Bits + Bips: Is Bitcoin Finally Being Priced on Fundamentals?

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

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Austin Campbell (0:34)

Let's start with Bitcoin, because this is interesting in the context of the world.

First weekly candle to close above its 50-week moving average for 45-ish weeks. That line has marked the end of past bear markets, and obviously it continues to run. There's a debate going as to whether this is short covering for real buyers out there, but I'm going to remind everybody every trade has two sides. You always have a buyer and a seller. So in early September, we couldn't get this far, and now we closed the weekly average at 81,160. Monday has added another lag. Galaxy Digital and Alex Thorne are noting the 50-week is the bear market ceiling, and you have to reclaim that. Quote, in four of the five completed bear markets, once the 50-week moving average was first broken to the upside, the bear market bottom was definitely in. Benjamin Cowan said a rally to a higher high and weekly closes above the 50-week SMA would materially weaken the bear case. And Jurian Timmer at Fidelity said, I'm sensing that a new four-year bull cycle is underway.

There is the case that it was all shorts. IT Tech said Coinbase Premium negative 166 of 168 hours. It was short covering that drove the bounce. Real US buyers never showed up. Listed companies have only added 5,900 BTC against 89,000 in July 2025, and spot ETFs for the whole week.

Counterpoint, the case that the reclaim holds. GlassNode said corporate treasury cost basis around 80K. ETF cost basis around 85K. It's all spot.

And a desk note that was circulating on the street is a pure squeeze, usually gives back 50 to 70% in the next session of the gain. This one did not. So Ram, you're a markets guy. You've been watching all kinds of markets for a very long time. We've just seen Bitcoin reemerge from the dead, like sort of move up from the rubble levels that we were seeing for a while. What are you making of the price action? Do you think it's just shorts? Is there more?

Ram Ahluwalia (2:55)

It is a short squeeze, but it doesn't matter. It doesn't make it illegitimate. You know, rallies off of bottoms do find shorts offside. Then they have to get involved. Then that can attract momentum, and then momentum people get involved. Then the FOMO buyers show up. So that's just a classic dynamic. I don't think it invalidates anything. It's impressive. So what causes is a surprise. A surprise being that possibly the Clarity Act passes, that the Dems have moved the ball.

And that surprise is kind of upsetting what consensus had been just the day before, which is that Clarity Act would not pass. So you had a lot of people concluding it would not pass, and you had this kind of deterioration in Bitcoin up until this event.

So that is like a kind of a wildfire set of conditions there. Dry timber, offsite positioning, and this news impulse. So the thing you got to focus on then is the Clarity Act. Will it pass or not? Right now, expectations have gone up quite a bit. So what happens here turns on the path of Congress.

Austin Campbell (4:14)

Chris, what about you? What are you making of this price move?

Chris Perkins (4:18)

I think we're in a regime change right now.

You're right, Austin. Prices go up when there are more buyers than sellers. And from the beginning of Bitcoin, there's always been this push and pull where is the asset a front-tier risk asset? Or is it price movement based on its fundamentals? And I think you can say that across crypto. Now over the years, there were some issues around fundamentals where we couldn't embrace fundamentals because the regulators didn't allow us to. If a token had a cash flow, it was a security and it was left for dead. Now we're seeing the opposite. Securities are just fine. We have a roadmap for them. We have exemptions as well. The regulators are providing that clarity so that artificial barrier to investments based on fundamentals has been removed. And what gets me excited about this is that, again, it was really acting like a frontier risk asset, very sensitive to geopolitical stresses, macro stresses. It feels like finally we're starting to look at the fundamentals instead.