Ivan on Tech analyzes Bitcoin's drop, ETF outflows, and crypto market developments
Ivan on Tech, a solo crypto analyst, covers Bitcoin's decline to 57K, persistent ETF outflows, and a range of industry news including a new bank-backed stablecoin, Trump's crypto earnings disclosure, and Microstrategy's financial risks.
Summary
Ivan on Tech presents a bullish long-term case for Bitcoin despite its current drop to 57K and below the 200-day exponential moving average, arguing that the ETF outflows driving the decline are a sign of peak negativity rather than structural failure. He reveals that 140 financial firms including BlackRock, Coinbase, and Visa are launching a new stablecoin called OpenUSD, natively on Solana, Base, and Stripe's Tempo chain — but not on Ethereum — which he reads as a significant signal for Solana's retail dominance. Trump's financial disclosures show $635 million earned from his memecoin and $236 million from World Liberty Finance. Ivan also issues a detailed warning about Microstrategy's STRIFE preferred stock, arguing it is a structurally unsustainable instrument that is forcing Sailor into an ever-escalating yield trap.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Bitcoin Drops to 57K — Reading the ETF Outflow Signal
Ivan on Tech: We went all the way to new cycle lows yesterday at 57K. We are being pushed down into the buy zone — further and further into the buy zone. That's the effect of going below the 200 exponential moving average, losing the support, and now heading to these fantastic areas around 50K and also lower at around 45K.
I think this is a fantastic opportunity already to buy, close to the 200-week moving average. But then imagine if we actually go a bit lower — 50K, 40K — it would be absolute heaven, Valhalla, if you have money. If you've been de-risking since Q4, since October, this is the best situation. Currently we're living through our best timeline if you have money to deploy. And if you are fully deployed, you just hoddle, hoddle, hoddle. Then guess what — this is good news for you also. Whatever income you have, you can put into the market and lower your average buy price.
Everyone has some kind of income. You have a job. If you don't have a job, maybe benefits, maybe some other income — straight into the market at these low levels. Holy crap, it would be insane. Imagine just a few months ago, six months ago, eight months ago, Bitcoin was 120, 125. Super expensive. Super expensive. That's why we said be careful, sell in October. Now 58K, man. Amazing.
So all in all, Bitcoin is super cheap and we do see the ETF outflow hammering us each and every day. Each and every day, new outflow. We cannot really catch a breath here because each and every day they are dumping. Wall Street wants out. Wall Street wants out. And it's also one of the signs that soon enough the bottom will hit, because when you have this peak of negativity, this peak of outflow, it means that whatever bad could happen — for example, that ETFs have constant outflow — has already happened. Everyone who wanted to sell has already sold.
Now, it's too early currently. But in August, September, October, we will be more and more in the situation where everyone who wanted to sell already sold. Just like ETFs were pumping us on the way up, they're now dumping us on the way down. And it's just the reality of life. Whatever buyers you had, now they're sellers.
Only a few people buy and hold forever and don't touch for ideological reasons. Most people that say they will buy and hold actually don't do it. Everyone is a hero in the bull market. Everyone is a believer and a philosopher and an early adopter, a pilgrim. He's going to hoddle Bitcoin for 10-plus years because he's here for the long term. As soon as you have a 50% dump, the frontier pilgrim, the early adopter, suddenly sells to recover and cover his losses. Even those people that say they're never going to sell — they're still going to sell. The bear is very tough. Very, very tough. And this is a signal of that.
ETFs are a signal of the bear being super tough. It's darkest before the dawn. And now we are in the darkest hour. Wall Street wants out. We have $2.4 billion worth of Bitcoin outflows in the last nine days. It's crazy. It's insane. It's relentless. We've never had anything like this. But also, we've never had a bear market since 2022. So it's normal that people don't really recognize the current bearishness, and the mistake people make is thinking that the industry has changed, or that this is somehow bad, or that this is somehow extending the bear. It doesn't extend the bear. It's not bad — it's good. You need whoever wants to sell to sell as soon as possible. It's pretty normal. Just know that this is part of the plan and nothing bad has happened.
