Digital Asset News host covers JPMorgan, Citi, and Schwab entering crypto, with MicroStrategy's record Bitcoin purchase
Digital Asset News host Robbie covers major institutional moves into crypto, including Charles Schwab's spot crypto trading launch and JPMorgan and Citibank executives explaining their blockchain payment strategies.
Summary
The host opens by noting Bitcoin is up 1.7% and Ethereum up 1.5% on what he calls April 20th, and highlights MicroStrategy's record purchase of 34,164 Bitcoin at an average of ~$74,000, totaling $2.5 billion — the largest single acquisition in the company's history. He then walks through Charles Schwab's announcement of spot crypto trading, noting the firm manages nearly $12 trillion in client assets across 39 million brokerage accounts. The centerpiece of the episode is a breakdown of clips from a panel featuring Samir Khaliq, Global Head of Services at Citigroup, and Omar Farooq from JPMorgan, who explain why their institutions are building blockchain payment rails, including programmable smart contracts, 24/7 cross-border settlement, and tokenized money markets on Ethereum. The host also contrasts JPMorgan's permissioned coin with open stablecoins like USDC, arguing both have distinct roles in the emerging financial infrastructure.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Introduction and Market Overview
Host: Hello everybody. It is a great day to be in Bitcoin and crypto. Today we're going to take a look at why we were right, and we're going to take a look at some pretty big names that are filtering into this new gold rush. I think it's well approved. The big names — Schwab, JPMorgan, and Citibank — I think it's just the tip of the iceberg. So again, you who are watching this video, you were right. Today is a pretty great day.
We've had some geopolitical issues going on. I don't know if the Strait of Hormuz is closed or open — I can't tell anymore. And even if I say it right now, in two minutes it might be the exact opposite. We'll see how it all plays out, but today is good. Bitcoin's up 1.7%, Ethereum 1.5%. Kind of a bummer for me because I'm always buying Bitcoin every Monday. I dollar-cost average every Monday. I know people tell me I need to wait for the 200-week moving average, or the 250-week moving average, or the 300-week moving average or whatever else it is, but I just buy every Monday. Everybody knows I use the Cash App, which works out pretty well. There are no fees if you're buying recurring — weekly or daily. If you do it as a one-off, yes, there are fees. But on a recurring basis, there are none, and the spreads are pretty manageable.
The reason I do it every Monday is we've talked about the risk levels — using Ben's key risk levels, right now at 0.3. I usually start around 0.5, and as it goes lower, my buys actually increase. So hopefully we get to the 0.3, 0.29 range in the $59,000 range again, but I'm not holding my breath.
MicroStrategy's Record Bitcoin Purchase
Host: And neither is Michael Saylor, as somebody knows something. Because today is April 20th — congratulations, 420. MicroStrategy just bought the most amount of Bitcoin they have ever bought across all the time frames they've been buying. They bought 34,164 Bitcoin. The average cost was around $74,000, and the total acquisition cost was $2.5 billion. You can take a look at this at strategy.com/purchases — I think I put it in the description. As far as Bitcoin acquired, this is the most ever. And this goes back to when Bitcoin was nice and low — look at that, 2020 when they first got in at $11,021, $10,000. Not too bad.
So congratulations to Michael Saylor. We'll see what happens. I still think Bitcoin has a ways to go lower. I know that's not the most popular opinion, but I think that's where it's going. But it doesn't matter what I think — it's what the ETFs and the people who are buying think.
Bitcoin and Ethereum ETF Inflows
Host: Today is Monday. On Friday we had a massive influx — this was the most over the last two weeks or so, maybe even a month or two months. $663 million, spearheaded by BlackRock and Fidelity at $163 million. And even Ethereum had a nice little run for the ETF — again, one of the biggest days over the last two to four weeks, $127 million coming in. So we have those things: ETFs, Strategy, and you doing your own buys. So let's get into it.
