Bitcoin risk levels rise as Fed Chair Kevin Warsh prepares Jackson Hole speech on financial innovation
Solo presenter analysis from Digital Asset News covering Bitcoin risk metrics, market conditions, and the upcoming Federal Reserve Jackson Hole speech.
Summary
The host of Digital Asset News delivers a solo market update covering Bitcoin's price appreciation toward $80,000, rising risk levels on the Bitcoin Risk scale, and the significance of Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh's upcoming speech at the Jackson Hole Economic Policy Symposium on Friday at 10:00 a.m. Eastern time. The host notes that this year's Jackson Hole theme — financial innovation: implications for payments and policy — could signal meaningful commentary on tokenization and digital asset infrastructure. He also covers Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent's move to potentially deploy up to $1 trillion from the Treasury General Account to support bond markets, Bitcoin ETF inflows of $2 billion in a single week (described as their best week since October 2025), and a reported data breach affecting Bitcoin IRA and iTrust Capital users.
The host also spends considerable time reviewing risk levels across a broad range of assets on the Bitcoin Risk site — noting Ethereum is already at 0.56, XRP at 0.5, Dogecoin at a relatively low 0.198, and Gold at a high 0.78 — to help viewers assess relative value outside of Bitcoin alone.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Bitcoin price and market overview
The price is going up. Bitcoin seems to be appreciating and the digital asset market just has a rocket ship. But unfortunately, because of that, the risk levels are going up, and we need to talk about the Fed Chair, as the speech is coming up from Jackson Hole this Friday at 10:00 a.m. Eastern time. What they're going to talk about, I think, could be a big push for digital assets.
First of all, there's quite a bit of price appreciation going on. I think everybody loves that. We can take a look at our portfolio and say this is a pretty good thing. Now, as time has gone on, we've taken different approaches. I personally buy Bitcoin every Monday at roughly 6:30 in the morning using the Cash App on a recurring basis. As a reminder, the Cash App is great, but if you do it as a one-off, the spreads will kill you, and the fees are there. But if you set it up as a recurring purchase, the spreads are almost non-existent and the fees are almost non-existent.
As far as the markets go, there are a couple of good pieces of news.
Scott Bessent and the Treasury General Account
First of all, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent last week did a pretty great thing for bonds. He said, "Hey, we're going to pump in two to four billion dollars into the bond market," which I thought was quite a lowball offer considering the fact that it's almost a $30 trillion market. But that's what it was, and of course the market responded positively and the rates did go down for a little bit on the 20 and 30-year, but they went right back up.
And then today we just heard that Scott Bessent said, "Hey, you know what? Maybe that four billion wasn't enough. Let's do a full trillion from the TGA — the Treasury General Account." Now, not to get too much into the weeds, just know that when he's talking about using the Treasury General Account, he's not talking about taking the entire trillion dollars and putting it into the bond market. That's not how it works. But he says — and I think this gives a little bit of confidence to the market — the Treasury General Account balance right now, as of the latest data I have from August 20th, looks like it's $935 billion, almost near one trillion. So they're saying: look, we've built this up, we did a good job, and we want to use this for a rainy day. Here's the rainy day. We're going to prop up the markets. And of course, once they do that, they'll also probably do a little money printing as they debase the currency. That's what all the governments do. And of course, those who own assets are on the winning side of this. Those who do not, not so much.
So that's what we have from Scott Bessent. People are very happy. It's going pretty good. Today we're almost at $80,000 right now — let me refresh this — $79,000, so roughly almost $80,000. Looking pretty good. I like that.
Market cap and altcoin overview
If we take a look at the markets themselves, market cap is $2.7 trillion, up 2%. Across the board in the last 24 hours, 2% for Ethereum — actually not too much of a big move for a lot of the altcoins. I think there's going to be a big move coming up, but this is what we have right now.
