Bankless周报：贝森特国债回购与加密市场回暖

Bankless Nation, it is the last week of August. It is time for the Bankless Weekly [music] Roll Up. David is out. He's at Burning Man somewhere in the desert, I'm sure. Right now, we've got Hib Keshi filling in. [music] Backed by popular demand. A lot of exciting things going on in crypto in the week. We got to talk about the Bessant put. It is week two. Is Bessant really going to use $1 trillion in the Treasury in order to impact and enact yield curve control?

We'll talk about what he's actually saying, how the markets interpreting it, what this means for crypto, whether the debasement trade is truly back on and uh his former mentor Stan Ducken Miller giving a little slap down on the week. So, there's some drama going on. Also, Coinbase entering the tokenized stock wars in a big way. Can they win the market? Athena turning on a fee switch. It's up 20% and toward the end since we have Hib on.

I got to ask him a question about the AI trade. How long it can continue before it eats up all the capital in the world. Stay tuned for all this. Hib, it's great to have you back on. Am I imagining things or has there been a big energy shift back into crypto? And I'm not just talking about prices. This is more than prices, isn't it? What What's happening here? Are you feeling this energy shift?

I'm definitely feeling it. I think we have to give a big salute to all the people who left the industry over the last [laughter] 6 months. I was thinking about that this morning of just all of the all the big like blog posts that people wrote and the the Twitter I was like, "Oh, so long guys, you know, this industry is not for me anymore. I'm off to all the hate." Everybody who quit at the bottom, [laughter] we needed you.

We needed you to move on so that we could be here now. So, salute to everybody who moved on because it, you know, look, uh, a forest needs a wildfire in order to stay healthy.

Yeah. So, is that a bit of a victory lap coming from you? Do is this is this earned

a little bit?

But like seriously, I mean, is it just prices or is there something fundamental going on here? What do you think has been the driver of this energy? Is it just it's time now the builders are building or was there's something fundamental that's happening? Well, I mean, look, we're going to start with this. Obviously, macro is what initially catalyzed this move, okay? But it's clear the macro part is done, right? It's not like there's more yield curve control.

I mean, there's more. It's not, you know, it's not the story is not over yet, but a lot of this is that crypto is intrinsically reflexive. Reflexivity breeds reflexivity. Upward moves breed upwards moves. And the reality is that the sellers are done. Sellers are exhausted. It's been it's been so many months of just everybody telling you crypto's dead. And the there's, you know, the the the bare market ends when the last seller sells, when the last weak hand turns over.

And once that's done, it's just like, yeah, what else is there to be sad about? Who else is there to exit? Who else is like, yeah, you know what? I'm done at 80K. That's all I wanted. I'm out. I think the reality is that um you you need this clearing of a full cycle to give the next cycle permission to begin.

Maybe this is why we always have cycles in crypto. We're going to start in the markets. Before we do, want to thank our friends and sponsors over at Okay, let's take a look at the charts here cuz we got to do it, man. 7 days looking good. Bitcoin up another 10%. It is hovering just above 80K at the time of recording. ETH got a big bump last week. Another smaller bump continues. So, up about 7%. Salana was a big mover on the week.

On the 7-day, it's up about 20%. Um, last week was the largest weekly dollar gain in Bitcoin history. Okay, so in absolute terms, in dollar gains, it was a 14K up week. That is absolutely massive. But we also have to zoom out a little bit here, hib, and we have to look at prices from a year-to-day perspective. This felt huge in the last two weeks, but we are back to approximately May 10th pricing. Okay, so we just went back in time about four months.

What do you think of these price moves? Like

do you think we've seen the lowest of lows on Bitcoin for the cycle? That would have been I guess 630 June 30th Bitcoin hit about 58K. Is that as low as we go in the cycle? Is it kind of up from here? At least above 58K from here.

Look, I think so. Um the reality is there's there's clearly a lot of resistance around the 80k level. We've been hovering around 80k for a little bit. Um if you look at the options markets, they tell you a lot of information about what the market believes the likely outcomes are going to be. So actually if you look at poly market, poly market's nice for dummies like me to just condest uh what condense what the what the options markets are saying about the likely moves for Bitcoin from here.

So, um, yeah, if you look at Bitcoin in 2026, you'll see that it's about equally likely that we hit 100K as that we go down to I think it was like uh 65ish or like 67 maybe. Um, so uh actually no below 65. So closer to 60K like 60K to 100K is roughly even odds of where we end up on the year. So I I think where we are set up right now is clearly Bitcoin is going to move. It's not going to sit here at 80K. Um, now a lot can change in macro, a lot can change in crypto period, but I think it's very unlikely that we tread below 60 this year.

Um, that to me feels like it's behind us again because of just the seller exhaustion.

Seller exhaustion. Do you also think some of the actions of Bessant this this Treasury put that we're going to get into next are part of this? This is a Bernstein analyst and of course you know they're bullish when things are bullish. So, take this analysis with a grain of salt, but a lot of people are calling for the debasement trade saying that trade is back on. Here's a headline from CNBC from Bernstein analysts.

Debasement trade to take Bitcoin to 300K in 3 years. Bernstein says, "Let's uh talk about what they're calling the the Bessin put, this this Treasury put, and just to recap what happened last week and to bring us to some of the events that happened over the weekend and then on Monday. So, uh we had the 30-year bond market. So yields on the third year, they tagged on August 18th about 5.3%. Which is a 20-year high, the highest since 2007.

So people monitoring bond yields kind of freaking out. This is notable. This is interesting. On August 19th, Treasury then doubled its long-end buyback. So it was doing some buybacks for market liquidity. went from about two billion those those buybacks I think it's per week to about four billion. Okay. So immediately yields on the on the the 30-year dumped. Uh but then they bump back up and so Besson came out and said we will continue to do this.

Um on Sunday, August 23rd, the 30-year yields went back to all-time highs. So Bessant called a Monday press conference and that's where we got the news on the week. In the Monday press conference, Bessant said that the 4 billion per week was kind of a minimum. He called this his brand for it. Wasn't the best input. It was the Treasury twist. That's what he's trying to meme into existence. He said, "We routinely do buybacks and we're going to increase the size of the buyback.

It could be more than 4 billion per issue." So he's saying now this 4 billion that he put in place last week, well that's more like a floor, it's not a cap. And he sort of implied they're going to do what it takes to keep yield within lines. At least that's how the market interpreted that. And then uh finance media kind of ran away with this a little bit. It's hard to know what happened, but I saw this uh report earlier this week in CNBC said Besson could tap nearly $1 trillion in the Treasury General account to fund buybacks, sources said.

Okay, this wasn't Bessant actually saying this, but this was uh this story was