"They Are MASSIVELY Manipulating Bitcoin & We’ve Got Proof” - Jordi Visser & Mike Novogratz

Markets rarely move for just one reason. When price breaks violently, it's usually because multiple forces converge at the same time: macro positioning, liquidity stress, structural unwinds, and human behavior colliding all at once. Last week's sell-off in Bitcoin and the broader crypto market fits that pattern almost perfectly. What looked chaotic on the surface begins to look far more deliberate once you zoom out. In today's video, we're piecing together two perspectives from people who sit at the intersection of crypto, traditional finance, and global capital flows. Jordi Visser, president of 22V Research and a former Wall Street strategist, approaches this drawdown from a structural angle: how Bitcoin is being traded, hedged, and treated inside institutional portfolios. Mike Novogratz, CEO of Galaxy Digital, looks at the same move through the lens of flow, sentiment, and market plumbing: who may have been selling, where that liquidity moved, and why the damage felt so sudden. Novogratz suggests this sell-off has the fingerprints of a large seller moving size through offshore venues, potentially routed through Binance, creating a cascade where price was set at the margin. Jordi, meanwhile, zooms out and shows something just as important: Bitcoin didn't collapse in isolation. Its year-to-date performance mirrors the drawdown in SaaS and software equities almost tick for tick. That similarity isn't coincidence. It points to how institutions currently classify Bitcoin, not what it aspires to be. Taken together, these views tell a more complete story. This wasn't simply panic, nor was it random. It was the intersection of de-risking, crowded positioning, and Bitcoin being treated, at least for now, as part of a broader long-duration growth-sensitive trade. And the implications of that framing matter enormously for what happens next. In the rest of this video, Jordi Visser explains why Bitcoin has become entangled with software, private equity, and hedge fund balance sheets, and how that relationship may finally begin to unwind. Then, Mike Novogratz lays out what likely caused the sell-off, why he believes a tradable low may already be in, and what catalysts—or lack thereof—could define the next phase of this cycle. If you value clear thinking over noise, make sure you like the video, subscribe to the channel, and stay with us through the full analysis. Thanks, and enjoy the video.

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The thing that's going on, and I just want to live in the world of facts right now: you cannot separate Bitcoin from the traditional finance world. You just can't. And if you were to ask me what needs to happen for Bitcoin to get to a million, I will say the same thing I've said repeatedly. When an investor sitting at home, or a pension fund, or a sovereign wealth fund, or an endowment, or a foundation can invest in the seven most liquid companies in the world, the biggest companies in the world, and get a similar or better return than Bitcoin, you don't need to invest too much money in Bitcoin. I think the hardest part for people to accept—and I know it's polarizing—is that there is no fundamental narrative that you can go on. Now when people ask me, I go, yeah, I think Bitcoin's or the market cap of crypto will eventually be the monetary base of the world, which is about $120 trillion. The assets are $800 trillion, so you could focus on a percentage of the financial assets, but I think those assets are going to delever. So I really did think what had to happen is there had to be no growth. So let's replace speculative and just say growth, because what I do believe is happening this year is the most important year for crypto ever from a utility basis. Stablecoins—like nobody's talking about the fact, I don't know if you saw the volumes for January: $10 trillion. Last year they were $33 trillion. The network effects are kicking in, and the reason is because of OpenClaw and Moltbook. AI agents are real and they're happening now. And that's the most critical part for me for the network effects. So stablecoins are already happening. With that, you're going to have more volumes. You're going to have people focusing again on, hey, how do I make money off that? Oh, I'll go to Ethereum. Right now, everyone's panicked, and I get it. It makes sense to me that everyone would be panicked, but tokenization is coming at the end of the year. The Clarity Act is now over 70%. Like there are things that people have to focus on that are growth. The problem with SaaS, as people are realizing, is SaaS is directly at odds with artificial intelligence. And I've been writing about it. We've talked about it here. People that love the show seem to be okay with me. The second I started talking about the fact I don't want to be involved in tech, like, oh, that's already happened. I wrote a piece on software needing to be rerated in December. That's what's happening. The problem is SaaS had its biggest bubble ever and the most VC investments the same year the crypto space did. They are combined. They are connected. So I think people are missing the fact that so far this year the IGV, which is the software ETF, as of yesterday's close was down 24%. Bitcoin as of this morning when we walked in here was down 24%. These are year-to-date. The overlay of the two is eerie. So I think when you can find something that says Bitcoin is being treated like a software group. But here's the thing about it: there are a lot of hedge funds who also have private arms. They have investments. I'm not going to go through the names, but a lot of them had a lot of trouble in 2022 when—

These are like the crossover funds, you're saying?