Everyone Is Claiming They Sold — But Where Were They in October?
You do see more and more people saying that they sold Bitcoin. Why didn't they sell at the top in October, like we were doing? That's a big question. Because no one wants to say that they're out at a very high price. We said on October 8th we're out, we start to de-risk. Most people are only saying it now. Why say it now?
Apparently there's a guy on Pomp who said he sold in 2025. I didn't hear any public record of him stating that, but now he says he's been out since 2025. Why say it now? The average person needed to hear it then. Everyone — Pomp at 125K was saying we're going to go to a million. No one was saying we're going to go down at all. Now everyone is suddenly as smart as "I sold Bitcoin." What do you mean you sold Bitcoin? Now is the time to buy Bitcoin.
This particular guest says he sold in 2025 because AI and biotech are better opportunities. And it's true, but it's been true since October. You look at the money scanner — all of the AI companies have been doing insane numbers. Biotech is very similar. It's a very hot ecosystem.
It is true that biotech and AI have been good opportunities, but they've been good opportunities since Q4 last year. Now crypto isn't a good opportunity in the short term. You have to understand that there is no inherently bad asset or failed asset. It just rotates. Just like crypto was super hyped just a few months ago in October, now everyone thinks it's dirt. Everyone is rotating out and declaring publicly that they sold. It's classic. This story is always like this. Always, always, always.
So my message to you: be positive. This is a very important time for our industry. It is a time to be bullish on crypto because we are in the buy zone. Bitcoin is at the 200 exponential moving average — now we're below it. These prices long-term are going to be fantastic. You're going to look back at 50K, 40K and think it's crazy cheap. Just a few months ago in October, imagine someone said, "Hey, you want Bitcoin for 40K?" You would say, "Yes, please, give me Bitcoin at 40K, give me Bitcoin at 50K." Now we're soon there. And I can promise you most people here will not buy. They will not buy. They would be begging for it up here — but now they will not buy.
140 Banks Launch OpenUSD Stablecoin — Solana Wins, Circle Dumps
Now in terms of industry news, we do have bankers going all in on stablecoins, and there are some interesting developments for the chains they have chosen. 140 firms in finance have come together and are doing a stablecoin. This has led to Circle dumping — if you look at Circle, they did a big fat dump yesterday from around $75 all the way to $60, like a 20% dump, because Circle does the USDC stablecoin. And now there's news that 140 banks — BlackRock, Coinbase, Visa, and payment companies — are coming together and doing OpenUSD.
What is interesting is that Ripple was not invited. Ripple also doesn't seem to care, even though their business is directly affected. You look at Ripple — it doesn't care about anything. Again, it's not about tech here. Ripple is still super high market cap. The price is bare, but it's still top 10. Anyway, Ripple is not part of it.
You see, it's really not about tech that much in many cases. Here you have a new stablecoin coming with all of these financial firms. Stripe is part of it. And what is interesting is that this coin will natively be on Stripe's blockchain, Tempo. Coinbase is part of it also. So the coin is launching natively on Tempo, on Base, and on Solana. You notice that ETH is not part of it. I asked Grok whether it's going to be on ETH or not, and it says natively it's not going to be on ETH. It's going to be on Solana from day one, and also on Tempo and Base — but not on ETH.
So it shows you that on ETH there is no retail adoption with the way that ETH has been developing. The high fee is still high, because as soon as you have a bit of usage the fees shoot up. Even though temporarily it may be low fee, whenever we say ETH has high fees there's always someone saying, "Oh, but today it's low." Okay — you have a few more users and it's going to be high. So the retail adoption is happening on these L2 corporate chains, which I don't like. Base, Tempo — corporate chains. And they are getting eaten alive by Solana.
So the biggest winner here in my mind is Solana, because corporate chains will not survive long term anyway. I don't think they are going to be so key in the coming five to ten years. And even if they survive, the activity cannot compare to Solana. So all in all, good stuff for Solana, proving that at the end of the day for retail, it is the chain. It is the chain for retail.
