A Wiser Retirement®

257. The Election Outcome Impact on Crypto, BTC ETFs, and Bitwise Files for Index Product

• Wiser Wealth Management • Episode 257

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Tune in to this episode of A Wiser Retirement® Podcast where we discuss how the post-election landscape is shaping the future of cryptocurrency. Casey Smith and Robert Swarthout from Teton Crypto Capital join us to unravel complex policy shifts and market dynamics. We explore the hurdles and timelines facing U.S. cryptocurrency regulation, drawing intriguing parallels with previous reforms like Trump's tax changes. As more people access digital currencies through platforms such as Venmo and PayPal, the need for robust education becomes crucial, and we’re here to guide you through it all.

Podcast Episodes Referenced:
- Ep 246: SEC v. Ripple Lawsuit Resolved, BTC ETFs, and the Election
- Ep 252: The Crypto Agenda: SEC's Next Moves, BTC ETFs, and Kamala Harris' Crypto Policy

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This podcast was produced by Wiser Wealth Management. Thanks for listening!

Crypto Policy and Post-Election Market Trends

Speaker 1

I think that if we can get regulation in the first year, that would be amazing. I think it's probably more certainly within the first two, but it took Trump his first term almost two years to get tax done, and I can't imagine that crypto is much faster.

Speaker 2

Welcome to Wiser Retirement Podcast. We believe the best financial advice should always be conflict-free. I'm your host, casey Smith, guiding you to financial freedom days. My co-host, robert Swarthout, founder CEO, portfolio manager at Teton Crypto Capital. Hey, robert, hey, how's it going? Man, what a great time to be doing a crypto podcast. This is our first one post-election. Yeah, I mean, I quite honestly, I'm surprised that my phone isn't ringing with hey. When you tried to add crypto to our portfolios, we should have said yes, but instead we didn't respond or we said no.

Speaker 1

Yeah, I could see maybe some of those calls. Next week after Thanksgiving I granted this podcast. I think we'll post next Wednesday, a week from the weekend the week following Thanksgiving, but I imagine there's a lot of conversation that happens over some meals on Thursday.

Speaker 2

I think it hasn't happened, though, because people still don't understand crypto.

Speaker 1

Oh, a hundred percent. Yeah, you know, I think we're. We can say that same thing for the next year or two.

Speaker 2

It's going to be a while, but it's not like during like 07, 08, 09, somewhere in there it was commodities. Everyone was buying a commodity fund, right, because everyone knows what oil is, or a cow, or whatever. But this Bitcoin, I don't know about this Bitcoin. Someone else told me a couple of weeks ago oh, don't buy that Bitcoin, that thing's a Ponzi scheme.

Speaker 1

So you still have a lot of education to do for sure A lot of education and a lot of old talking points there.

Speaker 1

And one metric to kind of understand the level of consciousness that crypto is and I guess society in general is. People like to watch where the Coinbase app is in the ranking in the Apple App Store. It is still way down. We are nowhere near peak euphoria because that will shoot through the roof and that is maybe one of your signs that you might either not buy or you might sell something. Yeah, of course.

Speaker 2

It's available in more places now. I mean I think I saw on Venmo I was paying somebody on Venmo recently and you can buy coins through Venmo.

Speaker 2

You can buy it through PayPal, yeah, so there's other avenues too, but yeah, that is interesting. Or ETFs, that's right. Yeah, the ETFs certainly make it a lot easier Accessible. Yeah, and for professional money managers too, because it's basically you have the SEC approval of it when you're buying a ETF. Even my own compliance people say, hey, we need to walk back some of the crypto language because, from what we can tell, there's still a lot of bad behavior in crypto land and you need to talk about the risk of owning the crypto. And I'm like guys, it's in an ETF which is all approved by the SEC. Like, your ETF is not getting stolen. The SEC, like your ETF is not getting stolen.

Speaker 1

But but if you're buying Bitcoin through, some website you never heard of that could be a. That could be a problem, right?

Speaker 2

So even the compliance, world has to, um, has to understand crypto and markets and how this stuff is, uh is structured and where you should be owning it.

