Where’s the Bitcoin Rally? Why Bitwise Still Believes It’s Coming

At the end of 2025, you made a few predictions for 2026. One of them from bitwise, was that Bitcoin was going to reach a new all time high in 2026, and that the four year cycle will be broken. So far, the the four year cycle has been playing out pretty much regularly, and Bitcoin is still down 40%, roughly 40% from its previous all time high. So do you still stand by your prediction? Yes, it's a good question. Look, I think what's important to remember is that we just saw a near 30% jump in Bitcoin prices in a very short period of time. So this is a heavily momentum driven and highly reflexive asset and asset class. We only need another 10% or so to turn positive. Year to date we've seen enormous acceleration in ETF flows. We've seen ongoing purchases by Treasury companies. And from where we sit at bitwise, the investors were speaking to are really excited about where we're at in terms of developments, catalysts and fundamentals. And so I do think that we could reach a new all time high this year. I definitely think we're going to end the year positive, which would break that four year cycle of three up years and one down year. Of course, this year is supposed to be a down year based on that cycle. New all time highs is a little bit harder of a reach. But I do think with the continued momentum, strong Q4 that we typically see and a little bit of the macro uncertainty settling, we could certainly shoot to new all time highs in 2026. We'll continue in a moment. But first, I want to tell you about a product from our partner. Every year exchanges get hacked, wallets get drained and keys get stolen. Engrave zero is built to make that impossible. No USB, no Bluetooth, no WiFi. Every transaction is signed offline and verified by QR code. It's the only wallet certified EL7. The highest security rating of financial device can hold four layers of tamper protection. Biometric access. Nothing gets in. Back up your key on graphene steel. Fireproof built to outlast disasters. Track your portfolio in the liquid app. Your keys never leave the device. Engrave. Own your crypto. And now let's get back to the conversation. I still want to touch on another prediction that you made last year. So it was about ETFs. Basically, you were saying that 2026 was going to be like an amazing year for crypto ETFs, that ETFs will sort of absorb over Are 100% of the new supplies of, uh, of Bitcoin, but also other cryptocurrencies. We are seeing that there is still a net outflows at this moment from the point of view of Bitcoin ETFs. And it's at least $1 billion net outflows. We saw a huge outflows in May June. I think now it's recovering a bit. What happened during the year that you didn't expect from the point of view of the ETF inflows and outflows? Yeah it's a good question. So I think heading into 2026, if you remember we made these predictions at the end of November. So we were right after the October 10th flash crash. A bunch of liquidity left the ecosystem. And from there we entered this prolonged crypto winter. And I think the summer really was kind of the the depths of that crypto winter. We believe we bottomed. We think price is, you know, clearly recovered from the 60 K range for Bitcoin for for lower for many other alts. And what we've seen is a reversal in Bitcoin ETFs going from outflows in the summer to several billion of inflows so far in in August and September. The thing that we weren't expecting, I think that was difficult to forecast was the rise in macroeconomic uncertainty and geopolitical conflict this year, which has affected all macro assets. It's inflected. It's it's affected oil prices and inflation prints, which in turns change the likelihood of rates from cuts to hikes, which going into this year, the expectation by the market was that we would see several rate cuts. Right now, there's a slightly higher than a coin toss probability that rates get raised at the next FOMC meeting, or at least this year. So I think there was some macro factors and geopolitical factors that played a role this year in terms of investor appetite for risk on assets. The other thing that we didn't necessarily forecast, but certainly played out was this broad capital rotation that we saw across investors out of crypto, out of other asset classes, and into AI and the equities market. The space X IPO is a great example of that. When we were speaking with investors around the time of the space X IPO, they mentioned that they were selling assets to raise capital to get exposure to space X, because clients were asking for it because they wanted exposure to it. It was going to get added to the Nasdaq and become part of the benchmark. So they need to have some exposure. Otherwise they're short space X, but it was such a massive IPO that the capital pull from other asset classes, including crypto, but also including things like gold drove prices lower. I think you saw the sell off in gold happen around the same time as the sell off in Bitcoin and crypto assets, midsummer, and that's not super surprising given we knew that capital was rotating. Look, the momentum in the equities market is certainly still there. But it started to stall out. And while I don't think equities are going to be poor performing over the next 6 to 12 months, I do think they'll underperform crypto assets as investors start to reposition themselves in across the asset class spectrum. We know investors we were speaking with back then weren't saying they were exiting crypto forever, just like they're not exiting gold or other asset classes forever. It was a rotation. And like all rotations, it comes back around. And most investors we speak to today are thinking about if right now is the right time to reenter the market, if they've missed the bottom, which, you know, around 60 K would have been much more favorable entry point than around 80 K. So I think that means is that investors are paying attention and will see capital rotate