Now, it's the middle of the week and it's midday. So the midweek trade, we're seeing Bitcoin at around seventy eight thousand. Now, the crypto major topping about eighty thousand dollars on Monday night and coming off its best week in over three years. Now, sentiment has already flipped and now on greed, according to CoinMarketCap. So joining me is crypto market analyst Ray Salmon to discuss this and more. Ray, thanks for joining us today.
Thanks for having me.
All right, Ray, so crypto is waking up last week, and now bulls are eyeing an end to the bear market that began last October. So what are the factors in crypto's comeback?
Well, to be honest, Johnny, the regime has clearly shifted from sell the rips to buy the dips, and people are buying to sell now instead of selling to buy back later, right? And after a long period of low volatility and high apathy in terms of investor sentiment, The rally through $70K, through that resistance, appears to have put a final nail in the coffin of the bull market. Last week what we saw was this historic $4.5 billion in liquidations across futures markets. alongside equally sized volumes in the Bitcoin ETFs. And that's changed the mood among investors. Over the last five trading sessions, the Bitcoin ETFs sold $2 billion in inflows. BlackRock's IBIT, the volumes there showed the largest buy side skew in two years. And the year-to-date flows into the Bitcoin ETF, the IBIT one with BlackRock is now positive. So I think the data shows that not only was Bitcoin trading at a discount, was its volatility suppressed for a long period of time, but now sentiment and flow from the retail investor side and from the institutional investor side are now moving in tandem on the buy side.
All right. So Ray, I want to talk about hyper liquid because we also saw a huge spike last week after the president's White House crypto gathering. And we also saw ETH and Solana outperforming Bitcoin as the rally got going. So what are you paying attention to when it comes to these ALTS?
Well, if Trump mentions a stock or a cryptocurrency, the price tends to go up, and that's a little bit of what happened last week. But really, the Crypto Summit and the Trump administration calling for immediate action on the Clarity Act, a Senate floor vote is supposedly scheduled for September 15th. If it can pass in the Senate and get to the president's desk, he is committed to signing it. So I think the price action that you saw in Ethereum and DeFi related tokens and hyper liquid is kind of aligned with this trend of tokenization, right? Being the main story, tokenization of real world assets. tokenization of IPOs, tokenization of commodities and futures like oil commodities, oil futures contracts which trade over the weekends at Hyperliquid. There's been deep interest in that so the movement in Hype Token, Solana, Ethereum is kind of aligned with this hope that Clarity is going to get out of the get out of the Senate and to the president's desk and become law.
All right. So now I want to shift over to some financial market news. So ahead of the Fed chair Kevin Warsh's Jackson Hole debut. Can the Treasury kind of ease a force to the Fed to keep rates unchanged at this moment. What are we looking at here.
CME FedWatch tool, I think has a rating of, it might be 30%. The Fed is likely to hold. PCE data, which came out today, shows that inflation is, it's still running above the 2% target that the Fed has, but core inflation is still kind of in line with what the expectation is. So that gives the Fed a little bit of wiggle room over the next few FOMCs to decide is a hold on rates more appropriate? Is a rate hike more appropriate? So I think you see the market pricing that appropriately. The bigger story is that Bessant backstopped the bond market by essentially committing to yield curve control and quantitative easing again. And that's the narrative that's kind of given stocks a boost and has also given crypto a boost. So The new narrative at the moment, at least within fintech and crypto, is that the debasement trade is back because yield curve control is likely to spike inflation and diminish the purchasing power of the dollar. It'll be interesting to see how Fed Chair Warsh addresses what the U.S. Treasury is doing and whether or not there's a conflict between the Treasury and the Fed now in terms of what their objectives are.
All right. So, Ray, I want to talk to you about what variables are you watching across both the DeFi and the TradeFi markets moving in the near term?
Clarity, obviously. If that can become law, then it'll make it easier for B2C and B2B kind of products and services to launch and sandbox in the United States between TradFi, crypto, tokenization, integration of blockchain until all of TradFi. So I think that's still the main linchpin that everyone's waiting for. Beyond that, do capital flows into crypto? Are we going to see kind of like the end of the AI trade, right? And more sustainable capital flows into crypto and does that lift crypto prices sustainably over the long term? Or will Anthropic file its S1 this week and IPO in September and all the focus is back again on the stock markets and equities, similar to what we saw with the SpaceX trade, where basically all the money was pulled out of crypto and went into the AI trade, right? So I think that's something that investors should keep their mind on.
No, it's definitely something that I think everyone will be looking at again. Thank you so much for joining us, Ray. Appreciate your time.
Thanks for having me.