Speaker 1

Yeah, absolutely it's. You know, like we said out of the start, it is a lot of learning to still happen, and that is across the spectrum of knowledge. I mean people that think they know crypto probably don't know crypto Right, and they have more to know.

Speaker 2

Including politicians, which is a great segue. Yes, now that you've got the Trump, train has left the station right and he looks like he's probably going to have the house. I didn't know it's up for grabs until I think this morning I saw California's still counting. I think three other countries have already had elections.

Speaker 1

Right? Yes, it's unfortunate that we are still playing this game, whether you like it or not. It is unfortunate, in my opinion.

Speaker 2

Do you think we get crypto policy in the first two years?

Speaker 1

Yes, you know I've said yes in the past. I think you know I was trying to find a way to describe how I feel about crypto and the possibilities of crypto following the election, and I have trouble coming up with a great way to explain it. Besides, I'm just excited, you know. It finally feels like a weight has been lifted and, especially because you know I personally don't hold Bitcoin, I look at other tokens and I find more interest there, but some of those tokens have been so beaten down by the regulators and, like you could feel like a pressure relief valve, go off the evening of the election when it started to become clear that Trump was going to be reelected, and then crypto has just gone on an amazing run since then. I mean there's no other way to describe it.

Speaker 2

I was actually watching the election on CNBC because they had a broadcast from the economic standpoint which I found much more interesting. Most people they got into the weeds, so most people would have no idea what they were talking about. It did make my head spin. But then I had Bitcoin on my computer screen, I had the future market on my computer screen, I had betting markets and as I was watching all this at once, I was like my brain is like on overload. I think I went to bed at like one o'clock in the morning. In the end I should have had Elon Musk. He had evidently some homemade app that he put together himself and a couple hours into the night he decided Trump won and he got it from the table and told Dana White. He says Trump won.

Speaker 2

I'm going home and he walks out and everyone's looking at him like what no one's called even one state yet.

Speaker 1

State. Yeah, well, when you have access to lots of data, twitter being one of the big pieces, you might have a bit of a you know and he's got an AI company.

Speaker 2

So there you go.

Crypto Betting, Regulation, Market Trends

Speaker 1

I know but what I'm saying is that nobody could call it, but somehow he yeah, I don't know. Well, even Polymarket, if you're watching it, they posted this a day or two after the election. They were, on average, calling states two to three hours sooner than the networks were calling them Winner, whoever it was. It was kind of cool to see that play out, and the same political map that they showed on October the 25th so a little over two weeks or a little under two weeks before the election is exactly the way the country finished.

Speaker 2

See, I was. I was sort of debating that in my head going. I feel like there's a probably a male bias there, because I was just. I was just thinking there's probably too many women that are betting on polymarket. But then the dude's cell phone was taken shortly after the election and he was raided.

Speaker 1

He was raided to get his cell phone. Yes, so a quick story on the Polymarket that I found really fascinating is you could bet anywhere in the world. It wasn't just a? U betting website and a French better bet underneath four different pseudonyms and ended up profiting like $40 million. Like made made an amazing bet streak there and how he did his research. This is fascinating. He didn't necessarily do polling to say, casey, how did you vote? He would go to your neighbor and say, how do you think Casey's going to vote? Oh, wow, and like it was always, it was never asking directly what you're going to do. It's going to ask you what your neighbor did and he's like people are always willing to answer that question Um, and he's like, and that that's how we did it. And I was like man, that's brilliant. Um, so kind of fascinated to kind of see how that one played out. So I did not read that.

Speaker 2

That's awesome. So tell me about your outlook now. I mean, I know it's rosy.

Speaker 1

Yeah, I mean it's rosy, but there's momentum and it feels like it can build upon itself. It's not going to happen in the first 90 days. We might get some executive order that says something, but really we need Congress to codify stuff in law. We need clear rules of the road for whether it's the SEC, the CFTC, whoever it is. There's some rumor out there that there's going to be a almost like a FINRA for crypto, so like a third I guess a third party working group that would kind of oversee it. That would be fascinating, because I think there is some blurred lines between where the crypto falls, whether it's the SEC and the CFTC. Admittedly, I would like to say it's never security, but there's some that certainly probably act like one. So you see that. But I think that you know, if we can get regulation in the first year, that would be amazing. I think it's probably more certainly within the first two.

