Ivan on Tech discusses Bitcoin's position near the 200 EMA, SEC crypto regulation changes, sovereign debt concerns, and AI developments
Ivan on Tech solo livestream covering Bitcoin market positioning, new SEC crypto rules, global bond yield concerns, and local AI models.
Summary
Ivan on Tech presents a solo livestream covering several interconnected topics. He opens with the SEC's announcement of a new "Regulation Crypto Assets" proposal that would allow projects to raise up to $5 million through token offerings without full registration — framing this as "ICO season 2.0" — while noting that without the Clarity Act being passed by Congress, these rules remain reversible by future administrations. Robin Hood CEO Vlad Tenev is also cited as saying we are in the early innings of a global tokenization super cycle, reinforcing the ICO 2.0 theme. Ivan then discusses Bitcoin's current position near the 200 EMA as a buying zone, his own DCA strategy, and his $300K price target. He also covers rising sovereign bond yields in the US, UK, France, and Germany as signs of a developing sovereign debt crisis, arguing this environment is bullish for Bitcoin as an outside asset. Additionally, he discusses the emergence of uncensored local Chinese AI models (Qwen) as a potential disruption to paid AI services, Anthropic surpassing OpenAI in quarterly revenue, and Michael Saylor's MicroStrategy situation. He also notes Cameron Winklevoss's observation that the AI boom has effectively created a "time machine" back to $65K Bitcoin prices by drawing liquidity into semiconductors away from crypto.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Bitcoin Near the 200 EMA and the SEC's New Crypto Rules
Ivan: Welcome to another episode. As you can see right now, Bitcoin is still at around the 200 EMA moving average, but the SEC is making big moves. The SEC is coming out basically saying that you can raise up to $5 million for your ICO without being registered to any great extent. You have to disclose what you're doing, you have to disclose the goal and the idea, but not much else. Watch this from Paul Atkins where he basically says, "Yeah, ICO season 2.0 — let's go."
Paul Atkins: "When I took office, I pledged to ensure that the United States remains the crypto capital of the world. For too long, issuers and investors had to navigate an activist SEC weaponized against this asset class. The result has been uncertainty and inefficiency, chasing crypto asset innovation outside of the United States. So today, I'm excited to announce that the SEC is taking the most historic step yet to modernize federal securities regulations for crypto assets. The United States must and will lead. Our new rule proposal, Regulation Crypto Assets, will ensure that we do. Now, let me be clear — the SEC continues to support congressional work on the Clarity Act, and we expect to see the bill reach the president's desk. Under our current statutory authority, we are acting now."
Ivan: Basically, what he's saying is that the Clarity Act is too slow. They don't make any progress. Likely this year there will be no Clarity Act — maybe a 10% chance it gets through this year. Democrats have successfully stopped the Clarity Act. But the SEC is saying, listen, crypto is too important to not have great regulation in the US while you guys are trying to figure out the Clarity Act. Let us create rules in the meanwhile.
So these rules that the SEC is currently creating — Regulation Crypto Assets as they call it — they are good, but they can be reversed by future administrations. This is very important. By future administrations, this could be reversed. And why is this so important? Because we now have a very pro-crypto administration. In the coming years, if we have another administration which says, "Hey, Trump had all of these dealings with crypto, let's go after it, let's short it" — it may happen. So it's good that the SEC is doing rules. It's going to fuel this coming bull market fantastically. But we still need the Clarity Act. We need the Clarity Act to ensure that all of these rules are set in stone.
But as we're looking at the bull market in the coming few months — the start of a great, glorious bull market — we have to mainly look at what's happening to Bitcoin. This regulation from the SEC is going to help this bull market no matter what future administrations are going to do.
Bitcoin DCA Strategy and Price Target
As you know, we are currently DCAing in this beautiful big green buy zone, which is moving up together with the 200 EMA moving average. Everything around the 200 EMA is very, very cheap for Bitcoin. Even if it goes lower, it's still going to be historically extremely cheap.
As you know, we exited crypto fully in October. I told you very clearly on October 8th — you can check my timeline. And now we're buying back. Bitcoin will go very, very high. $300K is my target. I think it's very reasonable that we reach it. It's barely a 2x from the previous high, and that's our plan.
