---
title: 'The $10 Trillion Crypto Case Nobody Is Pricing In'
source: 'https://youtube.com/watch?v=GQ8MnALMXd4'
video_id: 'GQ8MnALMXd4'
date: 2026-07-31
duration_sec: 1275
---

# The $10 Trillion Crypto Case Nobody Is Pricing In

> Source: [The $10 Trillion Crypto Case Nobody Is Pricing In](https://youtube.com/watch?v=GQ8MnALMXd4)

## Summary

In this video, the speaker argues that three converging forces — institutional ETF adoption, AI-driven market uncertainty, and the rise of decentralized AI — could push the total crypto market cap beyond $10 trillion. He reviews Bitcoin's historical cycle patterns, recent inflation data, and the slow but steady institutional accumulation, concluding that the current boring period precedes a major upward leg.

### Key Points

- **Three Forces for $10T Crypto** [00:13] — The speaker outlines three forces that could drive crypto beyond $10T: Bitcoin's resilience despite geopolitical conflict, a post-October institutional wave, and an overlooked narrative that could redefine crypto's purpose.
- **CPI Comes in Lower Than Expected** [01:07] — CPI inflation came in at 3.5% vs 3.8% expected, and core CPI fell to 2.6% vs 2.8% expected, supporting the view that inflation fears were overblown.
- **Oil Market Absorbs War Shock** [03:26] — Oil peaked at $110 during the conflict, later bought at $67, and settled around $79 as markets routed around the Strait of Hormuz, indicating geopolitical events have less impact.
- **The Bottom Likely In** [04:09] — The speaker believes the bottom is in unless something major blows up, noting that previous crashes were caused by Terra Luna and FTX, and no similar catalyst exists this cycle.
- **Historical Bottoming Pattern** [07:47] — Bitcoin's bottom typically occurs exactly one year after the all-time high; after that, a boring consolidation period precedes the next explosive rally.
- **Boring Periods Offer the Best Entries** [10:55] — Most profits are made by buying during dull consolidation phases, like buying at $19,000 before the run to $122,000.
- **Gold ETF Adoption as a Blueprint** [12:05] — Spot gold ETFs launched in 2003 and saw minimal gains for two years before exploding in 2006; spot Bitcoin ETFs launched in 2024, suggesting similar trajectory with big moves from 2027 onward.
- **Bitcoin's Scarcity vs Gold** [14:47] — Gold is abundant in the universe and may lose value with future space mining, while Bitcoin's fixed supply keeps it scarce.
- **AI Disruption Drives Hedging** [15:54] — AI's potential to disrupt SaaS and uncertain markets pushes institutions to allocate a small percentage to Bitcoin as a hedge.
- **Decentralized AI as Crypto's Next Narrative** [17:31] — Decentralized AI could reignite interest in crypto as a coordination layer for AI models, potentially transforming the space beyond finance.
- **Three Forces Could Exceed $10T** [19:46] — The combination of institutional flows, AI uncertainty, and decentralized AI positions crypto for its most interesting cycle yet.

### Conclusion

The speaker is confident that the crypto market is on the verge of a massive upward move driven by institutional adoption, AI disruption, and decentralized AI, with the potential to exceed $10 trillion in market cap over the next several years.