Speaker 2

But it took Trump his first term almost two years to get tax done, and I can't imagine that crypto is much faster. So yeah, I don't know that there's. I think there's some draft out there. I don't think it'd be starting from scratch, but there are some things that didn't get pushed through before.

Speaker 1

I don't know if that could be doctored up or yeah, there's some work that needs to happen and, admittedly, I think there's a distraction that is being presented by the Bitcoin community for a Bitcoin reserve for the US. I just don't understand it. We've been talking about regulation for years. All of a sudden, trump gets elected. They don't talk about that anymore. Now they're talking about Bitcoin reserve. You could see them drooling through their tweets.

Speaker 2

Because a Bitcoin reserve and that much health only drives the price up all right, I mean it's pure.

Speaker 1

Yeah, it's pure great.

Speaker 2

There's nothing else to it there's really no reason why bitcoin shouldn't be at a hundred thousand now, and in a couple years, the floor ought to be like 375. If you uh follow along with what people are saying, this is all speculation has absolutely, you could also be 20 000000 again. We just don't know what's around the corner, which is why when?

Speaker 2

you're investing in it, you don't put majority of your retirement. I would keep it under 3% for sure, 1% for most people. But we recently did some planning for a family that I asked, hey, what's this account over here? And they were like, oh, that's crypto. And he rolled his eyes and he's like my friend told me to buy all this stuff and I put $50,000 in. Now it's worth $10,000. And it had some stuff in there that you should keep. But I was like you need to sell all this other stuff right off the losses and then you just put it in Bitcoin and Ethereum and just leave it and just pretend you don't have it and we'll see where it is in 10 years.

Speaker 1

So he had a good week. Yeah, I mean, outside of the few tokens you almost couldn't miss the last couple of weeks and some of these tokens have just gone on amazing runs. You know, it's like I've had. I've held a token that has been basically net down or even for the year right, all year long, and then now it is up one percent higher than the bitcoin is year to date.

Speaker 2

So it's just kind of like it is ripped and ripped hard, um, so pretty crazy another positive for people who lean towards crypto, my relationship with the SEC is they're my regulator and the SEC does a really good job of protecting people. Unfortunately, in my industry there are still people who are criminals that haven't been caught yet. There are still active Ponzi schemes out there. I was reading recently I think the guy was local promising 15 and a half percent rate of return on your investment and they write checks to him, and he bought nice cars and houses with it and now the people have nothing and he's on the run. So I know that's what the SEC is there to prevent in my mind. But I will say that Gensler seemed to have a war with crypto and when Trump said the first thing he would do day one is fire Gensler, I don't think he can actually do that.

Speaker 1

I think, Gensler is going to have to resign and I guess we can jump ahead to that partner note. So Gensler is resigning January the 20th. So that has been announced.

Speaker 2

I saw his little letter that he was basically saying basically patted himself on the back for all the great things he did for the last four years.

Speaker 1

I'm like we live in a different universe, is all I know, so so I guess well, I'll wrap up the the the election part of this conversation. So the last thing I'll talk about here is the. There was a crypto pack called fair shake that did a lot of backing candidates on both sides of the aisle and that really their line was are you for crypto and you're running against them? That's anti-crypto. You likely were going to get money for your campaign. Oh, yeah, they. They funded 48 different candidates across the country. Yeah, all 48 of them won their seats or won their graces, which is insane.

Speaker 2

That's right. You look at that data and you think the election was just about crypto.

Speaker 1

Right? Yeah, I saw some data. That's the last couple of weeks and you have to assume these polls are accurate, which you know. We know what polls are worth these days, but if if it was a non crypto voter we know what polls are worth these days but if it was a non-crypto voter, they basically were split 50-50 Trump-Harris, and if it was a crypto voter, they were five and a half points five and a half more points more likely to vote for Trump than they were for Harris, and that literally was the election. Not saying that crypto basically got this election, but it probably helped.

Speaker 2

If you look at the data, it looks like it was decided by crypto. Obviously, you can manipulate data to look like anything, absolutely.