Crossover funds, and you also have endowments. You have other places that have made significant investments in private equity, private credit, VC. Well, all of a sudden, the entire long-duration asset market has been questioned. So, what is happening with software? You're starting to read stories about how it's impacting private debt, private equity. Well, there's also hedge funds. And you know what? If hedge funds want to hedge, how do you hedge all of your illiquid private investments in SaaS? Well, if you want to do something liquid that's very correlated, I think Bitcoin is your best alternative. So, I think there's a lot of that happening, too.

So you think institutions may be going long private tech companies or software companies and short Bitcoin as a way to hedge against the privates?

So, in the equity world—and this happened with Bear Stearns, it happened with Lehman, it happened with the oil companies—you have to go back to the cap structure. And if you're in trouble with an illiquid asset, okay, you're hoping for an exit strategy. Well, if that thing is being marked down and it's being dragged down with the public equities, if you want to hedge that risk to have something offset it for whatever reason, Bitcoin is part of the cap structure of this because it's related. People look for hedges. So, when the energy market was falling back in 2015 and 2016, the debt's sitting there, the equity's going down. So people had to find something to hedge and they were using the equity. So when you're worried about your debt, you go into the equity. It's all cap structure things to kind of protect against losses. But hedge funds in particular, remember, they're sending out monthly statements. They're going to be asked about the questions on their privates for SaaS. And you go through the numbers of SaaS in terms of what percentage of the VC market it was. And the numbers were enormous in 2021. I think it was equal to the prior three years in terms of deal size, and for crypto it was at least that—it may have been the entire time of crypto. So these are linked. They're all linked on the private side. It doesn't excuse the fact that Bitcoin was falling before this, but if you do the overlay in software, software has been weak for a while and I think this is directly related to AI. The good news coming out of this is I did expect eventually software to come down and the Mag 7 to start to go through a rerating. I thought Bitcoin would start to diverge at the same time. Instead, what's happened is this fall has been so violent and it's now getting into—there's debt, there's everything. It just reminds me that it falls. The key thing will be for everyone who's watching: if this is what I'm saying, the privates will not bounce. Software to me will not have a significant bounce. And when I say software, for all the people focused on this, I am buying Palantir this week. So, it has finally got to levels that for me I can justify buying it. I was late to the party, but their earnings were spectacular in terms of what they're saying about their commercial and enterprise business, which fits in with my AI theme. You should start to see a divergence between the cyber software, the Palantirs of the world on the analytics and the data storage side, and the enterprise software—the Salesforce.coms, the Adobes—they should not bounce very much. If Bitcoin starts to bounce and IGV sits, that means we're starting to see the unwind of the hedges that I believe are put on. And if there are unwinds in the hedges, that's a good sign to at least change the technical picture for Bitcoin.

What Jordi is really describing here is a structural misclassification problem. Bitcoin, in practice, has been treated by institutions less like an independent monetary asset and more like a liquid proxy for risk in long-duration growth portfolios. Hedge funds with heavy exposure to private SaaS, venture capital, and illiquid tech needed a way to hedge downside risk. Bitcoin—liquid, volatile, and highly correlated—became part of that hedge. When software rerated lower under pressure from AI disruption and tighter capital conditions, Bitcoin was pulled into the unwind. But Jordi also points to the inflection point. The hedge only works while the correlation holds. If software remains weak and Bitcoin begins to stabilize or diverge, that signals hedges being unwound rather than added. That's not a narrative shift. It's a positioning shift. And historically, those moments matter far more for price than sentiment ever does. That structural backdrop sets the stage for Mike Novogratz's perspective, because once positioning breaks, the question becomes tactical: who was selling? How aggressive was it? And is it finished? Novogratz steps inside the market itself—margin behavior, exchange flow, political risk, and the psychology of large holders—to assess whether this was a temporary shock or something more prolonged.