlackRock's doing besides Bitcoin obviously that's the number one, but like it is Ethereum where the stuff is happening—the biggest uh stablecoin market, the biggest RWA tokenized market, and uh just like in the dotcom boom I I hear the the saying back then was uh, you know, no financial adviser got in trouble for recommending like IBM or Microsoft or one of those kind of ones that were kind of kind of boring. Ethereum is kind of boring, but it's the one that nobody's going to get fired for recommending. I totally agree with that. It's already gotten the stamp of approval from the SEC. It's already compliant. There's no question marks. Easy. Scott, thank you so much for being on today. I want to give you final thoughts and just uh, you know, please uh plug your own stuff with this question. You interview some of the biggest names in crypto on your podcast? Who's been your favorite guest of late, and what did they say? What kind of um info did they give you that resonated with you?
There are so many, honestly. Uh, but you mentioned Matt Hogan from Bitwise before. I have him on the show all the time. I count him as a friend. And every time he comes on, it just reassures me that all of the narratives that are spinning in my head are accurate because of all the people, of all the pundits, of all the people with opinions, he is literally on the road seemingly 24/7, 365 on the front line having these conversations with every one of these institutions. And so I think his insight is the most valuable, and it really allows you to zoom out and see how early we are in the process of this huge wall of money coming in to crypto. He did say one thing that I've used a thousand times on my show recently, and he kind of said it in passing. We were talking about macro more, you know, what's happening. This is even before Liberation Day. And he said, "Well, now that governments have made recessions illegal," and he basically was the idea that like they'll do whatever they can to make sure the stock market never goes down more than 10 20% to show you good data to tell you to cook the data and revisit it later when you're not looking. But basically, governments just don't allow it anymore. And one day that bubble is eventually going to pop. But it was just such a funny comment at the moment. You know, governments have made recessions illegal. That was the single comment that's probably resonated with me the most. But I just love Matt. I love what they're doing at Bitwise, and and I think that uh his perspective comes from a much deeper sample size of conversations than anybody else is having right now. Cool. Altcoin Daily audience, go check out his latest content with Bitwise's Matt Hogan and type in the comments, hey, just saw you on Altcoin Daily. Scott, I'll see you uh soon. Uh, thank you so much for coming on today. Thank you, man. It was great to catch up again. Right to catch up.