Speaker 4

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Speaker 2

But well, truth be told, I mean, he won every group Correct Right, except for, was there two right, was it it?

Crypto ETF Trends and Launches

Speaker 1

was smaller pockets. But yeah, I mean you can't win the popular vote and not win a lot of other things. Correct, that's correct. Yeah, so I guess we jump to our next topic here. So, staying in crypto, the ETFs 2024 has been amazing, specifically for the Bitcoin ETFs, the basket of them, they are over 100 billion of AUM. At this point that was on nobody's radar. 30 to 50, I think, was kind of the upper limit of what you were hearing people think that we might get to when we were talking about it in January.

Speaker 2

But it's pretty amazing. Yeah, and I just got back from the Schwab conference. Amazingly, there wasn't a whole lot of conversation about crypto there. You and I talked about that over dinner a couple of nights ago, probably because Schwab's not really in that space. It was really mostly about, I feel like it was an AI conference for one day.

Speaker 2

But certainly, talking to my advisor, friends are much more. They're not as progressive with their firms. You see it in their growth rate and you see it in just in how they conduct business. They're just natural planners in that they always stick to the safe bet, right. Even they are going now tell us more about which ETF you chose and why you chose that. And of course, they were like man, you've made a great decision by adding crypto to your portfolio. I was like no, no, no, no, no, let's be really careful.

Speaker 2

We didn't just add it to everyone's portfolio. We gave everyone a sign up. It's basically like a sign up genius that said this is what you want. This is the case where, if you want to do this, you have to sign up for it, and so we had 15% of our people who did that, and it was mostly the younger client base, but also the very wealthy. The people in the middle didn't do it. So you have $500 in a Bitcoin ETF or you might have $150,000 at Bitcoin ETF, but nothing, really nothing much in the middle. But that was all made possible because of the ETF for a while. We wouldn't have done that without that.

Speaker 1

Right, and you know and that was not to say you were trying to time the market but that was great timing when you guys did that in the summer and then like what Bitcoin's done since then, so it's pretty cool yeah.

Speaker 2

And we added Ethereum to a very, very small percentage.

Speaker 1

That hasn't worked out as well, ethereum's been lagging.

Speaker 1

It's been interesting. Normally, ethereum is a bit of the leader of sorts early on for alts and it hasn't done that this cycle. So something's going on there and I haven't quite personally figured out what it is yet. I think it's because you can barely explain bitcoin. How do you explain it? Fair enough, yeah, so on the on the etf topic here. So there's. I saw this tweet. I found it super fascinating. So 575 etfs were launched um in 2024. So far, and this was as of late october 14 of the top 30 by inflows are Bitcoin or Ethereum ETFs and six of the top 10 are crypto, which is just like basically all but one in Ethereum. They're all Rester Bitcoin, so it's just every. I do a weekly podcast where I talk about news in a very similar format to this, and we feel like we should just rename the thing a Bitcoin ETF podcast, because that's what it seems what we're always talking about, because this is always something new. Stat that like just blowing people's mind.

Speaker 2

Are you doing that on LinkedIn?

Speaker 1

I do cross post it on LinkedIn as a live where you can subscribe in a podcast player, if you want to listen.

Speaker 2

How do you find that podcast?

Speaker 1

You can go to TetonCryptocapitalcom there's a link there. It's probably the easiest way to get to it or podcasttetoncryptocapitalcom will get you there, okay, cool. So yeah, it just continues to be an amazing run and I think 2025, we're going to see some other ETFs for other cryptos. I know XRP's got four or five, maybe six out there that are in application status. You have a few Solana, and even Bitwise has filed for a index product. I think it's the top 10, if I'm not mistaken. Let me look at our notes real quick on that, but while you're looking, at that you sent me a message.

Speaker 2

I forgot to respond to it. You said that WisdomTree was launching. Oh yeah, you sent me a message I forgot to respond to it.

Speaker 2

You said that WisdomTree was launching. Oh yeah, so my joke is WisdomTree has some of the best fund concepts but, for whatever reason, they've never traded well and the bid-ask spread is always so much wider on their funds than other funds. And there was a point at which time I had it, we used some of the WisdomTree funds and we just kind of left it, cause you're you're having to pay this huge premium to get into the fund. And I haven't looked at the funds in a couple of years. Maybe they fixed it. But when you sent me that, that text, I was like, oh, that sounds great. Except it's going to cost a fortune to own it, which means nobody's going to buy it in this market.

