Vieten: Bitcoin Rallying to $175K Amid Restored Crypto Sentiment

Clarity Act is upon us. It's back on the table for September 15th. Let's ask Brian Wheaton, senior research analyst at Siebert. It's great to see you. Pretty interesting to see the run up that we saw for the month of August. I mean, that was pretty exciting, right? I saw an Ethereum did even better than Bitcoin. What do you attribute the run up in the past? I know you wanted to sort of look at this chronologically. Yeah it's a great question, Nicole. So I think what we had in May and June was sentiment overshot a little bit. So you had strategy was talking about selling Bitcoin for the first time. And I think that spooked the market. So sentiment really overshot. You had that low on June 30th. And then since then, you know, you have had a number of positive developments. You've had a little bit more of the debasement trade coming back. So that's good for Bitcoin. You've also had the SEC, CFTC have come out with some favorable guidance for the next couple of years. And then you also had the president, you know, talking about the potential U.S. accumulation of Bitcoin and digital assets. So a number of factors that have kind of fueled the. And there was also a big short squeeze the last couple of weeks. Yeah, that's a good point. That's a good point about the short squeeze too. So Etherium was up about 28% or so above 25% for August. We saw Bitcoin up above 20% gain for August. And now what I mean what is going to be the next thing to watch. I mean people can sit and wait and they've been pretty good at it because they got they got used to seeing it at over 100 right. For a while for Bitcoin. And now we're here at 33 now. So I'm sorry. We're here at that's not the right number. I will get you the right number 77,000. That makes more sense. 77,000. So how do we get back to the 100,000. Yeah. Do we. So I think definitely next stop 100,000. We have a 12 month price target of 175,000. So at some point mid next year. And I do think that, you know, the way that the way that you get there is you have favorable. So we think we're kind of in like the January 2023 timeframe. So right after the bear market, we do think June 30th was the low. And from here, we think we'll get people really excited is you do have a real demand catalyst on the calendar. So that's the Genius Act implementation in January 2027. And we do think that stablecoins are, you know, a very easy and approachable consumer gateway into the industry, onto blockchain rails. We think it brings a lot more users and liquidity on chain. We think stablecoins are, you know, pretty, pretty easy. It's so easy. I think even my grandfather, who's 95 years old and tuned in, he might be able to, you know, use, use tap to pay with the stablecoin. There's already 5 billion digital payments users. So we kind of learned how to use payments. You use tap to pay during Covid. And we think it's kind of an easy consumer behavior to, you know, to teach from stablecoins. I think I want to touch on what you said about the Genius Act implementation in January of 2027. That could be a catalyst that people have not yet priced in. Is that right? Tell me more about that. We think so too. And if you think back, the last major access catalyst was the spot ETF approvals back in January of 2024. And what happened back then was once the market realized that, hey, this is coming, we are going to get spot ETFs. And that happened right around October 2023. With the grayscale ruling. We do think it's it's a similar setup where you have, you know, a real catalyst on the calendar. And back then I remember, you know, estimating maybe the inflows for ETFs could be 5 billion, 10 billion over a couple of years. And they did 20 billion over the first two months. And so we do think that there's, you know, potential that the market is underestimating this. There's also, you know, some of the largest tech platforms are testing this stuff. So Meta's got a pilot right now in a couple of countries. We think that kind of continues. And it's very interesting that you said you think the low is in for this year. And we did see it clear the 50 day moving average going above 81,000 just recently. So we will continue to watch the story. Thank you so much, Brian. It's