Charles Schwab Launches Spot Crypto Trading
Host: Schwab. Charles Schwab, if you don't know, is a pretty big player. They hold a record $11.77 trillion to $11.9 trillion in total client assets — we'll just round up and say about $12 trillion. They serve around 39 million active brokerage accounts.
This was actually talked about last week on April 16th. Charles Schwab announced details of their spot crypto trading launch. It's just going to be Bitcoin and Ethereum, which I think we all expected. But this is a pretty big player getting into it.
I thought it was interesting that Charles Schwab has 537,000 subscribers on YouTube — congratulations, Charles Schwab, you're beating me in the subscriber race. They put up a video a couple of days ago about how much crypto you should have in your portfolio. If it's on YouTube, they're sharing it with all of their individuals, all of their 39 million brokerage accounts, because they want this to be a success. They want to get paid. And again, this is the crypto gold rush, and we beat the pants off everybody. You front-ran a lot of people — a lot of smart people — depending on when you got in, of course.
The video is about seven minutes long. It's not very exciting per se, but it does give some very sound advice — the same things we talk about. Don't invest more than you can afford to lose. Watch out for scams. They don't talk about exchanges or leverage because that's their business. But they did say you can take profits along the way, and it's all about risk versus reward. They break it down pretty nicely and humbly. It's solid financial advice, especially coming from Charles Schwab putting it in front of the right investors. Congratulations, Charles Schwab — we're glad you're here. A little late, but we'll take it.
JPMorgan and Citibank Enter Crypto Payments
Host: Now let's get into the other two — JPMorgan and Citi. This is Omar Farooq and Samir Khaliq. They're Global Head of Services at Citigroup and JPMorgan respectively. We're going to go over three different clips from a longer panel — roughly about 39 minutes total — and we'll cover three clips, each about a minute and a half.
Before we get into the clips, let me just run down Citi's evolution quickly so everybody knows they didn't just come out of nowhere. This is why things take time.
In 2020 to 2021, they were actually one of the first to talk about Bitcoin. They did a piece where the post was titled "Bitcoin is at a tipping point" in 2021. They suggested Bitcoin could become the currency of choice for international trade — and I think they were right. In 2022 to 2023, during the massive downturn, they talked about how crypto winter was here, but in the background they began developing internal blockchain solutions. They launched Citi Token Services for institutional cross-border payments. Fast forward to 2024 and 2025 — they invested in stablecoin payments and began projecting high price targets for Bitcoin at $140,000. They were pretty close, actually. We hit $126,000, so $140,000 is actually a pretty good prediction — probably the best job anyone did. They cited ETF adoption and regulatory clarity as major drivers. And then in 2026, right now, they're launching Bitcoin custody infrastructure as a line item in institutional portfolios, integrated with Swift and traditional reporting tools. So they've been right on.
Citigroup: Why They're Doing Crypto Payments
Host: Let's take a listen. This is Samir Khaliq, Head of Citigroup. Take a listen to what he says about why they're doing crypto payments.
Samir Khaliq: "We've been on this journey given the fact that we're in 90 markets around the world with the biggest global footprint. Our focus has always been on serving the big multinationals who work with us — always been on being able to move money around real time, 24/7 across the globe. So that's always been an interest. What we've done using blockchain is really an add-on to what I would call our existing strategy of thinking about 24/7 movement of money, 24/7 payments around the world, and the ability to move payments, money, liquidity, and settle securities and cash around the world. We feel this new technology actually gives us a leg up in how we execute that strategy.
We've been on this journey for the last five or so years. We call it Citi Token Services. We've built this technology out. We've connected five of the biggest branches that we have from a dollar and euro standpoint — we're enabled in Hong Kong, London, Dublin, New York, and Singapore. We've connected those five big locations for Citi. The real client problem we were looking to solve is the ability for large multinationals, big banks, broker-dealers, and fintechs to be able to move their money around and make payments seamlessly around the world, 24/7."
