Remy Blaire: We are nearly halfway through the most historically bullish month of the year for Bitcoin. Over the past two months, the crypto major has made two big moves that led to a 40% rebound from its bear market lows. And this kind of price action isn’t unusual for bull markets. During bull markets this decade, Bitcoin has surged at least 15% in a single week an average of four and a half times a year.
And in alts, Hyperliquid has pulled back over 15% from its all-time highs set in September. The token’s major breakout began back in August, when Trump said the CFTC is working hard to bring the decentralized futures platform. Well, joining me to break down the crypto market action is Bryan Courchesne, founder of DAiM. Bryan, great to have you back on the show. Thank you so much for joining us.
So let’s start out by looking at Bitcoin. We have been looking at range-bound trading in this historically bullish October. But with 15% moves common in bull markets, do you think the big jumps we’ve seen over the past two months signal that we are indeed back in a bull market?
Bryan Courchesne: Yes, we firmly think we’re back in a bull market. And that move was pretty significant. It’s great to see an asset with such a large dollar value move up that much. So the move over the second half of September, really over that one-week period, was above 20%. And as you showed there in the chart, yes, Bitcoin on average since 2020 has four and a half weeks a year where it goes up by 15% or more over that seven-day period.
So we’ve only had one this year. We’re in the start of the bull market. We think that there’s one to two more, and we’ll try to do a little simple math here, you know, without some calculators. But Bitcoin at 81,500, a 15% move is going to put us around 94,000. That’d be a great way to end the year. But that would just make two of these 15% weeks. If we end up having three, we might be around 108 to finish the year. That’d be a great place.
Remy Blaire: Yeah. And while we continue to monitor these levels for Bitcoin, we oftentimes hear about Bitcoin reaching the lofty $1 million mark in the long term. So where do you fit in on this thesis, and how can mutual funds actually make this milestone happen?
Bryan Courchesne: Yeah. So there are a lot of public figures out there that say Bitcoin will one day go to a million. Here at DAiM, we wanted to look and see how that could be possible. Where is the buyer going to come from? And right now, even though there are the Bitcoin ETFs out there, they don’t trade at the same price as Bitcoin, right? They have their own price. So clients have a little bit of a problem correlating what they see in the news and headlines versus the price of the ETFs.
Then when they talk to their advisors about it, the advisor is troubled with the question, should my client own Bitcoin? And when they think about it and they look at Bitcoin alone, whether it’s the ETF in their statement, and there’s a pullback in the price, it really stands out in their portfolio. There’s a red line, and it looks kind of big.
Whereas if we start to see mutual funds come online, and this could be somewhere in the next few years, where they take something that’s a diversified portfolio, a 60/40 stock-bond portfolio, let’s say reduce the bond side by 5%, add that 5%, make that Bitcoin. Now the advisor can go, should my client own this diversified investment product that contains Bitcoin? And that one line in there will look better. Even if Bitcoin pulls down a little bit, it won’t show as much.
And this will give many advisors an easier way to get their clients into it. That’ll make them an automatic buyer to buy more Bitcoin. A lot of volume could flow into this space, and I think that that’s what, over time, can get us to $1 million. But if you’re waiting for that to happen, waiting for your advisor to think about it, you’re going to miss out on the price appreciation before then. So you’re going to want to look to get allocated now.
Remy Blaire: Well, Bryan, while I have you here, I do want to get your take on Hyperliquid, which is up around 80% in the past six months, outperforming the majors along with fellow alts including Solana and XRP. So there has been some chatter that it could flip XRP’s market cap, despite being less than one-fourth of that currently. So give us a dose of reality here. Weigh in for us.
Bryan Courchesne: Yeah. Reality, this is what I like to say. So XRP’s and Hyperliquid’s forward price projections through 2028 are two completely different stories. I’ll start with XRP. Look, it does a great job marketing. However, it’s getting old. It’s ten years old. And in fact, they just discovered a bug that’s been in it for ten years that could actually inflate the supply. So there goes an investment case out the window.
And then talking about it being the financial layer, where Ripple is going to help settle a lot of stuff in financial networks and credit cards, we saw Circle, the company, and its network take that business, and we’re seeing credit card companies settle on what Circle has developed. So I think when Bitcoin goes up, it struggles to go up. When Bitcoin stumbles a bit in this bull market, we think XRP is going to go down a bit more.
Over to Hyperliquid. Hyperliquid’s new. It’s nearing two years old. It’s got a great founder in Jeff Yan. This is the trade-all, trade-everything exchange, where you can actually add leverage into the product. What’s also really great about it is, people may have heard, where are pre-IPO stocks trading? And a lot of hype came from when SpaceX was going public, that a derivative of SpaceX was already trading on Hyperliquid with leverage. So there’s more of this to come. And users themselves can post and make markets. So it’s already doing about the same amount of volume as Binance. And we think this thing is the future here, to operate the underlying financial layer.
Remy Blaire: And Bryan, finally, before I let you go, I do want to get your take on the regulatory landscape. We saw a flurry of rulemaking announcements coming out from the CFTC and SEC following the failed CLARITY Act Senate cloture vote. But [unclear: “Kathy’s”] proposals on things such as tokenization, as well as frameworks for RIAs, continue to inspire bullish price action.
Bryan Courchesne: Yes. In fact, look, with CLARITY, there was a lot of stuff in it that had to do more with what politicians are buying and selling and how they’re doing it, versus really the framework of how crypto can operate. And I think we’re getting a more robust set of guidelines now that each independent body is looking at these and going in and saying, hey, this is what exchanges and broker-dealers and advisors can do. Hey, this is what tokenized assets can be. This is what stablecoins can be. To us, it looks a lot clearer now.
What they put in place will not be permanent law. We would need something like the CLARITY Act down the road. But this should be in place for several years, running underneath it. As companies implement and play by these rules, they could become solidified law in the future. This is a very good thing.
Remy Blaire: Well, Bryan, always great talking to you. Thank you so much for weighing in on what we’re seeing across the crypto landscape. Appreciate your time as well as your perspective.
Bryan Courchesne: Thanks for having me.
