Bitcoin Holds Strong As Tokenized Stocks EXPLODE To $3.4B

**Scott Melker** (0:01)
Bitcoin is holding strong as tokenized stocks explode to 3.4 billion in monthly volume. While that's a small number, the rapid growth of tokenized equities is definitely worth discussing, as that's clearly the major trend moving into the future. To discuss that and everything else happening in crypto markets and beyond, I have my friend James Butterfill from CoinShares. Let's go.
Good morning, everybody. Happy Thursday, and welcome to the show. Bitcoin actually remaining relatively strong in the face of a lot of what I would say would be expected macro headwinds. I'm gonna bring on James right now, and we can break it all down. Good morning, James, how are you?

**James Butterfill** (0:57)
Hi, Scott, good, thanks, yeah. Surviving the crypto winters, they say.

**Scott Melker** (1:02)
I live in Florida, crypto winters like 109 degrees every single day and humid. So listen, I guess we could just start with the market because broadly I think we're starting to see, A, I think a slight bit of optimism, although the fear and greed and those things don't indicate it. But I am seeing a bit of optimism that people think we could be bottoming. I take a look personally at the Bitcoin chart, and I see the 50 MA here on the monthly as glaring a potential line for an area for bottoming that you could have. And the 200 MA here on the weekly, which we temporarily broke down or above and sitting right on.
And it seems like the general sentiment is extremely negative, but people I trust starting to look at these things and say, hey, maybe it's just going to be a choppy summer and then we're going to rise from here.

**James Butterfill** (1:54)
Yeah, I mean, I take quite a more macro approach to this. Rather than looking at average averages. I do think they certainly have quite a kind of important impact on sentiment. But yeah, I think there's been a lot of headwinds since October, which is exactly a year and a half after the halving. And I wouldn't have thought the halving should have an effect, but it has. We've seen $39 billion worth of selling over this period. And that's by whales. And that's put a lot of pressure on Bitcoin prices, as we can see.
What's really encouraging for me is that whales have stopped selling now. They don't buy for a while. They don't buy for around six months prior to the next halving, which puts it sort of Q4 2027, so just over a year's time.
So I think the market is moving much more in macro fundamentals at the moment, and we can see what is around. There's the hawkish fed and even more hawkish after yesterday's FOMC minutes. So then we're not going to see much price uptick from that. But there's definitely, I think, evidence that a bottom is forming.

**Scott Melker** (3:06)
We have these situations where if bad news isn't moving the market lower, that maybe that's an indication that things are steadily improving. I know that's sort of a silver lining, but you would think that the Iran War ceasefire ending, or like you said, a hawkish fed. It's been a lot of things that would traditionally be bad news, and potentially actually move the market down. So the fact that we're holding strong, kind of the title here maybe is a signal. It is to me.

**James Butterfill** (3:33)
Yeah, I mean, Microsoft is selling, has not really, three and a half thousand Bitcoins not really had much of an effect, nor has this news from the FMC, or the recent undoing of the ceasefire in Iran. So actually the market's looking quite resilient from that perspective, and then you've got fund flows. We've seen $8 billion of outflows over the last eight weeks. That is a new record, both proportionally, if you look at it as the outflows, there's a percentage of assets under management, and actually the overall figure, $8 billion. I think the last prior one that was around run of outflows, the biggest one we've seen was around 5.3. So a pretty chunky number, but over the last three trading days, we've seen $600 million of inflows. And that's the first meaningful inflows we've seen since the start of May.
So it does suggest that not massively optimistic, but maybe we're at this kind of investor capitulation point right now.

**Scott Melker** (4:37)
Yeah, I guess it leaves the question, who's left to sell? As you said, the whales have sold. I had seen some evidence, but the on-chain evidence is always so confusing, tweets that they were buying again, but you've said they sort of stalled, but either way, not selling is good news.