Digital Asset News host Rob analyzes the failure of the Clarity Act and what comes next for crypto markets and XRP
Solo presentation by Rob of Digital Asset News on crypto market conditions following the Clarity Act's failure to pass.
Summary
Rob from Digital Asset News opens by addressing the failure of the Clarity Act, arguing that its failure was predictable given that the opposing party had no incentive to hand the sitting president a legislative win. He features commentary from Randy Hipper (Miss Teen Crypto), who argues that the Clarity Act was essentially theater — designed to delay crypto regulation until major global banks were ready to roll out their own stablecoin products. Rob then walks through historical Bitcoin and altcoin performance data around midterm election years, showing that buying during peak fear periods has historically produced strong returns. He also discusses XRP's performance relative to Bitcoin and other altcoins, and closes with thoughts on what regulatory path is likely now that the Clarity Act has failed, predicting the SEC and CFTC will step in with rules that may later be dismantled.
A significant portion of the episode is devoted to Rob's personal DCA strategy, including his Cash App recurring buy setup and current altcoin holdings (Solana, Cardano, Tron, BNB, and possibly XRP). Rob also walks viewers through the Dan Teaches Crypto 'Pros vs. Joes' price prediction tool, reviewing predictions from prominent figures such as Samson Mow, Raoul Pal, Robert Kiyosaki, and Tom Lee, and encouraging viewers to submit their own predictions.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
The Clarity Act Fails — and Why It Was Expected
Rob: As you all very well know, the Clarity Act didn't go through, and I think we all knew it wouldn't go through. So let's just talk about what really comes next.
If we take a look at the markets themselves today, it's looking pretty good. Bitcoin's at — hold on, I can't refresh this. Sorry. Yeah, that's more like it. 76,000, down about 4%. Too bad. Ethereum is down 5%, probably going to drop some more. BNB — wow. XRP is down 12%. We're going to talk about it today, matter of fact. And across the board, not too great. A little bit of a recovery over the last hour as people were buying the dip.
I have to tell you, that was what a couple of my favorite guys over on X — well, three of them actually — Ivan on Tech, Wes, and Metal Law Man. They gave us some pretty sound advice. All three of them, great stuff. Look at this — they said, just a reminder, all dips are for buying. Don't be that guy or that gal. Time to be bearish was October 2025. Now is the time to be bullish. Bull, bull, bull. Noise and media doesn't matter. Bullish. Ivan says it, and then Wes goes: Fed rate hike tomorrow, time is very much for accumulating.
And then Metal Law Man — who was a great guest when we did the 20-hour live stream — says this: Schiff, Gillibrand, and Slotkin all voted no on the Clarity Act. Fairshake spent $30 million on these Democrats, but not a dime for John Deacon, who incidentally is running against Ed Markey, who voted no on the GENIUS Act and now the Clarity Act.
It is interesting that you spend $30 million on a couple of candidates — senators, congressmen — and you say, hey, we'd like you to vote a little bit pro-crypto. Sure, no problem, give us that money. And then when the most important act comes through, they're like, nope, not voting for that. And that, my friend, is politics. Have fun with that.
Randy Hipper on Why the Clarity Act Was Always Theater
I've talked about this on the channel for quite some time. I just never thought it was going to pass. I just didn't see the opposing party giving the party that's in power right now — the Republicans — a nice little victory lap. If you campaign as the crypto president and you bring in a Clarity Act, that's a huge win, and they do not want to give that to the sitting president. So that's just par for the course. But it goes beyond that.
And funny enough, to talk about this behind the scenes — Randy Hipper, you might know her as Miss Teen Crypto. She was on the show for that 20-hour live stream and she laid it out perfectly in about a minute and thirty seconds. Just take a listen to what she says about the Clarity Act, the banks, and how it's all show — all smoke and mirrors.
Randy Hipper: No, I think it's either going to be like a massive run or it's just going to be chill. We've got midterms coming up. We've got Clarity. It really depends on the banks — and hear me out here.
