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So 2025 was supposed to be a year where we would have a blow-off top based on the four-year cycle of crypto. But we had also, like, a lot of volatility without that increase of, of the blow-off top.
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The reason for that is that we had a lot of macro changes. I'm very bullish. I, I think that every year isn't going to be a crypto year, but we're most certainly in a crypto decade.
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[upbeat music] On this episode of Early Bird, Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, having spent most of the year up, are now down in twenty twenty-five. Why did this happen?
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What about the new crypto ETFs in the market? And where could crypto go in twenty twenty-six?
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Joining us today on the podcast to discuss these topics are Mehdi Labar, co-founder and chief investment officer at YO Labs, and Matt Carr, managing partner at QCI Capital Management.
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If you're an investor looking to stay on top of the latest market trends, then you're listening to the right podcast. This is Early Bird, and I'm your host, Steven Lerner.
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Subscribe to Early Bird for free at www.earlybird.email. Once again, that's earlybird.email. And now, today's discussion. Hello, everybody. Welcome to today's Early Bird Podcast.
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Today, we're talking about cryptocurrency investing in twenty twenty-five. Prices for Bitcoin and other leading cryptocurrencies started twenty twenty-five strong but have since fallen.
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In fact, here we are in December twenty twenty-five, and both Bitcoin and Ethereum are negative for the year.
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So we've put together an all-star panel of experts to help us make sense of it all and what happened this year with, uh, cryptocurrency prices. Um, uh, Mehdi, we'll start with you.
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Um, why did most cryptocurrency prices have a bad twenty twenty-five? So twenty twenty-five was supposed to be a year where we would have a blow-off top based on the four-year cycle of crypto.
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But we had also, like, a lot of volatility without that increase of, of the blow-off top. The reason for that is that we had a lot of macro changes, mostly headwinds in terms of the liquidity.
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Uh, a lot of people have been waiting for the interest rates to go down and, um, the unwinding of the carry trade in Japan- Mm. -on the yen.
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All of these have affected, uh, the liquidity on the markets, and with additional volatility and uncertainty, we haven't seen, um, like, this, uh, uh, increase, uh, in the cryptocurrency prices, basically.
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Mm-hmm. Okay. So it's, it's more macro issues you're saying that have been the issue here with, with cryptocurrency prices in twenty twenty-five. Yes. And I, I would say also, like,
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normally the four-year cycle gets less and less effective. Uh, like, it has it less and less potent every, uh, cycle for a very simple reason.
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The first time we divided by two the inflation rate of Bitcoin, uh, it went from twenty percent to twelve percent, and then twelve percent to six percent inflation, six percent to three percent.
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So the first time you had a lot of supply change for Bitcoin. Right now you have less of a supply change in Bitcoin.
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You also have a market cap for Bitcoin and for crypto that is in trillions of dollars, so the inflow that you need to have is bigger in order to have any impact on the price.
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And so all of this means that basically cryptocurrency is maturing over time, and so the impact on prices decreases over time. Mm. I'm glad to hear that.
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Cryptocurrencies are certainly maturing, and that's definitely true this year, in which we'll talk a little bit about that. Um, good points about comparing it to inflation and the dollar as well.
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Um, Matt, let me bring you into this conversation. Why, why was twenty twenty-five such a, a bad year for cryptocurrencies? I really see twenty twenty-five as a year of growing pains for the industry.
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Um, I think patience really is important here and having a big picture of what's really being undertaken kind of behind the scenes.
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It was a year where the regulatory environment did a one-eighty in many jurisdictions and is much more constructive. Uh, it was a year where institutional participation and involvement has picked up at an amazing pace.
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It's also a year that a lot of investors are able to get involved, uh, with things like ETFs and things that are m-more tangible and readily available to them.
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Um, so I-- to me, it was a year price-wise, there were less fireworks, but behind the scenes, there were more chess moves. And big picture, I'm very constructive on it. I'm not too disappointed really, uh, in the
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year activity here price-wise.
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I see it as a year of
Load full transcript
building infrastructure and building a foundation for the next wave of growth.So we did an episode, I think it was in January, about cryptocurrencies for the year, predictions. Had experts on.
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Most expected twenty twenty five to be a spectacular year for cryptocurrency, especially in the wake of the election. A new administration that was gonna come in and be very pro-crypto it seemed.
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And I guess that didn't happen. Um, in, in fact, just to compare crypto, 'cause it's not... crypto doesn't sit in a bubble by itself. Stocks are up this year. Gold hit a record high and is up a lot this year.
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What happened with crypto? It depends what you set the expectation, I guess.
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Uh, so we had very high expectations for crypto, I think in itself, um, which, uh, we have seen that increase happen in November, uh, last year, uh, around the election.
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And since then, we basically just defended, uh, those numbers. I mean, Bitcoin got new all-time highs of a hundred and twenty-six thousand dollars in October, but it was more, more or less like that same level.
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So in terms of, uh, total market cap for crypto, uh, we basically just defended the position and, um, because the expectations were very high.
