Digital Asset News covers the OCC stablecoin yield loophole, Visa's rumored Fireblocks acquisition, and a Bitcoin mining hash rate resurgence
A solo presenter episode from the Digital Asset News channel covering several developments in crypto regulation, institutional investment, and infrastructure.
Summary
The host covers the OCC's implementation of the Genius Act framework for stablecoins, highlighting a specific provision — dubbed the "stablecoin yield loophole" — that routes yield approval through the OCC rather than banning it outright, despite bank lobbying to eliminate yield entirely. He also reviews a Fidelity Digital Assets report on Bitcoin-focused perpetual preferred stocks, noting that $12 billion in such instruments sits against a $150 trillion global bond market. The episode closes with observations on Bitcoin's hash rate hitting near all-time highs, a rumored Visa acquisition of Fireblocks for $2.5 billion, and a Q&A session with viewers.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Bitcoin ETF Flows and Market Context
There are quite a lot of things going on behind the scenes, and today we're going to take a look at what is going on in that trajectory, even though we've had quite a massive outflow. The Bitcoin ETF flow — this was the largest this month alone — shows a negative flow for Bitcoin ETFs. As of yesterday, we outflowed $635 million. That's quite a bit. It's pretty interesting though: the day before we had an inflow of $524 million, and then an outflow of $635 million. So for this week we can actually see that we're over a billion dollars, because on the 19th of October we were at $526 million, then $524 million — a nice little inflow there. But the outflow is $635 million.
People are taking profits, doing what they want to do, and people get worried about this. They start to talk about bubbles, they talk about AI, they talk about the economy — and it's all true — but we have to take a look at what's going on behind the scenes. We lost quite a bit in one day, but Bitcoin seemed to shrug it off. We're at $2.83 trillion. Bitcoin is actually holding up 0.4%, and some altcoins are actually rallying in the last day or so.
If you take a look at the flows over time for the ETFs — just looking at the dailies — we can see that over the last six months or so, this was one of the bigger ones at $636 million. I think the last time we had to go back was in June, about a ways away: May saw $733 million, $649 million, and again in May. So over time this is one of the bigger outflows, but the inflows are looking pretty strong as time has gone on.
If we take a look at the cumulative picture, the big thing is up and to the right. For a while we've been making lower highs. We can see that October 10th, 2025 — just four days previously — was the all-time high for Bitcoin. Then we peaked at May 5th. Look at that. And then of course there were the outflows we just talked about. Now we're kind of coming up to this point to ask: will we make a higher high and go beyond this point of $62 billion as we're sitting at $58 billion, or will we go back down? Nobody knows, but I can tell you that it's probably going to be turbulent, especially going into the midterms. That's the first week of November. Coming up after that, I see things going in the opposite direction, but we'll see how it goes.
We can take a look at the markets themselves. The S&P 500 is down today. The growth stocks — the QQQ — are down as well over the last 24 hours. So we're looking at this and thinking, maybe there's a little bit of uncorrelation going on in the markets. That's just the broad sense. I want to give everybody just a little bit of perspective as we go into our realm, which is digital assets and regulation.
The OCC's Genius Act Implementation and the Stablecoin Yield Loophole
We all know Bitcoin doesn't need regulation — it just helps out a little bit. And especially as we get into altcoins and stablecoins, and the thesis I've proposed: this cycle, we're going to see three big narratives. It's going to be payments, tokenization of real-world assets — whether that be equities, commodities, real estate, or whatever — and the last one will be payments for AI agents. We'll talk about Visa getting into that in a bit.
But this is one of the bigger stories that kind of flew under the radar. The OCC advancing US digital asset leadership through the implementation of the Genius Act. There was a quote in their statement: "Just as President Abraham Lincoln's National Currency Act of 1863 established a national framework for bank-issued currency, the Genius Act establishes a federal framework for payment stablecoins in the digital age." That sounds great. It sounds like everything's going to work out pretty fantastically.
The thing is, though, we have to peel back the layers and see just how much the talons of the banks got into this regulation and what they allowed. They are not too happy about one particular provision — what we like to call the stablecoin loophole.
