Bitcoin Institutional Adoption & Q4 Market Outlook | BMTV Oct. 15, 2026

Grace Remington (0:00)

Good morning and happy Thursday. Welcome into BMTV. I'm Grace Remington with Sean Hagan. Well, the markets are all over the place this morning. And one of the reasons is because PPI coming in hotter than expected. It's actually at its second highest level since November, 2022, Sean.

Sean Hagan (0:15)

Yeah, look, it's becoming a ongoing problem, right? And the Fed meeting is coming up. This certainly makes the market more convinced that they're gonna be more willing to hike again. I know there's a lot of conversation around, will they wait? Will it be perceived as political?

But the way the Fed is positioned, they may have backed themselves into a corner where they may not really have a choice.

Grace Remington (0:38)

Yeah, lots to get to today. We'll get to that as well. But here's who's joining us on today's episode. Amy Oldenburg, head of digital asset strategy at Morgan Stanley, Micah Warren, mathematics associate professor at the University of Oregon, Obi Enwosu, CEO of Feddy, Lark Davis, host of the Lark Davis show, and Sean Farrell, head of digital asset strategy at Fundstrat Global Advisors. But let's begin with our headlines. BlackRock's digital asset products brought in $7.9 billion in net inflows during Q3, reversing outflows from the first half of the year. Assets under management rose 63% to nearly $80 billion, with rising Bitcoin and crypto prices accounting for most of the increase. The total remains 23% below a year ago. Binance is shutting down its Bitcoin mining pool, with remaining miners required to switch providers before November 10th. According to Hashrate Index, computing power directed at the pool has fallen about 65% since December, reducing its share of the Bitcoin network from 2.3% to under 1%.

Kraken's parent company, Payward, has agreed to acquire Lithuania's Saldo Bank, a deal that would make it the first crypto-native firm to own a European bank. Payward says the acquisition would support interest-paying deposits, lending and payment services for European customers. The deal is expected to close in 2027 Patrick Witt's time as Executive Director of the White House Crypto Council has ended with the White House confirming his temporary assignment expired. Witt helped lead Senate negotiations on the Clarity Act, which remained stalled after failing a procedural vote last month. No successor has been announced. A global chip stock sell-off deepened overnight, with South Korea's cost be falling about 7 percent. SK Hynex and Samsung dropped roughly 11 and 9 percent respectively. The declines followed selling on Wall Street as hot US inflation data fuels rate hike concerns and investors questioned debt-funded AI expansion.

And the Kremlin says Russian diesel has started reaching global markets following an agreement with President Trump aimed at lowering fuel prices. Moscow partially lifted its diesel export ban on October 10th. The Kremlin says the supplies should help stabilize oil markets.

And with that, let's go to the markets this morning. Bitcoin trading under $81,000. That's down 2.75% on the day, still under pressure as investors pull back from riskier assets. And on Wall Street, everyone watching, the AI sell-off, the S&P 500 and Nasdaq, both suffering their worst days since July yesterday, the SPY down about 7 tenths of a percentage point this morning, and QQQ also pointing to weakness down about 1.25%.

The big concern there, higher borrowing costs. But here's the interesting reversal here, the 10-year yield down to 5.09% this morning. It was actually around 5.04 pre-market. That's down almost 25 basis points since yesterday morning. And gold benefiting from the shift, it is back up over $4,100 per ounce today. That's a jump of 1.4%. And finally, oil, WTI, just under $95 a barrel, but Brent's still above $100. So Sean, lots of action here. What stands out the most to you?

Sean Hagan (4:15)

Well, nothing too surprising. It's a lot of what we've been calling for on this show. You know, we've previously discussed that we believe that kind of a bump or at least a temporary reversal of some sort was due in the bond market. We're now seeing that. Will it be continued is up for the market to decide. But at the same time, we've also been covering kind of the private debt market and this AI trade and kind of showing that there's certainly signs of stress. And so is this a temporary bump in the road? Perhaps. Is this a sign of that trade beginning to unwind? Also, perhaps. But it's something that doesn't surprise us. I think that at least a little bit of friction was inevitable. And in the short term here, we're seeing Bitcoin sell off a little bit at the same time.

But I think what's going to be important to monitor is how does Bitcoin respond off the back end of this, right? You know, this is kind of a reactionary impact of kind of the broader market.