MARA CEO Thiel Remains Confident in Bitcoin Amid Downtown | Bloomberg Businessweek

I think your Bitcoin at this level is finding support in the kind of 84,000 range which is just about where the break even point is on most ETF purchases, Bitcoin ETF purchases and that seems to be a level of support where essentially people, large investors who are trying to defend their positions if you would want to keep it above that level, which if it falls below that, you'd see more sales most probably out of the ETFs back into liquidity. You know, Bitcoin, it's very much driven by global liquidity. You had expectations of more from the Fed and more clarity around market structure. But I think what you really have to look at is there was a huge runup in the kind of August through September into October period and a number of us felt the market was frothy in the beginning of Q3 and things were getting a little bit overheated and now we've seen some of that come off. You've also seen a lot of money that rotated into AI now rotating out of AI and starting to rotate into more Dow stocks. And so I think you're generally seeing a risk-off environment. Risk-off tends to drive people out of Bitcoin. But the liquidity that the federal government is going to inject in the marketplace now that quantitative tightening is over. We're starting to see easing again. We believe that will bode well. The dollar's down which also bodes well for Bitcoin and I think you're going to continue to see Bitcoin appreciate but you got to realize it's a very large asset class it's a couple trillion dollars in size and it takes a lot to move the price and I think what we're seeing now is just some healthy retracement.

Well, I think you have to in regards to crypto, you have to look at the derivatives market, which is much bigger than the actual spot Bitcoin market. And you have to see the sheer amount of leverage and positions that have come off since the peak. You've gone from the $90 billionish range down to the $30 billion range of open positions. And so that's a huge amount of leverage that comes off which essentially sucks wind out of the marketplace. And people have been moving their money out of Bitcoin and into other things. I think you've also seen look at the AI stocks. Most of the second tier AI stocks have all seen a pretty large comedown since the peak. Even stocks such as Oracle, look at CoreWeave. You know, look at these stocks and how they've performed. And I think what you're seeing is a rotation out of some of those and into other stocks. And Bitcoin is associated with technology. It's associated with the risk-on assets and it's very associated with liquidity.

I think you have to look at the long-term trend. But more importantly, go back a little over a year ago, go 14, 15 months ago. No US money center bank would deal with crypto-related companies, nor would they take crypto deposits, nor would they let you trade crypto, nor would they let you wire money to crypto exchanges almost. And today you have every bank including JP Morgan now moving ahead and doing all sorts of things with crypto. You're seeing tokenization of assets. DTCC has now gotten a no action letter from the SEC around tokenizing assets. You're seeing all sorts of activities around the traditional finance environment where they're embracing crypto. And I believe that what part of the effect of that is you're now going to see all sorts of things wrapped around crypto which will make the space much more relevant but it takes time for those products to take effect get launched and I think again Bitcoin has had a great run over the past 15 years it's been one of the best performing assets on record and I think that we're going to continue to see great performance out of Bitcoin over the coming years.