The reason the OCC is stepping in and doing this is because Congress couldn't get it done. Actually, I'll take that back — Congress did do its job in the sense that they voted, but they didn't have enough votes. It was a 60/40 split in the Senate, not a supermajority. Because of that, the Genius Act didn't go forward. So the OCC and the SEC stepped in. The OCC — the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency — said, "Let's move forward because we need to get ahead of this. We want to keep our stance as the global leader, because if not, things are going to fall behind. Let's go with the Genius Act."
First things first — I like the reserves provision. For everything they do with stablecoins, there has to be a one-to-one backed reserve. Tether's already been doing this, either with the US dollar or with treasuries or bonds, but there has to be a provable reserve for what you're issuing. You can't just create stablecoins out of thin air. That's reserved for America and fiat — they can create that out of thin air with a couple of clicks on a keyboard. But for stablecoins, you better have reserves.
It says you can redeem them instantly. That is not quite true. What this provision says is that you can redeem your stablecoin — USDC, Tether, PayPal USD, whatever else — but if it's going through the banks, it's going to take up to two business days, because that's what banks like. They're slow, and that's just how it is.
On risk and supervision: there's going to be oversight through the OCC, and they're going to approve or reject things as they come before the office, which should lead to stability and transparency. I like that aspect. Things can flow through the banks, and the banks are fine with that.
But here's the thing the banks couldn't stop. The big thing with the banks was: you better not give yield, because if you give yield, that'll really sink our savings accounts — the ones where we give a whopping 0.2% yield for people who put their money in, and then we can give out fat loans. That's capitalism, and that's what the banks are doing. I have nothing against the banks. It's just that their business model is what it is, and it would behoove the citizens for the banks to just embrace this and move forward. But they just don't want to.
So the OCC created what they're calling a stablecoin yield loophole. In this provision, you can't have a stablecoin issuer — you can't have Circle, you can't have Tether — going, "Hey, you want some Tether? Here's 4%." You can't do that. The banks won't allow it. And you can't do it on the exchange level either. Coinbase can't just say, "Hey, we've got a nice fat deal with Circle, so we're going to give you 3%." You can't do that.
What they say is: okay, you guys can work together, but as of today, everything stops. You can't give any rewards — doesn't matter how little or how much. Everything now has to go through the OCC, and they will approve or deny what you're trying to do with yield. They're not saying they'll disapprove everything or approve everything — you just have to bring it before them. And the banks are like, "Wait a second, this isn't good for us. They might approve everything, or they might approve nothing." It's all up in the air.
But I can tell you right now that with the OCC moving forward and saying we need to get the Genius Act moving to put us at the forefront from a global perspective — that we're the leaders in digital assets and cryptocurrency — I think they may want to approve a couple here, deny a couple there, and move forward. And that is the stablecoin loophole.
Fidelity Digital Assets Report: Bitcoin Perpetual Preferred Stocks
There was another report from Fidelity Digital Assets. They talk about perpetual preferred stocks and note that there were 135,000 Bitcoin accumulated over just over a year for these preferred stocks, despite representing only a fraction of the global fixed income market. It was a pretty good report — quick, not too lengthy. It talked about how much accumulation there has been in perpetual preferred stocks. Mostly you're talking about Strategy and Stretch and things like that.
I like this one: growth of M2, US debt, and Bitcoin. M2 just goes right along with inflation. And I like this image — it says the fixed income market, if it were the Pyramid of Giza, is 2.3 million blocks. Bitcoin-focused perpetual stocks are only 153 blocks. And Bitcoin itself, because it's so scarce, is only 25 blocks. So if you look at that, you think: wow, there's a lot of opportunity.
To summarize, the TL;DR really just comes down to the fourth bullet point: room to grow. These preferreds are about $12 billion total — which is a lot, if you think about Strategy and Stretch — against a global bond market of about $150 trillion. Let me say that again: $12 billion versus $150 trillion.