Circle doesn't like it. Very, very important. They don't like it. Circle is down. But it is business. You have now this credibly neutral stablecoin, as they call it, because so many different companies are involved. More competition. And with OpenUSD you actually get instant yield sharing. So for the end customer it's good — you have more options. As you know, stablecoins are always a bit of a risk because they're centralized, which means they can freeze your account. So it's always good to have several credible options.
Solana Price Still Bearish Despite Ecosystem Wins
Now, while it's good for Solana the ecosystem, tech-wise, price-wise, Solana is very bad still. I will only be bullish if it goes to 93 or if it goes to 30. Solana is just consolidating below support that it broke in the beginning of June. So just to clarify — when we are bullish on Solana developments, we're not bullish on Solana price. Currently we're bearish on Solana price. I think Solana has more downside. I will only change my mind if it goes bull on the weekly.
Influencer Coins and the Return of Scam Season on Solana
Something else — we did have a few weeks of interesting developments in gaming on Solana. You remember Kintara and the other stuff that was happening. But now it's back to scamming. Basically, Anas is pumping his own coin. Luke Belmar is doing his own coin also. People are calling these out as scams. But at the same time, you see the attention still being captured. I wish we just continued with the gaming meta. We had a gaming meta for a few weeks, and now with the influencer coin stuff — it's bad, it's bad, it's bad.
Now the king of influencer coins is Trump. And now we do have, black and white on paper, how much money he's made. Some kind of corporate filing was released. 900 pages of Trump financial disclosures have been made public, and we now know how much he made from Trumpcoin — from the Trump memecoin — he made $635 million. From World Liberty Finance, he made $236 million. This is pure extraction, because where is this money coming from? It's from people trading. The way he has structured it is smart — he's getting it from royalties. He himself is not dumping on anyone. He's just getting royalties, getting legitimate income. But the companies that are operating this of course get this money from market participants in one way or another.
Then $196 million from the sale of ownership interest in the USD1 stablecoin. $65.6 million from the sale of Trump's stake in World Liberty Financial. $6 million in Melania Trump's NFT sales and collectibles business. And a tiny $1.8 million in staking rewards.
The Trump mania was the peak. The industry survived for a few more quarters until October. But I think Trump's coin was around January 2025 — that was the peak. With celebrity coins, you always have to be a bit careful. At the end of the day, it's so much trust in one person. You really have to like them in order to participate, and you need to set stop-losses and be super careful.
Still, you see Anas's coin is pumping. So if you are a momentum trader, a trench trader, you have no choice but to participate in whatever is pumping — as long as you follow the mechanical rules and have a stop-loss. But most people don't know the mechanical rules. When they enter a coin, they think they're on some kind of grand journey. They enter and then kind of forget it, get complacent. And that's when you get grilled. You get grilled as sheep. Your portfolio gets extracted.
When you're thinking like that — if you're part of Bull Mania, you know the mechanical rules. You still ride whatever momentum is there, but you don't date it, you don't romanticize it. You know that today's opportunity can go to zero tomorrow. Today you're a great smart investor, tomorrow you're a pleb at a big loss. And then some people hold their big loss for years hoping it will recover — losing years of their life, all the nerve cells, all the relationships in real life. It can get quite crazy, guys. For how long people hold garbage, hoping it's going to come back, reading Telegram every day, reading Twitter every day, connecting with other bag holders, trying to find new reasons why they were not dumb to buy it in the first place.
It's not dumb to buy. The dumb part is not selling when stop-loss hits. The dumb part is not having a stop-loss. The dumb part is then gaslighting yourself into holding something which you intended as a quick flip.
Pump.fun Token Unlock — Timing Coincidence?
It is interesting timing that people are saying trenches are back just when Pump.fun has another token unlock. Maybe coincidence, maybe not. It's up to you, but something to keep in mind.
