Latest / The Starting Block / Bitcoin to $100k? Feat. CoinMarketCap’s Research Lead Alice Liu

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Bitcoin to $100k? Feat. CoinMarketCap’s Research Lead Alice Liu · The Starting Block

• 0:07
  Speaker 1: Welcome back to The Starting Block. We've made it to Wednesday, so congratulations. It's called hump day for a reason because it's downhill to the weekend. I hope the week has been treating you well so far wherever you are around the world. We've been back in the saddle in the new studio, getting close to finishing things off here after a fantastic week in New York last week.
• 0:27
  If you missed that, the Starting Block broadcast live from Avalanche Summit, and we had some fantastic conversations with the biggest names in the industry. Very, very happy to have sat down with Kevin O'Leary, mister Wonderful himself, for an in-depth interview. We spoke about a lot of things in that interview, namely the Clarity Act and its impasse in the US Senate. He also spoke very candidly about FTX and SPF, his experience having met Sam Bankman Fried and the issues that ensued after that. And we also spoke a little bit about his investment thesis and why he looks to invest in infrastructure, even power, powering Bitcoin mining and AI compute.
• 1:11
  A really interesting conversation. If you missed that, I did upload that to X today. Just check out my personal account, gazzerjenx. It's pinned on the top of my profile. You can also find that on The Block's channel as well.
• 1:24
  If you wanna go watch the entire broadcast that we did across those two days, you can find that on The Block's YouTube channel. And if you're joining us there today, please go ahead and subscribe to the channel. If you don't already, give us a like. And if you're watching us on X this afternoon or morning, wherever you are, please like and retweet the broadcast so we can get more people joining us for today's fantastic conversation. If you're new here, this is how the show works.
• 1:47
  We jump into the block briefing. That's our rundown of the top stories you need to know from the last twenty four hours in the crypto and blockchain space. And then we will be moving on to the hot seat segment of the show today. We're gonna have Alice Lu from CoinMarketCap joining us to talk about the markets and some of the research and insights that they've been producing from their platform. Of course, if you don't know CoinMarketCap, I'd be surprised if you didn't.
• 2:11
  I'm there every day checking all the major tokens, what's happening with their price, amazing data, dashboards there, and pretty much everything you need to know with crypto. So we'll be chatting to her in a little bit. But first things first, let's jump into the block briefing so we can get you informed on what's been happening in the last twenty four hours. Our first headline of the day, SoFi just became the first bank to settle card transactions on chain across Mastercard's global network. The lender has begun using its own stablecoin, SoFi USD, to settle both debit and credit card payments, and it's moving its entire card program over to blockchain based settlement.
• 2:48
  The program is expected to clear more than $25,000,000,000 in annualized volume. It builds on a March agreement between the two companies, and SoFi says it plans to offer the same settlement option to other issuing banks through its Galileo technology platform. Stablecoins are quietly moving onto mainstream payment rails. Washington is signaling a market overhaul. CFTC chair Michael Selig says regulators need to be ready need to ready, rather, US markets for what he calls mass tokenization, round the clock trading, and broader stablecoin use.
• 3:21
  Speaking yesterday at a treasury market conference at the New York Fed, Selig argued that the next decade will bring more change to financial markets than the previous several decades combined. He pointed to tokenization, on chain finance, and twenty four seven trading as the forces reshaping the system and said the Trump administration has already laid the groundwork by embracing innovation and rightsizing regulation, a clear tone setter for the top derivatives regulator. And on that point, we also sat down for really good conversations with Chris Giancarlo, former CFTC chairman last week in New York City. If you want to catch that interview, you can find that on the Block platforms as well. Our next headline, the same regulator is also sounding an alarm on prediction markets.