The Clarity Act was just all smoke and mirrors. What banker is going to pay Liz Warren to yap, yap, yap? And the reason why they're doing that — I actually explained this on my show yesterday with an article behind me — it was like all these 21 global banks, and notice the number 21, between the US and Europe are going to team up on stablecoins. Well, what were the bankers paying Liz Warren to complain about? Stablecoins. Because they were cooking. They weren't ready to put the meal out on the counter. So they were like, "Hey, Liz Warren, just yap and screw it all up for a little bit. Postpone this and let us cook." Because the banks in the US were like, no stablecoin — we can't have it. Because we're not ready. You're not allowed to have yield because we don't give you yield, so why should you get yield from somewhere else?
And then in Europe, the banks were saying — and Christine Lagarde from the ECB, she's like, oh my gosh, you guys can't have stablecoins. Stablecoins are bad, especially US-denominated ones. But the euro — we need the digital euro, the CBDC, not stablecoins.
Oh. Oh. What happened in that same article? They're saying that there's going to be euro-denominated stablecoins in tandem with US dollar-denominated stablecoins. So the banks at the end of the year are going to roll this thing out, and then the Clarity Act will pass because the banks are ready to pass it.
That's why I tell everyone: do not bet your price action, your portfolio, nothing on what the Clarity Act is doing, because they don't care about you. It's all theater. Gary Gensler, Operation Choke Point 2.0 — it was scripted to hold back crypto again until the banks were ready for the GENIUS Act. And then once they had the GENIUS Act, they're like, wait, hold on. We have Clarity, but we're not ready for Clarity. Let's just tell them what we're going to do and then actually do it later on.
Rob: Anybody disagree with that right now? Seems pretty reasonable. Shout out to Randy — she's on either Fox News or Newsmax right now giving a little interview about her experiences and what's going on. When she was talking about that last week — I think we did that on Thursday — I was listening and thinking, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And now here we are. It pretty much repeated itself. Maybe six months ago people would have listened to that and said that's insane, but here we are and it came to fruition. That's what it is.
Midterm Election Cycles and Historical Crypto Performance
We have a sphere of control and we can only control the things right in front of us. So what do we do now? It really does come down to the basics of what we talked about yesterday — four-year cycles, midterm elections, and how they pretty much overlap.
The midterm year is this year, 2026. Before that was 2022, which was also a pretty down year for crypto and for stocks. And 2018 was a down year for crypto and stocks as well. Every four years we get a midterm election year when we vote in or out the congressional seats to see who's going to retain or give them up. And again, since 1942, if you bought on midterm election day, you would be up roughly 15% in six or seven months.
We took a look at Bitcoin from 2014, 2018, and 2022. If you just waited six months, you'd actually be down in 2014 and 2018, but you'd be up in 2022. And if you waited for a year, you were doing pretty damn good. In 2014, if you waited a year, you'd be up 25% — and that's only in 2015. The price was around $330. If you would have held two more years to 2017, you'd be up over 3,000% — I think it's over 8,000%. Correct me in the comments section, but you went from essentially $330 to $19,776.
In 2018, you went from $6,400 to $9,300. Who wouldn't like to buy Bitcoin at $6,461? All you had to do was wait until 2021 and it was at roughly $64,000 to $67,000. In 2022, the price was $18,000 and of course we went to $125,000. So that's just Bitcoin itself.
We compared this against the altcoins — they didn't do too hot unless you actually held them. The best ones were Solana and Tron. If you would have held them from election day to their all-time high, these are the gains you would have got. A little bit more risky because Bitcoin's in the middle. But again, this is pretty much what I was hoping for. I'm sorry to say that, but it's true. You guys know this. I was hoping we would see a pretty down Q4 because I always say that bear markets are for accumulation. It's not just me saying that — we've got some relatively smart individuals like Milano saying the same thing, Wes and Ivan saying these are times for accumulation. This isn't the time to go chasing all-time highs with crazy price predictions. That's pretty much how it is and how it's going to be for a while.
Federal Reserve Rate Decision Tomorrow
Tomorrow is also going to be kind of rough for price action if you're thinking about going long on something. Let me refresh this. Ah — it went up. So, 94.5% probability, and it was like 80% a week ago. We're going to be raising rates when the Federal Reserve has their FOMC meeting tomorrow — I always say SEC, I'm sorry, Federal Reserve. Kevin Warsh will probably raise rates. Maybe he doesn't, but if he doesn't, that'd be fantastic for price action — though really bad if you want to accumulate. But if he does come out and say he's going to raise rates, don't expect a massive drop in the market. Some of this will be priced in. I still do think you'll see a little bit of a pullback because markets are a funny thing — you have a 94.5% chance priced in and there are always those holdouts going long. Good luck to those guys. So maybe tomorrow will be a little bit wacky.
