Scott Melker: Bitcoin "Massive Discount," How Institutions Are Reshaping Crypto

Added: 2026-05-05

[00:00:00]Crypto has matured, but that hasn't necessarily made it easier to trade.

[00:00:03]Price action looks strong, but underneath liquidity, macro pressure, and institutional flows are starting to shape this market in ways we just haven't seen before.

[00:00:11]>> You've never missed the move in any market cuz there's always something else that's ready to move, right? I think it's trading at a massive discount and I'm buying it every day. What makes markets so hard, especially bare markets, is that they spend most of the time going up. Right now, I would just say ride the trend. I think there are a lot of reasons to believe we'd at least get a pop through that resistance.

[00:00:28]Making predictions on the future based on squiggly lines on the chart. Really fun, but it's a riskmanagement tool and nothing else. There's no better marketing for Bitcoin than higher prices. At the bottom of any market, you see a massive transfer of wealth. We hands strong.

[00:00:58]Welcome to verified market insiders.

[00:01:01]Crypto has matured, but that hasn't necessarily made it easier to trade.

[00:01:04]Price action looks strong, but underneath liquidity, macro pressure, and institutional flows are starting to shape this market in ways we just haven't seen before. So, are traders actually reading this environment or are we seeing just reaction plays at this point? Joining me now is the Wolf of Wall Street's host and longtime market mav with Verify Investing, Scott Melker.

[00:01:24]Scott, thanks for have or being here today. Thank you so much for having me.

[00:01:28]>> Yeah, thanks for taking the time. Well, listen, Scott, you know, you you've lived through multiple cycles in this space, the crashes, the blowoffs, the bare markets. So, when someone's sitting at home right now and they're watching this crypto market move, and they think to themselves, did I already miss the move? What what would you tell them?

[00:01:45]>> You've never missed the move in crypto, and you've never missed the move in any market because there's always something else that's ready to move, right? I I think the notion actually that you missed it is probably overeotional investing that you shouldn't be participating in anyways because you zoom out and take a long-term view, everything's always up and to the right.

[00:02:02]Just a lot of speed bumps when you zoom in. So, you know, I'm generally optimistic, bullish about markets, they never go down for too long. Uh even in the worst case scenarios, you can zoom back and look at the Dow Jones and the Great Depression looks like a blip if you, you know, zoom out long enough. So, uh I I think you definitely haven't missed it. And I actually think if we're speaking specifically about Bitcoin, uh, I think it's trading at a massive discount right now. I don't care if it's 78, 68, 58, 28, 88. I think it's trading at a massive discount and I'm buying it every day.

[00:02:35]>> I love it. All right. So, do you think this trend then has legs? Are we looking for a setup where, for example, are we going to the moon with this? Is it going to be a straight shot up? We've we've hit the bottom. It's up for here for the next few months. or are we looking at, you know, that consolidation between what 7476 there for a while? Uh that push up. Do do you see a new consolidation level or just a push straight through some of those resistance areas?

[00:02:58]>> I love the uh term going to the moon because like even if I told you Bitcoin was going to the moon, half of the people on Twitter would tell you that there's no such thing as the moon and we've never been there. Um so I don't know. But if we're assuming we are going to the moon and that it's real, which I do, and that the earth is not flat.

[00:03:14]Yeah, I think that this is a big move that we've had here, right? So, obviously, you know, yeah, nothing uh makes you look dumber than recording something and then an hour later the market goes against you. So, I can't speak for it, but as you said, this kind of mid70s area has been key. I think 74 was sort of a level that was a previous all-time high. It was support during the April tariff tariff shake and so that's been a key area. I never like to draw a specific line, right? It's always kind of a zone. Uh in March we topped out at about 76 and for the first time end of you know last week we're seeing Bitcoin breaking above that 76 level. People would say it was on that news about the straight of our moves being open but you know for for whatever reason I think there were a lot of technical reasons to believe that it had been consolidating up towards that level and breaking higher. So, I think, you know, you talk about bullish trends, bearish trends. It depends on your time frame and it depends on your perspective as a trader and an investor. You could go from 60,000 Bitcoin to $97,000 Bitcoin and still be in a bearish trend and not make a new higher high, right? So, the last higher high really on the Bitcoin chart, you could say it was 97,600, 97,800, depends on your exchange. So, is that bullish or bearish if you go up 50% from $60,000, right? I would say it's pretty bullish, but you're not anywhere near an all-time high yet. And maybe you're still in the bare market. It's interesting because, you know, >> Ben Cowan often says this, and it's something that I've said in the past, too.