Everyone is of course saying one leg lower, one leg lower. Everyone on Twitter is saying one leg lower. And listen, maybe they will be correct. We are ready for one leg lower because we're just deploying a minor amount here in the buy zone. We're ready to buy lower also. I just wouldn't be so sure, because it is easier to time the top than the bottom. The top is way easier to time than the bottom. The top — we saw that the trend was shifting, that there was overexuberance. The bottom — it's all about how long the chop is going to be. It can be a few months, can be six months, can be way shorter. So I wouldn't be counting too much on people's accuracy in predicting the bottom. You just have to be humble like we are.
We're saying that somewhere here is going to be the bottom. It's already almost a year after the top. So don't worry too much. Just look at the big grand bullish picture. You have to be thinking like a bull. Otherwise, you're going to be on the sidelines.
The time to be bearish was October. We were bearish in October. October 8th — risk off, sold all the altcoins, everything. We're out. We won the bear game. We were bearish from October until July. Perfect execution, fantastic results. And why are we so great? Because we're humble. We're just observing the market. We're not trying to predict. We're just seeing what the market is doing and we react based on that.
Michael Saylor and MicroStrategy
Look here — I don't know what Saylor is doing. I think Saylor is just vibing at this point. He posted a new AI-generated ad where he's a beaver in a river. In another one, he's in the Alps speaking German. MicroStrategy stock is getting dumped and dumped and dumped. This guy is speaking in German — "gratis, gratis" — and now here is where he's a koala, swinging in the bamboo tree.
Guys, if MicroStrategy's preferred stock yield goes back to 100, this will be studied as the most historical financial advertising — a new era of financial advertising. I've never seen anything like this.
Looking at MicroStrategy stock — guys, it will pump eventually. I just want to be very clear: we're making fun of Saylor in the bear market because it's the bear market. You should be bearish in the bear market. We've been bearish since October. But once Bitcoin pumps, his stock is also going to pump. Don't get it wrong. But I'm not touching MicroStrategy until Bitcoin is in a bull trend. And then it's also a question of whether you really want to touch it, because you can just trade Bitcoin with leverage, which is essentially the same thing. Trading Bitcoin with leverage on Bybit or other exchanges — you can see the links below for exchanges I use. It's the same as buying MicroStrategy, but you could argue it's a bit better because there you have full control. With Saylor, no one knows what's happening.
Whale Accumulation and Cameron Winklevoss
Look here — about 43,000 Bitcoin worth $2.7 billion has been bought over the past 60 days by large holders, says Bloomberg. Whales are accumulating in a very nice way.
And look here — Cameron Winklevoss declares the AI boom has created a time machine to buy Bitcoin at $65,000, calling it an unprecedented buying opportunity. That's interesting. Now, first I thought that AI created a time machine and we all got teleported back in price to $65K. But what he's saying is actually true. The AI boom has had so much attention on it that it has sucked all of the liquidity from crypto — all your altcoins are down — and it's been put into semiconductors, put into Nvidia. So in that way, metaphorically, you could say yes, AI created a time machine and teleported us back towards $65K.
We did not get a real time machine yet. But with the open-source Chinese models, uncensored Chinese models, maybe that's possible, because the cracks in AI are starting to happen based on what China is doing.
Chinese AI Models and Local Uncensored AI
We're still bullish AI. If the stock is in a bull trend, we're bullish. Some of them are already in a bear trend, so we stay away. But look at this — you now have free models you can download to your desktop if you have enough RAM, and you can run them, and they are uncensored. Just watch this — this is the new stuff from China, Quen 3.8 uncensored.
The demonstration shows: if you go to Claude and ask it to find a torrent for Spider-Man 4K, it's going to refuse. Then you do the same thing with Quen 3.8 uncensored — it opens Chrome, goes to 1337x, opens some new tabs for YTS, and just goes straight into it without caring. It's crazy. You have Anthropic and OpenAI caring so much about safety, and then on the other side you have Quen 3.8, which is similarly capable, and they just don't care. It's like somebody just says, "Let's do a little bit of reinforcement learning — just make the user happy." All the gates go away and you can do this stuff.
I don't know about you guys, but when I have an AI model, I want it to just do what I say. I don't want it to preach. I don't want it to teach me morals. I don't want it to teach me political gender identity or that something is unsafe. It's my machine. I know what's safe. You're a freaking AI — you do what I say. I have my own morals. Don't teach me morals. Your moral is not my moral.