Coinbase Pushes X402 Standard for AI Agent Payments
For the tech people in the chat — there's news on the X402 standard, where basically agents can pay for APIs. Agents can pay for APIs. Coinbase has really been pushing it, and I guess Coinbase is trying to become kind of the hub for AI commerce — so that if you have an agent and it needs to buy some API access, it will be doing it through Coinbase, because Coinbase has been pushing this X402 standard a lot.
Basically it means that your agent, if it wants to access some service, gets information about how to pay for the service via stablecoin via this HTTP code, it pays, and then it has access. Super simple. Now this company, Ampify, which does all kinds of API connections, is now integrating it and saying that all of their services are now going to be available for AI agents.
Let me play this quickly.
Ampify spokesperson: "To reach their full potential, our really big hairy audacious goal is to kill the API key and replace it with a mechanism where the client side authorizes usage through" — there's a bunch of technical language, but basically currently if you need to access some kind of API you need an API key.
Let me explain. Normally if you're a developer, you have to sign up, create an account, get the key from the service — let's say you want to access some price data or interface with some kind of app. You need to sign up, create a password, generate an API key — a whole onboarding procedure just to get the API key. The idea with this stuff is that no onboarding is needed. You just call this HTTP 402, and you get information on how to pay with stablecoin for whatever you want to do. And AI can do that, because AI cannot go and add a credit card to a billing account, specify the billing manager, and so on. But it can pay with stablecoin.
Ampify spokesperson: "Ampify is the largest marketplace of web automation tools for agents, and as of today we're bringing this entire community into the 402 ecosystem. So agents can discover and pay for API tools at runtime without having to provision an account and without needing credentials."
There we go. So for Coinbase, it's an interesting strategy. I see this more as interesting stuff for Coinbase coin holders. Can Coinbase actually become a hub for AI commerce? Because AI commerce will require stablecoins. Without stablecoins, no AI commerce.
Now looking at the Coinbase chart — be careful. It looks very bad. It's actually now testing support. Should it break it, we have another support about 30% down. So be a bit careful. But at some point maybe this will play out. It's kind of a strategy they have to marry crypto and AI.
Solana's Agave Update and Sui's Walrus Memory — Skepticism on Both
Solana is getting some updates with the Agave client. It's going to be faster. You can trade, you can lose money even faster in the trenches — or make money faster. It all depends on whether you have mechanical rules or not.
Now let's go to Sui. They have the Walrus memory announcement. Let me know if you love Sui. If you love Sui and you haven't de-risked, I feel very sorry for you, because Sui's price is horrible. It's very, very bad. It broke support. The Walrus will not help here. The Walrus will not help.
Let's see what Walrus actually is.
Sui/Walrus spokesperson: "Our big bet for Walrus is that memory becomes a composable, tradable construct for the AI ecosystem. If you think about what Evernote brought — Evernote allowed you to store content, query that content, and really carry it wherever you wanted. We believe that all the querying you're doing, all these agentic queries and the fact that agents are giving you opinions, and you are effectively creating value as a result of your prompts — you're going to start to build intellectual capital as a consumer yourself, or as a business, in the form of memories. And these memories are going to matter. They're going to be priced. They're going to be something you can cross-coordinate between yourself and other agents. There are going to be collaborations that happen across the board, and we believe memory is very, very key to that. Central to that is elements of portability and verifiability."
I don't fully understand it. Let me ask AI what Walrus memory actually is. Portable, persistent memory for AI agents. Session-based memory. So it's like a file. You can store it in a decentralized way. It's like a storage system on-chain.
Say it plainly — it's a file. It's a hard disk. We've had that for a very long time. Basically, if you say it like that, it's bad for a pitch. You need to say it's more like giving agents a personal, long-term brain — which is like a text file. And the thing is, AI makes everything way simpler. Before, you needed all kinds of formats for systems to communicate. Now AI communicates in English. You give it context. It's an English file. Your memory is like an MD file. Don't make it complex.
So Walrus — until I understand it more or someone tells me something different — to me it's like your agent now has an MD file attached with the memory. That's all it is.
