You do have a situation where the president's going to want to win those midterms. So, he's going to flood the zone with capital. He's going to drop interest rates. He's going to try to perk up the economy to get people to vote with his team come the midterm.
People just don't know what's coming. At least according to Wall Street, Washington, and crypto expert Anthony Scaramucci.
That bodes well for the stock market. I think it bodes well for the altcoin market and I think it certainly bodes well for crypto.
In this interview, we talk Clarity Act, Bitcoin prediction, crypto predictions, Anthony Scaramucci's top three altcoin picks, and much more. The name of your show is Altcoin Daily, right? You want those altcoins to move. What are a lot of those altcoins about? They're about use cases. They're about utility. Smash the like button. Subscribe to Altcoin Daily. Let me intro this thing. Anthony Scaramucci, founder of Skybridge Capital. Welcome back to Altcoin Daily. I know you've got a new book out called Salana Rising: Investing in the Fast Lane of Crypto. We're going to talk all about crypto today and your outlook for 2026. But before we get to that, how you doing today?
Well, listen, I'm great. I'm working from home. I'm not in sunny California as I suspect you are. I'm in monsoon weather here in New York where it's raining with a crisp 40 mph wind outside. So, I'm in here in a heated room. Thank God. Blessed to be here and not in the traffic outside.
Looking very festive inside your office and I am glad you're here. As crypto is really changing and we're seeing a convergence of crypto, Wall Street and politics and it just so happens I would consider you an expert in crypto, Wall Street and politics. So before we get to what you think comes next, give me your synopsis on what the hell happened in 2025.
Well, listen, a couple things. You could be an expert and you still get a lot of things wrong. So, I'll set the stage for you. I think there was a jailbreak in November of 2024. So, whatever you think of Donald Trump, he's pro-crypto. And whatever you think of Joe Biden and Gary Gensler, they are not pro crypto. They were really trying to hurt the industry, in some cases trying to put the industry out of business in the United States or certainly at least off the shore of the United States. And so, one of the more positive things about President Trump is he brought in a team like Paul Atkins, SEC chair, Governor Waller, Chris Waller, Nikki Bowman from the Fed, who are all positive on the world of tokenization and payments and positive on Bitcoin as a piece of digital property and they want to get the regulation right and fair for the consumer, the user, and the eventual investor. And so that was a very big bright spot. So when you got the jailbreak, Aaron, we had a nice move up and then people said, 'Okay, this is great. These tokens are going to 150 to 200,000. That's what we think they're worth. Here are the reasons why.' But then a couple of things happened that we did not fully anticipate. Number one, the whale selling. And again, you just have to look at the wallets. There's probably $4.6 billion of whale selling this year into the ETF demand and other retail and potential institutional demand. October 10th was a capitulation. Some of that whale selling happened before October 10th, but you had a leverage situation in the markets. The president put out a tweet related to rare earth minerals and it was just that one little tiny spark that caused a blow up in the markets. There was a massive amount of deleveraging. It impacted some of the market makers. It forced a liquidity crisis. As a result of which you saw a little bit of an altcoin bear market and a 30% drop which by the way is a garden variety drop in Bitcoin but it's still a drop that wasn't expected. So we watch that meter between bull and bear. We were tilted to the bulls. We're now decidedly very bearish. I think on a scale of 1 to 100 the bull meter is something like 13 or 14. And so I like that for 2026 because that means the sentiment is so negative that we just get a few positive things going. Perhaps a little bit of less whale selling, we'll see a retracing back to the Bitcoin 52-week high. But I got it wrong. I didn't expect that kind of selling this year from the whales. I think, this is another part of the story, but it's more minor. We would have thought if you invited me on in December of 24, I would have said we were going to get both pieces of legislation passed by the end of the year. The stable coin act, but then also the market structure, the clarity act would have also been passed. That didn't happen. So, bad news for us. The Democrats still hate crypto. We could pretend otherwise. There's a few that don't, but they've made this thing very partisan. And it's sad to see because it's against the interests of the investor, the consumer. It's against the interests of people that are transacting in the financial services institution. And the technologies that you and I study are actually technologies that can unleash lots of cost savings into the economy, which then leads to more money and capital being deployed into economic innovation. And so, you can chat GPT this, but I've done some homework on this. There's between, depending on how you measure it, three and a half to $4 trillion worth of transaction verification expenses in the global economy per year. It's credit card fees, wire service fees, admin fees, lawyer fees, and banking fees on doing things with mortgages. If you could get that down, let's say you cut it in half, you could unleash a $2 trillion capital spend in other areas of the economy or just better wages for people. This happened during web one and the internet in terms of the S-curve explosion of efficiency in the economy. I would like to see that here. And it's hard, frankly, because we haven't gotten it done yet. It's not going to happen by the end of the year. I think we both know that we've only got 10 days left to go in the year. Could it happen in the first quarter? Maybe. But you've seen the ugly head of Democratic antagonism again related to our industry. So if the Clarity Act doesn't pass by the midterms, because probably by the midterms, after that, there'll be a big shakeup.
Do you think it's still like is it way less likely to pass if it's after the midterms? And if it doesn't pass, is that detrimental to the crypto?
Well, I think it is detrimental because I do think there is still a market expectation that it's going to pass. I do think you need that clarity. Frankly, it's interesting because the act is appropriately named. You got to get it because you want to start that process of tokenization. Your name of your show is Altcoin Daily, right? You want those altcoins to move. What are a lot of those altcoins about? They're about use cases. They're about utility. Now, you and I were on the show Killer Whales. We had that one memecoin guy. I was blasting away at that memecoin since we did the show.
Yeah. That memecoin is down 80 or 90%. Because it doesn't have a lot of tangible value. But then there are other coins that you and I know like Solana or Avalanche or other layer 1 technologies Aptos or Sui that could be used in the process of tokenizing financial assets like stocks and bonds or real world assets like real estate. So, there's a bifurcation, there's Bitcoin and then there's altcoins and there is real use cases, real utility for some of them. But you're not going to get that deployed until you get that clarity that's required from the government in terms of what the rules are because who's going to spend the kind of money that you need to switch over the financial system if you're not guaranteed that you're going to be able to use it. You certainly don't want to be sued in some kind of regulatory enforcement situation. So, that's the dilemma that we're all facing right now.
So, we need the Clarity Act to pass before the midterms. If this was like a Polymarket odds, like what percent chance do you give the Clarity Act to pass before midterms?
