Key insights
- Bitcoin's price decline below $70K, triggered by MicroStrategy's first-ever sale of Bitcoin, has dampened crypto trader sentiment. This event, despite the small sale volume, signals a shift for a long-term Bitcoin proponent. The article suggests crypto is currently out of favor compared to AI and other tech sectors, drawing parallels to the housing bubble with MicroStrategy's leveraged Bitcoin strategy. This sentiment shift could indicate reduced speculative interest in crypto assets.
Bitcoin (BTC-USD) dropped back below $70,000 per token this week after Michael Saylor's Strategy (MSTR) sold bitcoin for the first time ever.
Morning Brief Host Julie Hyman and Yahoo Finance Senior Reporter Pras Subramanian are joined by Payne Capital Management's Ryan Payne for a discussion on crypto trader sentiments after this sale from a longtime bull.
Let's move on to something else that is um very faith-based and that is crypto, but a lot of people have lost their faith in crypto as of late. Um, and this week, the catalyst was strategy selling two and a half million dollars worth of its Bitcoin. It's only like a tiny, tiny um percentage of its overall Bitcoin holding. But when you have a guy who has said over and over again, never sell, hold it forever in the form of Michael Saylor, and then they sell a little bit, then you know, that even even though he sort of telegraphed that they might do it,
Yes.
it's just one more thing. Like crypto is not cool right now. I think we can say pretty. SpaceX is cool, Anthropic is cool, right, AI is cool, Marvell somehow is cool, Dell somehow is cool. Crypto is not cool.
Well, it's kind of fascinating because I've always said it's just a bunch of younger dudes, you know, gambling in their basement. Uh, I think that's the crypto market. Um, and what you're seeing here is there's so many other places to gamble with your money now, whether it's AI, the predictions markets, a great place to be. And Micro strategy kind of reminds me of the housing bubble where, you know, you would see your the price of your house go up, so you would borrow against it. You'd buy another house, the price of that would go up, you buy, you'll borrow money again to buy another place. So that's essentially what Micro strategy has done, right? They're just borrowing against uh Bitcoin to buy more Bitcoin, to buy more Bitcoin. So at some point when you're borrowing real money against, you know, we'll call them imaginary assets,
Mhm.
that's going to become a problem. And I think just like everyone got wiped out during the housing bubble who was leveraged to the teeth, that's exactly what's going to happen to these uh Bitcoin bank companies that trade publicly. I mean it's not if, it's just when. Um you're already starting to see that like wall crumble a little bit here.
Yeah. Yeah. The underwater mortgages.
Julie, you you'd noted the Joe Weisenthal's list of the crypto winter list and I think there's a bunch of interesting things on there. Uh I mean a couple things that that pop out to me, you know, just overall you're talking about it's a mature industry now, right? Believe it or not we we joke around about it.
Is it?
I know, I know, I know. But it's but it's like the adoption stage, the adoption sort of euphoria stage is sort of over, right? That's one thing, right? Social media influence is weakened, right? The the the power that these these guys had like the Sailors of the world had is sort of less influential these days, right? And the one other thing that that I think is interesting is the fact that a lot of the institutions have already embraced it, right? And there's not so much more you can go with the the bigger banks.
Right. I mean the industry was like, oh, adoption institutional adoption, when it happens, that's going to be the thing. Okay, and it happened, uh pretty pretty dramatically and but it, you know, it's not self-sustai I mean it cuts both ways. Those institutions when they trade something, they don't just buy it.
Right. Right.
Right? If they're involved with it.
Well, then you have, sorry, you have a you have a a a administration in place that's very crypto-friendly. And even that's not a thing, right? So, where do you go?
Well, I think first off, I I don't know how much of these institutions actually hold on their books as opposed to they provide it funds so retail investors can get in. I'm happy to provide you the picks and shovels and charge you a fee. So I think that's really where Wall Street is on that trade as opposed to they're like hoarding it for their own balance sheet. Like that's not actually true. So I think overall it just again, it's just it's like this gold rush of a, you know, what is it? Digits on a screen. It's not it's fake scarcity. You can name all the reasons. when we look back retrospectively, we're going be this is one of the silliest trades of all time. You can quote me on that.