For the traditional markets — we're down just a little bit. Not too much. I would have thought the markets would have loved this, but who knows. Maybe something was posted on Truth Social about Iran from President Trump. Down 0.22% — not too bad from the opening. We'll take it. Over five days, not too good. Over a month, looking pretty good. Six months, one year — yeah. The S&P 500, I think, at some point will hit that 8,000 level.
Bitcoin ETF inflows and technical analysis
We've got some good news, and I think it really comes down to whales and insiders. Eric Balchunas came out and said — and this is a pretty good chart — Bitcoin ETFs took in inflows of about $2 billion last week. It's amazing how they just know to buy at the right time. And that's their best week since October 2025. Now, I don't need to remind you what happened in October 2025, but October 6th was a great day for Bitcoin, and then roughly four days later we had quite a bit of a drop. But it is a reminder that somebody knows something somewhere. Whales start to move. And we see a $2 billion inflow, so I like that.
On top of that, if we're taking a look at a little bit of the technical analysis side — which isn't my strong suit, there are a lot of different people you can watch for that — I do like to follow Ivan on Tech and the Bull Mania charts. He was right. If we're taking a look at the weekly, Bitcoin is bearish. However, if we take a look at the daily, obviously Bitcoin is quite bullish. As of two months ago, it's up 22%. But the weekly is the big thing, and that's what the Bull Mania money line is all about.
I will say it was quite interesting when I took a look at this on TradingView. The flip level was $79,548 on the weekly, and we are almost there — actually, we are above that. So if we can hold this into another week, this could be a pretty big run as far as the technical analysis style goes.
Bitcoin Risk levels explained
For me, to make it simple, I'm going to stop accumulating at the 0.5 risk level, and we're getting pretty close. It's amazing how fast we ran up. As far as the risk levels go, we're at 0.455. It wasn't just a couple of weeks ago that we were below 0.35, and all of a sudden, bam, here we are. I remember we actually talked about when we were at a 0.28 level and things were looking bleak. Good for me because I was buying the whole time, but it's amazing how fast it goes up.
I just want to remind everybody what that looks like as far as risk levels. As the price goes down, risk levels go down. Some people would say, "Well, that doesn't make any sense. When the price goes down, the risk levels go down?" No, that's not how it works. When the price goes down, it is not as risky to buy good assets. Now, if you're doing a risk level for Fartcoin, yeah, okay, you've got a point. But as far as risk levels for Bitcoin historically speaking — not too bad.
At the 0.1 level, we can see that didn't happen too often since 2015. So that's off the table. However, 0.1 to 0.2 was a pretty good time to buy. Look at these levels — the price was $293, $342, $356, $270, $230, $176 back in 2015, which is a lot better than paying $1,000 for it just a couple of years beforehand.
Then we come over here — at the risk level of 0.1 to almost 0.2, around $3,400. We hit it again in March of 2020, 0.13 at $3,800. And then also in 2022 when the price was — and these were good prices — $22,000, $20,000, $19,000, then down to $15,570. I remember in 2022 people were talking about how Bitcoin would go down to $10,000 or below $10,000, and I was like, "Yeah, maybe, but I'm just going to dollar-cost average and see what happens." I did the same thing and it seems to work out.
Then of course we go to 0.2 to 0.3, which just happened recently. Look at those numbers — $62,000, not too bad, $64,000, $60,000, $62,000, and so on. And 0.3 to 0.4 — now we're talking a lot of time frame, a lot of buying. 0.4 to 0.5 — $81,000, $82,000, $76,000, $112,000. And just to give this perspective, 0.4 is us going up, and that's where we're at right now at $79,000.
So I think as we go up and if we hit the 0.5 to 0.6 range, these tend to be historically speaking some pretty good prices — though I don't think I'm going to accumulate there. Look at that: $67,000 — oh, that was the high — $30,000, $40,000, and so on. So yeah, for me, once we get above 0.5, I'm going to stop accumulating Bitcoin. I know people will probably say, "You should accumulate all the time like Strategy does." Well, I'm not a billionaire and I don't have a billion-dollar company, so I'm not going to be doing that.