CoinX Exchange Shuts Down — History Repeating
As we go through these cycles, the same thing keeps happening over and over again. It's like we're in Groundhog Day. Case in point: a blockchain exchange just shut down. Didn't we have this happen in 2022? Here we go again. CoinX — and I don't even know the volume of CoinX — but it's going to shut down after nine years as a crypto slump and compliance costs bite. CoinX is a long-running global crypto exchange launched in December 2017. That's when I got into crypto — well, I got in November, but yeah. Sorry CoinX, but this is par for the course. An exchange shuts down almost in Q4 of the midterm, post all-time high year for crypto. Kind of crazy.
Shout Out to CryptoKid
Before we get into XRP and some altcoins, shout out to CryptoKid for getting his channel back yesterday. I want to say thanks to everybody. CryptoKid seems like a good guy. Apparently YouTube shut him down, so we did a little post and a lot of people did the same and said, hey, this kid's a good guy, talks reasonably, doesn't show anything really objectionable — could you give him his channel back? And YouTube listened. That's the power of a community when we all work together. And remember, if we don't work together for each other, who the hell is going to come save us? It's pretty much us against the world. He was pretty upset about losing it after starting the channel when he was like 15 years old. Thanks everybody for helping CryptoKid get his channel back.
XRP vs. Bitcoin vs. Altcoins — Portfolio Comparison from the 2022 Midterm Low
Now, let's finish up before we get to the Q&A on XRP. Yesterday someone said, "Rob, you're so biased and you don't ever talk about XRP." And I get it. XRP's out there, people love it, XRP army. I know a couple of whales here in Puerto Rico who love it to death and all I do is make fun of them when we're drinking. But it's still not a bad thing. And I know some people say, well, it's the banker coin, it's the Brad Garlinghouse coin. And I have to ask you: are we here for the tech or are we here for our wallets? Be honest. It's okay. You don't have to say it out loud.
Anyhow, the topic is portfolio balance. We took a look at how much you would have increased in percentage terms if you had invested on midterm election day, which was November 8th, 2022. Now we have one coming up November 2nd, 2026 — something to keep in mind.
So we did Bitcoin at $10 a day, and at your peak you'd be up 200%. You invested $10,000 and you'd own $31,000. That's pretty good — you invested $10,000, got $31,000 in essentially three years. Not bad at all. But how would you have done against a whole basket of altcoins?
Let's throw some in there. Let's throw in Tesla because everybody talks about how great Tesla is — and remember there was a stock split so it'll be a little off. What about Strategy? And then let's do crypto. We already did ETH and BNB. Let's put in XRP. We already did Tron. Let's do Zcash. Let's do Dow, Chainlink, Stellar — those were around. I'm not going to do Bitcoin Cash, don't even ask me. How about Avalanche? How about Near? Throw in a little Shib. How about Tether Gold? And how about ICP? Everybody talks about that. That's a lot of stuff.
Okay, what the hell is this? Wow. First of all, if you invested in Zcash back then, you can take my spot today because you're up 3,270% if you would have invested back in — was it even around in 2022? Let's see. Yeah, it was. Wow. So, sorry XRP army, you lost. No, I'm just kidding. But okay, Zcash, God bless you. That's amazing. I didn't even think about that one. So now we have to take out Zcash because it's just screwing up the charts. If you want to invest in that, hey, something to look into.
So here's some normality. You're doing $10 a day and coming around here, everything's up. Look at that. February 2023 — ICP up 64%, Near 48%, Avalanche, Shib, Bitcoin, Chainlink, Stellar, Doge, XRP. Can someone throw in the chat when XRP exited their lawsuit against the SEC? Because that would probably be the time when everything blew up for them.
Now we're in July 2023. XRP — well, it must have been around 2023 because you're up 92%. Stellar 73%. Bitcoin only 30%. Crazy. MicroStrategy 26%. And Tesla, you're down 1.7%. Well, that sucks.
Let's take a look at 2024. Avalanche, you're up 269%. Near, Strategy, Shib, Bitcoin. And XRP, you're only up 20%. Not that great, I'll be honest with you. Doge 66% — you're up 66% on Doge. That's crazy.
