Ivan on Tech reacts to Bitcoin dropping to $80K and surveys the week's macro events
Ivan on Tech (Ivan) presents a solo stream addressing Bitcoin's drop to $80K, dismissing panic while covering macro risks, AI cybersecurity threats, tokenized equities, and geopolitical developments.
Summary
Ivan opens by reassuring viewers that despite Bitcoin falling to and briefly below $80K, the bull trend remains intact by his strategy's rules, and that the time to have been bearish was the previous October. He addresses Arthur Hayes's sudden reversal from bullish to dumping ETH, ENA, and UNI, arguing that Hayes's short-term trading calls have a poor track record and that following anyone on social media blindly is the real portfolio killer. Ivan then surveys a packed macro week — Fed, ECB, BOJ, Bank of Canada, and Bank of China all deciding simultaneously, alongside US Q3 GDP and the UK budget — arguing that the midterm elections are the single biggest uncertainty overhanging crypto and equities. He also covers AI-driven cybersecurity threats accelerating rapidly, the debate over tokenized equities, France's fiscal deterioration, and Brazil's market reaction to Lula's re-election.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Bitcoin at $80K — Is the Bull Market Over?
Ivan: Welcome to another episode. As you can see right now, Bitcoin is at $80K. People are freaking out because we actually went a bit below $80K. People are asking me: Ivan, is the bull market over? Are we all wrecked? Are we going to go back towards a new, great, and beautiful bear market?
I'm here to tell you that according to our rules, according to our strategy, not too much has changed. We're still in the bull trend. When we are in a bull trend, we are bullish. We are still in a situation where we just had a year of bear, which means that normally after a year of bear, you don't want to be bearish. The time to be bearish was last October — just as a gentle reminder.
Now, what's important here is that we did have a scenario which would be super mega bullish, where we just bounce off of this 82. For now, at least, it seems that we are down, and this is a scenario that we will probably have to downgrade as the most probable. The most probable now is to find some kind of footing here.
Look at the date — it's the 26th now. When is the midterm? The 3rd of November. Exactly, the 3rd of November. Now there's a bit of hesitation about what's going to happen at the midterm. That's the biggest problem. Should Trump start to lose power, we may have a bit of an issue with crypto — with all of the deregulation, with everything that's going on in crypto. Should Trump start losing power and, for example, get stuck in all kinds of investigations and not be able to focus on removing more rules, on getting away from the obstacles to American business success — which he's been doing in a very good way, removing the SEC and CFTC issues — you remember during Biden, the SEC was massively in the way. So there is a bit of concern about how that's going to be.
As we see the midterms pass, the path to bullishness is opening up. You want clarity. It doesn't even matter who is elected, what kind of party gets more control. It's just about clarity. We need clarity. Only Ivan gives you clarity on the situation here each and every day.
Big welcome to everyone watching live. Last week was a bit of a boring week, but today we have a lot. Finally, the news cycle is kicking in. We have Brazil collapsing. We also have Europe as a concept not really doing well — looking at car manufacturers, you did see Volvo dropping 20, what is it, 30% on the stock market. So European cars doing very, very poorly.
The Macro Week Ahead — Fed, ECB, BOJ, and More
This week we have all kinds of things. For example, the Fed decision coming on Wednesday. You have yields at 5%. So what they decide is going to be interesting because they're kind of constrained by the market here. They cannot cut — if they cut, the rates are going to fly even higher because there's going to be mistrust that the Fed has any kind of control of inflation. If they raise rates, it is going to be an issue also because the economy is already not doing too well. So yeah, interesting to see what's going to happen. In any case, the solution is the printer — in one way or another, it's going to lead to the printer. So we're bullish on hard assets. We're bullish on Bitcoin, especially after a year of bear.
This is the central bank super week. We have the Fed, ECB, BOJ, Bank of Canada, Bank of China — all deciding — plus the first US Q3 GDP dropping, PCE, Euro area Q3 GDP, and the UK budget on Wednesday. Everything is coming this week. This week is going to get volatile. It's going to get crazy.
Arthur Hayes Dumps ETH, ENA, and UNI
Even when I'm in the bathtub and things are collapsing and Arthur Hayes is dumping, dumping, dumping, dumping — this is just a few days after he was bull, bull, bull, bull. The guy changes very fast. Just a few days ago he was very, very bullish. The move came just nine days after Hayes shared bullish views on Bitcoin and Ether. Now dum, dum, dum, dum.