Speaker 1

But yeah it, sec handles it, at least in the XRP case there's, you know, there's five, six, whatever there are. Are they going to basically do the same thing, where everyone gets to launch the same day, or are we going to launch kind of staggered as as if the applications had come in? I don't know. There is obviously a first mover advantage, but I don't think it's that material at the end of the day. So probably not for that one.

Speaker 2

No.

Bitcoin, MicroStrategy, and SEC Updates

Speaker 1

Yeah, yep, so um and other Bitcoin news. Emory University so here in Atlanta, added Bitcoin to their endowment holdings. You've seen public endowments for like states do it. You've seen other large foundations do it, but this is the first university endowment that I've seen has gone into Bitcoin and admittedly it's a small buy. I think it was around $16 million for For Emory's $10 billion endowment. That's a rounding error, but who knows, we'll have to see quarterly, as they file their 13F, how that kind of changes. If it does so you know. Just, I guess, more illustrating how it's just creeping into areas that you would have never thought would have touched your stuff, and largely because of the ETF product, because it makes it so much cheaper and easier to kind of access.

Speaker 2

Does? Does our alma mater have a Bitcoin in there?

Speaker 1

They do not. I, even even from my subtle nudging, that has not had it.

Speaker 2

Definitely not. That's really not in their risk profile.

Speaker 1

Correct. Well, you know, what's funny is like a lot of these endowments are obviously so long-term focused, more than a human ever would be for their own selves. It's like a lot of them are in private equity or these other alternatives that they can take the risk because they have a 100 or 200-year type mindset.

Speaker 2

Yeah, Maybe someday but not currently.

Speaker 1

Barry does not hold that. Yeah, um, and so the next thing, this is I just found this pretty cool. So there's a um, a chart that overlays the russell 2000 in bitcoin's performance for the year 2024, and obviously they're they're offset because they're not the same numbers, but the shape of the chart oh my gosh, could it not be more similar? And this is as of late October, so it is since changed because Bitcoin went on such a large run and I'm sure that Russell did not do that. But it is pretty crazy just to see, like, how wildly different asset classes can somewhat be mirrored, and this is what AI would love to consume, and it would show you this. This has happened to be a trader that I was following online. That kind of brought it to attention, but it's pretty cool, so we can maybe link that in the show notes.

Speaker 2

Yeah, I can probably even do that in our own chart Russell 2000 and Bitcoin.

Speaker 1

Yep, and that was on the eight hour chart in particular.

Speaker 2

Oh, eight hour chart, really yes.

Speaker 4

Yeah.

Speaker 2

Um micro strategy. So tell our listeners what this, what this, for what this group is or this company is or do we even know what this is.

Speaker 1

It is a. It's a company that's been around for goodness since thecom boom. I do know that. I don't know how much it predates that it's. It was, um, its own majority, or at least the largest shareholders.

Speaker 1

Michael saylor he's the ceo. Excuse me, he's not the ceo, but he's the chairman of the board. He used to be a ceo. He has a pass with the sec. There's no doubt about it. He's got um, I don't know if sanctioned the right word, but he got in trouble in the 2000s and kind of had to pay his time for that. Effectively, I don't know, he didn't go to jail, but he had to deal with it. But he went from being a huge Bitcoin skeptic to the largest Bitcoin bull, in my opinion at least of any size. Microchip has been buying Bitcoin predating ETFs they would buy the raw product off the crypto exchanges and, prior to the ETFs, people that wanted to get exposure to Bitcoin started buying MicroStrategy as a way to kind of get that as a publicly traded company. As a publicly traded company? Yeah, it is. In my opinion, microstrategy is no different than a hedge fund. At this point, I don't know what product they sell to real customers, but right now they're known as-.

Speaker 2

I was about to say what do they actually do?

