Bitcoin analyst weighs two market scenarios against the backdrop of the GENIUS Act, geopolitical risk, and four-year cycle history
Rob from Digital Asset News presents a solo analysis of whether now is a good time to buy Bitcoin, covering the GENIUS Act's uncertain Senate prospects, four-year cycle patterns, and risk metrics.
Summary
Rob from Digital Asset News delivers a solo market analysis focused on two key scenarios shaping Bitcoin's near-term outlook: the potential passage or failure of the GENIUS Act in the Senate, and the historical four-year cycle pattern suggesting a rally may be ahead. He also flags ongoing Iran military operations as a geopolitical risk factor weighing on investor sentiment.
Rob argues that the GENIUS Act — which would divide crypto oversight between the SEC and CFTC and introduce exchange registration, customer fund segregation, and anti-fraud protections — is unlikely to pass due to Democratic opposition led by Senator Elizabeth Warren, who is tying the bill to ethics concerns over President Trump's reported crypto earnings. Rob also walks through Bitcoin's current risk level metrics, the 2022 price cycle as a historical analogue, and broader industry developments including Polygon's restructuring toward payments (completing a $250 million acquisition of Coin Me and Sequence with a target of profitability by 2027), Robinhood's contradictory stance on memecoins, and a Bonk DAO hack in which a wallet offloaded approximately $4.1 million in Bonk tokens through Binance (with an earlier transfer from the same hack totaling roughly $20 million), raising questions about whether decentralized exchanges should be able to freeze wallets linked to theft.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Should You Buy Bitcoin Now? Framing the Two Scenarios
Rob: The question really isn't should I buy right now. The question is how heavy should I go into it. There are a couple of things going on in the background that I think we should all be aware of as we're dollar-cost averaging or putting in our dry powder.
First of all, geopolitical experts need not apply. I think we know there's an issue with Iran. This is the seventh night straight, I should say, as CENTCOM releases new footage of the latest operations — forces that were hit, surveillance sites, military logistics infrastructure, underground weapons storage, and maritime capabilities. This is the war — and those are not my words, that's President Trump saying it — the war with Iran rages on. The markets didn't seem to care too much for the last two or three days, but it is something I think that's going to weigh heavy on everybody who is actually investing. But there are two things that I think people will really think about.
The GENIUS Act: What It Does and Why It May Not Pass
The first is the GENIUS Act. I have not been very optimistic about it passing, especially in midterm years. The Democrats would have to come over and really give Trump a big win for this to go through. And if this gets passed, Trump is going to post about it and brag about it everywhere and really take a victory lap — that's what he does. So if this passes, it'll represent some major movement from the Democratic Party.
This isn't a political channel. We're mostly here for digital assets, Bitcoin mostly right now. But as far as the GENIUS Act passing, looking at Poly Market — which I'm not a big fan of — you can see that back in the day it was at 82% in February, then it hit another lower high of 74% on May 9th, and today it's roughly at 39%. Why is that? Because information has been coming out, and we can see that the ring leader — unfortunately Senator Elizabeth Warren — is not going to let this go. She's going to make it very difficult for this to get across the finish line. She's only one person, but she does carry a lot of weight in the Senate.
This was just released recently: Elizabeth Warren demands Trump disclose his 2026 crypto earnings by July 23rd. Now, Donald Trump as a businessman doesn't have to report anything. He made $1.4 billion in crypto income, and inquiring minds want to know. The President is not required to file until May 27th, but Warren wants the numbers now as the Senate prepares to debate the GENIUS Act. And really this comes down to an ethics issue. I think the Democrats are wrong here because this is a structural bill. The GENIUS Act is a structural bill. If they want to talk about ethics, go through the judiciary committee. But right now, that's what's tying it all up — it's about ethics. And come on, they're politicians. Do they have any of those?
His 2021 disclosure showed $1.4 billion in crypto income. As a reminder, Elizabeth Warren was the minority leader on the banking committee, and it was Chairman Tim Scott, Republican from South Carolina, who chaired it. To get the GENIUS Act bill out of committee, they had to have two Democrats cross over. And they did — Ruben Gallego and Angela Alsobrooks. They made it very clear, though: even though we voted to get this out of committee, we are not going to vote for the bill as it is currently written. And that was back months ago.