Host: He's right. You would think in this day and age that I can send an email and it can hit anybody's inbox within seconds — but yet for me to move things around in a money market, it takes a long time and I'm missing out. And that's just me, just average investor Joe Blow, not billions of dollars. So think about when he talks about needing to make this faster, needing to make this better, and the way they figured it out is through blockchain technology.
And that leads me to the point about money markets. It's difficult for me to wrap my head around because I'm not a huge player like that. But what he's saying is they're essentially trying to eliminate some of the middlemen — because even the banks have to have middle people to make this actually work. If things are closed down on the weekend and you've got one middleperson and another and another, that's a fee you have to pay all the way through. And for all the money you're trying to invest and make use of, you're missing out on two days out of every week. Extrapolate that by the month. Now six months. Now twelve months. Yearly — you're talking about a lot of time missing out on investments where you could actually make the money work for you.
This is what these big institutions are trying to fight, and I understand now why they're doing these things. They're going to talk about smart contracts, tokenized funds, and all the things they're doing. It's going to be a race for the first one that can actually do this at scale.
Old Rails vs. New Rails: How the Technology Works
Host: The next question asked was: okay, tell us how this works — the old rails versus the new rails. What are you guys doing now? This is about a minute. Take a listen.
Samir Khaliq: "So if I think of the existing infrastructure, we've actually thought about that as two separate parallel rails, and then we've looked to connect those rails. In the existing banking rails — if you think about the clearing product where banks, correspondent banks, send money around the globe — what we were doing was effectively using Swift messaging service to move money around and using our central clearing account at the Fed to be able to move money between banks to enable the movement of US dollars around the world. What this infrastructure does is use exactly the same outcome but on different technology, which is blockchain. That technology allows us to do atomic settlement — instant settlement of that payment, that remittance, across different jurisdictions. The outcome is the same. What we're trying to do now is effectively link conventional infrastructure with blockchain technology to allow us to bring more players into the entire ecosystem of moving money around the world."
Host: So before Omar starts talking about what's going on at JPMorgan, this is why they're doing it this particular way. But there is a catch — and the catch is, well, what if they're just going to use JPMorgan coin or Citi coin, some permissioned type of thing? Because isn't that the whole point of the banks — to keep everything in-house? Well, they're starting to realize that's not going to work for everything.
Before we listen to Omar from JPMorgan, I just want to run down JPMorgan's timeline. We all know Jamie Dimon was a big hater for Bitcoin — that's fine. But he did always say blockchain had potential, and he was 100% correct. They put out their JPMorgan coin and they've been using it.
JPMorgan Coin vs. USDC: Four Key Differences
Host: Here's the difference between JPMorgan coin and a stablecoin like USDC. There are four things to remember.
First, credit risk versus reserve risk. With JPMorgan coin, you're trusting that JPMorgan is going to stay solvent. Now in 2008 and 2009, they all got bailed out — every single one of the banks got bailed out because if not, they would have become insolvent. So if you believe JPMorgan can do that, that's fine and you can use JPMorgan coin. USDC is different because of the GENIUS Act — they have to have reserves, one-to-one US dollar or treasuries. So it's about which one you believe in, which one you want to go with. That's up to you as an individual, a company, or a corporation.
Second, programmable smart contracts, which Samir actually alluded to. JPMorgan coin uses programmable payments. A corporation can set a rule — for example, pay the shipping company a million dollars when the IoT sensor on the cargo ship confirms it has docked in whatever city it's supposed to dock at. In that situation, you can have JPMorgan coin use their Onyx ledger — again, a permissioned blockchain — and do it that way. Or they can use USDC or Tether.
Third, king of DeFi. USDC is the primary fuel for trading on decentralized exchanges and lending protocols. JPMorgan coin is used for corporate treasury. USDC is used for global liquidity and on-chain trading.