[00:04:45]>> What makes markets so hard, especially bare markets, is that they spend most of the time going up. So you know bare markets you kind of have these dramatic drops that happen fast and then you see that consolidation which often forms a bare flag but for a very long time you kind of have lower volume and place price floats up right it makes higher highs and higher lows in a local trend and then you drop again and then it kind of floats up. So most of the time if you just take it for you know minute to minute you're going up. So, it's very hard, I think, to know if that next time that it goes up, it's going to keep going up and climbing that wall of worry or if you're going to get that dramatic drop to the downside again. So, listen, right now, I would just say ride the trend. I think that this is the most renewed optimism we've had that's justified here above the mid70s and there's not much price action in the high 70s, low 80s into like kind of the mid 80s through 84, 88. So, I would expect us to visit that.

[00:05:41]>> Yeah. And one thing I find interesting about crypto is, you know, it used to be kind of the thing of its own, right? It had its own logic uh is reacting to almost almost nothing besides the investors and and just itself and altcoins and and Bitcoin and the major I guess you know Salana, Ethereum, but now it seems to it seems to act a lot more on liquidity to macrodata. I mean even the straight like you said or uh if Fed news comes out on a Wednesday. I mean, in your view, what is actually driving that market right now? I mean, the Bitcoin market, I mean, is it going to be starting to be tied in a lot more to, let's say, the max 7 go up? Well, Bitcoin's going to go up, too.

[00:06:20]>> I think that's more of a random walk in the park than the correlation to be quite honest. If you zoom out, Bitcoin has mostly over its history been uncorrelated. And if you've watched the past few months, you had markets making all-time high after all-time high after all-time high and Bitcoin floating down.

[00:06:36]So an uncorrelated asset is the holy grail of your portfolio because it carries idiosyncratic risk. It improves your sharp ratio. The problem is for something to be truly uncorrelated. That means sometimes it's going to go down when everything else is going up. So I love when people say it's correlated when things go down, but we don't get credit when it's going down and things are getting up going up. As bad as that is, as a Bitcoin holder, that's not a correlation, right? So I definitely think it moves on headlines. I definitely think you see spikes at market open and close because now we have institutional participants and a lot of them are trading during market hours. There are times when clearly it's tied to news and things but then you know the weekend comes and Bitcoin does its own thing and right now I think that there were a lot of reasons to believe it was going to go up regardless of this news as I pointed to you before. So there were a few metrics actually we talked about them on market mavericks last week. I think I brought them up. We had 270,000 bitcoins accumulated in 30 days by whale wallets. Those are the same wallets that sold all the way from 126 to 60, right? 30,000 Bitcoin at a time, 40,000 Bitcoin at a time. They've been buying in the 60s and low 70s in huge quantities. We have the lowest Bitcoin supply on exchanges since 2013.

[00:07:47]Of course, that can change if somebody just sends a whole lot of Bitcoin to an exchange. So, you have to take all of this sort of loosely. Um, and then you had Bitcoin hitting resistance, but funding rates on perpetual exchanges, uh, negative, and you don't see that often. People are very optimistic when it comes to positioning with Bitcoin. If you look at a chart of funding rates, it's almost always green. Then you get these red spikes, and then you get a short squeeze because you have like bearish positioning, you're at resistance, and that's the fuel for the next push up. So, I pointed out all those things very recently right before the move happened. I don't know where the move will land, but there are a lot of reasons to believe we'd at least get a pop through that resistance that had nothing to do with macro because by the way macro is so confusing and ridiculous it makes no sense any.

[00:08:28]>> Yeah. And you know that is interesting because you do talk about uh you know your technical analysis on the Wolf of Wall Streets um and talking about you know some of those consolidation levels a pop through that pivot top. Um, but do you think technical analysis will continue working for Bitcoin forever or does there a point where macro does come back into play and you have to factor in uh you talk a lot about uh I think it's having um or you know a lot of those kind of plays where there's just not as much room to continue growing if we I mean obviously demand's going to be there if having continues but do you ever see technical analysis not working I guess is my long question.