So listen — with Arthur Hayes, I love Arthur Hayes. He's amazing and he's great. But he's great at one thing, and that's entrepreneurship. Everyone should be doing what they're good at. As a founder, I respect Arthur Hayes. He is the best when it comes to founding. He did BitMEX. He did it in a professional manner. Fantastic. When it comes to his investments, I've been following what he's been saying for the past three, four years — during the whole last cycle, he was quite vocal about what he's doing. And unfortunately, that has not been doing too well. You can chat with Grok about what he's been saying here and there through the years. But when it comes to the short-term trading he's been doing, man — not too great. Not too great.
Following what he's doing — maybe it works for him. Again, what he tweets versus what he's actually doing, no one knows. But just what he tweets, how he's buying, how he's selling, how nine days ago he was bullish and now he's got another gut feeling — I personally don't follow. Maybe you follow. Maybe your strategy is to follow what Arthur Hayes is tweeting. I don't follow. It never helped me. I remember back in May 2021, 2022 — somewhere around when he started putting out his thoughts about the market after BitMEX — I tried following. Everything got wrecked. And I'm not blaming him. I'm never blaming him. I'm blaming myself for following some guy on Twitter telling me what to do. That's the number one thing to blame. That's your own brain. When you just follow someone on Twitter, your own brain messes up your portfolio very, very badly.
And that's why we have this disclaimer. This disclaimer — it's not just something that I show because I have to. I really want you to pause and become one with the disclaimer. Read every word. Pause and consider what these sentences say. They're saying that crypto and trading are high risk. Results are not typical. I may hold assets I discuss, and if you copy me, I may not tell you when I sell because I don't live stream 24/7. I cannot live stream from the bathtub. This is entertainment and education. Is it financial advice? No. Is it entertainment? Yes.
Crypto Bubbles — What's Actually Green?
Let's look at the crypto bubbles. What do we see here? Surprisingly, many of them are green and many of them haven't even lost too much. In fact, as soon as Arthur Hayes sold his ENA, ENA started to pump. I don't really understand trying to optimize too much here, because ENA — look at the chart. The chart is quite good. We just broke above this level, now we're retesting. The chart is quite good. Let's see how it will be. But we're bullish in a bull trend.
ENA is up 9% since yesterday. You have NEAR green. Everything is up since yesterday. Most things are up since yesterday. If we look on the weekly, most things are down, but not all. Zcash is up a bit. UNI is slightly up. Pepe up a bit. Dash — let me know if you love Dash. On the daily, ENA up, PEPE up, Arbitrum up, HYPE slightly. But yeah, the week is just the beginning. It's going to get quite intense this week with all of the news.
AI Cybersecurity — The Accelerating Threat
Let's see what's going to happen with the hacking. The hacking stopped during the weekend. It's very considerate of all of these AI agents that they don't hack during weekends, because last week we had so much hacking — like half of the internet got hacked. There was the PHP issue, the SSL certificate issue, so much hacking. Railway, everything got hacked. But during the weekend, the AI agents relaxed. Now it's Monday. Let's see if the agents are back hacking, because that's a big question mark — how it's going to be with cybersecurity. Will we see an internet lockdown? I know it sounds crazy, but it's not too far-fetched in case literally everything starts getting hacked.
There is a possibility that there's going to be some sort of lockdown on the internet. Obviously impossible to say what's going to happen because we've never dealt with anything like this. But let's say banks start getting hacked. Let's say you have all kinds of things going out of control. What will they do? Will they try to shut down different systems? Probably.
And that's the biggest story overall — how are we going to deal with all of the AI hacking? Because it is accelerating quite a lot. Look here — you have the CrowdStrike CEO. He's of course the CEO of a cybersecurity company, so he has a bit of an interest in being dramatic here. But it's also true what he's saying — that nowadays hacks happen that normally would take a nation state, and today you can just use an LLM and that's it. Listen to this.
CrowdStrike CEO: "So what can go wrong is a lot of what you've already seen and reported on. You've got data breaches, you've got ransomware, you've got the ability to steal trade secrets, you've got disruption. All of the things that you have been reporting on, we've been talking about on your network for many years. That is now all possible. But with AI, it's actually just democratizing who can do this. We wrote a report on this and we're seeing many different adversary groups with very low skill now able to conduct nation-state level attacks for basically the cost of tokens and a prompt — and that's the scary part."