And then the last two — interoperability gap. If you want to go fast, go by yourself. That's JPMorgan coin. If you want to go far, you've got to bring as many people with you as you can. JPMorgan coin is like a high-speed rail — it's great, it's awesome, but it's only for JPMorgan's individual clients. USDC is like a global highway. Anyone can drive on it, everybody can use it, and you can tap into that global liquidity.
Which one wins? JPMorgan coin is winning the institution race. USDC is winning the on-chain race. But JPMorgan actually stated that they're going to start using USDC for certain collateral settlements in 2025, signaling that even the world's biggest bank realizes it needs a bridge to the open internet of money.
JPMorgan on Ethereum and Programmable Payments
Host: So without further ado, I'll let Omar explain why Ethereum and JPMorgan are doing what they do. This is about two minutes. Take a listen.
Omar Farooq: "I will say I think our strategy — again, similar to Citi but different in the sense that we have focused on new things versus existing things. Now we can also make the existing infrastructure much better, but for us, because the technology and our infrastructure is born out of Ethereum at the beginning — one of the things that inspired us was when Ethereum came about, which was more than ten years ago now. We saw Ethereum as a public chain that is actually a general-purpose computer, distributed. So it can do lots of things that frankly core infrastructure just cannot do.
In addition to the 24/7 money movement, which many of our clients are now using across many of our branches — actually most of our branches globally — in addition to that, we are doing things that we could never do before. Because of having this technology now linking dollars and euros within our ecosystem, we can do instant FX settlement for dollar-euro pairs with players like Siemens that we work with. Or we move money for large e-commerce companies across the world with this platform. And more recently over the last few years, we've started to really get into programmable payments, which is in our view the real differentiator of this technology.
We can load up smart contracts. We have some players who essentially design their own rules. It's kind of like choose your own adventure when it comes to payments — you come to JPMorgan infrastructure because it's a blockchain, you face the blockchain directly, you come in, you design what sort of smart contract you want to load on it, and then if you want to split payments, if you want to take certain actions, you can do those actions based on data inputs. And frankly it's so flexible that if you really wanted to move money because it's too cold in New York, you can move money because it's too cold in New York. So that's how we think about this tech. It does all the things in terms of making the existing infrastructure better, but then it opens avenues that frankly I think many of the players are just starting to think about. I do think some of our stablecoin colleagues talk about things like agent payments and machine-to-machine. And that's it."
The Payments Race and the Road Ahead
Host: Again, what he talked about as far as payments — and he mentioned our stablecoin partners and payments for machine payments, AI payments, things like that — it's the same thing. I always look at it like this: for payments, I'm going to go for the best, which is either Binance or Base. One of those is going to win. You can't buy Base. That's just how it is with BNB. Ethereum, Solana, Tron, Binance — B, E, S, T. That's kind of the thesis. That's pretty much what I'm going to stick with.
And it's all about what you are — are you a massive global corporation? Are you an institution? Are you a small business, a large business, an individual? I think it really comes down to using these rails in the best way you see fit. That's why Visa tracks all the different stablecoins, like we've talked about — that's at visa.onchainanalytics.com. You can check it out for yourself.
But really what it comes down to is: the banks have to have something behind it. These rails have to actually be usable. You're going to have to be able to use the funds from your bank to cross them over into some kind of Ethereum, Solana, Tron, or Binance-type thing, where when you pay for things at a vendor, you're not using the 1.5% to 3% rate that these payment processors are doing right now — Stripe, PayPal, Visa, MasterCard. We talked about yesterday how Stripe is doing their own layer one and that's going to be 1.5%, but you can do it even cheaper if you use these other types of rails. But it has to be behind the scenes. The everyday user shouldn't know about it. It's the same thing as connecting to the internet — twenty years ago it was kind of a pain getting your AOL CD and going through all that. Behind the scenes, fiat to crypto has to be seamless. That's why the Clarity Act has to get going, and there has to be some kind of incentive for people to actually do that versus using Visa or MasterCard. And I think that's really going to come down to the vendors using it.
Again, I just think you're in the right place at the right time. You picked the right way. Citibank, JPMorgan, Schwab — they're all coming.
