Why Thursday Could Trigger Crypto's Biggest Bull Run

Added: 2026-05-17

[00:00:00]The market is relieving. Bitcoin is holding and some altcoins are bouncing.

[00:00:05]My friend Tiki just dropped a banger video outlining his Bitcoin bull thesis, arguing that October 10 was the wash out that ended the bare market. And I think he's right. And there's actually multiple other factors that would support the thesis that crypto is about to see a major inflow in capital that is unlocked by one major piece of regulation. Senator Cynthia Lumis is calling for the Clarity Act to be approved by the Banking Committee as early as this coming Thursday. Wall Street's Q1 filings for 13F are being revealed latest by May 15, and that could actually show some interesting developments and where institutional capital is positioned. I've been in institutional rooms and meetings over the past few weeks across Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and Hong Kong. sovereign wealth funds, family offices, allocators with regulatory clarity that's already done, which is what Cynthia Lumis is currently fighting for in Washington DC.

[00:01:12]>> The biggest businesses in that sector is not in the US.

[00:01:14]>> Yes.

[00:01:15]>> Right. So, and and and also Binance is not in China. We we got kicked out of China, right? China banned exchanges.

[00:01:21]>> So, u so we're we're we're we're industry leader in the new fintech industry that's not in the US, that's not in China. And UAE walked them bus UAE is like this is fantastic right >> so what did they give you like when you say what they like they gave you support they I mean walk me through the like they seem to have been very friendly towards you which is amazing >> well I think the most important thing is regulatory support right so having proper regulations in place so that you know we can run a proper business and that's the mo having clear regulatory guidelines >> yeah Binance in Dubai >> well we we are now headquartering Abu Dhabi okay uh Abu Dhabi ADGM Abu Dhabi global markets the the financial regulator there give Binance a global license to offer the crypto exchange.

[00:02:00]>> When the founder of the largest crypto exchange in the world tells you that the market leader is in Abu Dhabi, then that's clear strategic positioning. Abu Dhabi global markets is actually one of the most forward-looking and progressive authorities regulating crypto businesses and also attracting them. They really understand that cryptocurrencies, blockchain technology, digital assets, whatever you want to call it, but this whole sector is here to stay and is going to grow massively and overhaul the financial system as we know it today.

[00:02:35]The Hong Kong Monetary Authority and regulators in Hong Kong are moving at a similar pace. They're already licensing banks like HSBC or Standard Chartered to issue stable coins. Now, the US is only catching up here, but it feels like we're very close to have full clarity by passing this act. And what that could unlock, we're going to talk about in a minute. But first, let me actually walk you through three things that I'm currently watching. Number one, the flows, then the filings, and thirdly, Thursday's vote, because they all eventually point at the same thing.

[00:03:10]Let's start with the flows. Taiiki just dropped his full thesis, which I strongly recommend you to watch. link is in the description. Quick summary of what he's been tracking. Marginal sellers exhausted. The Iran war happened. Stocks dumped 10%. Bitcoin held 65k. The fear and greed hit historic lows lower than Luna. The 3AC collapse and even lower than during COVID. October 10 was then this catastrophic washout event. The 4-year cycle believers capitulated and sold.

[00:03:44]Now there's nobody left to sell. On top of that, we have Michael Sailor buying billions of Bitcoin every single month.