And you see Sui — they have these pump and dumps sometimes. Be careful. Always be careful with the Sui pump and dump. I don't know what they're doing with the market maker, but in the bear market it has had two of these pump and dumps. The money line held you in bear trend. The money line told you not to trust the pump and dumps. Many people fell for them, especially when they hear about Walrus memory that is going to tokenize AI memory. The tech may be real, but for you making money in the bear trend, it will not help.
And look at the Sui TVL — it's going down a lot. Where's the TVL? It goes down a lot. Will Walrus help with this? You have to ask: which KPI will Walrus actually affect? Will it help with DEX volume? How is tokenizing memory going to help with DEX volume? Where's the focus on key metrics? DEX volume, TVL — those are the key metrics. Sui's DEX volume is around $50 million. It's tiny. And somehow Sui is compared to Solana. It's not comparable to Solana. Maybe it was for a few weeks in the bull when they had momentum. But look at Solana's TVL — still holding up quite okay, obviously down since the peak, but Solana's DEX volume at its peak in 2025 was like $4 billion and now it's like $1–2 billion. Still way higher than the 2024 baseline. Sui at $50 million — I don't see it as any kind of Solana killer. Not with these stats.
NASDAQ Distributes Market Data via Pyth Network
We have Pyth now working with NASDAQ for data distribution. The exchange behind the opening bell is now distributing its market data through the Pyth data marketplace. So basically what's going to happen is that stock prices are going to be on-chain — or at least a portion of them — via the Pyth network. NASDAQ is incorporating Pyth to share data on-chain. Interesting development.
Always Hold Two Thoughts at Once — Developments vs. Price
You see, in this kind of situation, we have to hold two thoughts in the brain at the same time. We see what's happening with the developments. We're excited about the developments — excited about Solana, excited about Sui, Walrus, whatever. But the charts are garbage. And as long as they're garbage and going down, we don't touch. They need to start turning around. Bull trend. Bull trend. Then we can put the money in. Very important. So keep two thoughts in the brain at the same time. Many people cannot do it. Please confirm that you're capable of doing so.
MetaMask Money Account on Monad
Someone asked about Monad the other day. Introducing the MetaMask Money account, live exclusively on Monad — your new account that earns yield in DeFi with a card that spends. So they've shoved it into MetaMask somehow. If you switch to Monad, you have this kind of 4% yield, which you can get in many places. I wonder how many users this actually gives in the bear market — where you have a chain where you have to switch your account in MetaMask and then you have this 4% yield that you can get so many places. Maybe five, maybe ten new users. I'm very curious from a marketing and business perspective how many users this actually generates.
Phantom Acquires Ventials — Expanding into Self-Custodial Derivatives
Ventials is now joining Phantom. Phantom is growing, acquiring new companies. Ventials is a team building on top of Hyperliquid. Phantom is moving more and more towards self-custodial leverage derivatives and expanding into that space with acquisitions.
Q&A — Token Price vs. Business Value
Let's go to questions, answers, debates, discussions.
Baby Genius asks: "Ivan, appreciate you, bro. Question — I've always wondered how the correlation between token price and what they affiliate with as a business works."
Token price and business have no connection in most cases. In 99% of cases, token price and business have no connection. Token price can have its own fantastic pump without any business, and business can do very well while the token goes to zero. It happens all the time. Pump.fun is probably the recent big example — it listed, had this post-listing hype, then died down, although the business is doing well. They survived the bear market in a good way. People are still minting influencer memes and so on.
MiCA Deadline Passes — Nothing Happened
How could the migration from USDT to USDC affect the market, with MiCA now being a thing?
It will not affect at all. Don't worry. The migration already happened months ago, over the last few years. Nothing is going to happen now. If you've been trading in the EU, you just saw that USDT was getting removed more and more from exchanges. Today is the last day of the grandfathering period. MiCA was already accepted years ago and they just had this grandfathering time where everyone needed to comply. This is not new. It's already been priced in many times. Everyone who needed to remove USDT already removed it from the exchange.