• 4:06
  In a new advisory from the CFTC's division of market oversight, staff warned that so called mentioned market contracts, bets on whether someone will say a specific word or who will show up at an event carry a heightened risk of manipulation. The agency says there are only limited circumstances where those contracts can be listed without running afoul of the Commodity Exchange Act. It comes as prediction markets have exploded into multibillion dollar businesses and as concerns about insider trading keep bubbling up. Then Coinbase is giving borrowers more certainty. The exchange has added fixed rate Bitcoin backed loans through Morpho Midnight, letting users borrow USDC with the interest rate and repayment date locked in upfront.
• 4:50
  It sits alongside Coinbase's existing variable rate loans built on Morpho Blue, a book that's grown past $1,400,000,000 outstanding, backed by roughly 3,000,000,000 in collateral. Morpho launched Midnight on Base back in July to bring fixed rates to on chain lending, and Coinbase says it's the first major consumer platform to offer loans through it at scale. DeFi lending looking a lot more like a bank. Our next headline, CME Group, is widening its crypto derivatives bench. The exchange plans to launch Bitcoin Cash and Uniswap futures on October 19, pending regulatory review, offering both standard and micro sized contracts.
• 5:29
  It's the latest addition to a single asset lineup that already spans Bitcoin, Ether, XRP, Solano, Cardano, Chainlink, Stellar, Avalanche, and SWI. The demand is there. CME says its crypto futures and options average nearly 280,000 contracts a day in the first half of twenty twenty six with about $8,300,000,000 in notional value. Then on to our next story. Canada's banking giants are going on chain together, and I'm sure this will bring its smile to my producer, Jordan Space.
• 5:58
  The country's six largest banks, RBC, TD, Scotiabank, BMO, CIBC, and National Bank says they're jointly exploring a Canadian dollar tokenized deposit system to keep the nation's payment infrastructure competitive and secure. In a joint statement yesterday, they said the first phase focuses on moving tokenized deposits efficiently between financial institutions with the goal of faster programmable payments while preserving safety and regulatory oversight. The door is open for other deposit taking institutions to join later. And our last headline of the day, crypto venture firm, Hashd, is moving into private credit. It's anchoring a new digital asset credit fund targeting $300,000,000 founded by Abu Dhabi based investor, Mohamed Hamdi, and managed by Thorough Capital Management.
• 6:45
  The plan here is to lend U. Dollars settled via stablecoins directly to digital asset institutions with Hash as the primary backer. Hash says the fund tackles a critical financing bottleneck where traditional banks are held back by capital requirements and existing crypto lenders only underwrites against collateral. In other words, credit for profitable audited firms that still can't get a loan. And that's it for today's Block briefing.
• 7:14
  If you're interested in reading any more of our top headlines or stories, go and check out The Block's website, that's theblock.co, for the top news you need to know in the cryptocurrency industry. And if you missed it, The Block announced the launch of The Latent, which is our new sister site specifically focused on AI and has a load of other interesting data and insights, including comparative benchmarks of different AI models out there. So definitely encourage you to go and check out the latent.co. That's the website. And you can find the latent on X, that's the latent co as the handle.
• 7:53
  We're gonna move on to our next segment of the show. Straight into the hot seat, it's a great pleasure to welcome Alice Liu to the show from CoinMarketCap. First things first, Alice. Welcome to the show. It's great to have you with us.
• 8:06
  How are you doing?
• 8:10
  Speaker 2: Especially now the market is, has been trending up, upwards for the past twenty four hours. How have you been?
• 8:17
  Speaker 1: I'm I'm doing very well. Finally caught up on some rest after traveling to New York. I was in and out, two two days. I've got a young baby at home. So, if I look a little bit tired, that's why.
• 8:28
  But, we're we're we're going strong, straight back into the swing of things, and it's been a really exciting week in terms of the markets. We had Andre Dragos from Bitwise yesterday on the show to talk to us about why he, you know, thinks Bitcoin shot up over $85,000. Maybe you can give us some insights from the CoinMarketCap team and your your exceptional research department there as to the main driving factor behind Bitcoin climbing up above $85,000 and holding strong as we talk.
