Bitcoin's recent price action has been driven largely by institutional flows, and in New York morning trade, we are looking at both Bitcoin and trending lower now.
The market has been range bound and seeing structurally lower volatility.
However, the second half of the year does present massive non-crypto macro catalysts.
We have 3 mega.
IPOs from SpaceX open AI as well as anthropic and a new monetary policy regime under incoming Fed chair Kevin Warsh as well as the approaching midterm election.
Now joining us this morning to discuss how these factors will directly impact liquidity as well as price action and even 401k adoption is David Lawant, Head of Research at Anchorage Digital.
David, good morning.
Thank you so much for joining us.
So first and foremost, I do want to start out with the upcoming mega IPOs, and you've noted that public offerings from these names such as SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic could be a major factor for digital assets.
So break this down for us.
Hey Remy, thanks for having me.
Excited to be here.
Yeah, for sure, as you well noted, uh, the Bitcoin space, especially let's say the crypto majors, they have been failing a little bit to follow suit with the market rally that we saw over the past 6 to 9 months, and there's a bunch of reasons for that.
Some are more structural, but others are more narrative, and I would say that I mean The fact that we have all these hot IPOs and these teams, maybe AI related, uh, this is sucking a lot of air and capital out of, out of the room.
For Bitcoin specifically, what that means is that it's having a lot of trouble to cross the 80K level barrier.
Whenever Bitcoin gets closer to this 800 level.
The amount of sell pressure that we can see on the order books is very clear in the data gets pretty heavy.
So this has been a hard selling for, for Bitcoin to break, going forward, let's see how things change, but I think it's going to be a big battle at the top of this 600 to 80K price range, which is where Bitcoin has been trading for a good while now.
Yes, and 2026 has been quite the year when it comes to volatility, especially given the geopolitical situation in the Middle East, and we have been looking at digital assets as well as other asset classes over the weekend when the traditional markets are closed.
But if, as you said, everyone who wanted to sell Bitcoin already sold by April, when do you expect this historical volatility to actually return here?
Yeah, this is a great question, and I think the big driver here is probably going to be macro induced.
You covered this well in the previous segment, but there's this big chain of events, right?
The Iranian conflict which is impacting oil prices, which is putting pressure on inflation and inflation expectations here in the US, and therefore putting a dent on interest rate cuts.
Right, just a few months ago, the market was pricing multiple interest rate cuts.
Throughout 2026, now the CME Fed fund futures are pricing a 50% chance that we're actually going to see an interest rate hike in 2026.
So I think whenever the macro environment here becomes a little clearer, I think this is going to be a major driver for a lot of these risks on assets, and I think Bitcoin plays at a pretty end of the spectrum here.
There are other important industries.
Developments as well.
So for example, we are on the verge of potentially seeing the crypto market structure bill getting approved over the next 2 to 3 months.
Let's see the tough battle here.
Most folks are attributing a 50 to 50, 50% chance of it getting it passed, but there's also some interesting industry drivers.
Overall, I think the important thing to keep in mind is that the fundamental investment case for Bitcoin, I think, remains still very solid.
Governments continue to Overspend.
This idea of a non-sovereign store of value today is way more accepted than it used to be.
You can see that by the caliber of institutions that are engaging with Bitcoin and crypto more broadly, names like BlackRock and Morgan Stanley.
So in thinking about the longer term here, I think Bitcoin continues to have a very bright future.
In the very short term though, I think we're going to be dependent on what happens on the macro.
This is probably going to be driving the buzz for us.
And David, now that you've given us this overview regarding the macro environment as well as the regulatory expectations when it comes to digital assets, how does all of this translate to the American consumers, especially when it comes to retirement accounts?
I understand that you expect 401k adoption to be slow, but also massive.
So tell us your expectations and what this means for everyone in the ecosystem.
Yeah, this is also another interesting potential long term tailwind for the industry.
We of course saw over the past a little over 2 years the launch of ETFs, which has completely transformed the asset class, right, to the level of institutional adoption we saw, the level of capital that came into the industry completely transformed crypto over the past 2.5 years.
We are also on the verge of a new potential transformation here which would be the potential adoption of alternative assets.
Generally and crypto more specifically into 401ks.
I think here we're going to see a much slower roll compared to what we see, what we saw with ETFs.
Those were very successful right out of the gate.
The 401k market has a slightly different, different dynamic.
It's probably going to take a lot longer for us to see, uh, for us to see adoption, but over the next few years, this is a very big market.
We're talking about a $10 trillion market.
Even if a A small amount of that capital ends up flowing into crypto over the next few years.
I think it can be very relevant.
This is also an interesting part of the market because it has a different volatility profile, right?
These are typically pricing sensitive buys that happens every paycheck.
So it's also a different flow that comes into the market.
It's all part of crypto growing as an asset class, and I think 401ks will have a role to play.
It's just going to take a little bit of time for it to enroll due to its specific dynamics.
Well, David, we will have to leave it there for today, but thank you so much for joining us today and thank you so much for sharing all of your insights.
Thank you.