Ivan: So what he's saying here, basically, is that it's only the beginning. And there are many people saying it's only the beginning. We have Nikita Bier coming out saying the perfect storm is frontier models finding obscure security vulnerabilities at breakneck pace while voice models become indecipherable from human speech. When a model hits a roadblock, it will just spoof caller ID as your bank and call you pretending to be your banker.
And what he means here is that Jack Dorsey and his company released a new model that is only trained on speech — not text, only speech. And man, it speaks scary. It's called Desa. So Desa is this AI.
Desa (AI voice demo): "Hey, how you doing?"
Demo participant: Yeah. How you doing, Ronaldo?
Desa: "I'm good. I'm good. I'm not Ronaldo. You're mixing me up with another guy."
Demo participant: No, I'm the man. I'm not Ronaldo.
Desa: "No, you're not Ronaldo. How you doing, man? How's it been?"
Demo participant: Man, I'm doing good, bro. I ain't going to lie, I'm tired though.
Ivan: Yeah, this is going to be quite insane. All the boomers — and many of us are boomers, by the way, I start to see myself also a bit as a boomer in some regards — they're going to get phished. Holy crap, they're going to get scammed. If anything, you should inform your elderly family: phone call, don't trust. There's going to be quite some scamming going on where you get a call, it sounds like your family, but it's AI and they want money because something is urgent. Some kind of thing has happened. They need urgent money to help out.
We are entering uncharted territory here in ways that no one has seen. Each and every day some kind of hardware wallet gets hacked. Keystone leaked all your data. They said, "We owe you an apology. Everything exposed." They say that scammers may pose as — by phone, text, email, or mail — offering refunds, replacement devices, or fixes for your order. None of it is from them. They also say scammers can come to your house. Why? Because you exposed shipping addresses. So scammers may call you, text you, or they may turn up on your doorstep.
So yeah, we're entering this weird, exciting world. At the same time, we're kind of not prepared. I don't know if the world is prepared.
CrowdStrike is one of the cybersecurity plays — bull trend since here, fantastic. The CEO we just heard. Let's check Cloudflare — obviously going to be massive here. Cloudflare is going to be massive, massive, massive. Still bullish, kind of like CrowdStrike, still in trend. Fantastic. So Cloudflare, CrowdStrike, cybersecurity — it's so needed. Everyone's going to be rushing to get cybersecurity.
Following the Plan — Bull Trend Until Further Notice
So if we are to wrap up the crypto part, we just follow the plan. We're humble. We just follow the plan. It's bullish. We start to accumulate here below the 200-week moving average. We're bullish. Arthur Hayes is bearish. You also have Benjamin Cowen — big shout out, we love Benjamin Cowen — he says bears are regaining control. Yeah, maybe some short-term control. Long-term bullish. We're bullish. A year of bear has passed. We accumulated a bit below the 200-week, now bull trend. We just follow the strategy.
The problem is that most people listen to me, they listen to Ben, they listen to Arthur Hayes, and then in the brain it's just a porridge. It's a mush. You just do your gut feeling. You don't know anything. You have no strategy. So I'm just telling you — have your own. Have something of your own. The best thing with the mechanical rules and what we teach in Bulmania is that no matter what happens, you're okay, because you have a stop loss. Stop loss hit — no problem. We don't know the future. No one knows the future. I don't know where Bitcoin is going to go. We only have probabilities and we position based on probabilities. Should the market go against the highest probability scenario into some low probability — stop loss hit, good, money protected. We're all about protecting the money. All strategies we teach in Bulmania have money protection built in. It's very important because if you lose, let's say, 30% of your capital, you need like 40–50% to get back. Losses are hard to recover. So always protect that capital and then see how we can ride the big beautiful trends.
Tokenized Equities — The Other Side of the Story
Moving on, we have an interesting story here — a full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal against tokenized equities. You remember that GameStop or AMC complained that Robin Hood tokenized their stock? Anyway, here is their side of the story. Here's why the CEOs don't like — in some cases, not always — that there's a tokenized version of their stock that they did not approve of.
The risks they list: pricing disparities — token prices will likely diverge from your true share price, stoking investor confusion and volatility. Obscured ownership — tokens may obscure who ultimately owns your stock and impair your ability to communicate with shareholders. I mean, it's all fair. It's a new world where all of this has to be fixed in one way or another. But it's fair — if you have a token holder of your stock, before you could speak to your shareholders, now you can't, because you don't know. Maybe it's Kim Jong-un. For all you know, it could be Kim Jong-un.