• 8:58
  Speaker 2: Sure. Because yesterday, we did have a bit of a milestone when Bitcoin hit 87,000. But what has driven it? Because today, we've seen the price cooling down a little bit. And as we speak, CoinMarketCap right now is printing fair and great index at 75.
• 9:15
  We're in great. It's 11 uplift from last week. Right now, BTC is trading around 85,440 USD. So this 87 k, the market has called a a breakout. But what I'm reading from the positioning data side, it seems to be like a squeeze because it it was what we are saying is that it's not the spot money that have flowing.
• 9:40
  It is mostly liquidation driven because the CMC liquidation charts recorded that Monday cleared around $4,558,000,000 USD of forced short liquidation covering against just 57,000,000 USD worth of long liquidation. So what we are saying, it seems to be a very speedy uptrend squeeze because of the shorts getting liquidated. And it's not just that, but also Tuesday, we are seeing that trend to continue a little bit as well. This seems to be a signature of, you know, the bearish positioning is getting cleared out. So the market is resetting for that new price level again.
• 10:20
  But what's really interesting right now is not just the liquidation and the long short positioning, but also funding rates as well because it seems funding is quite cheap at the moment. That is why maybe the market started to accumulate on that leverage again. So, hopefully, you know, going into this week from recovery from what we experienced last week, the decline of Clarity Act, the Fed raising interest rates. And this week, coming into yesterday, we saw Nasdaq 100 all time high above 30,000 points. I think that is reciting the market a little bit for AI stocks, equity, for gold, what we are seeing for oil, and together with BTC and the rest of the market as well.
• 11:04
  Speaker 1: Beautiful. And very interesting to hear you talk about, you know, the futures markets because Andre Dragosch was telling us yesterday that he thought that most of this was kind of spot driven and that was quite positive for Bitcoin. Maybe you can give us a quick rundown of perhaps some insights on major alts that rallied in conjunction with Bitcoin climbing and if there's any other information or insights that you can give us as to why.
• 11:31
  Speaker 2: Yep. Because the Altcoin market moves so fast. So literally every twenty four hours is printing a new narrative. As we speak right now, CMC Altcoins is the index is giving me 52. So we are officially in that altcoin season.
• 11:46
  If you don't feel it that way, it's probably because you are not in the right narrative. So to tie up to the new section you just covered just now, you know, very important news, saying what is happening with the Bitcoin Cash and with Uniswap. If I sort the top 100 coins by, twenty four hour performance, you can see that leading the chart, we have layer zero and then followed by Bitcoin Cash, followed by Celestia, Bitcoin, Satoshi Vision, Pudgee, Aptos, and together with Uniswap, etcetera, is all giving very good around 15 to 20% uplift for the past twenty four hours. And some of these are indeed driven by the CME potential listing. But also what what you can see is how much influence Trifai market has on crypto market right now.
• 12:38
  Because of this news coming out, we are seeing the entire lift of the DeFi sector as well. And to be honest, it is very interesting because things like this, it's a clear example of a repricing driven entirely by distribution rather than fundamentals because of this new CME potential listing future listing news that is driving has driven the price of Uniswap and Bitcoin Cash a lot higher than, let's say, the change of the protocol itself. So what we are then going to see if is whether this can be cascaded around in the wider sector as well. But what's also interesting is outside of this type of mainstream listing driven news, we are seeing the entire sort of uptake of the DeFi sector also because of the activities coming back and also because some of the most talked about posts on CMC nowadays are linked to tokenization. So tokenize tokenize stocks index, and also some pre IPO products as well.
• 13:42
  So those have been contributing volume to the to the infrastructure of DeFi sector, and we're seeing some revenue on, this application, protocols, having, increase in their revenue income as well.
• 13:57
  Speaker 1: Two very bullish takes in two days. Andre Dragos says to me yesterday that, the bull market is officially here, and you're telling me that alt season is officially here. So I'm I'm definitely smiling, and I think our audience has probably needed a little bit of hope, Ian. So that's good to hear. I wanna pull on the the thread of RWA tokenization and perhaps how quickly the industry has had to react and, you know, players from cryptocurrency exchanges to even, you know, Dart platforms like CoinMarketCap to quickly catch up and and serve this type of information to your, you know, your users or your your website visitors.
