00:00 Scott Melker
JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon went on National TV last week and was so flustered about the Clarity Act and the competition from the crypto industry that he dropped a massive S-bomb, live. We also have Michael Saylor selling Bitcoin on behalf of strategy for the first time in history. We got a lot to talk about. Let’s go.
00:34 Scott Melker
What is up everybody? Welcome to the Daily Wolf on Yahoo Finance. I am your host, Scott Melker, also known as the Wolf of All Streets. Now,
00:46 Scott Melker
we’ve got 15 minutes to unpack the news and some days seemingly there’s nothing to talk about, and some days there’s seemingly everything to talk about. And we like to pride ourselves here on sort of separating the signal from the noise and we have a lot of signal today. Now, the first story is the one that I alluded to there in the intro. Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan went on TV and absolutely lost his cool again about the crypto industry, specifically about Coinbase and Brian Armstrong and definitely about the Clarity Act. We’re just going to go ahead and show you the entire video and then we’ll unpack it. Here we go.
01:29 Jamie Dimon
So, you know, this is it’s complicated and the government needs to do it thoughtfully. If they don’t do it thoughtfully, it will be because it’ll be a huge problem.
01:36 Maria Bartiromo
So are you happy with the way the Clarity Act is turning out?
01:38 Jamie Dimon
No.
01:39 Jamie Dimon
No, because it it it it allows them to effectively pay interest on deposits, stable coins or something like that without the protection that they should have and it doesn’t do anything for AML/BSA. and has almost no legal protections. So no, it’s the banks will not accept it that way. And they won’t accept And the ABA, the small banks, the credit unions, not just the big guys. I’m not worried about stable coin, but if it happen, I’m telling you, I would have nothing to do with it and it would eventually blow up on its own. Okay? But that’s my personal thing, but I do understand the concern of all the other banks. So,
02:12 Maria Bartiromo
Well, the markup is coming. I mean, what are you gonna do about it?
02:14 Jamie Dimon
It is, we’ll fight it. If we lose, we lose, and we’ll live.
02:16 Maria Bartiromo
Yeah. Okay.
02:17 Jamie Dimon
But it will be fought. This will not be no one’s gonna bow down to this guy, okay, or that company. And he’s the only one.
02:24 Maria Bartiromo
Yeah.
02:25 Jamie Dimon
And he’s spending hundreds of millions of dollars in Washington on this thing.
02:28 Maria Bartiromo
He said he’s he’s representing the whole industry.
02:30 Jamie Dimon
He’s full of shit.
02:32 Maria Bartiromo
Well, um, we’re gonna watch that one.
02:35 Speaker B
Yeah.
02:36 Maria Bartiromo
Wow. Well, I mean this is turning into a big fight between the whole, you know, each industry. And and and you’re talking about blockchain and and and getting blockchain out?
02:49 Jamie Dimon
We do blockchain.
02:50 Maria Bartiromo
You’ve been doing that for a long time.
02:51 Jamie Dimon
We have connections. We have we’re we’re going to do it. I think it’s a legitimate technology. I think stable coin could be a legitimate payment system.
02:59 Scott Melker
Her reaction was absolutely priceless. Now, let’s remember that Jamie Dimon has called this a Ponzi scheme. He said it’s a fraud. anyone at JP Morgan who touches Bitcoin will be fired. I mean, he’s had every expletive in the world for it. He just generally doesn’t drop him on national TV. I mean, this is what this guy is. If you’re in Game of Thrones, he’s the evil king, right? And those people sleep with their sisters on that show, which is crazy. Not saying that he would ever do that. I’m just saying on that show,
03:26 Scott Melker
that’s something that we’ve seen happen, right? And so listen, he’s saying all the quiet parts out loud, as I alluded to before, right? And what’s very, very interesting here is that we have this situation now where the banks are trying to kill the Clarity Act because they don’t like the compromise, uh, that was proposed on stablecoin yield. But if they kill the Clarity Act, what people don’t realize is that the Genius Act, which has already passed into law, is actually worse for the banks. It’s a really interesting nuance that I don’t think people are really understanding. The Genius Act bans issuers like Tether and Circle from allowing yield, but they don’t then extend that to the second parties like Coinbase and the other exchanges.
03:57 Scott Melker
Right now, Coinbase has the best possible scenario. They can offer yield or rewards or whatever you want to call it to their customers just for holding USDC on the platform. So Jamie Dimon here is advocating basically to kill the Clarity Act, or at least to fix the Clarity Act so it doesn’t offer these yields, but what they’re doing is actually going to kill it, dead on arrival, and they’re going to be in a worse situation.