So for that, we are currently downloading Quen here in the studio. I have LM Studio open. It says it's a bit too big to run on this machine — I may need to either upgrade or get another one just for this local Chinese stuff. But basically, here in LM Studio, you go to Models, Explore, you write "Quen," and you find the latest one — Quen 27B, four days ago. See how many people have downloaded it — 912,000 downloads. You can run it locally. No AI subscription. Obviously, you're going to pay electricity. You also need a big machine. For my machine it says "too large," but we're 43% through the download. I'll try running it, and if it doesn't work, I'll get another one with more RAM.
Why is this so important? Because people are saying this is the first domino in the AI collapse. We don't know if it's going to collapse or when, so we're bullish until the bull trend ends. But keep an eye on what's happening with Chinese Opus-level intelligence running fully local at home on dual RTX 4090s.
Once you start using local AI, you'll notice that it's freaking instant. No streaming tokens. Super fast reply. You don't have to wait.
Anthropic Surpasses OpenAI in Revenue
Anthropic just passed OpenAI in quarterly revenue for the first time — more than doubling to $11.6 billion, while OpenAI grew to $6.7 billion. Wow. I've been spending a lot with Anthropic. That's why I'm looking for Chinese versions. With Claude Code and everything, if I think about how much it would cost to do the same work with people — not only in money, but also in nervous system load, because when you work with people you have to explain, coordinate, they have vacations — the AI is not only cheaper in salary, it's also that you deal less with other people, which in many cases is quite nice when you just speak to AI. They just do stuff, bam bam bam bam.
Except when it starts being a freaking teacher teaching you morals — that's bad. Claude is now messing up their cash cow by giving so much moral guidance. It's woke. We're apolitical on this channel. But some people, especially on this channel, they don't like it. So let's see if we can get Chinese Quen for free and just pay the electricity company. You still need to pay Nvidia for the card. So if Chinese Quen becomes big, it's not a problem for Nvidia, it's not a problem for Micron.
From this perspective, if an AI stock is a cheap manufacturer and they are in a bull trend, don't be bearish on them. But many of them are in a bearish trend. Micron is in a bear trend. Intel is in a bear trend. They could go into bull again, but for us, if it's a bear trend, we stay away. AMD is still in a bull trend. AMD obviously doesn't care if it's OpenAI or open source.
Sovereign Debt Crisis — US, UK, France, Germany
Look here — Stan Druckenmiller told Scott Bessant exactly what it would take to stop Washington from spending: "The clowns in Washington, unless they get a signal from the bond market, they're just going to keep spending." Now we do see a signal from the bond market with the high interest rates that it's time to be careful with spending.
Bond market anxiety remains a major headwind with the 10-year Treasury yield around 4.7%, near its highest since early 2025, as rising government debt, heavy Treasury issuance, and AI-related borrowing kept pressure on long-term yields. Sovereign debt crisis — tick tock. It's coming. And Bitcoin is here as the life raft.
US annualized interest cost is $1.2 trillion. The bond yields are going up. Why are bond yields going up so much? Because the financial markets are not trusting the US as much. They're demanding higher interest rates. So it's going to be very interesting what the Fed does, because the interest rates are going to highs of 2008. What's going to be the result? The Fed is going to have to come out and start buying the bonds, because when they buy the bonds, the interest rate goes down. When bonds go up in price, the interest rate goes down — it's an inverse relationship. So based on the current yields and the fact that the yield curve is skyrocketing, they will have to buy soon. They will have to increase liquidity soon.
Obviously, it's not that easy. They cannot just click a button. They have to make it credible. They have to make a story, because if the financial markets see that the US is basically desperate and just pumping their own bonds without any greater narrative, everyone is just going to sell even more. Kind of like Saylor, by the way — you see, Saylor is now in a position where everyone sees that the preferred stock yield is kind of in trouble, but Saylor is selling MicroStrategy stock to raise money to pay the preferred stock dividend. The market still is not giving him that $100 price because even if he has all of this money to pay, there's still too much risk. What if he mismanages? The same thing is with US yields — if they start buying without a clear story, US Treasuries are going to be sold off even more.
Bitcoin did not exist the last time global long bond yields were this high. And to be fair, it's not only the US — it's also the UK. UK is cooked. France is also cooked. Western countries are now facing the sovereign debt crisis. It's happening in the US, it's happening in France.
UK 10-year gilt yield: 5% — highest auction rate since 2007. UK 30-year gilt: 5.8% — highest since 1998. France: highest since 2008. France 30-year: highest since the global financial crisis. Germany: also very high. Big, big issue in the EU.