So what does the GENIUS Act do? It's kind of a big deal. It divides oversight between the SEC and CFTC — who's going to do what, are these commodities, are these securities, and who handles that? The new rules include registration for exchanges, brokers, and dealers; customer fund segregation, which would have helped us a whole lot with FTX and Celsius, but hey, four years too late; enhanced disclosures; qualified custody; anti-fraud and anti-manipulation provisions. This is exactly what Warren says she wants. And DeFi safe harbors — because let's be honest, DeFi is quite honestly a joke in my personal opinion, as we see nothing but hacks, scams, and exploits. Then illicit finance protections, anti-money laundering, know-your-customer requirements. It is interesting that she is so against this, because this is what the bill would actually do.
But it all comes down to ethics, and really it comes down to one person. Midterm elections are ugly. They are going to try to bury this. I just don't see it passing — but I could be wrong. All they need is a supermajority. Right now Republicans are sitting at 53. You need 60. That means you need seven Democrats to defect and come over. We'll see if it actually happens. But again, this isn't looking too good. I hope it is, but it's something we have to think about because this is going to go to a vote in the Senate — some are saying next week, some are saying early August.
If that's the case, then we really need to be aware that we should probably be buying before this happens if it does pass. If it doesn't, this is one of the things I'm thinking about. I don't want to go in super heavy. I want to think about what the risk levels are, what else is going on. Because if I dump everything in right now — which seems pretty reasonable, even though the four-year cycles historically speaking would suggest we probably bottom out around September or October — what if this does pass? What if it goes heavy? If it does pass, you will see a lot of positive price action. If it doesn't pass, you're going to see a lot of negative price action. No one really knows for sure. I just don't see this bill passing. Let me know what you think about that in the comments section.
"Sell in May and Go Away" — The Historical Snapshot
But let's take a different angle. First of all, remember that old adage: sell in May and go away. Maybe we should have listened. This is the historical snapshot of May 10th, 2026. Bitcoin was a nice $82,000 — wouldn't we like that to come back to sell into? Ethereum was $2,300. XRP was $1.47. BNB was $663. Solana was almost $100. Tron was $0.35. Dogecoin and Hyperliquid at $43. It was a pretty good time. So next time May comes around, maybe you might want to heed that advice. Just saying.
The Four-Year Cycle and What It Suggests for Now
The next thing to think about is this: regardless of whether the GENIUS Act passes or not, if we're thinking about the four-year cycle, we have a rally ahead of us. Now this is 2022, and I know people say, "Well, that doesn't make any sense." Does it really have to match up perfectly? No, it doesn't. But it is uncanny how much it has matched up over the last four years.
We can see that there was a big drop-off in 2022 — most of us remember this — boom, down in May. Then we went sideways for a bit. Remember "sell in May and go away." Went sideways, then boom, down it goes from around $30,000 down to $19,000 in June. Then we moved sideways for a little bit, and July came around and everyone was like, "Okay, it's fine." Then we had a little rally and we peaked out around August 13th to 15th, somewhere around there, going from $19,000 up to $24,365. That's a nice little rally. Everybody was like, "Okay, we're back, baby. This is happening." And then of course, what happens again in the later part of August? Down it goes. September comes, and then of course the big fallout was November 9th, 2022, which is around the time FTX collapsed. Correct me in the comments section if I'm off on that.
So if we think about the four-year cycles and what's going to happen, we're due for a run-up here. It would be nice to accumulate a little bit and wait for it to pump up. Maybe if you're a trader, you want to take some profits. Or you say to yourself, "Four-year cycles are undefeated — I'm going to wait all the way to October or November." You can do that, and that might not be a bad idea. It's just something to think about. Or maybe you just say, "I don't know what it's going to be. Maybe I'll just put a little bit in."
Risk Metrics and Moving Averages
Take a look at these moving averages — we are actually moving up away from the 200-day exponential moving average. Interesting. And then also you might want to take a look at risk levels. Right now the risk level for Bitcoin is at 0.306, almost at 0.299. These risk levels — they're not forever. They're very fleeting. They come and go.
If you look at the risk level of 0 to 0.1, after 2015 it never hit that level ever. So you're like, okay, it's probably not going to hit there. What's the next one? 0.1 to 0.2. That one, past 2015, you only had it happen in December 2018, March 2020 during the coronavirus crash, and in June, July, August, September 2022 — like we just talked about — when the price was around $15,750.