[00:09:06]If you ask a technical analyst, they don't care what the market is, what the asset is, what the news is. They tell you that everything's in the chart, right? So, it's kind of an interesting example. I could point to you all these fundamental reasons Bitcoin was going to go up that happens to be right at the most key level on the chart >> and we get a little piece of news and then people are like, that's the reason it broke up. But it's been sitting there consolidating under this level. So, was the chart telling you that the news was coming or did the news tell you what the chart was going to do? Right. And uh people chart gold and silver and the S&P and oil and those markets are much bigger than Bitcoin and continue to work. I am a firm believer that technical analysis is not a crystal ball. Uh making predictions on the future based on squiggly lines on a chart is really fun, but it's a riskmanagement tool and nothing else. It does not tell you what's going to happen in the future. It gives you an arguable reason to take a position and to set a stop-loss and to size your position accordingly. And that's it. And your reason does not have to be the same as anyone else's reason. And we can draw different lines on the chart or the same line or Gareth often I think uses a linear chart. I use a logarithmic chart.

[00:10:12]They look completely different. You know, when we go on a show and if you show the same chart with the same lines to 50 guys, you'll get 50 different answers on what's likely to happen and how it's going to happen and what the path of that will be. So I think Bitcoin trades technically. it will continue to trade technically but no more or less than anything else.

[00:10:33]>> Okay, that's an interesting take. I I appreciate that. We've had a lot of conversations with guests um about know somebody like cycles for example it's like what comes first the chicken or the egg the news about the tariffs the the market falls yeah it just happens to line up with the cycles but what you know what comes first so it's uh it's interesting take I like that um so let's talk about the structural shift um because ETFs are here um institutions are allocating black rockck now part of the conversation so uh and we talk a lot for the everyday retail trader here on verified market insider so what was or what has actually changed about this market that most people still really haven't caught up to, do you think?

[00:11:11]>> F first and foremost has to be just a change in the administration. Right. So, obviously, and I'm not one to at this point massively credit Trump administration for being so outright pro- crypto that there's been a lot of issues there and there's been a lot of positives. Obviously, it's more getting rid of the last administration that was so important because the pendulum had swung so far anti-crypto under that administration and Gendler was attacking every single company with, you know, regulation by enforcement. So, even just having all of that erased and starting to get just some sensible thinking and not outright anti-crypto sentiment, I think was very very valuable. Obviously, at the very beginning, you know, we got talk of a strategic Bitcoin reserve and the Genius Act and the Clarity Act and all these things. So I think people are more comfortable participating in crypto in the United States right now as a result of the administration administrative change. But that came actually after you know January 2024 when the ETFs were approved and that was force-fed down Gary Gendler's throat. He did not want to approve these like he had no intention of doing it turned out the law had uh you know less uh ruled in favor of Gayscale and basically he had no choice. And I think it was more Larry Frink and the institutions coming in and becoming more and more bullish on Bitcoin and finding new products and adoption ways to adopt it that really has been the story and I don't think people are realizing quite how big it is because stories that used to move the market 30% in a day in crypto like are rounding errors and are completely forgotten in our insane news cycle, you know, in a matter of hours. I can point to three this week or in the last week and a half that are so big that they should have Bitcoin move 20% in a day if it was the old days. First, Morgan Stanley launched their own Bitcoin spot ETF last week. They're the first commercial bank in the world to do that.

[00:12:57]They're on the sell side. The sell side never does that. They're not an ETF issuer, but still chose to enter a product space where there were already 10 existing products. 10 existing Bitcoin spot ETFs they decided to enter.

[00:13:10]So, what does that mean? Two things.

[00:13:12]First, they have an army of 16 17,000 adviserss who now are being asked by their clients for crypto exposure. So, Morgan Stanley has a decision to make.

[00:13:22]Do we sell them Black Rockck's ETF and give Black Rockck the fees or do we create our own product so at least we can capture the fees on a product that our customers want and that we will now be actively going out and incentivized to sell because we make money on it.

