Bitcoin has officially been declared dead for almost the 500th time in history today. I'm going to tell you exactly what happens almost every time Bitcoin is declared dead.
Meanwhile, Binance is struggling in the European Union and more. We've got a lot to talk about. Let's go.
What is up everybody? Welcome to the Daily Wolf on Yahoo Finance. I am your host Scott Melker, also known as the Wolf of all streets. You can follow me on the socials at all the places you see below, which is just one place, X at Scott Melker.
Now, we've got 15 minutes to discuss what is going on with the markets and today is one of those days where if you want to discuss what's going on with the markets, you're going to be wrong an hour later.
So, obviously, overnight we had a number of articles about Bitcoin reaching its lowest point since 2024. Of course, that was by about $50 or $60, but hey, let's not let the details impact our hyperbolic fear headlines.
Obviously, then as preparing the show, we saw that the PCE print came in. Core inflation was running a bit hot and all markets dumped, bounced, dumped, bounced, dumped, bounced.
So, what's happening in the immediate moment with price is irrelevant. We just know that we're seeing a lot of volatility for a lot of reasons. Now, as I said, this was kind of the first story.
PC report Fed's preferred inflation measure hits three year high keeping top of possible rate hikes in place. We had core PC rising to 3.4%. This is the highest since October of 2023 with headline inflation at 4.1%.
Both up from April, both hotter on the year. Now you have the market pricing roughly a 50% chance of September rate hikes.
Not cuts. I remember when our sock puppet, Kevin Warsh was supposed to come in and do Trump's bidding and cut, but the markets, even though I don't think it'll happen, are pricing in heights because inflation is coming in so hot. Now we know
every time something like this happens, especially when it's already on the back of a lot of liquidations, we see massive, massive, massive people being flushed from crypto, over a billion dollars in liquidations in just a matter of hours. Of course, of course.
That said, you know, you can take a look at our favored index for what's happening with Bitcoin and you see this, Fear and Greed is debt.
Minus 14. That's the actual index right there. It's you can see that the needle's actually bleeding.
No, it's actually at 12 today. If we're being honest, but this is one of those times when we're seeing, you know, Bitcoin selling off into massive fear, bouncing around right at the range lows of where it's been all month anyways, and people are freaking out.
And I'm going to tell you a lot more about the freaking out when we get to the end of the show. But right now for the
morning, the afternoon, and the evening, we'll probably be talking about inflation and how it affects markets and I highly predict that we will have forgotten that we talked about that by tomorrow.
I put inflation prints very squarely in the noise category if we are bucketing signal and noise. We'll see what worst does, but he's got a lot of weeks still to do it.
Now, something that is definitely signal right now, we have Binance withdraws Greek Mica bid but vows to remain in Europe. Now, I've been covering this story for the past few weeks, but right now with Binance
taking their application out and withdrawing it. Uh we have the biggest exchange on Earth speed dating EU regulators six days before the deadline.
This is not a licensing strategy at this point. It's just a shotgun Vegas wedding.
So, they went to Greece as I told you over the past weeks because they had it on good information that that would be the easiest regulator to get past. Binance, one of the largest exchanges in Europe, the largest exchange in the world,
and has been operating basically issue-free in Europe.
Now, if you get one license from one regulator, that means that you have a basically a license passport for all 27 EU, 30 EEA countries.
So, what Binance is saying here is that the timeline was getting tight, so we uh pulled out. This was not rejection.
We decided. So you know when you know that your girlfriend is about to break up with you so you dump her first so you can tell everybody that you dumped her even though you wanted to stay with her.
It's kind of like that. It's kind of like when you're getting thrown out of a bar and then you're like, I was leaving anyways.
Right? Uh but either way, so now they're being forced to court a number of other regulators to try to get this license.
They say that they will remain in Europe, but they're not saying that they will be in Europe as of the July 1st deadline. So they had a pretty like uh
pretty definitive response to this. Uh co CEO Richard Tang uh promised that a license will be coming in coming months, right? So certainly not by the July 1st deadline.
Uh and interestingly, he even went on to say that funds are safe and accessible, that they're emailing every EU user individually,
right? And most compelling in crypto is he had to say, listen, you know, uh there's a scam warning here. Never
uh we would never ask you for your password or your 2FA and blah blah blah. All the things that you know are going to make this situation super ripe for scammers, right? With every time we have an exchange shutting down or any question as to its availability, you get scammers stepping in. So be careful out there.
Now, this is really an interesting situation because Binance has worked very hard over the past few years to become compliant and they have done so especially since their issues in the United States.
But meanwhile, while they were courting this one regulator, OKX and Kraken and Coinbase have all gotten their licenses without much of a headache.
And so it just seems like Binance uh having an unfortunate path here by getting rejected by the Greek regulator. And as I told you, we have it on pretty good information that that is because of one Christine Lagarde, the head of the European Central Bank who just does not want Binance
operating. It's going to be interesting to see how this plays out. But if you are not Mica compliant in the next few days, you will not be operating in Europe by July.
Now, we we've heard that only 200 companies roughly total out of over 3,000 applying for these licenses are getting them, and only 14 are even able to run a trading flat platform. So we're going to see a major culling in Europe
that we had forgotten about was likely to happen because this rule was put in place many, many years ago. So, yeah, there's some, you know, it's an unfortunate situation at the moment for Binance,
but I am highly confident that they will eventually get back. Now, there's an interesting tie in that story to the next one, which is a major expose by the Wall Street Journal.
I'm sure you all saw this. How crypto Exchange became a major hub for illicit Iranian cash. Iranian entities have moved more than 3.84 billion in transactions through the crypto exchange Coinx, according to an analysis of public blockchain data.