Speaker 1

I think they're a software company, but no one ever talks about it. Maybe I should look that up so I could be a little more informed there. But at the end of the day MicroStrategy they'd onesie, twosie, sell some stock on the open market, take that capital and then they would buy some Bitcoin. That's what they were doing as of say, six months ago In late October, michael announced a no joke, a 42 software. Maybe it's only focused on Bitcoin too, be my guess.

Speaker 2

Nothing about Bitcoin whatsoever in their profile.

Speaker 1

Yeah, this is funny, but that is the only thing that they're known for these days. Here it is. Microstrategy is the the only thing that they're known for these days.

Speaker 2

Oh no, no, here it is. Microstrategy is the world's first and largest Bitcoin treasury company.

Speaker 1

Yes, well, that's, I'm sure, michael told marketing to finance, accumulate Bitcoin.

Speaker 2

So there you go, go ahead.

Speaker 1

So they have a 42 billion with a B capital plan. 21 billion of it is at the money equity offerings. So they're selling stock a huge dilution, I think that's on a magnitude of like a 5% or 10% dilution. It is noticeable. And then the other 21 billion is fixed income securities they're selling, so basically selling bonds, right, and at the end of the day, they're taking, buying 42 billion and in his mind he's going to turn in 100 percent, is going to buy Bitcoin and it's going to be used. It's going to go up in value. Here's why I scratch my head. He says he's never selling Bitcoin. Ok, why are you buying it? Like? Are you never going to reap the reward from this, like as a shareholder?

Speaker 2

Other than there's a lot of software, I guess.

Speaker 1

but that or he could continue. Maybe he can borrow against it in the future. Like it seems like I'm missing a step here and no real journalist Right.

Speaker 1

And no real journalist has ever asked him the questions like what do you do in the second half of this on this trade? We understand the first of the front half. What's the back half? And I don't know it's. He gets on these shows and gets in these interviews and he says all these fancy finance words that half the time I'm not even sure he understands because I get lost. It feels like word salad crypto version and I'm just like somebody needs to have a real conversation and maybe he's right. So far he has been right and his confidence continues to go through the roof. So it's fascinating to watch. It's a bit of a soap opera in crypto, but so far it's been a positive one of sorts.

Speaker 2

I mean, if he survived crypto winter, you would think that he was well capitalized to be able to do that.

Speaker 1

Yeah, and admittedly, they've been buying for so long. So their average I mean the price today is $92,000 and change, I think their average is right around high 40s, low 50s. So they're still well on the money at this point and even during crypto winter they were bouncing around right about breakeven and they were buying heavily at that point. So, right, um, our next topic on Bitcoin, and last topic, I believe, is the options trading for the I bet ticker started trading, uh, last week, um, and it's you know, the first day was a tremendous amount of volume. I think it's tapered off a little bit, but, like I only think it's going to add volatility to Bitcoin, which is already a pretty volatile asset to begin with. So, but it gives professional traders, you know, more of the tools that they might desire to trade these different products.

Speaker 1

So and I you know we hinted at, so we're going to jump to the SEC here. Gensler's leaving on the 20th, the day that he announced that. That was a week ago, thursday, and, excuse me, last week, not a week ago crypto just shot up immediately, and especially the ones that he's been attacking. He slash the SEC has been attacking Again. It's like a pressure relief valve went off and these things feel like they finally can participate in the market. Another commissioner I'm probably going to get this last name incorrect, but Lazarg I think is how you say.

Speaker 1

It is leaving on January, the 17th. So that leaves three commissioners at the SEC, two Republican, one Democrat. I'm not sure how these I know the president gets to appoint them. Can Trump do you know if he can fill all the vacancies, or do they have to be at least two Democrats with three Republicans in this case?

Speaker 2

That I don't know. And do they have to be Senate approved, or is that just his cabinet?

Speaker 1

Or is that just his cabinet? Well, I know the chair would get approved. I don't know if the other not the head chair, but, like the other chairs, how that works. So maybe some homework for me to do there. But maybe in the interim I don't know what gets done between you know, basically the inauguration and when these other appointees actually get confirmed, but we could see some happenings with crypto.