Now, does this mean Bitcoin is going to break into that market in the next six months and take 10%, just grab $15 trillion? No. That's not what's going to happen. Some people may think that, but they are mistaken. What's going to happen is it's going to be a slow grind. People are going to figure it out. They're going to figure out that maybe it'll do pretty well and stick around — just like it has since the very beginning. Just like it stuck around after everybody said it was going to zero. Just like Jamie Dimon said it was complete nonsense, even though now his company, JP Morgan, is getting into it. It's amazing how it just sticks around. But to get to $150 trillion, or even a fraction of that, it's going to take some time.
Just as a quick refresher — because even I sometimes need it — what is the difference between perpetual preferred stock and common stock? It comes down to your risk appetite.
For dividends: with preferred stock, like Stretch, you get a fixed rate and you get paid first. With common stock, dividends — if you even have them — are variable and you get paid last. You might have some, you might have none. But with preferred stock, you always get paid a certain amount without the headaches.
As far as priority in bankruptcy: preferred stock has a higher claim, common stock has the lowest claim. Voting rights: preferred stock has none, common stock usually does. Maturity: preferred stock is perpetual — it goes on forever — as opposed to a 10-year Treasury or a 30-year bond. Common stock is also perpetual ownership, so none there either.
Price behavior: preferred stock is more like a bond — it's rate sensitive. As yields go up, price goes down; as price goes up, yields go down. Common stock is volatile, as we all know. Sometimes it goes up, sometimes it goes down.
The upside in a perpetual preferred is limited — you get fixed dividends, whatever that is: five, six, seven percent. In a common stock, the upside is unlimited. You could have invested in Nvidia when it was a nickel and now it's hundreds of dollars. Can you sell a preferred stock? Yes. But if it's $100, it rarely rises 30%, because the price is driven by interest rates and dividend safety, not growth. A preferred stock is pretty boring, but it is safe. Common stock is a little more risky but a lot more fun.
Bitcoin Hash Rate Resurgence
Finishing up with Bitcoin hash rate. I did not have this on my bingo card, because we've talked about how the big mining corporations — TeraWulf, MARA, and Riot — have pivoted to give more space and opportunity to their AI counterparts and data centers. That's worked out pretty well for them. They said, "Hey, we're not going to do as much Bitcoin mining." Well, guess what? The difficulty level and the hash rate just went up over the last six months.
I think it's because the smaller Bitcoin miners are taking up the spot left by the larger ones. They're saying, "Hey, if you don't want to make money, I'll do it." So here's the Bitcoin hash rate over six months — look at that, an all-time high for the last six months. Over a year it's not the all-time high, but over three years it's pretty close. And then if you take a look at the hash rate for all time — look at that. There was nothing back in the day. Obviously 2017 the Bitcoin race was on, but look at this hash rate now. That's a lot.
What does that mean? As the hash rate increases, so does the difficulty level. The difficulty level is correspondent with the hash rate: higher hash rate, higher difficulty level. So you'd expect exactly what you see here. Over a year, you can see how it cratered downward because the larger Bitcoin miners stepped back. But now that the smaller miners have gotten back in, the difficulty level is doing the same thing. Maybe we're on the precipice of another big bull run. I'm not going to say that, but it does feel a lot better than where we were.
Visa's Rumored Fireblocks Acquisition
As we were talking about payments and looking at the ways forward — my three narratives for the big prospects being payments, tokenization of real-world assets, and AI agents — Visa is reportedly in talks to acquire Fireblocks for $2.5 billion. First of all, it's a rumor. Fireblocks said, "That's not true at present time." And Visa didn't even want to talk about it. Usually you would just say no — Visa would say no and that's it. But they didn't.
It doesn't make a lot of sense that these big companies wouldn't start to hoover up smaller companies to maintain their dominance. It worked out pretty well for Amazon. Amazon has a $2.5 trillion empire built on acquisitions like Twitch, MGM, Whole Foods, Fire Sticks, robotics, Audible, Zappos. And Meta — used to be called Facebook — bought WhatsApp for $19 billion, Oculus for $2 billion, Instagram for $1 billion, and so on. That's what they do. So when Visa does something like this, it's not surprising. If you want to be the dominant force in payments, which is the narrative, why wouldn't you?
