Scaramucci on Coinbase, Gensler and Bitcoin Forecast

SkyBridge Capital founder Anthony Scaramucci discusses Coinbase posting a profit for the first time in two years, his views on SEC Chair Gary Gensler and why he is sticking with his forecast for Bitcoin on Bloomberg Television.

For more on Bitcoin, please see: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-02-15/bitcoin-btc-spot-etf-flows-eclipse-once-dominant-futures-linked-fund
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I do. I just want to get your thoughts about the recent run up that we’ve seen in Bitcoin. I think last time I checked were around 52,000, a far cry from 69, but it looks like we’re headed in that direction. But a but a big move from 16, 17, 18,000

Towards the end of 2022 which was the end of as horrible as for crypto. So yeah, but I think the one thing I would just add on the Coinbase situation, everything’s up, it’s going to improve the staking on the altcoins

And there’s huge margins in that. So even if they lose a little on the exchange traded funds, meaning some of their customers buy the ETF as opposed to just buying Bitcoin natively on the exchange and they’re picking up revenues from the whole lift in the overall market capitalization.

Do you think that so you think this is going to spread beyond just Bitcoin itself? I know it’s already done that to a certain extent, but the narrative has always been spot Bitcoin ETF, so you don’t really need Coinbase, but we forget that there’s a whole other ecosystem. Yeah.

So I so I think what is typically happening is as you see a swelling in bitcoin, the grandfather of cryptos, it sort of spills over into the other assets. And so just, just what happens is you making profits in Bitcoin, you start to redeploy them into riskier assets and

Some of those assets are really not that risky relative to Bitcoin. As an example, a theorem in Solana or probably now in that big boys club. And so but listen, you know, you could you, you stick with a place like Coinbase because it’s safe. It’s good, you know high, highly good

Regulatory process inside. There’s probably one of the best run cryptocurrency exchanges in the world. So you feel the safety there. And they do take a reasonable size of the profits as a result of that. And I don’t think we should underestimate that.

So Gary Gensler made pretty clear that the SEC was holding its nose as it approved those spot Bitcoin ETFs. What does that mean for the prospect of ETFs backed by other cryptocurrencies like ether? Like like anything else, You are so nice because I, you know, say that he was

Holding his nose is such a you know, he had like a vomit bag under his desk, like when he was like, you know, so you were just such a nice person but had to be polite. You know, what I would say is that he’s up against it because he’s lost several cases.

He will take another lawsuit to get there. I think he will. I think he will. I think he’s decided that the powers that be politically in the elite don’t like crypto. They don’t like the energy around Bitcoin. And I don’t think they want an ETF for

Etherium. And so that may decision I think gets pushed. I think it causes another lawsuit. He’ll likely lose that lawsuit and then you’re coming up against the election. And so then the real question is will Mr. Gensler, in a new Joe Biden administration, will he be the FCC

Chairman? My my guess is he probably won’t be at that point. I want to go back to Bitcoin for a moment because, of course, you’ve made a lot of headlines when you gave a Bitcoin price forecast of $170,000 about 18 months after the having in April.

Given the rally that we’ve seen, 52,000 above that level. What’s your latest price forecast? You sticking with that? I am sticking with that. But the typical thing, what I was trying to say in that podcast was there’s a technical analysis that you can do over

The past 14 years. The price at the time of the having if you multiply that by four, that’s typically where Bitcoin has run to in that cycle. And so I was just using a $50,000 number for April. So this could run up because there’s a

Lot of momentum right now. You guys are seeing that the network is only producing 900 coins a day and you know, you’ve got 12 times the demand of that right now, which is why you’re seeing a price squeeze to the upside.

So so I’m going to stick with that price prediction only because I think it’s conservative based on where we are right now. And I think people need to understand look at what happened in a video, look at what happened to Apple over the last decade in video, over the last 18

Months. It’s not impossible now that this asset has been regulated and has this regulatory ETF wrapper around it. Yeah. And remember, you know, I’ve been on Wall Street in my 36 year on Wall Street. Wall Street sells product. Yeah. And, you know, these products are sold and not bought.

And you have armies of people now that are putting these products in people’s portfolios. So it’s very limited demand for an asset like Bitcoin. You actually look great for a guy who’s been on Wall Street for 36 years, by the way.

So a lot a lot of a lot of Botox on my forehead. And I guess I can give you a referral to my dermatologist if you have an interest, I might need it one day. I am curious. So, I mean, who is kind of in this space right now?

Because you talk about how okay, we may maybe we see a repeat of Nvidia in Apple and some of these big run ups here. But you know, that takes a lot of retail interest. Some of that that really got shook out when we saw that big drop last year around in 2022.

Excuse me, whatever it was, are we going to see more of those people come back into it? Meaning this isn’t just going to be the whales and some of the institutional and crypto faithful, so. So it’s a really good question. And so the skeptics are saying it’s the

Whales. Gensler himself is trying to make the argument that it’s a few people that control Bitcoin. We really don’t see that over 70% of the holders of Bitcoin own less than one Bitcoin. But what I do see is continued adoption and I see people like BlackRock and Fidelity adding it to their omnibus

Portfolios over time. And so I think this thing squeezes up and the skeptics, particularly people that are on the short side, are going to have to get out of the way. You talked about how Wall Street sells products, and we’ve seen obviously, Wall Street leaders like Larry Fink, like

Howard Lutnick talk up crypto following the launch of the spot Bitcoin ETF. What portion of Wall Street leaders do you think really understands the dynamics and the inner workings of the asset class? Would you say it’s a quarter of a half of them?

It’s probably a handful of them. I think it’s a great question, and I think the answer is it’s a handful of them. But here’s what I would say to my Wall Street contemporaries. It’s a one way ticket towards Bitcoin, meaning the more research you do and you

Go down the rabbit hole of Bitcoin to understand the network, the decentralized properties of the network, the immutability of the network, it becomes a very, very compelling thing. So if you look at a Paul Tudor Jones or a Stanley Druckenmiller, a Larry Fink is an example who is negative on Bitcoin.

2436 short months ago. Understood better what it was and then green lighted the ETF. And so my prediction is as people understand it better, when I hear Wall Street executives railing against Bitcoin. My secondary question is how much homework have they actually done? Or are they saying that because they are

Under the gun with regulators?