## Transcript

crypto market and assume that we need another 2021-style crypto bull run in order to achieve something like that. But, I think that's the wrong way to think about it. I think that there are three forces lining up right now that
have the potential to send crypto well beyond 10 trillion dollars over the three forces is already showing up in Bitcoin's refusal to break despite the war with Iran restarting for like the 5-billionth time. Then, there's the
second driving force I see sending us to a well beyond 10 trillion dollars in market cap. It doesn't really come into effect until after October, but is a force that we haven't seen or haven't had in any past bull run ever. And then,
there's the third force which almost nobody is talking about today, but has the potential to completely change not only the way and the reasons why people buy Bitcoin and crypto today, but in general the narrative and the purpose
crypto, I think it has the potential to be a completely different sort of asset viewpoint or or asset class in the way people view it going into this next Bitcoin currently today is sitting at $64,000.
We've seen a nice and meaningful bump in price because today CPI came in, and it was a lot lower than people expected. Expectations were around 3.8%, but CPI
inflation came in at around 3.5%, and core CPI inflation fell to 2.6% below expectations of 2.8%. This is something that I've been harping on for a while now talking about how expectations for inflation and Fed rate hikes were
actually far overblown because they were based on oil prices that had since gone away. It was a temporary thing that had to do with the Iran conflict that had seemingly gone away. And I say seemingly because this has been the craziest back
and forth non-stop Groundhog Day I've ever lived in in my entire life because every other day this war is on and then this war is off, and then this war is on, and I feel like I'm just making the same video over and over again because
over and then it's back. And you know, we're yet again back to this. So, the the war was ended sort of. It we had a sort of peace deal, kind of not peace deal, maybe it was a peace deal, I don't know. It was enough of a peace deal the
oil prices fell off a cliff and we went back down to pre-war oil levels and that's what I was basing that off of, okay? So, pre-war oil levels, inflation over the next couple months because energy is priced into everything. But
then as of like last week last week this week, you know, whatever, I don't even But the important part is it kind of doesn't even matter at this point. We that a lot of countries have started routing around the straight that you
straight it there's always an alternative route around the straight because this is kind of revealed this bottleneck to be you know, everyone knew now this is in people's heads and they're going to figure out that they
So, we've kind of routed around it. The oil market the global oil market is kind of absorbed this. China's buying a lot less than they used to. We have ways now. We have ways to sort of absorb this enough. Obviously, it's better if the
that the markets are kind of just like over this. The market's just going up, Bitcoin's going up, everyone is over it. Oil prices are also going up, which is not a good thing. So, we bought them on July 2nd at 67,000
ironically at 67 not thousand, 67 dollars. And we've gone back up since to about 79 dollars. So, you know, the heights of the war it was 110. We're sitting at 79. That's not too bad. You know, maybe this is just a momentary
blip, maybe it's not. As long as it's kind of okay, you know, not anything out of control, which it seems like that's very likely given it it's already been out of control and we were fine. So, I just can't imagine unless you know Trump
it getting any more out of control. So, I kind of think this is old news and like I've been saying, inflation is going to be totally fine going into the tailwind as we head into the great reckoning for the bears in October. So,
something blows up, unless something crazy happens, it's really hard to imagine the bottom not being in. But again, I I think I pointed this out last all together. Uh but that you know Terra Luna and FTX were what caused those
What are you going to get this cycle to do that? I don't know. It does really feel like the bottom's in. At least you kind of have to anticipate that it could be in even if you're super bearish. I don't see how you're not pricing in the
know the very minimum. And if that's the case, if the bottom's in, you've got to ask yourself the question, where are we heading next? Where where's Bitcoin's heading next? Where where's Bitcoin's trajectory between now and 2029? Where
are we going? Okay? it's now appropriate time to start having that conversation now that we've like you know been beaten in the depths of the bear market, we got to start looking towards the light and start changing our mindset of where are
make some of you guys who are four-year cycle maxis really happy today because we're just going to look really quickly at past cycles and we're going to start all the way back in 2013. You can see in 2013 after the all-time high of you know
$1,200, people lost their minds and they called Bitcoin a fad, it's over, there's nothing left. And it collapsed all the way down to $159. And uh you can see you know it looked pretty over during this time period,
okay? Bitcoin's just 1,200 to 159, you know people lost don't think of it like that today, they crash. And it had an all-time high in December of 2013 and you can see in
December of 2014, we absolutely collapsed and then bottomed in terms of Bitcoin's price. I guess you could call this a little bit lower that happened in August of '15, but Bitcoin was really
it a little bit of a grace here. And in the depths of, you know, misery and despair as everyone kind of gave up, you know, nobody was buying here. Nobody was Everyone was max interested here. Nobody was interested here. Uh you can see that