The stock price for Visa is down a little bit today, but look at it over five days, one month, six months, one year, five years. That's not bad. I'll take Visa.
Back to the Visa story — I want to make sure everybody goes to visa onchainanalytics.com. You can see the transactions. But did we ever talk about the lending section? They're tracking lending on digital asset rails — loan volume by protocol. Jupiter is at $36 billion. Outstanding loans by protocol: one protocol at $355 billion, Compound at $20 billion, Morpho at $134 million. And they're also tracking agentic payments now — or maybe I just missed it. They're giving you the volume. I think this may be a new part because I've never seen it before. But they're tracking that for a reason: because they want to buy Fireblocks.
What does Fireblocks do? It does almost everything. Products include wallet as a service — which you probably see on Coinbase — a policy engine, payments network, agentic payments, tokenization, earn, staking. And Fireblocks is also one of the institutional custodians for Bitcoin ETFs, alongside Fidelity Digital Assets and Coinbase Prime.
So if Visa wants to buy Fireblocks — which I would assume they would, especially given what they're already tracking — it would make a lot of sense and would push things further into the adoption phase.
Q&A
Host: All right, let's get into a little Q&A and answer your questions.
Danszie Rob asks what time Dane is live streamed and how often. It's never. We did a couple of live streams. For those who don't know, Danszie is asking about a channel called Dne. Dane is my second channel where I talk about AI — specifically how I use AI in my everyday life, mostly for my businesses to cut costs and make money, and to take back some of my time. I don't compare different models or frontier projects. I talk about how I use it for my short-term and long-term rentals, how I use it day-to-day for this channel, how I do it for payments, and how I recreate products. There's a term called SaaS — software as a service — and I now call it software as a template, because I take everything that people are trying to sell me with recurring fees, which I despise, and I just recreate it. I have Claude do it, it shows me how, and that's what we do on that show.
Mr. Jabby Bravo asks where I see Bitcoin going in terms of price. It's somewhere between $10 and $5 million. I do see it going up, but I can't tell you if that's going to happen in Q4. In Q4, I still believe we're going to have a big pullback. We always have a big pullback in Q4, and this will be the first time we really haven't — so that'd be something if it didn't happen. Regardless, I can't tell you where the price is going. I can just tell you that we're going to talk tomorrow about the difference between buy-and-hold and trading, and how lopsided it is when you do it a specific way.
Mullet — a tier-10 level trader who always has great information — says there's a very high probability of it going up or down. That's the kind of keen alpha you come here to Digital Asset News for.
Someone asks about the beef between Near and ICP — the Internet Computer Protocol founder accused Near of stealing their tech. I don't know. I'm only in it for the tech. The founder of Near, I believe his name is Illia Polosukhin. He is the one who co-wrote the Google paper on the transformer architecture — the T in ChatGPT. He's been around for quite some time and clearly knows what he's talking about. Did he steal it? I don't know. You could say the same thing about a lot of different companies.
Kelb says: "Hey Rob, I just buy Bitcoin and go about my day." That's probably the best thing you can do. Hopefully Fidelity doesn't get hacked or scammed. This is why we talk about using them for custody, using your favorite cold storage devices, and also Bitcoin ETFs. I know a lot of the maximalists will say that's the wrong way to do it — "not your keys, not your crypto" — but I disagree. A lot of people who said "not your keys, not your crypto" now have no crypto. I would much rather scatter things around and be left with 75%, 50%, even 25% of my original portfolio if something gets hacked, instead of losing 100% because everything was in one place. Whether it's a third-party reseller issue, a leak, a scam, a hack — fill in the blank. That's not right for me anymore, and I'll keep talking about it.
Remember to DCA and buy on November 3rd. Not financial advice. But it's pretty good advice, because when you buy on midterm election day and wait six or seven months, you're usually in profit — and for straight-up Bitcoin, usually up pretty big after a year or so.