Now we get into 2025. Come on. Push, push, push. Okay, now here's where XRP starts really coming to shine, right? 381%. Stellar 198%, 195%, and so on. Where's Bitcoin? 160%. So you could do more, but you've got to take a heck of a lot more risk. That's just how it goes.
And then coming across here into June 2025, Strategy outperforms pretty much everything. Don't forget this is the height of Michael Saylor's "you never sell your Bitcoin ever — except for my company, because that's what we do and we're going to do it at some point, you'll just be surprised that we did it." Hey, I don't make the rules. It's what happened.
XRP at 46%, Bitcoin so on and so forth. XRP up 400% in July — that's pretty good. 300%, 400%, 336%. And then as we get towards the peak on October 8th — Bitcoin, I see — you'd have invested $10,000 and you'd be up 180% at $30,000. This is when the price was around $126,000. Pretty good. But XRP still beat you by 333%. That's a lot.
However, you have to remember — you had to buy in peak fear in 2022. That is when everybody was scared out of their minds. FTX had collapsed. It was going to go through litigation. We'd already seen Celsius and Voyager go down. Three Arrows Capital, BlockFi — you name it, it collapsed. Luna collapsed. A stablecoin collapsed. Everything went down the tubes. Elizabeth Warren was the most vocal, and of course some people thought it would never turn back. So for you to buy back then — hats off to you. That was peak fear, and that is when you buy. I don't care what you buy. I don't care what you get into as long as you believe in it and it actually makes it.
Speculation vs. Utility — What Really Drives Price
Remember, as I've said before, what will cause things to go up? It's not so much about utility and how much you can actually do. Really, it comes down to speculation and a little dash of utility. Don't believe me? Take a look at what happened to the Helium token roughly two weeks ago in a small little town outside of Dallas-Fort Worth. It went up 112% just because a small town of roughly 64,000 people decided they were going to use it exclusively for Wi-Fi. And if that's going to push you to hundreds of millions of dollars in valuation, so much the better. But I do not believe it's all about utility. I think a lot of it is speculation. And this is the time to start thinking about really acquiring.
Me personally, I've been doing this every Monday — acquire Bitcoin and move on.
Q&A — DCA Strategy, Cash App, and What Rob Is Buying
Rob: Now let's get into a little Q&A. Me and Black Diamond are pretty much the same right here — I don't even check my bags anymore. It's not so much about checking. It's about making sure your recurring orders are firing. That's what I've found.
For me, I have it on Cash App. Doesn't that suck, Rob? No, it's pretty awesome, actually — if you don't do single buys. If you do recurring buys and set it up, the spread is almost non-existent and there are no fees. Jack Dorsey set it up that way specifically because he wants you to keep buying Bitcoin. If you do a one-off, the spreads suck and there are fees. But if you just do recurring buys — like my setup every Monday at roughly 6:30 in the morning — I just make sure I check it every Monday. I make sure the risk levels aren't lower or higher and then I adjust as the price goes down. I tend to buy 2x, 4x, and a couple of times a nice little 8x of what I usually buy because the price had gone down so massively. That's all about DCA.
When the price goes down, the price goes up. It's fundamentals, baby. That's how it goes.
What Happens Now That the Clarity Act Failed
People are saying no to Clarity. And you know what's funny about that? Now that it's not going to go through, the SEC and the CFTC are going to step forward and say, okay, well, if you guys can't do it — which we knew you couldn't — we'll step in and write some rules and regulations.
The problem with the SEC and the CFTC is that when the current administration leaves — and who knows what's going to happen in 2028 — if there's a shift from the party in power now to a different party, it's very easy to appoint new heads of the SEC, CFTC, OCC, any types of organizations in the government. And because of that, they can appoint their own people and the first thing they can do is dismantle those policies.
Now, if they sign them as a bill, it's a lot different. You'd have to get a supermajority to override that. It has to go through the paces — through the House, the Senate, the president signs off on it. A heck of a lot harder. So this is why everybody was so enthused about it actually getting written up as legislation. But I took a look at it and said it's probably not going to happen.