If you are in these countries, you have to be careful because your taxes are going to go up. When you have consumer credit and you're the bank, you tell the borrower: go to work, pay me back, don't spend on entertainment. The same thing is with countries. The bond holders are telling all of these countries: raise more tax so you can pay me. Don't spend too much. Just raise tax and pay back your loan. Otherwise they sell the bond. When the bond sells, the interest rate goes up even more.
The problem is that the government doesn't own any productive asset. So you have to borrow money. You don't have anything productive that gives you money, and you are basically owned by the bond holders. The bond holders are now saying, "Hey, the yield is 5%. If you want to borrow more, now it's 5%." So you are going to be taxed. They're going to try to tax you to get back the money.
That's why, by the way, they are removing all of the tax incentives in the UK. Very bad. You've got to figure something out. You've got to get out, otherwise you're going to get milked.
You could move out of the UK and buy their bond and get 5%. Maybe that's the solution. You move out, you buy the bond, you get 5% per year. But this is a bit of a problem for risk assets — if the government can go bankrupt, you still get 5%, but if they go bankrupt, the stock market is going to dump anyway. So your stocks are going to go down anyway. If you have to pick between stocks or lending to the government, your risk is very connected. If the government goes bankrupt, the stocks are going to go to zero anyway.
So super exciting times for crypto. Crypto is the thing you can buy. It's outside. No matter what's happening in the country, it's outside.
Robin Hood CEO on Tokenization and Jim Cramer on Semiconductors
Robin Hood CEO Vlad is saying it's becoming increasingly clear that we're in the early innings of a global tokenization super cycle. Yes. And especially with the SEC saying you can raise up to $5 million now with the new rules without registering — ICO cycle 2.0, we're coming.
Jim Cramer came out and said that big semiconductor stocks have yet to rally. Now I get a bit worried for AI stocks because of that. I become a bit worried when he's bullish. Let's see what's going to happen.
Self-Custody, Hardware Wallets, and Exchange Risk
I hate that it's called Safe because everything called "safe" is basically begging to get hacked. Safe.global is the website for multisig wallets. Don't get phished — that's also why I don't really like giving step-by-step instructions, because I know you'll click the wrong button and get phished and then blame me. So I really don't like speaking about wallets or setting up wallets. Use your own brain, figure it out yourself. If you get phished by following my instructions — like a Google ad shows up with a phishing site and you click it — that's your own fault.
But if you want to know: you can have multisig with Safe Wallet. You can have different kinds of signers — your Ledger signer, your Trezor signer. Learn this. I don't want to give you step-by-step because again, you're going to mess it up.
It's so easy to get phished. Just yesterday I saw that DeFi Llama had to fight Apple for five months to get an impersonator app of DeFi Llama removed from the App Store. It was crazy. You search DeFi Llama on the App Store, the first result is DeFi Llama but it's a fake one that drains you. So just knowing all of the dangers, you have to be really careful and figure it out yourself.
Even typing the domain — know that there is a risk. If you write a typo in the domain, there is a fake website on that fake domain. They know the average person is going to make a typo, clicks enter, and sees "ah, it worked" — but it's a fake one that hopes you're going to make a typo.
For the average person, especially if you are on the older side — and I'm not being ageist, I mean as we all get older we don't use all of the latest tools, it's just natural — just use Coinbase. For all intents and purposes, if something happens to Coinbase, there's going to be a lawsuit, there's going to be recovery. You may get most of your money back. I got most of my money back from FTX. Actually, I got more because I had my money in ETH and ETH had dumped, so the dollar value at the time of the hack was bigger than when I got it back.
With the amount of regulations and how mature this industry is now, for most people who are not technical — with all of the hardware wallet hacks, I don't even know if I want to tell you to use a hardware wallet, because you see what's happening. They leak your customer info. So you can get targeted in your own home. Hardware wallets are tough, but then you buy many of them, your customer info is in all of them — Trezor, Ledger — and then you do a multisig, but with multisig you could lock yourself out if you don't know what you're doing.
At the end of the day, you just want to make money. To make money with crypto, you can have it in Coinbase. The big problem in the early days was also that many people did not have their taxes in order, so they just didn't want to touch anything like Coinbase. Now, one of the first questions people ask when they join Bull Mania is about taxes — and we can connect you with a tax professional in the US. Most people now in the US are super careful with tax. They do all accounting. This means you can now use the services without being paranoid.
Kraken is better than Coinbase, I agree. Kraken is way better. It's more of a human approach. With Coinbase, at least in the past, there was no support, the website didn't work, they'd freeze your account. Everything worked out in the end, but Kraken — very, very good.