[00:13:36]That's one side of that story. The other side is that they priced it at 14 bips, which is like 10 bits cheaper than the competitors. So now where there's a race to the bottom on fees and this says Morgan Stanley doesn't just intend to sell it to their own clients, but they're hoping that next time there's a major retail wave, people will buy the Morgan Stanley ETF because it's the cheapest, right? So that was a huge signal. Then this week, Goldman Sachs comes in with a income Bitcoin ETF.

[00:14:02]Goldman Sachs has not participated at all. Goldman Sachs, right? We're talking about the biggest institutions on the planet, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs in one week. So, this is going to be holding Bitcoin ETFs. So, not spot Bitcoin, but holding Bitcoin ETFs and then selling calls against it to earn a yield. And so, you'll have slightly capped upside uh to Bitcoin, but you'll have a guaranteed yield that's coming in constantly as an investor. So this is now Bitcoin pushing beyond just spot ETFs but getting the full suite of financial products and different ways to get exposure which we've seen sailor doing right with STRC and all these things and then yesterday Charles Schwab announces Bitcoin and Ethereum spot trading will come in a matter of weeks not buying and selling ETFs 39 million funded accounts on Charles Schwab will now be able to buy and sell Bitcoin and Ethereum natively on their platform.

[00:14:55]Carol Trump, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs this week. Do you think that people have noticed those pieces of news? I don't.

[00:15:01]>> When do you think that news cycle goes back onto crypto? I mean, obviously it's all about oiler right now and commodities, but when does crypto become uh more of the bell of the ball, if you would say, uh, of this? I mean, obviously those are three major news stories. It sounds like appetite is there for crypto. Uh, the people want it, but when does it get back in the the macro talk of the news cycle um politics even? There's no better marketing for Bitcoin than higher prices.

[00:15:29]So, if Bitcoin's up trading around 90,000 and everybody's talking about how it's up 50% off the lows, then everybody's going to care about all these news stories that went completely unnoticed because they were bearish on price. It's just how markets work.

[00:15:42]Listen, there's like this old meme that you always see uh on, you know, crypto Twitter and stuff where there's two lines that it can be at any point in the market, but it's like Bitcoin 60,000 and there's nobody lined up and it's like a Bitcoin 126,000 and everybody's lined up because retail buys FOMO at the top, right? And so we just need higher prices for them to FOMO in and see it in the news cycle and care again. So when Bitcoin inevitably goes up, I can't tell you when that will happen. Everybody will be talking about it and then we'll look back and go, "Wow, Goldman Sachs has a Bitcoin income ETF. I had no idea." Right.

[00:16:15]>> Yeah.

[00:16:15]>> Every single time.

[00:16:16]>> But that's interesting though because if people are already wanting that appetite or at least I guess the banks, right, are feeling the pressure for these ETFs. So they feel like there's appetite for um for crypto.

[00:16:29]Wouldn't that almost signal that okay, if if it's a it's an more of an internal talk at that point, right? Wouldn't that signal, oh man, this this is something kind of alarming. Just be careful. You know, a lot of people are already talking about it. It's not in the news, but a lot of people are already talking about it. Or is this more, you know, the crypto fans that are just kind of getting on this? This is not a a big >> Those products are not for crypto people at all. Like, no Bitcoiner who believes in self-custody and buying and holding spot Bitcoin and be your own bank is buying Charles Schwab Bitcoin that you can't move off Charles Schwab.

[00:17:04]>> Right. Right.

[00:17:05]>> I remember when Robin Hood launched crypto and originally you couldn't withdraw or deposit because they didn't have a wallet yet and you didn't have that functionality and Bitcoiners and crypto people went absolutely nuts. What do you mean I can buy it here but like I have to leave it on Robin Hood? I'm not doing that. And they eventually launched a wallet and uh you know gave the full suite. Charles Schwab has already said you can't move your Bitcoin to Ethereum off. Right? So this is for their customers. No Bitcoiner is going to buy on Charles Schwab and leave it there.

[00:17:32]Right? At least they want the optionality, right, to know that they would be able to take it off. So, this is for their own customers. It's really a walled garden right now. You know, listen, what it really is is that there's been a trend that's very noticeable. JB Morgan, Charles Schwab, they've alluded to it. If money leaves, say Charles Schwab does not offer Bitcoin and Ethereum, and one of their customers really wants to buy Bitcoin, what do they do? They take money off of Charles Schwab, not all of it, but they take whatever, you know, they sell something They take that money, they go to Coinbase, they buy Bitcoin. That money never comes back ever. It can't come back in Bitcoin. Like I said, you can't even deposit it, right? So, they're very fearful, I think, of capital flight. So, this is almost like uh you know, a defensive mechanism as much as it is anything else.