• 14:32
  There's a lot of tokenization going on, securities, equities, all these different things coming on chain. Did that require a lot of work in the background? And, yeah, how interesting is it to see the evolution of these markets coming on chain?
• 14:49
  Speaker 2: Yeah. Sure. So first is the tools available to all the users. I think all the different data platforms are building they're building up their suites of offering as well for when it comes to RWA specific data. And on CoinMarketCap, you can go into dashboards and market, and then you will fill you will find real asset real world asset as a category.
• 15:13
  And on there, you can track all the different different RWA list listings, but also the issuers as well. So you can see what has been treated and who are the issuers and which chains people are trading it on. So what's really important is to say it from two different lenses. We say it from tokenization of spot market. So those are tokenized equities, tokenized index, etcetera, and the perpetual, the directives market.
• 15:42
  So that's the second avenue. And what's really interesting is, to be honest, when it comes to exchanges, when it comes to trading volume and activities nowadays, RWA is such an important components. I am writing the report this week and just about to launch, so I'm gonna give you guys a bit of a a quick
• 16:02
  Speaker 1: Let's do.
• 16:02
  Speaker 2: Through. Yes. Let's do that. So a few things. Number one is for the past eighty days.
• 16:09
  Right? So we look from, you know, the whole June, July, a bit of September for the part where we have the data on. What's really interesting is tokenized stocks itself has had such a great growth period. It's also driven by a lot of the AI stocks that we've seen for the past three months, the the trading activities there as well. So in total, right now, we have around the 3,000,000,000 USD in on chain TVL across the board with Undo, x stocks, v stocks, and a bit of Robinhood.
• 16:43
  Undo still takes lion's share when it comes to TVL. So Undo is now about 70 37% of the market share when it comes to TVL, followed by x stocks 30%. B stocks is catching up very fast at 26%. And when they comes to trade volume, what's interesting is B stocks definitely wins. They take 70% of the market volume when it comes to the past eighty day time frame.
• 17:08
  And what we've seen with the Robinhood chain growing is that their volume has been increasing as well, but that's also part of it is driven by the meme coin packs tokenized stocks as well. So some of the interesting developments in this area about what is really useful for crypto users and now giving what has been announced in The US for the five year waiver on the tokenization of equity by the SEC, I think that is giving the market a lot more injection of confidence. And hopefully, it translates to a lot more trading activity and liquidity as well.
• 17:46
  Speaker 1: That's really it's really interesting to hear, especially B stocks driving driving the volumes there. You did also mention Robinhood and these Meme Coin Meme Coins basically tied to these different tokenized stock offerings. I'll I I just know off the top of my head, you know, ZCAT taking a percentage of any any transfer fee and almost offering that to traders as a as a dividend. I think it's such an interesting use case for Meme Coins because I think the audience out there knows that I'm one of the biggest critics of Meme Coins. I think it's a it's a total casino and and gambling.
• 18:24
  But adults can gamble, that is what it is. But, you know, to to tie some mechanism that actually gives you something back other than just a token with, you know, some sort of meme or community around it is is super interesting. Yeah. Yeah. I I I know you probably don't wanna give, you know, too much opinion here, but I I did wanna get your thoughts on this meme coin craze and, yeah, especially on Robinhood chain and how much that helped them with fees since they've launched.
• 18:51
  Speaker 2: You hit the nail on the head because what has it done for the industry for good and bad because they did cause quite a bit of controversies. But also in this report, I have a dedicated section just to analyze this to see how it's how it started, what does it mean by main impact to stocks, and also what the impact of that has been. So definitely, like, when we release the report, definitely feel free to read it because it's it's a lot more interesting insights there as well. To your point, yes, what we've saying, for example, artificial Inu pack to NVIDIA, Boner pack to him. A meme coin, which is ticker meme pack to AMC.
