00:00 Speaker A
Investors have retreated from Bitcoin ETFs over the past few weeks, pulling more than $5 billion dollars from the funds. The record run of net outflows coming amid a weak start to 2025 for Bitcoin down more than 12% year-to-date. Joining me with more on the outlook, we’ve got Rich Ryan. He’s the founding contributor at Core Dow. That is a blockchain initiative designed to enhance Bitcoin’s utility in the decentralized finance space. Rich, thanks for coming in studio. We appreciate it. I just want to start on the selling that we are seeing in Bitcoin. What do you think is driving that and how do you anticipate it kind of resolving itself moving forward? What’s next?
01:19 Rich Ryan
So if I go back to November, I think we really pulled forward a lot of the expectations, right? And people got overexcited about the Trump election and the strategic Bitcoin reserve. Like people were expecting the US to start buying Bitcoin, right? And that was kind of the trade that that people were putting on. Then we throw in some macro pieces with the tariffs, right? Things have pretty quickly shifted there. And I think with the SBR, it’s super exciting to have a nation like the United States say, hey, we’re going to hold this asset and potentially find, you know, budget neutral ways to go acquire more. Like that’s all very exciting. But what the market wanted was, hey, we’re going to go open market, buy Bitcoin, right? And start this like kind of Bitcoin space race. That of course was not true, and I think you’re seeing kind of natural selling as a result of that. And we’re also seeing ETF rebalances the opposite way, right? Like what we saw throughout 2024 was more and more buy flow reflexively, you know, positive impact. Now you pretty much have Sailor as kind of the only real bid as these are kind of countervailing forces the other way as these readjust downwards.
02:56 Speaker A
So what resolves some of the pressure that we’re seeing here? Is it news from the White House about the SBR? Is it something causing, you know, more comfort when it comes to the tariff question in the room? What what leads to more buying?
03:24 Rich Ryan
So I think a lot of this is just uncertainty, right? The market hates uncertainty, and I think this is a tried and true story that we’ve seen time and time again. I think maybe by Q2, Q3 sometime in that realm, we see the, you know, we see Biden and Trump start to change, probably go back a little bit from this more aggressive policy. And I think then we’ll start to see more and more Bitcoin buying start again. But I think right now it’s kind of a classic period of accumulation. We’re also seeing maybe the death of the four-year cycle. There’s many people that were very excited about, you know, 2025 being really that run-up. Now maybe it’s more elongated, and we’ll see 2026 maybe be one of those years. But I think net net volatility is a gift in in in Bitcoin, and, you know, it rewards long-term patience.