after Bitcoin started to make a recovery, and not only did it make a recovery, but it actually went absolutely insane all the way up to $19,000 in terms of total Bitcoin price. And you
can see right after that, um we peaked in again December of 2017, and then collapsed down with one giant, you know, drop in November 2018 before we kind of drop in November 2018 before we kind of bottomed in December of 20 uh '18. So,
you had bull year was 2013, down year was 2014, up year or start of the recovery year was 2015. You had bull year was 2017, bear year was 2018, and then the recovery year, or the year we started recovering, was 2019. And you
can see, you know, Bitcoin made a pretty awesome recovery starting in 2019. It wasn't anything crazy. We kind of went up, sort of did some boring stuff for a while. People thought, is this really it? And then, you know, you had COVID,
market for a second there. And then, price went absolutely insane. We went all the way up to $64,000 from a low of 3,000. Uh so, it it was a especially if you're around in this cycle, it was pretty crazy. And then,
kind of similarly, in November of 2021, uh we peaked, and then we collapsed back down. And then we ended up bottoming in November of 2022. So, peaked in 2021,
bottomed in 2022, and then in 2023, we started the long, boring climb uh that accelerated all the way into 2025. And now I know a lot of people right now are focusing really heavily on this bottoming period because this bottoming
period typically always does come exactly 1 year after the all-time high. about that. They're thinking, you know, it's always happens. So but it's always happened and therefore we should have some sort of bottoming
period this time about 1 year after. And maybe that's not really what I want to focus on. I want to focus on it if you believe happens after. So after that bottoming period, you can see it every single
third year, you really start to see Bitcoin's price start to climb. And then period. It's sort of like a desert period where, you know, it it climbs up, really boring again before they get really exciting again. That happens
every single time. And so what we should kind of expect going into this next wave is post October, we should see price really start to climb. And then we should go through probably kind of a boring consolidation period. And you can
boring consolidation period. And you can see like it's exceptionally boring. Right here price climbs into, you know, March 2023, we have that banking crisis or whatever. And and it's climbing, it's doing good, but you can see like pretty
much like this entire period from March until essentially October of 2023, even though we climbed off the bottom, it's pretty boring in terms of price. Like we don't really go anywhere until, you know, just out of nowhere we should
start climbing. And that's how Bitcoin operates typically is it doesn't really go anywhere and then suddenly it's just like, I don't know, someone fed it some illegal drugs that make you absolutely crazy. I don't know.
This not the not my best analogy, but you get the idea. mean? It just kind of springs into life and goes bananas. And a lot of these gains happen in such a short window and people miss it because they They handle
boring periods that happen in crypto, and we're in one of those right now. We October if you're a four-year cycle believer, you think we're going one leg lower, maybe we are. If you're not, you know,
October it's probably just going to be kind of boring. And then, after that, October things are going to rocket out of control. They could, that'd be awesome. But typically, if you look at past cycles, that's not what happens.
You hit that bottom one year later. And then you do have a moment where things kind of burst back to life. You know, people kind of It's like that bearish moment in reverse.
But you know, it doesn't last for forever. You can see here in in 2022, you know, things burst back to life in in 2023. And then you had that another moment of that, and then we kind of, you know, sort of chopped sideways. And so
January to January. >> And then, you know, a little bit in March, and that was it. You know, it was just kind of sideways action from there until about late you know, late 2023. So
be prepared for, you know, things to turn around, but also be prepared for middle of this. And I remember in the middle of this in 2023 having this And and you don't want to be tuned out because there's a lot of money to be
made. And most of the money that is made by people is buying somewhere in here, okay? People that bought here, I'm sure they were kind of bummed when they bought it, you know, $19,000 Bitcoin. And they're like, "Oh my gosh,
I you know, I bought it 19,000 and then we dumped all the way down to 15,000." in the face. How How dare they? How stupid? But you know what? I bet they didn't feel so stupid when it price was sitting at 122K. I bet they were like,
bought it 19,000. I told you guys to buy it 19,000" kind of thing. And so that's maybe this is the bottom, maybe not. Maybe we dip down to like 55k or 54 or Um if either way, I don't think it's going to matter in the grand scheme of
lot higher from here over the next couple years. And one of those forces higher, and I've showed this chart before, it's always exceptionally blurry and kind of dumb, but you know, this is the is the best I can do, is because of
the ETFs uh and and what they do over time to the price. And I pointed this what I said with it was the institutional adoption phase takes a long time. It takes years and years for it to really build up steam. And so you
shouldn't expect it all overnight. You should expect this to slowly uh work its what you're seeing happening now. And you can see right here in 2003, this is when spot gold ETFs first went live. And about here is first when spot Bitcoin
ETFs went live. And so you this is 2024, the start of 2024, and this is 2003. And the start of 2024, and this is 2003. And you can see in 2004 and 2005, the gains were pretty minimal. The it wasn't anything insane. Even in 2006, it was