back in. A lot of that will manifest itself in ETF flows. I wanted to touch on what you just said regarding the battle for attention. So for sure in 2026, as you also mentioned in a recent interview, crypto has sort of lost the battle for attention from from investors. What I wanted to ask you is what is happening or what should happen to regain the attention of investors? Or maybe that's already happening, I don't know. Yeah, it looks Giovanni. I think all the things are happening right now. One thing for certain that needed to happen is that you needed to see equities stop having these blow off, momentous rises that they had in the first half of the year. And I think that's certainly happened. Optimism around the non-stop up. Only a trade has faded a bit. Equities have stalled out. I know a lot of investors worry about the September seasonality of equities in. A lot of the investment committees were on. Other folks that we speak to are very aware that September is historically a down month for equities. And so I think what investors are doing is taking a step back from the market. They're surveying all the potential investments they can make, all the different asset classes and crypto looks attractive relative to other asset classes. Right now, it's been trading down while everything else is trading near all time highs. So I do think that's part of the battle for attention. The other things that are happening to gain investor attention are things like massive momentum in tokenization. It seems like every other day we're seeing a major headline around some new all time high in tokenized stocks on Solana or some other network. We're seeing tons of financial institutions start tokenizing funds or explore tokenization. We're getting the clarity from the SEC around how to tokenize asset. What does it mean from a regulatory perspective. So I think that's positive. You also have the stablecoin momentum behind us, which, you know, started when the Genius act passed last year and was signed into law. But now there's been this long lag between when it was passed and when it actually goes into effect. Now the stablecoin, uh, which regulates payment stablecoins, goes into effect in early 2027. But right now we're in that final rulemaking period for agencies that then tell banks and other large businesses how to engage with regulated payment stablecoins. So I think that's another thing that's turning in crypto's direction. And it gets a lot of attention from Wall Street and mainstream finance, because stablecoins not only are such a big deal in D.C. right now, when people talk about the Clarity Act and what's hung it up, but because businesses know that stablecoins are set to disrupt their typical payment flows and transaction processes if they don't adapt them. So I think you have tokenization. I think you have stablecoins. You also have the debasement trade, which has reared its head again in August with gold and Bitcoin performing strongly at the same time that the US crossed $40 trillion in debt for the first time, and all of a sudden you're seeing headlines and every talking head across any financial media outlet, talking about the runaway debt and the inability for the US to, you know, move beyond this and what happens in those times. Investors turn to hard assets like gold and like Bitcoin. So I think we have a few things that are actually turning in the right direction already and have already turned investor attention, we believe will follow. And I think that will drive a lot of capital back into the crypto space. Now, I was talking to an expert not too long ago who was basically saying, I wonder when Bitcoin will go back outperforming indexes, because if Bitcoin won't become again this uh, highly performative asset that is able to outperform indexes, then investors would start asking themselves, why should they take on the additional risk of Bitcoin when if you look at the performance in the last five years, you see that in terms of performance, Bitcoin has has underperformed the S&P 500 in the last five years at least. So I'm not sure whether the wealth managers you are talking to or some other clients are also expressing the same concerns regarding this. But what are your thoughts on that issue? Yeah. Well, I think look, investors who have been paying attention to crypto or just getting into crypto are definitely aware that Bitcoin has been one of the best performing major assets for the past decade. And of course, there's been periods between then where Bitcoin's underperformed or outperformed the S&P 500 or the Nasdaq or other indexes they may track. But over the long term, Bitcoin's outperformed all of them. And I think what you see today is that investors have a lot more access to Bitcoin through things like ETFs. A lot of wealth management platforms and the large RIAs and Wirehouses now allow their advisors and wealth managers to access Bitcoin in client accounts. So that changes the narrative a little bit, because we have all this capital that we set as rotated out of crypto, or maybe been sidelined from crypto because they haven't had the access to it. But they know that over the long term, Bitcoin has outperformed these other indexes that they track against. And when momentum turns in Bitcoin's favor, I think we're well positioned for a lot of those investors to make those allocations. I think you saw that with the several billion of inflows, not only into Bitcoin, but into other majors like Solana, XRP and Ethereum. And so when we talk about Bitcoin's performance at bitwise, we take a very long term oriented view. And that's because most of the investors we face off with traditional financial advisors, RIAs and wealth managers, these are long term oriented investors. They typically don't try to trade in and out of a bunch of assets throughout the year. They take positions once they have conviction and they hold them for the long term. And I think that's what we're going to see here. As the price continues to