[00:03:51]It's predictable. Happens every time midmon, $1.5 billion in March, $3.4 billion in April. The whole stretch in digital credit thesis that Sailor has, I guess, talked about is that it's going to unlock a new form of uh buyers uh that previously cannot own Bitcoin. For example, Black Rockck's iShares preferred and income securities ETF. uh you know this has been around for you know a couple decades. uh it uses the benchmark index um by ICE, right? um not the you know one deporting and shooting people but you know the intercontinental exchange and you know I mean ICE says hey stretch is a good enough product and you know the second largest holding in this black rockck fixed income security a preferred shares ETF is stretch you know which is I mean you know we have all these anons on Twitter complaining about stretch but black rockck's like cool right let me just get that yield yum yum yum also van uh their preferred securities I mean the same thing right um I mean the the the The AUM here is like 2.3 bill. So it's not that crazy, but this thing has 6% of the AUM um in strategy, 10% in Boeing, interestingly. So I mean it's it's happening, right? I mean the stretch thesis is that the boomers are going to buy this thing because 11 and a half% is good and the boomers are buying and then the sailor you know sailor is taking the boomer's money and then he's buying Bitcoin with it. And in parallel, you have large funds and VCs like Paradm, Horn Ventures or A6Z that are raising billions of dollars that will eventually used to allocate across the crypto sector and build out the next generation of crypto infrastructure. They're building the rails before the retail narrative catches up. And the fact that a lot of these large crypto VCs are actually raising nine or even 10 figures right now is a very strong signal that we're going to see a large inflow of capital into the crypto industry and also into the startup ecosystem. So the flows are healing, crypto VCs are raising large capital rounds and Sailor is pulling boomer into Bitcoin. Now the only question is what turns this relief into an actual cycle. The answer is regulation. So let's talk about Thursday. Senator Cynthia Lummen just posted this on her ex account. Let's pass the clarity act out of the banking committee on Thursday. The United States will in all capital lead the way on digital asset innovation. And here's a quick Eli 5 what clarity act actually means. Now, currently every crypto project in America in the United States has the same problem. Nobody knows if their token is a commodity which is regulated by the CFTC or a security which would be regulated by the SEC. Two different agencies, two different sets of rules, and nobody's telling which one applies. The passing of the Clarity Act would draw that line. It would define what the CFTC oversees, what the SEC oversees, and critically what custody and trading and broker rules look like for digital assets. For institutions, this is the big signal. This is the major unlock where banks, custodians, asset managers, they're just waiting for because they can't deploy serious capital into something where the regulator might change their mind next quarter. clarity would fix that and remove this risk.

[00:07:17]>> We saw US turning really pro crypto. So we only had one year and a half of government supported development. Before there was like suppression and um this happens in almost every other country a few a few exceptions like UAE is probably one one exception. Um and now we only seeing the governments slowly turning to support it. They realize go even with the suppression the technology is growing. Bitcoin grown from like I don't know 5 cents to uh today is what $80,000 right so even with that suppression is grown so that's why a lot of the killer apps were actually killed before they were they were able to grow so payments uh yeah microp payments agentic payments that's going to agentic money that's going to come founder of the largest crypto exchange independently confirming the same thesis the technology was never the problem but the regulatory war was the actual bottleneck also want to shout out Coinbase here because they've been instrumental in drafting and amending and going back and forth with the official regulators here on finalizing the clarity act and they also gave their green light last week that the bill as it currently stands is good to go from their side. Now when the regulator unlock is this close from passing the question becomes who is already positioned for it. So let's look at what Wall Street is currently doing and how they're positioned. One of the most important filings in that context is 13F. Every quarter, institutional asset managers with over $100 million in assets have to file a so-called 13F with the SEC. It's a public document and it tells you exactly what they own. The most recent complete data is from Q4 of 2025, which was released on February 12th. There's a 45day window which is then the deadline past the quarter that they have to file that report and that deadline for Q1 of 2026 is happening on May 15. And here's what we've learned from the Q4 filings of last year that set the stage for next week. Q4 2025 was quite difficult in crypto. Bitcoin dropped 23% from the October all-time high and we also saw the catastrophic 1010 flash crash. This liquidity crash and delever massive delever that sent especially a lot of the altcoins to actually zero. So who sold, who held and who bought? The answer isn't capitulation. It is actually rotation.

[00:09:48]If we start with the hedge funds, aggregate hedge fund exposure to iBit, which is Black Rockck's Bitcoin ETF, fell from 140 million shares down to 82 million in Q4. That's a 28% cut. Brevin Howard, one of the biggest micro hedge funds in the world, slashed their position 85% from 37.5 million shares at Q2 to um down to 5.5 million by year end. Goldman Sachs also cut their IBIT position by nearly 40% from 33.9 million down to 20.7. That's the leverage flash.

[00:10:24]That's the speculative money getting cleaned out and is exactly what you want to see at a cycle bottom. Now, with the bad news out of the way, let's look at who kept buying. Black Rockck's own IBIT position, their proprietary holdings of their own Bitcoin ETF actually went up.

[00:10:41]They started in 2025 at 3 million shares and ended in Q4 at 12.8 million. They more than 4xed their own holdings of their own product within one year.

[00:10:54]Morgan Stanley accumulated every single quarter of 2025. They started at 4.9 million IBIT shares and ended up at 13.4 million. Their combined IBIT plus Fidelity FBTC exposure hit $1.24 billion. And that wasn't a coincidence because only five months later, Morgan Stanley launched their own Bitcoin ETF.