• 19:32
  So a lot of this crazy combos, I have to say. Some of them are playing a lot of, like, I guess, market share and contribution to the trade volume there as well. What we love about the meme meme community is definitely the liquidity. It's definitely some of the the the volume, the the pump, so called, I think that drives to the to the market. But at the same time, because Robinhood chain was set up to be the RWA native chain, I think they set up to to have such a great niche in the market to do tokenized stocks.
• 20:05
  But the what we've seen with now the rushing of the meme coins and this type of meme compacting to tokenized stocks is causing quite a bit of trouble because some users have been complaining about this for the chain itself. So it definitely helped a lot because it has pumped Robinhood's Robinhood Chain tokenization stocks volume to go up to 18% among, you know, the top four issuers. Although, yes, as we said, the number wise would be stocks by Robinhood chain being able to catch up for the past two two and a half month has been mostly driven by some of this creative. So we would call it a creative play as well. But in the past two weeks, we've seen that trend dying out a little bit.
• 20:51
  Now last week, with the SEC announcement and also currently this week, what we are seeing with Nasdaq trading at all time high, we're seeing oil price coming down. We're seeing potentially, you know, stock market having a lot more, upper room to go and more interest to be attracted into this area. Having access to global trading twenty four seven, especially to be able to trade some of these stocks and index on a non trading weekend is something crypto and blockchain has definitely has an advantage and a place to to play. So I think in terms of some of these mark market makers and some of these exchanges that do have deep liquidity and deep order book in this sector is going to benefit from this trend quite a lot.
• 21:41
  Speaker 1: Yeah. And just to back that up, we we sat down with Christian Carlo, former CFTC chairman last week. And he said to me he wouldn't be surprised if we saw in the next year at least trading in The U. S. Going twenty four five.
• 21:55
  So that's twenty four hours, Monday to Friday, in The U. S, and that's only possible with the blockchain infrastructure that we now have today. So it's really interesting to see this evolution of the markets. Alice, I wanted to chat to you just a little bit about your thoughts about the rest of 2026, where you think things are heading now. People, you know, influencers, analysts like Ben Cowan have come out and basically apologized for for being wrong about his call on the markets and where things are going because we've kind of had a bit of a breakout now.
• 22:27
  And his thesis was that we're going to bottom out in October, and that looks well and truly quashed. Perhaps you and the CoinMarket team have produced some sort of research or some insights about, you know, a prediction of where the end of the year goes and what we can expect going into early twenty twenty seven?
• 22:46
  Speaker 2: You're asking me this question on the most difficult week to give the prediction, but I will analyze this from the crypto native lens, and I'll analyze this from the global macro lens as well. So from crypto native lens, it's very difficult to predict because we never had something like this before. Why? July, Bitcoin pumped 7.2%. August, Bitcoin pumped 24.9%.
• 23:12
  September, so far, Bitcoin pumped 8.8%. We haven't seen this three months in a row of this type of growth since 2012. But what's really interesting is, okay. But back then, the market was very small. The players at the table were different.
• 23:29
  And historically, I don't know if you guys do remember this because we we generally tend to have an October, which means October is supposed to be a good month for us. But in 2012, when this type of three months in a row, such great performance happened, October experienced a dip. So we don't know anymore. Going to October, are we gonna have a pump? Are we gonna have a dip?
• 23:50
  We don't know. And it's very hard to predict because right now, as I said, the 87 k at the beginning that we saw from yesterday, that was from directives market. Right? That was a squeeze. So when things like this happened and when I checked the liquidation map on primary cap right now, I can see the big positions were placed very close to the current, trading, spot price.
• 24:14
  So that means when when we have another squeeze, it's gonna happen very fast either direction. So it's hard to predict, but I think for the rest of this year, we might go into a smooth sale, might actually even pump up a bit more. Why? Because from the second lens, which is global macro. Let's look at how things are going right now in the global market because AI equity had AI equity and some memory stocks and tape makers had got a bit of hate for the last two and a half months.