So what's going to happen? The SEC and CFTC will step in. They'll say, let's just do it this way. The OCC will come in. This is what a security is. This is what a currency is. This is what an equity is. This is what an investment is. They'll write some rules, they'll be in place for a couple of years, and then they'll get dismantled and we'll just do the whole thing again. Not a big deal. I just didn't see it passing. A lot of hatred out there.
What Rob Is Currently Buying
So what else am I buying? I've been buying Solana — can't lie about that. I do like Cardano. I've been buying Cardano intermittently. I buy Tron. I do not buy Ethereum. The price action is horrible. I know people say it's the future and the investment is going big, but just take a look at the price action over the last three or four years. I'm not going to buy any more Ethereum. A little bit of BNB. And I'm thinking about buying a little XRP now because maybe it could do something — I don't know. We'll see how it goes.
There's only so many tokens and cryptos you can buy. And then I also buy traditional stocks and real estate. When you do all these things, there's only so much you can put in. You may want to buy more — I know you're all doing the same thing. You're like, I really would like to buy this, but there's only so much powder that I have. That's pretty much where we're at.
Price Predictions — Pros vs. Joes
Jerick has a great question: Rob, do you have a fun prediction for the bottom? Like a bet with yourself? I don't have a bet with myself. And this is where everybody comes in. I would like all of you to do a price prediction — every single one of you.
Where I'd like you to do that is on Dan Teaches Crypto. Free site, 100% free, always free. Go to tools, right where it says Profits — which is a play on words, pro-fits, profits, which we all like, and profits as in the people who make forward-thinking statements. We track everybody who makes a price prediction and we keep their price predictions on the Wayback Time Machine so somebody can't erase it. They can delete their post, but that's okay because we've got it in our history.
If you go to 2D, you can lay this all out by the price prediction, the person, and the time frame. Like Samson Mow — who is the biggest offender in my personal opinion — a million by 2026. Okay, that's irrational. Raoul Pal, $450,000 by the end of 2026. Okay, it's not going to happen. Robert Kiyosaki, $250,000 — he says that forever. Tom Lee, the best hair in crypto by far, is not going to make that. And so on and so forth.
I don't really care about those guys. You guys will beat every single one of these people. Go to 3D right here. Here's all the people that have put in their price predictions. Here's today. Here's roughly the price level at $76K. Let's zoom in. Who's been right? So far, Echoli is crushing it — $69K. It's pretty close. We're at $76K. Looks pretty good. You Are Suspicious at $94K. North Viking at $56K. Domer at $100K. Arie at $75K. Let's expand that. $53K, $55K, $38K, $39K, DOM Biz now at $32K. I still think you guys are going to beat them.
If you want to put your price prediction, it's very simple. Top right-hand corner, click on Submit a Call. Do you want to report on a public figure and say, hey, I saw that Cathie Wood said a million dollars tomorrow — give me the link. Or do you want to post your own prediction? Just post your own prediction. My name is Rob Wolf. What's the price? I personally think it's going to go to $150,000 to $170,000 by — I think it was November 2029. Something like that. I'm conservative. Where did you make this call? Live in front of everyone. And you can post it. And there you go, you're on the board.
I call it the Pros versus the Joes. I guarantee the Joes are going to beat the price-predicting geniuses. But we'll see.
Moving Averages and Buying Opportunities
Angelina says she can't see Bitcoin going below the 200-week moving average. I mean, Angela is correct, but these are good times to buy. If you take a look at moving averages, this is a good one to get into if you're so inclined.
Let's zoom in. The 200-week simple moving average — not exponential — is at $65,400, and right now we are well above that. But it was great timing to buy below that. Look at that — below the 200-week you were at $62K, $59K, $58K. Not too bad. And we could still go below this. You never know. We're just one Truth Social post away from the 350-week moving average. And then here's the 150-week, and the 100-week at $89K — be nice. The 50-week and 20-week are all messed up. The 8-week is the nearest one, sure. But I always take a look at the 200 and the 250 to see where we're at. We can get below the 250 at $58K — prime buying opportunities, I think, but I could be wrong.
Rusty's here: in two weeks' time it was around $66K. I hope so. Me too. Me too. I wish I would have bought when it was $58K. I think I got it right around $60K. I was still happy. But remember, I've been buying Bitcoin since it was like $8,500 and I've sold some along the way. You're never really selling — you're just rotating.