Risk levels across other assets
Over on the Bitcoin Risk site, it's not just risk levels for Bitcoin — there's a whole host of things, and there are some attractive options if you are looking outside of Bitcoin. Look at these risk levels: Ethereum is at 0.56 already. Bitcoin's at 0.4. I would definitely go for Bitcoin. I know Ethereum is described as the future of finance according to Wall Street, but okay. BNB is at 0.44. XRP is at 0.5. Solana is at 0.4 — a little bit elevated.
The ones that are looking pretty low: Dogecoin at 0.198 — I'm just putting it out there, that's a pretty low level. Cardano at 0.265, for those people out there. Gold at 0.78 — that's way too high. Silver at 0.6 — that's pretty high too. Apple at 0.5, pretty high. Netflix at 0.4. Strategy at 0.4. And Tesla at 0.331 — so some interesting prospects there.
Solana and the tokenization thesis
I would just say, before we get into the Fed Chair thing — if you take a look at Solana and that 200-day moving average, it's been above that for most of its trajectory. But if I look at this and move forward, it wasn't a bad time to accumulate around $92, $79, and so on. Below the $250 level, below the $300 level — yeah, look at those $62 prices, and we're just above $300 now.
The reason I brought up Solana — and we talked briefly about Binance and Ethereum, and we didn't talk about Tron, but those are the best — is that I think there's something to be said for payments. And it's not just payments. It's also tokenization of real-world assets: stocks, bonds, real estate, and everything else. You put those all together plus speculation, and you've got pretty high price appreciation of a specific asset.
Kevin Warsh's Jackson Hole speech and the tokenization theme
One of the things I'm looking forward to is the speech from Jackson Hole. Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh is scheduled for Friday, August 28th at approximately 10:00 a.m. Eastern time to give the normal speech that Fed Chairs usually do. This will be the first time he does that as Chair. This marks Warsh's debut address at the Jackson Hole Economic Policy Symposium.
I found this interesting about what he's talking about. This year's theme — the formal focus for the 2026 event — is "financial innovation: implications for payments and policy." I wonder if he might talk about some things they might be into, or maybe address it. Now, as a reminder, Warsh is more of a Bitcoin guy. I'm not entirely sure if he's said much about innovation as far as the rails that would be considering payments and tokenization and all those things, but I think he has talked about stocks and how we need to upgrade how that actually works. Because of that, I think it's going to be quite interesting. Maybe on Friday, just him saying something will be enough to spark a speculation run.
As a quick reminder — this is from the Kobayashi Letter — the entire world wants US stocks. It's kind of hard to do that if you can't verify everybody, and there are a lot of different people out there who don't have access to it. Well, how do you do that? You tokenize. This plays into a story from a couple of days ago about the private sector. Vlad Tenev, who is the CEO of Robinhood, is trying to tokenize and move forward with stocks. Also, the SEC and CFTC are trying to give access to the private sector for people and to tokenize different things.
This is interesting: the private sector alone bought a record $144 billion, bringing the annualized rate to $1.74 trillion — an all-time high. This surpasses the 2025 annualized record by $400 billion. You can see the US net capital inflows of private purchases of US equities. Now, wouldn't that be something if we give the average Joe and Jane — not just the accredited investor — a way to do this through tokenization? That could be a very big thing, which would tie back to what Kevin Warsh might be talking about coming up. I'm not saying he is — just saying it's interesting timing.
Live Q&A
Host: Scott Bessent — I think he's a pretty reasonably smart guy. I think he gets finance. A lot of this is posturing, right? Just to show that even if you don't have the ability, the great thing is to show that you can do something. Because of the posturing that's out there, people say, "I like that guy, I'm going to believe in that." And he can make a statement like, "We're going to prop up the bond market with four billion even though it's a $30 trillion market." Whatever. So yeah.