So we'll dig into that story in a moment. But
it's interesting to note that the favored exchange years ago in Iran was Binance.
But Binance actually chose to have strict compliance, KYC and effectively cut off all the sanctioned entities or anywhere that there could be questionable ties to a regime. So
as Binance sort of exited, that left a vacuum for another exchange, uh, with ties to China that is called Coinx. So first,
Binance becoming compliant and doing all the right things allowed for a bigger hole to form and for actual money laundering to happen through shadier exchanges. So this shows you once again, something we saw in the United States around FTX and other situations.
Often the good actors are punished and when that void is left, somebody comes in and fills it very easily. So you actually don't stop any of the crime by trying to highly regulate the compliant
entities. So, that is a very interesting thread I would say here, but
maybe the more interesting part here is that this is not just a story about Iran. It's actually a story about North Korea and Iran and Coinx the exchange in between.
And the story by tracking wallets and doing very diligent research to to their credit shows that the Ethereum and coins that were hacked from Bybit by North Korea last year, which was the biggest hack in the history of crypto, 1.5 billion dollars,
A lot of that money ended up at making its way to Iranian Central Bank wallets.
So, the first way a lot of people were reporting it was that somehow, you know, Iran was laundering money for North Korea. That's not really it. It's like these two exchanges, these two countries basically had to avoid sanctions and found out about the same laundromat down the street
and are both hanging out there but they don't know each other. Right, so these North Korean funds were basically being laundered apparently, allegedly through this exchange.
And Iran in trying to circumvent sanctions was using the same exchange to get that liquidity and those coins made their way from one to the other, but there's no direct connection in how that happened from one to the next.
But really a fascinating story. Listen, these kind of things will remain a black eye for crypto, but I will tell you this.
We've seen the stories about how easy it was for Cent and the US Treasury to freeze and sanction and shut down crypto wallets and funds using a transparent blockchain, which literally the Wall Street Journal themselves were able to do this research and track every one of those coins.
That makes life a lot easier for law enforcement than cash, gold and other assets that have been used for illicit activity in the past.
Very, very easy to freeze and find these illicit transactions.
So, I have another story right here that I just find interesting. Ave
Dfy protocol could sort to 3,500 by 2030 on Dfy revival, says Standard Chartered.
So you have a 200 year old bank here, which has tellers and holiday parties and they just told their clients that the future is a bank with none of those things.
This is basically a company cheerfully writing their own obituary and sharing it with the world. Right?
So, interestingly, Ave was suffering massively from all the Dfy hacks that I have covered previously on the show. Uh the Drift hack and the Keldow hack and
we know that that gave Ave toxic collateral and they had to have an emergency plan and all those things. Well, the sentiment here is that that's over.
Dfy is solid once again and will continue to grow. Now, this is not the first time Standard Chartered has made a hyperbolic price prediction. It's kind of their thing. They made a massive one that I covered on Uni swap just a week or two ago.
And it was based on the same ideas, basically that we'll see tokenized real world assets in Dfy pulling a 37X, so why shouldn't price do the same? So this is almost a 50X for Ave price by 2030
that they are predicting. I maybe, I have no idea if it's going to happen, but I think the real signal here is that people are starting to look at Dfy and value it according to the growth and the actual metrics and utility and not just on uh vibes and skittles.
So, I think that's a good thing. And now I want to get uh to my my my final story of the day that I alluded to at the beginning, which is Bitcoin is dead.
Again. So I don't know if uh I'm a victim of the X algorithm
and they just start feeding me content that I've engaged with, but I opened my for you feed, which I rarely do on X this morning, and it was just Bitcoin obituary after Bitcoin obituary and I started retweeting them. Let's let's just look at a couple of them.
Barstool president right here, Dave Portnoy, I need all the Bitcoin and crypto people who say it's going to a million and how it's the future to tell me why all the people who have always said it's a scam and going to zero are wrong. because seems like it's going to zero.
Next one from this guy. Had a lot of engagement.
I don't know what he's holding there. Is that a I don't know what's happening. Why I sold all my Bitcoin? It's over. Full video below.
Another obituary. Nick Huber, if Bitcoin and crypto can't gain ground in this unbelievable tech and AI run, it's a lost cause.
And it'll slowly go to zero over the next 10 years. Clear as day.
No other way it could possibly go. Right? Of course.
Bitcoin was supposed to be the hedge against exactly this, money printing, inflation, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You go down to the end of this very long one, which isn't even all shown here and it's dead. There are
so many examples on social media right now about how Bitcoin is dead and there are so many reasons that they're giving for it.
So, let's uh talk about what's happened in the past because before today, and not counting probably even most of these, but you know, very on very large accounts,
very credible. We have had Bitcoin declared dead according to a tracker 472 times since 2018.
There were 18 and 2026 already alone, and that doesn't count today. Uh the peak was 93 uh obituaries in 2017. And of course, uh we have eulogist like Buffett, Jamie Diamond, Peter Shiff, couple Nobel
economist who have been saying this. Now,
I want to show you the most compelling thing that I found here. Bitcoin has officially been declared dead 472 times. If you invested just $100 every time someone said it, you would have spent $47,100.
Today you'd own 1,043 Bitcoin worth more than $60 million. There's a lesson there.
When people are declaring Bitcoin dead for almost the 500th time today, it might just be time to take a look because sentiment is bad. As I showed you before, fear and greed was bleeding and through the floor. Sentiment is atrocious.
I still think we're in the bottoming process and nothing gets me more excited personally to buy Bitcoin whether right or wrong than people declaring it dead. That's all I've got for you today. I will see you back tomorrow for the next episode of the Daily Wolf.