MiCA went live. Crickets. Crickets. People expected something big and catastrophic because there were many clickbait titles — "Oh, MiCA is coming, it's going to change crypto forever." Relax. Nothing. It's already been in place in most cases. Most exchanges in the EU removed USDT a long time ago.
Same with the Clarity Act. "The Clarity Act is going to bring the bull market." It's not going to come because of the Clarity Act. The bull market is going to come when sellers are out, when we've had approximately a year of a bear market. The Clarity Act is like the least important thing for the bull market.
Coinbase Mortgages — Bullish
Coinbase and Betterment doing real estate mortgages — what do you think?
Bullish for sure. I think it's good. You can have crypto as your mortgage collateral, which means you don't sell. Instead of selling crypto to buy a house, you back the mortgage with crypto. Fantastic. And also less power to the bank, more power to the crypto side. Coinbase is not a fluffy angel — they have many cons also — but better than Wells Fargo, I guess. There are more options now. If you get a bad deal from your bank, high interest rate for a mortgage, you can go to another bank. You can go to Coinbase. If your bank doesn't like crypto, now Coinbase says, "Fantastic, deposit here." So yeah, conclusion — good.
Chainlink vs. Hyperliquid — Revenue Share That Matters vs. Revenue Share That Doesn't
Someone says they meant something like Chainlink or Hyperliquid is clearly of value.
Chainlink — I don't know if Chainlink is of value, man. I haven't seen too much of people buying Chainlink and it getting pumped. Hyperliquid, yes — they buy a lot of Hyperliquid. I don't know if Chainlink is of value. You really have to double-check what's happening there — who's buying it, how much they're selling.
Hyperliquid, on the other hand, yes. It's on-chain revenue straight into Hyperliquid. And you see how the chart looks, and you see how many people use Hyperliquid every day. It's like the most popular app in crypto. So there it makes perfect sense.
With Chainlink, I just don't know how many people buy to use Chainlink. And does Chainlink use the proceeds from the business to buy Chainlink? I don't know. It still depends on tokenomics. Pump.fun, for example, also had the revenue share where they bought the coin with revenue from the business — but it did not really help them pump. So it's a bit hit or miss. It depends on which holders you have, how much airdrop you did, who is pumping, who is dumping. If you have revenue share but it just gets dumped on all the time, it doesn't make sense.
Be careful with Chainlink, man. It's a super old coin. No one is excited for Oracle nowadays. If you still hold it and hope it's going to come back — maybe it will, just know it's Oracle. It's like in 2017 people got excited for Oracle. "It's so adopted, it's going to be used by Swift to connect." I don't know, man. I haven't seen Swift pump the Chainlink price. All this hype hasn't resulted in too much. Honestly, it hasn't.
And Chainlink is now coming back to 2022 lows. It's in the same price range as in the 2022 bear market. Be careful. This whole bull has been pathetic for Chainlink. Too much of this "oh, it's such a grand vision, it's going to connect with everything." No one cares. No one cares. Bad tokenomics, bad price, everything bad. And the revenue they make — I've heard they charge $10 million to integrate Chainlink into a chain, but that money doesn't go to the token. It goes to the shareholders of the company. So that's it.
Hyperliquid is different because it is in a bull trend. So the revenue share makes sense. If it's bull trend, revenue share makes sense. If it's bear trend, I don't care if they have revenue share — the revenue is not sharing good enough.
GTA 6 — Yes, Ivan Is Excited
Ivan, are you excited about GTA 6?
Yeah, that's one I'm actually excited about. People ask me, "Ivan, are you excited about the World Cup?" That's like the least thing I could care about. But GTA 6, man — now we're talking. I don't even have an Xbox. I need to buy Xbox again. Just for GTA 6, I'm going to buy Xbox. Now we're talking.
Pump.fun — Will It Do Well in the Bull?
Speaking of Pump.fun, do you think it will do well in the bull?