[00:11:16]They just launched it last month. So the Q4 buildup was the runway. I already mentioned that Goldman Sachs lowered their IBIT exposure by almost 40%. But that's actually not all correct because they rotated massively into Micro Strategy. Yes, they added $300 million in Micro Strategy shares and for the first time they took positions in XRP and Solana ETFs about $260 million across 10 different products. So, total Goldman crypto exposure at year end sits at around $2.36 billion. And remember the Mina point I opened up with? Well, here's the receipt for it. Because Mubadala, which is Abu Dhabi's sovereign wealth fund, has $300 billion in assets under management, and they increased their position to 12.7 million shares in Q4, adding 2,300 BTC equivalent.

[00:12:16]Combined with the Alvvada fund, which is also UAE based, Abu Dhabi was sitting on more than a billion dollars of Black Rocks Bitcoin ETF at the end of 2025.

[00:12:26]And that's not just theoretical institutional demand. That's a sovereign wealth fund signing a quarterly disclosure agreement confirming that they bought Bitcoin during a 23% draw down. Two weeks ago, Anthony Day on this channel laid out a filter. He said that institutions don't move on narratives anymore. They move on real revenue, real products, real adoption, tech companies, and not coins. Institutions are not chasing the hype. They're building positions in the infrastructure layer for the next financial system. The shakeout happened. The leverage flashed.

[00:13:02]What's left in the institutional book is the long duration capital. The exact cohorts that build bull markets, not the ones that end them. And if you want a tangible example, then look at Akash Network AKT. Yes, it is part of my own crypto portfolio for full disclosure.

[00:13:21]But AKT is up significantly over the last few weeks while the broader crypto market was still breeding. And that's not because Akash is pumping on. It's because they're renting GPU time to AI companies. It's a real product, real customers, and real revenue. This is decentralized compute infrastructure for the AI buildout. It sits at the exact intersection of two institutional grade narratives, AI and crypto infrastructure. This is exactly the filter Anthony Day described two weeks ago. It's a tech company, not a coin.

[00:13:56]And there's many such cases out there right now from different verticals, different narratives. When a bounce is selective, the projects that bounce first are the ones that pass institutional due diligence. Akash passes most things that aren't pumping don't. So if you're trying to find out what's signal and what's noise in this relief, then make the filter test.

[00:14:19]Revenue, real users, real product. Those are simple three questions that your crypto investment, your crypto token must pass. If a project doesn't have all three, the bounce is just noise. If it does, the bounce is positioning. Which brings us back to Thursday. There are three plausible scenarios for Thursday.

[00:14:41]Scenario one is it will pass and if the banking committee clears the Clarity Act, then the 13F report filings that you'll see on May 15 latest stop being a snapshot. They actually become a starting line. Positions get repriced quickly. Flows pick up and it's very bullish, very short term. Scenario two, we're going to see a delay. If the wood gets pushed, which could be a normal procedure, and there could be amendments, there could be a senator pulling a stand, whatever, the positions are still there waiting. It's still bullish medium-term. The third scenario is that the vote will fail. This is the only real downside scenario here. And even then, the flow story doesn't break.

[00:15:26]It just slows it down. CZ already said it. The suppression didn't kill the industry, it just drove it offshore. the long-term thesis stays intact either way. And if you listen to large organizations like DTCC, which is the largest post-trade settlement firm in the world with $15 trillion under custody that just put out a calendar on tokenization, and you look at all these other speakers at all these crypto and digital asset conferences in Miami, in Hong Kong, in Singapore, then that is not just a signal. That is actually already execution and that is the new financial system we're building. The era of digital finance when infrastructure is being built on a public calendar by the largest financial players in the world. You're not just watching a speculative cycle anymore. You're watching a category transition.

[00:16:17]>> To share some uh some numbers with you, we custody about $15 trillion. So we're the only post trade service in the United States. We handle about 1.4 4 million QIPS and four quadrillion dollars um in settlements. This morning we announced that in July, actually on July 13th um we will start with the first tokenization of US assets officially from the depository. Um and we're calling it a soft launch to really help the industry get ready uh for the big launch that will occur in October.

[00:16:50]>> Now watch Thursday. We will have a lot to talk about this after the vote and hopefully this is when the thesis stops being theoretical and starts being priced in which could be a very very bullish short-term signal. See you out.

[00:17:04]I'm going to see you very soon here.

[00:17:05]Until then, stay safe and be