[00:18:20]>> Yeah. Even more so than it sounds like risk appetite. Um so, it's interesting because you know, like you said, let's go back to the main news side when people buy at the top. Um, would you argue and this kind of leads me to my next question, but would you argue that that's a little bit too late to buy when everyone's lining up? Is that is that usually a top signal even for Bitcoin or crypto?

[00:18:40]>> Depends on your time frame. Once again, yes. If I mean classic top signal if you're trading >> uh if you're investing in Bitcoin on a 10-year time horizon, you just buy it, don't care. Same way you would like with a retirement account, dollar cost averaging, spy, right? Just an asset you buy. You don't try to out try to beat the market. You don't try to be a genius. You just keep buying stuff and wait a really long time. And I think Bitcoin generally you should have that sle. So what kind of pullback and I'm not talking about a dip but like a real pullback um would signal that this that that maybe even Bitcoin is going into a bare market only because I asked because a lot of you know retail investors who are again more bearish on the markets are looking at a more of a yeah this is we're here you know this is the top everyone's still rushing in somehow still buying good news today accelerates that. So, at what point do you see that, you know, in Bitcoin starting to turn around even even if it does, let's say it doesn't get to the highs, let's say it's not even at all-time highs, you know, we see these pullbacks even intermittently as uh we have to stack up uh to to go higher, right? As you said earlier, too, some consolidation's necessary. Uh but what happens when that rollover happens and like this? It's not technically bearish because we see an upside. we see a push through, you know, just recently of the 26 to 28 level.

[00:20:02]It's it's popped out of there. So, at what point is that a bigger rollover do you see some really big downside to Bitcoin? I >> I personally think we had it right and that this is part of that sort of like accepting of a bare market, the difficulty of knowing when things have flipped bullish. We're up 30%ish off the lows. It's nice move. It dropped 55 56%.

[00:20:25]Of course, that that math doesn't math.

[00:20:27]you still need to, you know, uh, go up a lot more, uh, in percentage-wise basis on the way up than than on the way down.

[00:20:33]But I don't see any reason right now to believe that Bitcoin would make a significantly lower low unless something changes. I thought the B I called it the I'm wrong all the time, by the way, but 60 that like high 50s look like a very tradable, convincing potential bottom.

[00:20:52]And my base case after that was we go sideways for a really long time from here and chop in a range. That's been happening. Now we're sort of breaking out of what I view as that range. So I just ride it until I have a reason not to. But like yeah, I mean we start closing candles in the mid to low 50s.

[00:21:09]We're in big trouble.

[00:21:10]>> Yeah, that's that's interesting. I remember actually our first conversation we had was at the money show. Um and you can find that interview on our our YouTube page as well. But that's exactly what was happening then. you said, you know, at that point it scoop it all up because it's only going to go up for there. Yeah, it consolidated a bit, but here we are now. So, you know, interesting interesting take there, Scott. Now, um I know you're super busy, so I do want to ask you one last question for the retail investors who may be trying to dip into crypto um who may be watching and even feel like they got left behind because they didn't buy in the in the 50s and 60s when it was consolidating there. Um what would you tell them? Absolutely. And this is going to be a little bit of a tricky one.

[00:21:50]Absolutely not to do at this point.

[00:21:52]>> Oh, well, I wouldn't I wouldn't be panic selling. Uh I think a lot of people did that uh in the 60s. And as I said, if you look at the behavior of the big players like listen at the bottom of any market, you see a massive transfer of wealth from weak hands to strong hands.

[00:22:10]Okay? And there was a chart very telling from last quarter uh trying to remember who put it out. river, someone like that. But it showed who had accumulated, bought, and who had sold Bitcoin in the first quarter. It was at the end of March. They they posted this piece of research. I believe it was 69,000 Bitcoin had been purchased by institutions.

[00:22:34]Something like 20,000 by ETFs or something. Then there was like governments was a little bit.