04:22 Scott Melker
So basically you have Jamie Dimon losing his cool on TV because he’s crying like a baby over a problem that he can’t fix. He’s basically backed into a corner. Now, this isn’t the first time, right? This is a this is a series. He he called Brian Armstrong full of shit in Davos last year. Then Brian Armstrong famously killed the Clarity Act uh, earlier this year by saying that he was not happy with the stable coin compromise. And then we ended up with the stable coin compromise. So if this was a series of things happening, according to Brian Armstrong who posted this very meme, this is the series, heated rivalry.
04:54 Scott Melker
Jamie Dimon came after him and then Brian Armstrong posted this and I’m not sure if Brian Armstrong knows what the show heated rivalry is actually about. Look it up.
05:03 Scott Melker
Look it up because I think he thinks they’re going to fight, but in the show. So, listen, this is developing, right? We all know that if this doesn’t happen by July 4th, the Clarity Act is dead and that would actually be probably a massive win for the crypto industry on the stablecoin side, but a massive loss for the crypto industry on all the other things that we need to see from the Clarity Act.
05:22 Scott Melker
Gary Gensler and the anti-crypto army nearly destroyed the American crypto industry by driving Bitcoin crypto perpetuals and innovation offshore. Now, when I read that to you last week, I said crypto perpetuals, oddly specific. Well, now we know why because he was telegraphing it right ahead. Here you go. CFTC approves Bitcoin perpetual futures trading in United States at Coinbase, Kalshi. So, Wall Street Journal somewhat got that wrong.
05:46 Scott Melker
So what they did is they actually approved them on Kalshi. That is factually true, but, uh, for Coinbase, the CFTC issued a no action letter allowing US customers to access Deribit perpetual futures offshore. So now, it’s semantics, but if we’re just being very specific about how this happened, Kalshi actually got the direct approval. Coinbase got a CFTC no action letter that through a loophole allows them to do it. If you remember, they bought Deribit, I believe last year. was the at the time the biggest acquisition in crypto history and Deribit is the largest futures and options exchange in crypto, which was not accessible to United States users.
06:17 Scott Melker
Now, there might be something to this nuance, and what might be to this nuance is that one Donald Trump Jr. sits on the board of one Kalshi. Not saying it’s a coincidence. But you got a truth from the president telling you exactly what’s going to happen. Then Michael Seelig, who is the only commissioner at the CFTC right now, every other seat is vacant.
06:40 Scott Melker
And you now have perpetual futures going live in the United States of America. and for those who don’t know what they are, they’re basically futures contracts that happen in real time. This is something that’s very unique to crypto. It’s a product that was created by Bitmex and then adopted across the entire crypto industry and now it’s coming to every market near you. But one side is basically short, one side is long, and it’s a futures contract that’s happening in real time. So depending on which way the general market is positioned, either longs or shorts pay a percentage, it’s called a funding rate that changes every eight hours to be long or to be short.
07:22 Scott Melker
It’s a much better way to trade futures, but, uh, it definitely encourages a bit of degeneracy and whether we like it or not, that is coming to a market near you. Now, if Jamie Dimon was not the biggest story of the day, certainly this morning, we had a huge announcement that would be the biggest story of the day right here. Michael Saylor’s strategy sells 32 Bitcoin for $2.5 million for the first time since 2022.
08:04 Scott Melker
Now you know that I love Spaceballs, and I love a good Spaceballs meme, and we’ve we’ve had Michael Saylor as Mega-Maid. Well, it’s Mega-Maid. She’s gone from suck to blow. If you can’t see that, he’s blowing out all the Bitcoins and firing on the Earth. Yeah, it got really ugly out there. Now, come on. Let’s be intellectually honest about what happened here. He told us weeks ago that he was going to inoculate the market, and selling 32 Bitcoin for just over $2 million when you hold billions of dollars worth of over 800,000 Bitcoins is just that. A very small sample to inoculate the market.
08:31 Scott Melker
I’m still not sure I ever expected to hear this headline that Michael Saylor or Strategy more specifically would ever be selling Bitcoin. Really have to pinch myself. I’ve broken this down for you a number of times. STRC, which is his perpetual, uh, which which is his, excuse me, security, is backed by Bitcoin held by Microstrategy. The SEC certainly needs to see that if it’s going to be uh marketed as backed by Bitcoin that he’s willing to sell some of that Bitcoin to fund those dividends.
09:05 Scott Melker
That’s exactly why they said they sold this. I would if I was a betting man, say that by next week, we will see Michael Saylor buying Bitcoin massively again and this will be a rounding area. I think they are just showing the regulators and the market that they are willing to sell. But listen, there is the flip side where he said he would never sell his Bitcoin. I’ve showed you the tweets where he said sell a kidney but never sell your Bitcoin.