stabilize, around 80,000 and moves higher. And so, yes, it underperformed over a short period, but it's outperformed over the long term. And many of the new investors coming into Bitcoin aren't day traders. They're long term investors who are positioning their portfolios and their client portfolios for the next decade, not the next six months. What are the macroeconomic catalysts that could drive Bitcoin price higher in the next couple of months? Well, certainly an end to the conflict in Iran would help because you would see oil prices reset at lower levels, which would reduce inflation fears, which would reduce the likelihood of rate cuts that the market is pricing in right now, and give the fed some room to breathe. So I do think the conflict in Iran just dragging on longer than most people expected plays a role, but with an end potentially in sight, because we don't think that the Trump administration wants us to drag on much longer. I think that's a positive macro catalyst if and when it does come. The other thing that's been playing a role somewhat is this will they won't they on the tariffs front, right. Like tariffs increase costs which therefore increase inflation expectations have the same knock on effect on rates. So those are two things that have really played a role this year in terms of macro headwinds that we've been facing. But I do think that what we saw was that Warsh is still not showing his hand in terms of what the FOMC is going to do. We saw Bessant start to intervene, first with the yen, then saying he's intervening with the long end of the bond market. I think that's a sign that the US doesn't want rates to go much higher. And that's a very powerful force. And what we've historically seen is Bitcoin performs well in low rate environments as investors go and look out along the risk spectrum for higher yield returns. So if we see the macro environment settle, if we actually don't see rate hikes and we see rates stay flat or come down, we see bonds start to normalize back to to normal levels. And if we see an end to this conflict in the Middle East, I think those are macroeconomic wins that turn in crypto's favor and in Bitcoin's favor in Q4. I would like to know your price prediction for Bitcoin for 2030. Ah, I love this question because as I mentioned, we love to think about things long term. My view is that Bitcoin is going to be above 1 million per coin in 2030. I think there's a bunch of factors driving it higher. But if you zoom out, the things that I think are most important is that we're expanding access for institutional investors to Bitcoin. They now can access Bitcoin in ETFs in client accounts across almost every major wealth management platform. But what's important to remember is just because they get access doesn't mean that they allocate right away. One interesting anecdote from our time at bitwise is that historically, it's taken about eight meetings from an advisor engaging with us to actually allocating to a Bitcoin fund. And those meetings don't happen every week for eight weeks. They typically happen once a quarter or so over the span of two years. So running that back, if most of these advisors are just getting access to Bitcoin this year, it stands that they likely won't allocate towards the end of this year or maybe the middle of next year. And I think that capital, once it starts coming into the into the ecosystems will stay. And a lot of advisors start with 1% and then ladder up from there to 2% or 5%. So I think institutional capital coming into the Bitcoin space is going to drive the price higher. I think continued regulatory clarity, not just for Bitcoin, but for the entire industry. We have regulated payment stablecoin legislation with the Genius Act going into effect later this year. We're going to churn through the uncertainty about the Clarity Act and get rules either from Congress or from the SEC and CFTC around regulation. That's going to be a positive. That allows investors to feel better about making allocations. And you have this continue rising concern around debasement of traditional fiat currencies. And it's something that is going to continue to push investors into hard assets over the next decade through 2030 and beyond. And when they look at hard assets that have the ability to hedge against fiat debasement, Bitcoin and gold are really the two out there that we see benefiting the most. And the thing is, is the gold market is massive. The Bitcoin market is tiny. It's like 1% of the gold market or 2% of the gold market. And we think the store of value or hard asset market is going to grow over time, much larger than it is today. It's grown over the past decade at like a 10% kegger. We think that will continue into the future. And we think that Bitcoin's share of that market will grow. So Bitcoin's share of a growing market will increase. And I think debasement will be a big part of that. Lastly, I would just add that we continue to see so much investor interest in things like model portfolios, which is a set and forget method that a lot of wealth management platforms use. And we've seen everyone from Charles Schwab to fidelity to everyone in between talk about how most investors should hold anywhere from 2 to 6% Bitcoin in their portfolios, depending on their risk preferences. And a lot of these platforms are starting to add Bitcoin to their model portfolio. So I think the institutional capital is going to flow into Bitcoin. I think concerns about debasement is going to flow assets into things like Bitcoin and gold. And as Bitcoin continues to reduce its volatility and as as its correlation to equities continues to trend back to where it historically has because it's been high recently, I think those things will all drive investors to adding Bitcoin to their portfolios alongside gold and as part of their typical portfolio allocation. Thanks again for joining us and hope to see you soon on our show. Amazing. Thank you Giovanni. Great to be here and hope to do it again soon.