Impaired capital raising — shifting volume from real shares to tokenized replicas may impair your ability to raise new capital. Yeah, this one is also fair. Normally if you have a stock, you could use it to raise debt, you could do what MicroStrategy is doing — their whole business is around leveraging their stock. Raise more debt based on it, do all kinds of stuff. When your stock doesn't have a liquid market and the market around your stock is kind of non-existent, all of that becomes very hard if not impossible.
Cyber theft — hackers may steal tokens from your investors, exposing you to novel legal and reputational risks. You have some investor who has his Ledger drained. Kim Jong-un has the coin. Now you have to remove the coin from circulation and figure something out.
Market manipulation — these venues will operate outside the SEC's cross-market surveillance and transparency frameworks. Yeah, to some extent true. It's DEXes, and now you have your coin paired with a memecoin and degens are trying to pump it.
AML/KYC loopholes, lack of investor protection — core SEC safeguards including the best execution framework do not apply. Legal liability — if you don't opt out, you could be held liable for anything that goes wrong. The SEC has given the CEOs a way to opt out, and it is true that if you don't opt out and something bad happens, you could have a bit of legal risk.
Does this make sense? It's interesting to see the other side of the story. I can see both sides. Let's say you have a company, you don't really care about crypto, you're just trying to build your company, you don't want to deal with this crypto cluster that is going on. I can see that side of the story also. It is new for them. But here's the thing — let them opt out. There's no problem in opting out. Let them opt out. And let the companies that opt in get something from being tokenized. What are the benefits? Maybe you have more holders. Maybe you have even deeper markets. Maybe you can raise even more money because your markets are even deeper and more liquid. So the market will just have to show itself. The tokenized stocks will have to show why they're so good. Companies that allow themselves to be tokenized will either reap the rewards of the blockchain revolution or maybe they'll just waste time and it would have been better not to tokenize. So let the market find out.
Obviously, we in crypto would love for all of that to be tokenized. It would be great if you could just buy any stock in your Phantom wallet or MetaMask. Fantastic. But listen — you see how fair we are? Some people say, "Ivan, you're a crypto maxi." I mean, sometimes we're bearish. We're very fair. We're very humble and we see the situation from all different sides.
Quantum and AI Security — Crypto Is Better Prepared
This is from Quaido — not sure how to pronounce it, but I love him. He says: "Not only am I not worried about the crypto community's ability to handle the upcoming AI quantum threat, I will venture to say that in the next two years, the world will realize crypto is far better prepared for it than the rest of the internet and finance. We've had a trillion-dollar irreversible honeypot for a decentralized system and adversarial security culture than pretty much anywhere else on Earth." True, true, true, true. Very, very true.
Elon Musk on AI Cloud Consolidation
Elon Musk has come out and said that the new AI cloud situation is consolidating fast. Let's actually see what's happening in the NASDAQ. Oh, we're actually up a bit. That's good. S&P also going to open up a bit. Fantastic.
But the problem is here that Elon Musk is saying that all of these new clouds — as of the past few weeks — that markets have almost entirely shut off access to money for any company that doesn't have substantial revenue independent of AI data centers. SpaceX closed $40 billion of that for GPUs, but they're investment grade and have Starlink and launch revenue. That means the 200-plus new clouds are going to see a Guppy-level death and consolidation. Some will make it, but not many. True. The financial markets don't want to lend to new clouds. Okay.
Brazil and France — Macro Deterioration
We have Brazil collapsing. You guys are dumping because Lula is unexpectedly re-elected. Some mail-in ballots people say came in, but it's a big problem. The markets don't like the socialist direction. You should have capitalism, no socialism. You should have a free market. Obviously, protect the weak — this and that — but you cannot go too far in either direction. Europe, for example, went too far. You can be anyone, you can get free money. It's very bad. Obviously, some kind of middle ground needs to be found. But you see the stock market — they don't like Lula. Lula, what's happening?
And by the way, since US aid was removed, the right-wing guys started winning in Latin America — except in this situation, I guess. But I think I saw something like that — that since USAID got removed, the capitalism guys started to win less in Latin America. I don't know if that's true. That's just an anecdote I heard. But quite interesting. Lula — he's back.