09:31 Scott Melker
he’s doing exactly what he needs to do to keep the Bit-Vac that I just showed you going. But it’s part of a broader story because even though he’s a small seller, we’ve had some very big sellers in the market. like this one I told you about last week. Massive 1.26 billion sale of BlackRock’s IBIT was likely a rapid exit by a large investor. So I told you about this last week. We were trying to unpack the fact that there were actually very few redemptions. So we had the huge sale, but we didn’t have the outflows to align with it, which was really the the big story. We started to get those outflows over the next few days. But what I think is more interesting about this story is that we now know that they sold at a discount. So basically, uh, unloaded a bunch of Bitcoin at a two or 3% discount.
10:14 Scott Melker
So we’re willing to take, you know, a 20 plus million dollar hit on that sale just to get out. So you have to be wondering who it is that was able and willing to sell that much. and in filings, there’s nobody who recently filed anytime that we can look that filed holding that much IBIT. so we really don’t know. And of course, the other seller in the market being, uh, retail or institutions or whoever we believe is holding the ETFs. We have 10 consecutive days of outflows on the Bitcoin spot ETF.
10:41 Scott Melker
So that is a record 2.97 billion drained. It’s the most we’ve seen in general, the most we’ve seen for a streak. So, gotta think that Bitcoin’s actually doing relatively well when you have this many massive sellers in the market. I find it actually, uh, relatively impressive that price has held up. But we have Saylor breaking his doctrine, even though he told us he was going to do so, massive outflows from the Bitcoin ETFs, and of course, one very big unknown seller who was willing to take an absolute bath to get out of their IBIT position relatively quickly. That’s that story. The next story is a massive uptick in tokenization. I’ve got three stories that align with this one as well.
11:23 Scott Melker
Paxos securities settlement company receives clearing agency registration from the US Securities and Exchange Commission. This is huge because this is the first crypto native agency, much like the DTCC for for stocks, is going to be able to clear tokenized stocks. When everything becomes tokenized, we now have a crypto player that can plug directly into the rails and plumbing of Wall Street to participate in this market.
11:51 Scott Melker
Citi predicts the tokenized securities market will grow to 5.5 trillion by 2030. Listen, that’s still a rounding error relative to the amount of volume that’s done, uh, in securities, obviously trading. But this is Citibank, right? This isn’t a small player giving some random prediction. They’re taking a look at this market and realize that as we see tokenization happening, and this is an unstoppable train that is happening, that this is going to grow exponentially. Now, remember the market cap of stable coins, which really are tokenized assets, just tokenized dollars. It’s only 300 and something billion right now. Right? So this is a almost a 20X in stable coin plus tokenization of everything from here in the next four years, three and a half years really. So this is a massive massive growth in this market that’s being projected here.
13:00 Scott Melker
And the final tokenization story I have right here, I think this is just massive. And it doesn’t seem like in the news cycle that this is being uh, focused on yet. I mean, it did just break about five hours ago. But exclusive Binance adds US stocks in Super Ash app push, plans to launch tokenized shares. I mean, I believe that they’re launching 7,000 plus US stocks and ETFs. This is to non-US users, remember Binance is not available in the United States, with zero commission and fractional shares from $5.
13:46 Scott Melker
So they’re doing this via their broker dealer Nest trading and custing with Alpaca and it’ll pay out in USDC, USDT or BNB. and they’ve said that B-stocks are coming in weeks so that users can tokenize their own stock holdings into BNB chain tokens. I mean, think about how fast this is all happening and tie it back to our friend Jamie Dimon there at the beginning, right? He’s worried about stable coins obviously and deposit flight.
14:24 Scott Melker
he really just doesn’t like Bitcoin and he doesn’t really like the stable coin side of this. But Binance now squarely in competition for the super app. We’ve seen Robin Hood doing this, Kraken offers their tokenized stocks and we know that Coinbase has said that they also intend to be an everything app. All of them adding stock trading, all of them having crypto trading. Imagine what happens when all of that is tokenized, when you’re just holding a wallet and your stocks, your dollars, your crypto, your ETFs, your retirement funds, literally everything is right there tokenized. You can move it back and forth seamlessly, take margin against the entire portfolio as one, stake it and earn a yield on the entire portfolio.
15:10 Scott Melker
You can see why Jamie Dimon is over there dropping S-bombs on Fox News. That story is going to continue to develop. I still don’t believe Clarity passes. We’ve got one month to get it done. And the irony is that he’ll be in a worse situation than where he started if that happened. Saylor sold, no big deal. It’s all I got for you today. We’ll be back tomorrow. Peace.