Speaker 1

I know that, like the two remaining Republican chairs, so that would be Mark Ueda and Hester Purse they're both very pro crypto. They both have said publicly that we need a more of like a sandbox for crypto to exist in the first two years and the tokens can graduate out of it, basically just to kind of help some ways grow from being a true security to potentially not being one. And there's all these cases out there. You have the Ripple case, you have the Coinbase case, you have the Kraken case. There's over 200 crypto cases, most of them we've never heard of and the idea that you know, maybe they get settled. The I've heard some a line that some attorneys on twitter have said is anything that's non-fraud should just be settled immediately or just withdrawn. The ones that have fraud obviously probably need to be dealt with, and that's not many of them, admittedly, at least the one at least, of the big Do you think those just get shut down like Trump's cases?

Speaker 2

Well, potentially.

Speaker 1

So they're in different states. The Coinbase case nothing has been decided, that could just go away. And the Ripple case it's a little interesting because they both have appealed. They haven't actually done the appeal yet. Ripple has put $125 million which was their penalty, decided by the court, in escrow because they didn't want to give it to the SEC, because they felt like they would win an appeal. Does the SEC say, yes, we'll take the 125 when we're done, or does Ripple try to negotiate it out? But there's other things Ripple cares about. There's some interesting angles to that one, but I could see, potentially by summer, that most of these are cleaned up, um, if it kind of goes that path.

Speaker 2

So that'd be interesting. I always thought that when you started a court case that there's really no stopping it well, I mean they proved that to be incorrect with all the trump cases, right yeah, but that that was because you're trying to prosecute the uh sitting president of the united states. Right, this would have to be like a total policy change. Uh, does a judge have a boss who calls them up and says, hey, make this one go away?

Speaker 1

I don't know but I think.

Speaker 2

But I think in the sec's case, since they brought the case, they can also withdraw it oh, because we have an we'd have a more favorable SEC chair that said, okay, yeah, yeah, they can withdraw. Yeah, I can see that. I can see that. Yeah, that would be a really pro-crypto.

Speaker 1

Yeah, we would go on another stair step up. I mean, that's really what would happen there.

Speaker 2

That's interesting.

Speaker 1

Yeah, okay. So in the last thing on our list here, just kind of reviewing history and just kind of seeing these market cycles crypto has gone through, there's a chance that the current market cap of crypto is right around outside of the cycle changing where we would go up in this bull run and we would come back down to the bottom of the bear market. So right around 3 trillion might be the bottom and that's roughly. We're at like 3.1 trillion today. But you kind of see these huge run-ups and 80% drawdown. You kind of work your way back up has been the cycle. So you might have an idea, if you hold crypto, what they might be worth, if you just hold through this whole thing, what they might be worth in, say, two years. So kind of fascinating to kind of look at how history has played out.

Speaker 2

All right, cool. Thanks for the update, robert, and thanks everyone for listening. If you are interested in learning more about Wise Wealth Management or Teton Crypto Capital, you can follow the links in the show notes and, obviously, comment on YouTube with your questions. We'd be happy to answer those and, robert, until next time. Thanks for doing this, yep, take care.

Speaker 3

Thanks for listening to a Wiser Retirement Podcast. We hope you enjoyed today's episode. Make sure to subscribe wherever you're listening. That way you don't miss any new episodes. We'd also appreciate if you could leave a rating and review. If you have any questions about anything that was discussed today, head to wiserinvestorcom and reach out.

Speaker 3

This episode was produced by Rachel Dotson. This podcast is strictly for informational purposes only and is not to be considered as investment advice or solicitation to buy or sell any financial products, securities, digital assets or any other investment vehicles or a basis to make any financial decisions. Wiser Wealth Management Incorporated is a registered investor advisor with the SEC. The host and or guests may personally own securities, digital assets or other investment vehicles mentioned on this podcast. Neither the host nor guests of the show are compensated for their participation and no referral fees are paid to or received by any host or guest for clients, listeners or similar interests. Investments involve risk and, unless otherwise stated, are not guaranteed. Be sure to first consult with a qualified financial advisor, tax professional, insurance professional and or legal professional before implementing any strategy discussed herein. Past performance is not indicative of future performance.

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Casey Smith

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Shawna Theriault, CFP®, CPA, CDFA®

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