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And, uh, the good thing, just as Matt said, uh, uh, like we, we, we got the regulations that we expected. We're winning like really important points in Europe, in the US, in Asia, in the UAE.
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Like these are like re-really good developments, and so we're building fundamentals. The, the other thing that you could say is that there is much less a reason for, uh, like a strong decrease now.
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Because we didn't have the blow-off top, there's like no real reason for selling your Bitcoins now. Like, what, what's, what, what is like the best scenario? You would sell at a hundred K, ninety K, get it at seventy.
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A lot of people don't want to do that bet. Mm. And so I think we got to the point where there is less volatility on the way up, but less volatility on the way down.
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Now, twenty twenty six can have a lot of volatility because of, again, all the macro things that are happening, but, uh, I, I would say it's just, just maturation. Yeah.
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It, it sounds like there is a floor developing for Bitcoin, for example, a price floor where it won't go down a certain point because to your point, Mehdi, it sounds like people are just gonna hold on to some of their Bitcoin investments, at least for the time being, depending on how the, the economy shakes out.
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Um, Matt, you brought up exchange traded funds and twenty twenty five, if there was a silver lining in cryptocurrency investing, it's definitely the rise of ETFs, exchange traded funds, that, uh, are in cryptocurrency.
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And specifically, we saw a big increase in spot cryptocurrency ETFs this year. These ETFs gave traditional investors increased access to cryptocurrencies a-as a good alternative for portfolios.
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Um, so Matt, what do you make of some of the new investing products this year, including crypto ETFs? I, I think it's a positive development.
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It's bringing millions of investors to the table that previously might have been interested but didn't undertake all of the steps, uh, to get involved in crypto. Generating wallets and things can be a bit cumbersome.
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The user experience isn't spectacular, uh, in crypto still. So to me, it's, it's a bridge to the mainstream, and it's, it's gonna bring a lot of capital in.
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It's-- And it's across the spectrum too, because as you mentioned, there are ETFs that individuals can buy.
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Uh, there's been a plethora of companies going public, whether it's Gemini or, you know, even the exchanges that a few years ago, that wasn't even on the radar. That's constructive.
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There's also been a lot of these, um, digital asset treasury companies, which are companies that have gone public, raised money, and they're looking to purchase spot crypto and hold it on their balance sheet.
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And th-this has been, in my view, uh, we, we trade a lot of derivatives.
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So this is a unique situation where new participants are creating and, to a certain degree, affecting the underlying structure of the crypto market.
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For instance, a lot of these, uh, digital asset treasury companies have come to the market.
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They've raised hundreds of millions of dollars, maybe even billions of dollars, and they've gone into the derivatives market, and they've sold derivatives to generate cash flow.
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If you look at the derivatives market previously, we never had large institutions coming to the market looking to sell like that. This, this has fundamentally changed, um, that aspect of the market.
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So one of the things that was brought up earlier here was the lower volatility. Well, these DATS, uh, treasury companies, have been selling vol effectively. They've been selling calls.
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Um, sometimes they've even been selling puts. And it-- I-- To a certain degree, you feel as though it's affecting the underlying.
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It certainly is a substitute for buying or selling spot, Bitcoin or Ethereum, and I think that's interesting. That's a new aspect of the markets that we've seen. Um, we
traffic in a lot of that.
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So I, I, I feel like the landscape itself is somewhat mutating and changing. But overall, it's growing, and I think that's constructive. Yeah.
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It is a positive way to look at things for the year, certainly with these new- [laughs] -investing products out there.
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Uh, Mehdi, what do, what do you think about some of the new crypto investing products, in particular, some of the new ETFs that have launched this year?Well, I think Matt responds very well on this.
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Uh, the, the other thing that I would add is, uh, we had the first time this month a staking yield, uh, in, uh, Ethereum ETFs.
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That's something that's revolutionary, that's amazing because it tells you that staking and yield on crypto is becoming more common- Mm-hmm... uh, and more adopted by Wall Street. Um, that's really important.
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Uh, it is also related to this, uh, perspective in Congress that decentralized finance, when it is really decentralized, is not a security.
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And so that's also like a development that's, uh, just as important in my opinion as everything happening around the stable coins.
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The other thing that I would want to think about in terms of, like, new investing products is tokenized gold. Tokenized gold only started really this year.
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I mean, Pax Gold has been around for quite some time, but just as with the stable coin of, uh, USDP, uh, Pax Gold didn't create, uh, like s- anything, uh, uh, like large.
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But now with Tether, we have someone who creates four billion in market cap for tokenized gold within, uh, two months of launching.
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So I think that, uh, that is, like, just one percent of the stable coin market cap today, but it is significant for something that has only two months. Um, yeah, and, and we-- Yo!
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uh, have-- We create a lot of, uh, s- basically savings accounts on-- with-- uh, that create DeFi yield, uh, on, on these, uh, like, different assets.
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We, we have, like, the USD, we have the euro, we have Bitcoin and, uh, Ethereum.