Live Q&A
Host: Swiper says, "I'm not a big player with the pool and the living room." First of all, this is not a living room. This is a very nice, expensive green screen that I have. I actually have a green screen — so much so that I have a green screen dog that sleeps here every time I do the live stream and does nothing. This place is old. That's just how it is. Time in the market, not timing the market.
Novice says, "The market is so boring right now." Novice is not wrong. I'd rather have major volatile swings. If Bitcoin dumps to $59K, which I think at some point it will, let's just get it over with so we can start buying and move on to the next cycle. Or if somebody comes out and says, "Hey, guess what — Bitcoin's now the world reserve currency," great, let's just do that so we can go all the way up. One of those two things has to happen. Sideways chop is boring. It's good for companies like Strategy, who are essentially raising funds to buy more Bitcoin. They're like, "This is cool — we extrapolate this time frame out, we know where Bitcoin's going to be." They're very happy. But it is boring, though there are some things around it that make it interesting.
Fatsonic says, "I'm not a big buyer of spot. I mostly trade. I wonder if some DeFi protocols will ever recover and I'm debating selling." That's a good question for a trader. For me, I don't know. Aave — you would think, because of the way they've protected themselves in the past with their umbrella service and how that protection works — I hope it does come back. But when trust goes, trust goes. I think they're going to really have to make the creditors whole and make everybody who lost whole. And that's not an easy thing, especially when you lost almost $300 million.
Trashpanda says, "You front-ran a lot of smarter people." You did. You took a huge risk putting in some internet nerd money where everybody thought it was laughable. Remember when FTX collapsed, and Voyager, and Celsius? I sure do. I used to talk about Voyager and Celsius all the time — I used to call them my one-two punch. Almost knocked me out. And everything collapsed essentially in 2022, and you were able to come right through. Or you picked it up this cycle and said, "I've done my research and there are actually some good things here." And it wasn't just you doing the research. Charles Schwab did a bunch of research. BlackRock did a bunch of research. Larry Fink said, "You know what? This is actually a flight to safety." And then before you know it, everybody's good. You did a great job. Now the question is when are you going to take those profits and stop round-tripping your bags.
Curly says, "No alt market, Robbie — didn't get your rest break from videos." Nah, it's okay. This is actually the best time to be here. When we get to a blow-off top, we get a bunch of tourists and everybody calls me Dan and it's just dumb. And then I start talking about how genius they are because they got into some meme coin. But this is good — all the core people are here, the people who know what's going on, here for the long haul, who've seen some major drops. We dropped 50% for Bitcoin in roughly four months and people are still here. That's a huge drop, and the people who said, "This is great, I guess I got cheap Bitcoin" — those are the ones who actually do well.
You know my story — I was offered 500 Bitcoin for $500 in like 2012, and I was like, "That's dumb, I don't even know what that is." And then of course, even if I would have bought it and it collapsed to 20 cents, I should have round-tripped my bags. Even if I would have sold it at two bucks — look how bad that would have been. So there are ways to take profit, but there are ways to stay in the market. And at the end of the day, it really just comes down to what are you doing with your life. Do you have your purpose? Do you have your family? Are you healthy? How much stress do you have? That's really what it comes down to. All this stuff that we accumulate doesn't really matter. If Bitcoin is freedom, use it for freedom. Use it to get you out of that 9-to-5 soul-sucking job that you hate.
Someone says, "I kept the ETH. I started a spot bag on Pendle. I sold the whole thing for a 25% return — pretty good. I really just want to buy and hold. I honestly haven't bought any Bitcoin since I sold it at $97K. I'm all right with that." And someone else says, "One day people will regret not buying at $100K." I remember when I bought at $8,500. I remember when I bought at $12,500 and then at $17,500. And when it collapsed back down to $5,000, I just thought it was the dumbest thing I'd ever done. But looking back — boy, I sure wouldn't mind buying Bitcoin at $17,000.