• 24:45
  Right? So we've seen as the HanX and a few other stocks did have quite a bit of correction and now gradually coming back in line. But now with Nasdaq printing all time high and the AI stocks seem to be coming back up again, the global macro seem to be setting for even higher trajectory. And a few things, even now with the Fed increasing the interest rates and to be honest, because the next decision is come is gonna come in about thirty five days. So on the October 28, we'll have another Fed interest decision.
• 25:20
  Right now, the CME market watch, Fed watch seems to be giving, about a 25 bps uplift. That's 55% chance of that happening again. So with interest rate potentially going up by another 25 bps for the rest of the year, I think with this risk sentiment, Bitcoin might see another injection of liquidity at the moment. But then you ask me, you say, Alice, gold and Bitcoin, the correlation of the two has been growing and gold has been has been hit quite hard. Now that with oil coming down, gold coming down, the Iran war seems to be settling a little bit.
• 25:58
  Now this week with US and China building relationship again. So does that mean Bitcoin's gonna go down together with the gold? Not really. Because if you look at the performance of gold so far this year and you look at the performance of BTC from the October 2025, the the high and the drop, Bitcoin right now does seem a lot more attractive compared with gold. So I think with that alone and with potentially the asset managers having a a a lot more allocation into this space with the ETF flows that we've seen for the past few weeks, I think Bitcoin will benefit from that compared with gold.
• 26:40
  Speaker 1: Beautiful. Andre Dragos was saying to us, he he would expect, Bitcoin to go to 100 to 150 k in the next, I don't know, 6 he didn't give us an exact time line, but he said that that's on the horizon. So we live in hope. As you can see, my studio is very much Bitcoin themed. So I cross my fingers that, you know, things are looking up, and his his take is right and that the bull, you know, the bull market has started and that your your take is right and that it's also, you know, altcoin season kicking off as well.
• 27:10
  I know traders like Michael Fundapop would be praying for that because his altcoin portfolio has been down pretty bad. But Alice, thank you so much for taking the time to chat to us today. I thoroughly enjoyed this conversation and your insights.
• 27:23
  Speaker 2: Thank you very much.
• 27:24
  Speaker 1: Beautiful. Thank you so much to Alice and the CoinMarketCap team for joining us on the Starting Block today to give us some insights into what's happening in the crypto markets. It's a very difficult thing to do and even more difficult to do it well, and I think they definitely do that. If you don't already, you can find CoinMarketCap on X. It's coinmarketcap.
• 27:44
  And while you're there, give Alice a follow on X as well. It's alicecrypto3. So you can find her on X as well. Go and give her a follow. If you joined us on X today to watch this live broadcast, please like and retweet the broadcast so more people can join us and catch up on what we spoke about today.
• 28:02
  If you're watching us on YouTube, please go ahead and subscribe to our channel. And, again, if you missed some of our interviews at Avalanche Summit in New York City last week, go and check that out on YouTube. I'll also be uploading full versions of some of our conversations from last week on my personal x. You can find that at gazza underscore jenx. Go and check those out.
• 28:22
  I've already uploaded our interview with Kevin O'Leary earlier today. We'll have conversations with Caroline Pham coming up in the next couple of days. Christian Carlo, I'll be uploading a little bit later today as well. And we also had plenty of other fantastic conversations, so go check out that livestream if you didn't. We will be back with another version of The Starting Block tomorrow.
• 28:42
  So set a reminder on your clocks if you don't have it already. We broadcast at 08:30AM eastern time in The US. And if you're here in Europe like me, that's 02:30PM Central European Time. Come and join us. I promise you'll be entertained.
• 28:56
  We will be having Joseph Chalum from SharpLink to chat to us about AgenTik AI and what that means for the crypto industry. That should be an interesting conversation. So set a reminder. Come and join us tomorrow. Until then, have a fantastic afternoon or evening wherever you are around the world.
• 29:11
  We'll see you on Thursday.