[00:22:42]Forget all that. 69,000 by institutions bought, 61,000 by retail sold.

[00:22:48]Who do you think's right there? Do you think it's the people who spent the quarter panicking and selling all their Bitcoin that were probably on sides or the strong hands and the institutional smart money that was buying it the whole time? And now you see the biggest whales who have been here since the very beginning buying Bitcoin again massively. So listen, I I don't need a chart to tell me that where people are positioned. Doesn't mean they're right, but who would you rather be on side with?

[00:23:17]>> Fair enough.

[00:23:18]>> Yeah. My piece of advice though is just buy by buy if you believe in Bitcoin or whatever you believe in, just kind of plug your nose and buy for a while. I mean, markets have me very worried, not going to lie. I mean, I don't understand this market cycle at all. silver trading like a illquid altcoin and you know crypto meme traders yoloing on 100x leverage on oil on hyperlquid on Saturdays like none of those things and predictive markets gambling on the weather these are like wear republic signs of like great depression things but I've never been more impressed with the government's ability to push buttons and pull levers to keep things going up than uh I have now I mean this last correction arguably the fastest 10% dip and recovery in history of markets like the fast, you know, of the stock market, this uh V-shaped bottom. So, somebody's buying.

[00:24:10]>> Somebody's buying. That's that's true.

[00:24:12]And so, what happens though if Bitcoin does get scooped up by all these institutions, all the government because from my understanding, you know, crypto was this was this, you know, alternative asset that you could have and like, you know, the people's people could have it.

[00:24:27]But now you see, you know, a lot of these a lot of these cryptos being scooped up by big money and government.

[00:24:33]I mean, what does that tell what does that tell of Bitcoin though? I mean, it's it sounds like it's evolved quite a bit from from what it used to be, I guess, as the the >> I think it kind of conflates two things.

[00:24:44]So, it's and it's interesting. I think the early Bitcoiners, hardcore libertarians, cipher punks, screw the government, right? Like, this is my way to opt out. Bitcoin will become the global reserve currency, right? That's the kind of like final boss in their opinion. Well, it can't become the global reserve currency without going through institutions and Wall Street and governments, right? So, that adoption would be required. I don't believe that Bitcoin will be the global reserve currency, by the way. I'm just speaking for kind of the ethos of the community.

[00:25:15]Um, I think it'll become much bigger and a major player. But uh so I think it's naive to be like we're gonna become the global reserve currency, but also like black rocks stay out and governments stay out. Like those two things do not make sense. So you also have Bitcoin the asset owning it and who owns it being conflated with mining and the network and the strength of the network itself.

[00:25:37]So just because Black Rockck owns a lot and if they dump maybe the price will go down, that has nothing to do with the Bitcoin network or the security of the network or the power of the network to be a base layer for a monetary system.

[00:25:50]So let them buy it makes the price go up, let them sell it, makes the price go down so I can buy more cheaper. But no matter how much they own, they can't destroy Bitcoin. They can just move the price.

[00:26:01]>> That's interesting. Well, thank you, Scott. I appreciate your time. Um, you've been very insightful. very excited to talk to you next time. See where Bitcoin's at. Uh yeah, it's it's it's an interesting ride for sure. Every time I talk to you, something major has happened in the crypto world. So, >> always dodging a bullet. Yeah.

[00:26:22]>> Well, Scott, um for our viewers, could you please let them know where they can uh find you at?

[00:26:26]>> Sure. You can find me at Scott Melker on X and you can find my show, The Wolf of All Streets podcast, basically on uh every platform. And actually, uh, if I can plug it, since this will be a Monday, uh, my first episode of my new daily show on Yahoo Finance actually launched today. So, it's every day at noon, the Daily Wolf on Yahoo Finance.

[00:26:46]It's actually the first and only crypto daily show on mainstream media ever. So, uh, yeah, I'll be screaming at the mainstream audience to buy Bitcoin every day. And then I guess I'll be doing that Neoatrix thing myself if price goes down.

[00:27:02]>> Well, that's awesome. Congratulations, Scott. That's that's a that's a big step. So, thank you so much. And for you viewing at home, please like and subscribe. We have amazing guests like Scott on all the time. Hopefully, we have you back, Scott. Thanks for joining us today. I really appreciate it.