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We added gold, and gold, we have-- we create yield on gold, and that's the first time as well happening with, like, um, uh, a carry trade on gold. Okay. That's good.
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And just, just real quick for, for the audience, um, yield staking for the Ethereum product, how, how would you de-define just what that is for, for, for investors out there who are hearing it for the first time? Yeah.
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So there are four types of yields in DeFi that are, like, sustainable. Yield staking- Well, what is yield staking?
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So yield staking is yield coming from, uh, the verification of transactions or the validation of transactions on the blockchain. Mm-hmm. And so you get paid in order to, uh, validate transactions.
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So some people pay gas fees. Uh, you, you receive the proceeds of these gas fees, uh, when, when you do staking, basically.
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And so in order to, um, validate these transactions, there is a need for liquidity to put at stake and, uh, to, to make the system of consensus work- Mm-hmm... for the blockchain.
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And so you get paid for these transactions fee- transaction fees. Okay. I see. That's good. And good, good for our investors to know about that, uh, sort of thing. Um, let's talk a little bit about twenty twenty-six.
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Um, I wonder if, if, if what we saw in twenty twenty-five has maybe humbled us a bit, you know, what-- in terms of what our expectations should be for cryptocurrency. So, uh, Mehdi, I'll start with you.
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After a lackluster twenty twenty-five, where could crypto go in twenty twenty-six? Well, I think twenty twenty-six is gonna be a year for, uh, seeing, uh, everything.
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We're gonna see probably very low prices and very high prices at the same time. I expect volatility to increase. Um, one reason is the macro environment. You have a lot of, um, cycles coming at the same time.
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You have, uh, lower interest rates, uh, you have high expectations for inflation, um, and you have also, like, the long cycle of the debt cycle that Ray Dalio loves to talk about,
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one that's almost like a hundred or a hundred and fifty years on the dollar that are-- that is coming all together in twenty twenty-six, twenty twenty-seven. And so there are a lot of points of view.
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There is no consensus on whether we have, uh, uh, overpriced the S&P, uh, or whether this is, like, totally normal with inflation.
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And so with everything that is happening also around the US administration, I expect, uh, the perspective to change drastically during the year.
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And so I would not be surprised to see Bitcoin both at eighty thousand and a hundred and eighty thousand dollars. Pretty big range. [chuckles] In the same year.
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That, that would, that would-- sounds like a lot of volatility, but it sounds like anything is possible in, in crypto next year. Absolutely.
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Which is both a good thing and, like, it's a little concerning, but interesting that, that, that's where things could go. Um, thank you, Mehdi. Um, Matt, I'll have you, um, close us out.
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You know, after what happened in twenty twenty-five, it was not a
good ending for cryptocurrency. What do you think will happen in twenty twenty-six? Where could cryptocurrency prices go? What will happen?
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Well, I, I also agree that volatility will probably be higher because it was just so historically low for twenty twenty-five. And I think the treasury companies selling a lot of it was a unique situation.
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And as we grow into that, it won't have as large of an effect.
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Um, a-another point that I would make is crypto is still very broad of a space, and I think it's important for investors to separate some of the smaller meme coins and different projects that might come up on their screens or across their computer, you know, and the truly large decentralizedUh, digital assets and commodities, you know, the Bitcoins, the Ethereums of the world, I think those are fundamentally different.
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And so when I speak of, of crypto, I'm predominantly focused on the largest, most liquid decentralized projects, things that also have derivatives around them, things that institutions are building on top of.
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I see JP Morgan just, uh, issued equity on Solana, for instance. Um, so, so these are platforms that no particular company controls, and the scale and scope of them is truly global.
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For those projects, I'm very bullish. I, I think that every year isn't going to be a crypto year, but we're most certainly in a crypto decade, and it's important to keep that in mind.
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I, I would be very careful and leery about, uh, smaller projects that maybe aren't as decentralized, may be difficult to understand the token creation and diffusion of on the front end.
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Uh, that's something for investors to always look into. But for twenty twenty-six, I'm optimistic. I think that we'll be higher. Mm. So focus on, on the big fish in cryptocurrency- Yeah.
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The Bitcoins, Ethereum, Solana, Cardano, for example, all the, the bigger projects you're talking about. Yeah. You're really seeing some of the largest
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platforms have infrastructure built around them, so now there are swaps built around them. There are options. These are put and calls, uh, just like you could trade in stocks. Uh, there's, there's swaps, there's perps.
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There's all sorts of infrastructure being built.
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So what that's gonna allow is that's gonna allow investors to create different return profiles, but it's also gonna allow institutions to get involved at scale because they don't have to go into something that's relatively illiquid and buy spot and potentially move the price a lot.
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They can deal with that in other manners. So I think that's really good, and it will generate a lot of growth.
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[outro music] Thank you again to Mehdi Labar and Matt Carr for sharing your insights on cryptocurrency, and thank you to everyone for listening to today's discussion.
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We'll be back next week for another episode of Early Bird. Have a great day. [outro music]