No idea. I don't give predictions. Now it does very poorly. If it goes bull trend, we're going to see in the chart how strong it is. If you ask many people what they thought about Chainlink for the 2023–2024 bull market, they would say, "Oh, Chainlink, I love it, it's so great." And then you see — it was so bad. So you just got to ignore the business narrative. No one can tell you what it's going to do.
Pump.fun as an app is very big. The token — I don't know if it's going to do well. We need to see if it goes bull trend first. How big is the candle? Does it have a big fat candle that just explodes? That's very interesting. If the candles are engulfing and they don't revisit all the old levels — meaning they're not overlapping — that's a stronger trend. You don't want it to overlap across the previous lows too much. We're going to see how the chart looks. But the first thing is just bull trend. Don't worry too much about whether it's going to do well or not. The only special case is if you're a bag holder who's down a lot — then you need like ICU. If you're a new investor, just wait for bull trend.
SpaceX Stock — Classic IPO Pattern, Potential Round Bottom
Let's check SpaceX. SpaceX is coming back. The daily chart still doesn't have a trend, but potentially now on the hourly it's looking interesting. And by the way, hourly trends can still be multi-week. SpaceX here at $179 is going to go bull on the hourly.
This is a classic IPO pattern. You have this pump — everyone is super excited — then a dump of about 35%. Round bottom. We love that. And now potentially going bull. So here is a good risk-reward to capture for nice momentum potentially coming back to new highs. As a new trade, it's what we want to see. We now have price history, so we have something to work with. There is now supply and demand. Many players sold here, scared. And now we have a fantastic return setup. But let's see if it goes bull first. Now that we have something to work with, it could be interesting for the bull case.
MSTR vs. Bitcoin — Don't Even Ask
What is better, MSTR or Bitcoin?
Bitcoin. Don't even ask about this. Bitcoin. Why even want MSTR? Why? The losses in it are insane. It loses more than Bitcoin. If you want more upside, do Bitcoin. Go to Bybit, use leverage on Bitcoin. It's better than MSTR. Why? Because with leverage Bitcoin, you control yourself — the stop-loss, the execution. You have full control. MSTR is leveraged Bitcoin, but they are vibing the strategy in real time. One day they're only buying Bitcoin. Next day they are also selling — they have this ponzinomics thing where they have to pay monthly yield, which is a stretch. Then they say, "Oh, now we're also selling Bitcoin." So they turn into a hedge fund, basically taking loans, taking leverage, taking debt to trade.
They say they're going to monetize their treasury. But really what it means is they will trade. When they think it's cheap, they're going to buy. When they think it's expensive, they're going to sell. But now they do the vice versa — they bought Bitcoin at 120K, 100K, 90K, and now when Bitcoin is at 57K, they said, "Oh, by the way, now we're maybe going to sell." So they are like a very badly managed hedge fund.
If you want more upside and you want more risk — because more upside means more risk, I hate to break it to you — Microstrategy is not the same risk as Bitcoin but with more upside. It doesn't work like that. Don't think that you can buy Bitcoin but also buy Microstrategy and have kind of the same risk but Microstrategy pumps more. That's the pleb mindset — trying to find something with the same risk but more upside. In reality, the market is efficient enough that if you want more upside in the bull, you need to take more risk.
You have the option to do it yourself. You can easily do it yourself. Learn how to manage risk, how to enter a trade, set stop-loss, etc. It is a lifelong skill you can apply across industries.
And with Microstrategy, you are kind of working against Saylor. When MNAV is above one, Saylor is going to print and dump stock. When MNAV is above one, he needs a lot of cash, and if it's above one, he's going to print new stock and dump. So as you know, when it's above one, you are the grilled sheep. Be very careful.
It's not for me. If you want Bitcoin, Bitcoin itself is enough. If you want more upside and you want more risk — because that's what it is — then Bitcoin with leverage is better than Microstrategy, which is also Bitcoin with leverage, except you don't know what else is going to happen day to day. They improvise as they go along and they're not that great at trading.