And now the one we're at, around 0.2 to 0.3 — past 2015, there are some opportunities there, but as time goes on, you don't see as many chances to get to these levels. And right now, we are at those levels. People would say, "Rob, I'm just going to wait till it goes to 0.1 to 0.2." You can do that, but look at this: would you be okay buying Bitcoin at $29,000, or $22,000, or $21,000, $19,000, $16,900? Because those are the levels we're talking about. Or would you say, "No, no, no — I've got to buy it at $15,000 or $16,000"? It's the same thing. So when I take a look at this, I'm like, I don't see why I should stop buying Bitcoin. It doesn't make any sense to me. Let me know where I'm wrong in the comments section.
It is actually less risky to buy Bitcoin than Ethereum right now. Bitcoin is at 0.306, Ethereum at 0.42, BNB at 0.31. Crazy, right?
Industry News: Polygon, Robinhood, and the Bonk DAO Hack
Moving into the last pieces before we get into the Q&A — it's good to see that people are realizing we need to grow up in this space and not pay so much attention to the noise that we all got caught up in. I was guilty of this myself, but time has gone on. It's time to grow up.
Polygon cuts their staff for the fourth time as it pivots from blockchain to payments. I know this is tough to hear, but this is what businesses have to do sometimes — they have to lay people off. Polygon is completing a $250 million acquisition of Coin Me and Sequence and restructuring to reach profitability by 2027. So they are looking toward payments, which we've been talking about the last couple of days. There is a bid on the table right now from Stripe, and also a rumor that Stripe and Block are looking to take over PayPal for roughly $56 billion. The DTCC is also moving into payments, and it looks like the things getting squeezed out would be Swift and similar systems. We talked about the different altcoins that the rails are being built on — links in the description for those videos. Moving toward the future is commendable, even if it doesn't always make sense.
Robinhood — and there's the CEO Vlad pumping his fist — Robinhood's high-stakes bet to onboard millions of casual users onto decentralized finance. How are they doing that? Well, Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev told CNBC on July 2nd that memecoins were a dead end — assets with no utility that serve no purpose. Six days later, he posted that the Robinhood chain works great for memes, too.
Because of that, we can see that tokenized real-world assets — RWAs — that Canton and others like Binance, Ethereum, and Tron are trying to bring in — the tokenized real-world asset count for Robinhood is only $12.66 million in active market capitalization. Meaning people don't care about real-world assets. They're not buying into it. You know what people are buying into? Cash Cat. Much of the larger activity came from memecoin traders piling into a new token called Cash Cat. The token rallied by more than 2,100% in its first week, briefly reaching a $156 million market cap — which is 12 times larger than the chain's entire tokenized real-world asset market.
I understand the discussion from people who say, "Rob, you don't understand — younger people don't have the opportunities that the older generation has, and this is the only way they can do it, is to gamble on memecoins." I'm not here to discourage anybody from that. If you want to gamble, have at it. I'm just saying that as time goes on, you're going to realize that is a dead end for most — not for all. There are a lot of people who dumped on you and took a massive amount of profits from your memecoins and laughed in your face. One of those was the President of the United States. Pretty good one.
Now I want to get everybody's opinion on this one. We have this argument that if something is decentralized, it's hands-off — everything goes, nothing matters what happens. I'm just curious if anybody's been a part of this. From Coinbase, it says: "Update — the Bonk DAO drainer just sent another 800 billion Bonk to Binance. The wallet has offloaded roughly 1.18 trillion tokens worth $4.1 million." And about a month ago, when the original hack happened, they offloaded roughly $20 million worth. And Binance and these exchanges let it happen.
So my question to you is: because this is decentralized, are you okay with this happening? Are you okay with Binance saying, "It's decentralized, we can do that"? Or do you think they should be able to freeze those accounts? Do you think there should be more AML and KYC enforcement? I don't understand why Binance is getting away with this, because I believe their CEO went to jail for this exact same thing. I could be wrong. I just want to know what people think about that, because I get emails — it's slowed down to maybe once every couple of weeks now — of people losing massive amounts of money or their entire life savings. And that is what the GENIUS Act is supposed to fix, if people can just get on board with it. But we'll see if it ever actually happens.
Q&A
Rob: Jesus, Samson Mau wants to know if it's going to be a million in 2026. I don't know if that guy's insane or not.
Ekko is right — senators and members of Congress should not trade on things they're voting on, because they probably have inside information. I'd love that inside information. If you could show me a place where, the day that congressmen, congresswomen, senators, or even the president and his family make those trades on a particular stock, crypto, or whatever else — the same day — then okay, I'm cool with it. I'd love to watch that. But usually it's after the fact, after they have to file, and it's months and months afterwards. Even the Pelosi stock tracker can only do so much. I just think that if you're in that position of power — and this is for all politicians — the American people put you there. You work for the people, not to take advantage of inside information.
