How Cory Klippsten Would Decide How to Secure Bitcoin Post-Coldcard

**Cory Klippsten** (0:00)
The alternative would be to change the rules of Bitcoin, like your Ethereum or something.
That would be the most stupid own goal in the history of Bitcoin, to just steal the coins and break the rules of Bitcoin. So dumb.

**Laura Shin** (0:19)
Hi everyone, welcome to Unchained, your now hype resource for all things crypto. I'm your host, Laura Shin. Thanks for joining this livestream. We'll first take a quick word from the sponsors who make this show possible.
This episode is brought to you by 1inchAqua, the shared liquidity layer from 1inch. Back multiple liquidity positions with one wallet balance, and keep your tokens in your wallet until a swap fills. See how it works at 1inch.com/aqua.
Today's guest is Cory Klippsten, founder and CEO of Swan. Welcome Cory.

**Cory Klippsten** (0:51)
Hi Laura, thanks for having me on.

**Laura Shin** (0:54)
Yeah, nice to see you again. Let's start with Bitcoin. A couple of weeks ago, we saw that the Bitcoin price shot up after Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said that the Treasury would aggressively double its long-term government debt buybacks from a max of $2 billion to at least $4 billion per operation. And ever since then, we've seen Bitcoin kind of at this 80k level at sometimes above it, now it's slightly below.
There's been comments about how this price move could potentially signal the end of the bear market. There's others who are not convinced. And I'm wondering what your thoughts are on where this market is headed. Yeah.

**Cory Klippsten** (1:34)
Well, first off, I hope we finish with Bitcoin too, because it is my favorite subject. And yeah, it's interesting that you led with that because there have been a lot of folks proffering other potential catalysts for what kind of kicked this off. But I also marked that Bessent's speech as being the thing that did it. It seemed pretty obvious when you kind of looked at the timing of it. And it basically just led straight into a bit of a liquidation cascade for the shorts that got caught off sides.
But what's interesting about that move is it was just supported by a lot of spot volume both in the ETFs and also real on-chain Bitcoin buying at places like Swan and others. And so we basically found ourselves with a rally that went up 23, 24 percent, something like that over the course of a week. And as you noted, it planted itself right around 80K, and it didn't involve leverage on the upside. So there was basically nobody to just crush and easily wash out here.
So yeah, I think stuck the landing is interesting, and it puts us in this place right below the 50-week moving average, which again, I'm not a numbers astrology guy and I don't trade, and I don't really recommend that most people who aren't already professional traders before they get into Bitcoin, y'all shouldn't be trading either. But there are a lot of people who do trade and they do trade support and resistance lines and that is one of the indicators that shows up on every professionals. Trading terminal is the 50-week moving average. So I'm not surprised at all that there's some resistance there. There also happened to be an enormous amount of volume traded in that 80-82k range historically, which again people pay attention to, whether it makes sense or not. A lot of people see that big volume thing and they assume that it's going to be hard to punch through and so they load up some shorts and that's why it takes a while to punch through later. What is interesting is there's just almost no historical volume at any large amount of historical volume at any level between 80-82 and all-time high. There's a little bit around 88, obviously 100K is like a psychological number. There's maybe a little bit of memory of the original pump to 108K before the pullback. That was kind of the first bull market peak in 25 And then after that, it's just, you know, 126K. So you know, I think it is, you know, I'm optimistically hoping that we're in the early green shoots of a bull market. I think we deserve it. I don't think we got the bull market that we deserved either of the last two times, frankly. And I would love to see Bitcoin just absolutely rip people's faces off and remind everyone that it is the king of the jungle.

**Laura Shin** (4:22)
Well, I did also want to ask because we are seeing that, you know, there's quite a lot of demand for Bitcoin ETFs. There's been about $3 billion in inflows over the past two weeks.
And at the same time, it looks like, you know, on-chain indicators are showing movement toward exchanges. So like, what does that say to you when you see, you know, those segments of the market acting in that way?