Saylor is great at many things. He's a smart person. He's great at structuring corporate debt, corporate assets, issuing debt, speaking in front of Wall Street. He is very good at that. But he's not a good trader. He's not a good investor. He's very bad at that. And until reality catches up with him and the dreams he's built up in people's brains face the brutal market — then everything collapses.
STRIFE Preferred Stock — A House of Cards
Stretch seemingly recovering so far. Hopefully we won't go into the next bull run with that sort of Damocles sword hanging over us.
It's not recovering. At 80–90, it's not recovering. And the problem is it's up from around 70 to 80, which is still so low, because he increased the dividend — which means his burn is now even higher. He pays a lot. You can now get like 15% yield buying it because he has a 12% dividend based on the $100 price, but now it's lower. So you can buy at $84 and the effective yield is like 15%. High yield — but we see that the market is still not buying it back to $100. Why? Because they see that the cash is running out. So it's risky. He has cash now, but he needs to get new cash all the time. He's on a treadmill.
That's why the demand is not overwhelming enough to get it back to $100. This is a house of cards. He constantly needs to get money to pay the dividend. And this high yield — it's very high. Anyone, Warren Buffett would kill to have 15% per year. It's outperforming the average market by quite a lot. So it should be popular. But why is no one buying it back to $100? The risk. That's why. High yield means low quality security. In financial markets, high yield means low quality. That's why they have high yield — because no one wants to give them money cheaply. They have to offer expensive yield.
Currently it is 15%. The market is saying, "For 15% per year, okay, I can buy this." But just a few weeks ago they were okay with around 11%, because it was at $100 and Saylor offered 11% based on $100. Now he offers 12% based on the $100 mark, but now it's at $84. So the effective yield is like 15%. To get it back to $100, he needs to put his yield at 15%, not 12%, because that's what the market is pricing it at now. If he comes out tomorrow and says, "Hey guys, yield is 15%," potentially it will go back to $100. But the problem is now his expense per year is about 50% larger than just a few weeks ago. It was around 10–11%, now it is 15%. So it's almost a 50% increase in cost. And where is the money going to come from? That's going to be the next big question.
It's going to go back to $100 and then probably down again, and now the market is going to demand maybe 20% to go back to $100 because they see the money is running out. We need more return. So it's basic market stuff.
For most people holding STRIFE, what I just told you is news to them. "Oh, high yield means bad security? I thought it means Bitcoin has created this crazy money glitch and crazy yield that only Saylor can offer." Many people — it's fine to not understand. I work in finance and crypto full-time since 2017. I can tell you it's very difficult to price it correctly, to see it for what it is. But then the average person who works full-time and has five kids says, "Oh no, I fully understand Saylor, I fully understand STRIFE." You don't understand. I'm telling you, you don't understand it.
If you don't get what I just told you — which is fine, by the way, if you're not experienced in the market, if you don't understand how yield, supply, and demand work — it's okay to not get it. But then don't touch STRIFE, and don't tell me you know more than me, which is sadly what most people do. They say, "Oh no, I get it. You don't know what you're speaking about." Crypto is great. Crypto is great. But anyway.
He needs to raise money all the time, and it's harder all the time because he has a limited amount of money and needs to grow it somehow. He needs to figure out how to get more cash. He can sell Microstrategy stock — that's why if you hold Microstrategy you're going to get dumped on. And he can sell Bitcoin. Those are the two options. Before he could also sell STRIFE, but now it's a problem because he needs to get money to pay STRIFE. So he needs to figure out some way to retire STRIFE — to remove all of this because it gives him a yearly expense which is very high.
It was a mistake. I'm fascinated how it's going to end. STRIFE holders are some of the most hyper-bullish people. It blows my mind. The Microstrategy and STRIFE investors come from the Bitcoin maxi movement — only Bitcoin, carnivore, all this Bitcoin maxi stuff, which is fine. But then they trust one guy who does a house of cards. And Adam Back, Samson Mow — they are like protecting Bitcoin treasury companies. It's part of the Bitcoin movement, which is very weird. Very strange. I don't understand it.