People would say, "But Rob, it's decentralized and they should do whatever they want." Sure, do that — be a private citizen. First of all, I'm paying for you to be there. Do your job.
Pelosi acts in her husband's best interest. That guy is a pretty great trader.
Isn't it crazy that Lindsey Graham only had a $2 million net worth, being one of the biggest war hawks? I think he was one of the least wealthy senators who recently passed away, which goes to show that maybe he didn't use all that inside information. Maybe he just wanted to serve the people. I didn't know this about Lindsey — he was an Air Force colonel, I believe, and I think he was an orphan who raised his sister because she was in a horrible environment. Yes, he was a war hawk and people hated him for certain things, but nobody's perfect.
Lindsey Graham was one of the most honest, transparent, and functional politicians — I would argue nothing wrong with that. He was open about it.
Susa says, "I earned about $5 scalping Trump. Still, I wish there was no Trump coin." Perhaps I'm wrong. Perhaps Trump coin is revolutionary. It's not revolutionary. It's just another memecoin, just like Melania — they're just there to make money. And it's the same thing with Robinhood. I'm very disappointed in Robinhood for embracing the meme culture. They look at it and go, "Well, it's a bunch of money and people are making money on it." And they can do whatever they want to. The problem is — and we all know how this ends — the early investors dump on the new ones coming in. They let it ride all the way up, whether that's a coordinated effort or not, and then they dump it on the latecomers. The majority of people lose money. It's not like everybody gets in and goes, "Oh, I made five bucks," and then everybody gets out at the same time. For some people to win, a lot more other people have to lose. And the bigger the winner, the more the losers. That's trading.
People are supposed to understand that, of course. But what will they associate their losses with? Will it be Robinhood or will it be the memecoin itself? Probably the memecoin.
Kamikaze says, "Rob, I'm telling you, I think we clear before November, but I think it's going to be a sell-the-news event that finds a bottom." Well, I hope so. The GENIUS Act passed in April or May of 2025, which is pretty good. You think, how did that really move the needle? Well, May 2025, then June, July, August, September — about four months later, we got an all-time high. That's it.
Capital Gains, Tax Strategy, and the Big Beautiful Bill
Someone says, "Rob, I don't want to take profits because we have to pay tax on those profits." Well, the great thing about taking profits and paying taxes is that if you're paying taxes, it means you made money. There could be an issue where, say, you bought Bitcoin at $125,000 and sold it at — wait, that's a bad example. Let's say you bought Bitcoin at $100,000 and sold it at $125,000. That's $25,000 profit. Not too bad. Now, depending on whether this is a long-term or short-term capital gain — short-term in America is below 12 months. In Germany, I've been told that if you wait over 12 months, you have no capital gains tax. I don't know if that's still in effect, but fantastic if so.
Let's say you're in America with long-term capital gains. Depending on your income level, it could be 15% or 20%. So 20% of $25,000 — what are you paying? $5,000. So you pay $5,000 in taxes, and you take home $20,000 of profit. Great. If you've got bills, maybe you want to pay those. Fantastic.
Or you could do something like this. The Big Beautiful Bill came out and said that if you have capital gains and you want to roll those into some type of real estate action, you can separate your real estate from the land it sits upon. Whatever that price is, you can depreciate those values and roll the capital gains into that and pay off the land. Pretty great, right? These are the types of things you should probably talk to your lawyer or wealth manager about — how do I do this, how does this work?
We're actually going to talk about this a little bit at the conference in Miami, the 20th to the 22nd. There are a bunch of new speakers. I bring this up because I think everybody needs a vacation, and Miami would be a pretty good place to go. James Check, co-founder and CEO of Checkmate On-Chain, is going to be there. That guy's very interesting. Mike McGlone is going to be there. A lot of people. A lot of them are going to be talking about trading. I just want to talk about tax minimization and a little AI stuff.
Good question about Mitch McConnell. I hear he's alive. I think it might be done by AI. Who knows.
The Genius Act — when did greedy equal smart? Everybody's greedy, unfortunately.
Does anybody have any questions on crypto, or are we just going to talk about Mitch McConnell and Congress? Here's a hot news flash: all politicians are liars. Can we agree on that? I think that's good.