The Belarusian Ministry of Foreign Affairs is very concerned with what's happening in European countries. They're issuing a deteriorating travel advisory to all Belarusian citizens, citing the deteriorating security situation in several European countries. In light of escalating unrest and mass protests, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Belarus strongly advises Belarusian citizens against non-essential travel to France, Belgium, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Albania, and recommends postponing or cancelling any such trips if possible.
There you go, guys. There you go. I mean, there's some truth in that. If you are from Paris, let us know — is the situation escalating or de-escalating? What's happening? I saw during the weekend that police stepped in and started to do their job in France. That's very good. Too late, though. Too late.
Speaking about France — what's happening with French debt? What's happening with French yields? Because the market doesn't like all of this protesting. Look here — your debt, guys. You're paying a big interest on your 10-year yield. How are you going to raise money? You have such high taxes you cannot raise taxes. You cannot cut benefits because you're going to get a big problem. So yeah, the market is basically saying: you are cooked. You're cooked. You need a bailout. The ECB will have to step in very fast here, very fast. The ECB is going to basically save France because it's worse than Greece. It's worse. It's very bad. Because Greece, you know, it had some maneuver room. France has no maneuver room. It's the highest taxes in the world. It's very bad, guys. Very. Let's see what's going to happen. I'm very interested. This affects the market, so it's very interesting. How are you going to fix it? Good luck.
Q&A
Ivan: Let's go to Q&A. We have a big week. We just have to see how it all unfolds.
Ivan, according to polls, Trump is more or less at 35%. That means — is the market already pricing in that Trump lost the majority? Sell the news could be. Yeah, I mean, absolutely. I think it's already priced in based on the polls, based on the prediction markets, etc. Everything that's public and on prediction markets is already used to price in. That's probably why the S&P has stalled out a bit during the last few months. NASDAQ has also stalled out a bit during the last few months. As soon as midterms are over, I think there's a good chance that the bullishness comes back. As soon as the midterms are over, because we just need clarity. There needs to be some kind of clarity about what's happening. When you have this uncertainty — 35%, 50% — it's still a percentage. It's still not guaranteed. There's still a risk. So what do you do when there's risk? You de-risk. There is some capital just de-risking until they know what's going to happen with Democrat, Republican. Once there's an outcome, they can put money back in, position based on the certainty they have. You always want certainty. When there's uncertainty, it means de-risking.
How's BNB looking? Let's check BNB quickly. BNB is looking a bit like Bitcoin. To be fair, it's looking like Bitcoin but actually a bit better. Very much like Bitcoin but stronger. BNB — people say Binance is a scam, but BNB is looking good. Bitcoin is now below this May high and BNB is still above it. So BNB is like Bitcoin but stronger. And TRX is even stronger. TRX — okay, technically a bear trend, but if you look through this bear market, it's like, which bear market? It's up and up and up. So technically bear trend in TRX, so better to be in BNB at this point in time. BNB — the chart is almost identical to Bitcoin as a bull/bear flip, but you see it's still above the May high. So actually better than Bitcoin for now, at least.
What will you call your book? I think I'll just call it Ivanomics. You know, Ivan like economics, but Ivanomics. Should I do a poll? Maybe I should do a poll, but I don't have too many other ideas. I don't want anything that can be banned by ads. I don't want anything with "trader" or "trading" — if it's something with trading, it's too big of a risk. And I want it to be personal. Big Profits was personal — it felt personal, you know, big profit. If I call it, you know, trend trading, follow trends — it's so boring. I just have one idea now.
Rich Dig, Poor Dig — exactly. We're going to call it Rich Dig, Poor Dig. My poor dig was telling me to follow X and follow Twitter. My rich dig was following the trends. Correct. I like that. I like that. But yeah, it needs to be some super nice personal name but also fully safe. So if Mark Zuckerberg sees the ad, he says, "Ivan, great, you can run the ad," because I want to promote the book. All of you who have read it know it's amazing. It's freaking insane. The first chapter — it's very nice. It's like the book. I love the book. It's this creation. It's amazing. So I want more people to find it, more people to learn about it. We need to run the ads.
The one problem with Ivanomics is that maybe you don't even understand how to spell it. You know, Ivanomics — is it like I-onomics? What the hell is it? It's also problematic. So I don't even know what the name is going to be. I need to have a chat with Claude maybe. Or maybe you guys have an idea.
From Pleb to Rich Pleb — maybe we just call it Pleb. The Chronicles of Pleb. The Book of Ivan. Maybe the Book of Pleb. Wrecked Pleb. Anyway, guys, listen — that's it. Thank you very much for being here.