Vieten: Bitcoin Rallying to $175K Amid Restored Crypto Sentiment

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
Brian Vieten, Senior Research Analyst at Siebert. It's great to see you.
Pretty interesting to see the run up that we saw for the month of August. I mean, that was pretty exciting, right? I saw, and Ethereum did even better than Bitcoin. What do you attribute the run up in the past? I know you wanted to sort of look at this chronologically.

**Brian Vieten** (0:18)
Yeah, it's a great question, Nicole. So I think what we had in May and June was sentiment overshot a little bit. So you had, Strategy was talking about selling Bitcoin for the first time, and I think that spooked the market. So sentiment really overshot. You had that low on June 30th. And then since then, you have had a number of positive developments. You've had a little bit more of the debasement trade coming back, so that's good for Bitcoin. You've also had the SEC, CFTC have come out with some favorable guidance for the next couple years. And then you also had the president talking about the potential US accumulation of Bitcoin and digital assets. So a number of factors that have fueled the...
And there was also a big short squeeze the last couple weeks.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:09)
Yeah, that's a good point. That's a good point about the short squeeze too.
So Ethereum was up about 28% or so, above 25% for August. We saw Bitcoin up above 20% gain for August. And now what? I mean, what is going to be the next thing to watch? I mean, people can sit and wait, and they've been pretty good at it because they got used to seeing it at over 100, right, for a while for Bitcoin. And now we're here at 33,000. So, I'm sorry. We're here at, that's not the right number. I will give you the right number. 77,000, that makes more sense. 77,000. So how do we get back to the 100,000?

**Brian Vieten** (1:50)
Yeah, so I think definitely next stop, 100,000. We have a 12-month price target of 175,000. So at some point mid-next year.
And I do think that, you know, the way that you get there is you have favorable.
So we think we're kind of in like the January 2023 time frame. So right after the bear market, we do think June 30th was the low. And from here, we think what gets people really excited is you do have a real demand catalyst on the calendar, so that's the Genius Act implementation in January 2027 And we do think that stable coins are a very easy and approachable consumer gateway into the industry. Onto blockchain rails, we think it brings a lot more users and liquidity on chain. We think stable coins are pretty easy. It's so easy. I think even my grandfather, who's 95 years old and tuned in, he might be able to use tap to pay with the stable coin. There's already 5 billion digital payments users, so we learned how to use payments, use tap to pay during COVID. We think it's an easy consumer behavior to teach from stable coins.

**SPEAKER_1** (3:07)
I think I want to touch on what you said about the Genius Act implementation in January of 2027
That could be a catalyst that people have not yet priced in. Is that right? Tell me more about that.

**Brian Vieten** (3:21)
We think so, too. And if you think back, the last major access catalyst was the Spot ETF approvals back in January of 2024 And what happened back then was once the market realized that, hey, this is coming, we are going to get Spot ETFs. And that happened right around October 2023 with the grayscale ruling. We do think it's a similar setup where you have a real catalyst on the calendar. And back then, I remember estimating maybe the inflows for the ETFs could be 5 billion, 10 billion over a couple of years. And they did 20 billion over the first two months. And so we do think that there's potential that the market is underestimating this. There's also some of the largest tech platforms are testing this stuff. So Meta has got a pilot right now in a couple of countries.
We think that kind of continues.

**SPEAKER_1** (4:13)
And it's very interesting that you said you think the law was in for this year. And we did see it clear the 50-day moving average going above 81,000 just recently. So we will continue to watch the story. Thank you so much, Brian. It's great to see you. Brian Vieten, Senior Research Analyst at Siebert.