Rusty says: "If Bitcoin goes 2% more and closes up, I think the super trend goes bullish on the weekly. That is usually very bullish and marks the bull run." That's exactly right, Rusty. We're talking about Bull Mania from Ivan on Tech. It would be interesting if we do close above the bullish level. Right now, on the daily, it's gone above. Looking pretty good. But the big thing is the weekly. If we can hit that, then sky's the limit.
Chris says: "I just bought a ton at $63 and sold it at $52 when it was hovering last week." I don't think it went down to $52 — maybe $59. Sold at $63 and lost about $10. That's one of the things with trading. I do a little bit of trading, but the vast, vast majority — 95% — is all just buy and hold, wait a little bit, then take some profits and put them into some safer stuff.
Miami asks: "Is recurring buys a better deal in Cash App or Kraken in your case?" So for Bitcoin, it's Cash App — that's what I use. However, for altcoins, Cash App is offering altcoins through MoonPay, and I despise MoonPay because their rates are high — 2.9% plus 3 cents — which is essentially the same thing you get with PayPal. I refuse to pay that on principle. For Kraken, what I do is sign up for Kraken Pro, which I believe is around $10 a month. Because of that, that's what I use for all altcoins and everything else I buy. So I have one for Bitcoin and one for altcoins.
I know people don't like to hear about altcoins because some are Bitcoin-only, and that's cool, that's fine. But you have to understand that at some point some of these altcoins are going to be winners — not the ones in the thousands, those are just for gamblers, and there's nothing wrong with that. But there are going to be some winners. We need tokenization. We need to speed things up. We need real-world assets to be on a blockchain to make things easier and to give more people access to this type of economy. Because of that, I just look at the best. I think the best are Binance, Ethereum, Solana, Tron. I know people get sick of it, but if we take a look at DeFi Llama analytics, those are the ones for payments, tokenization, and real-world assets. You've also got Ondo and Canton, and Polygon's in there too. There are going to be some winners that emerge and I don't want to miss it. So I just scatter things around. If I do a 10x, hey, great. If I lose out on some others, well, it's a bummer.
Data breach alert: Bitcoin IRA and iTrust Capital
Jim says: "Coin Bureau reported a data breach at iTrust." What I have on this — I just saw it before I went live — is from Zach XBT's Telegram group. What Zach XBT says is: "Community alert. I've reviewed evidence that two US-based investment platforms, Bitcoin IRA and iTrust Capital, allegedly had data breaches this year but appear to have not disclosed them. Leaked info includes personal details, portfolio holdings, banking details, custodian details, verification status, etc." The reason he believes it's Bitcoin IRA is because a threat actor targeted a Bitcoin IRA user and stole $1.2 million using the database.
So if you are a Bitcoin IRA user, it looks like that is what Zach is saying. However, for iTrust Capital, there is no other information available. I'm not sure why he put that in there, but we'll find out. I had an email out to the iTrust guys and we'll see if that's actually true. However, just as a reminder — this is data. Just like what happened with Ledger, and what happened with a lot of different things. I would not be surprised if my portfolio holdings and personal details are out there, which would be par for the course for everything else.
Closing Q&A
Someone asks: "What would you do if you were sidelined during the start of this bull run, asking for a friend?" I would just pick my spots. It's not like we can't go down — we've seen that this market is volatile. So maybe just pick your spots and buy the dips. I still believe we're going to see some downside in the rest of Q4, especially as the midterms come up. We'll see if that holds true. But even though I have that belief, it didn't matter because all I had to do was dollar-cost average every single Monday, watch the risk levels, and pick up more when the price went down. It was pretty simple. The hard part is parting with your gains and deciding when to actually take those profits.
No one's information is safe anymore. Beware of random phone calls. I mean, that's pretty much what everything is. I get phone calls every couple of days, a massive amount of emails, and I can pretty much guarantee that on the dark web all my information is there. Coinbase had a data breach too — if you're using Coinbase, your stuff's out there. Sorry.
Someone says: "I see three blinks. If I was part of the Ledger breach but have since moved — safe from wrench attacks, just social engineering." Yeah, social engineering happens. That's a bummer.