just really starting to take off uh as far as things. So 2000 uh or 2024, and 2025, which would be 2004. It's like one year one year lag. year one year lag. 2026 would be about 2005, okay, right
adoption curve in terms of if you're matching it. The 2026 would be be about cycle. So we're down, uh but you can imagine me what it might look like if we weren't. And then 2006 when things started really taking off uh for gold
would be about the equivalent of 2027 in terms of Bitcoin years. And you can see terms of Bitcoin years. And you can see between 2006 and 2013 how insane uh the price of gold went. That'd be the equivalent between 2007 and 2033 what
you could potentially see happening with something like Bitcoin. And then on on top of that, uh you have to also keep in mind, as I pointed out before, that a lot of these institutions they're they're very old, they're very slow, and
assets and especially in the the middle of the bear market. And so even when all the hype was really high around Bitcoin ETFs, that was really the first like dipping of the toe when it came to Wall Street institutions jumping into crypto.
products. They've they've really kept pushing things. They're still waiting for different bills to pass like the Clarity Act etc. But they've kept nudging forward dipping more of their toes into the water. And this next cycle
I think is when they go from dipping their toes to to really jumping into the water and starting to embrace what Bitcoin is as not [clears throat] their full portfolio, not even like a majority of their portfolio, but just another
asset that they're hedging into. Just another thing that they're holding in their portfolio especially in the AI era when things are getting really confusing disrupted. Bitcoin I think is a really attractive hedge against a lot of things
when you don't really know where to put your money. Especially even think about space era where you know, we're launching all these rockets and stuff up into space. And I I don't know when I I don't know if it's soon or or over the
next couple decades that we will be mining different minerals and ores from things like that. Like that is inevitably going to happen at some point. I don't think anyone would argue that at some point we will absolutely be
doing that. And when you look at gold, gold is actually a very abundant actually that rare. It's rare here on Earth. But in the universe like there's It's it's not like this super finite thing. It's a very abundant thing. Trees
trees here on Earth, but you know, no other planets in our solar system have trees. Trees are actually a lot rarer than gold is in terms of the universe. Gold is very abundant. So at some point we're going to start mining
you know, various rocks out there in space and we're going to be finding gold going to be a lot more gold in the the than there is today. And I don't again, I don't know what that expiration date is, but I think at some point people
gold will not be infinitely finite. Like eventually gold will become actually you know, there'll be a lot of it kind of, you know, floating around here. But Bitcoin, you know, is always going to be scarce. It will always be a scarce
quite a few angles right here to really point to Bitcoin and say, "Hey, this is in your portfolio. Maybe it's 5% of your portfolio. It's nothing crazy. But that is astronomical numbers in terms of Bitcoin gains that could be made in the
future. Speaking of AI, I think AI really changes everything when it comes before, but I really don't think enough people really getting what we're heading into. AI is set to disrupt everything. People are talking about this, talking
stuff like that. I don't think losing your jobs is much of pointing out. What I really think is an issue is disruption. I think AI is just primed to disrupt so many different SAS products and so many different markets,
know exactly how it's going to play out. And that uncertainty certainly has to maybe they're really heavily allocated into things like Figma or, you know, some of these classic SAS software companies that in the future will we
even need those things? And even the AI race as a whole is really confusing and constantly changing. Right now, we put a lot of emphasis on models, OpenAI and open source models coming to the market that are pretty much just as good. And
what happens, you know, when these become even better than, you know, some match them and they're a lot cheaper. Is there even any value in, you know, the models or is all the value captured at the compute layer or different part
of the stack? You get the idea. Like this is kind of an ever-changing thing that people are still figuring out. And so when it comes to allocating capital, money? Where you if you have trillions of dollars to allocate, where are you
putting all that money? And I think in that also confusing time, um Bitcoin it. You know, people are not going to put all their money there, but a place you're trying to figure out safe places to allocate those funds and figure out,
last kind of force that I really see changing crypto is also AI, but from a different angle. I think that crypto's past kind of bull of finance and all this kind of stuff. And And largely we are starting to see
stable coins, Robinhood jumping into crypto. It's all really exciting and amazing. And crypto has proven to be kind of smarter, better financial rails, digital money for the world. It's just, you know, we haven't quite reached, you
that, but you can see we're on we're on our way. We're we're making decent boring thing, right? It's becoming a boring, older narrative, and people are they're excited about the shiniest object in the room. And I think the idea
behind decentralized AI could really reignite the crypto space, which is, you know, inherently a very good decentralized coordination space. We've solved a lot of these same problems. And like I mentioned just a second ago, we
absurdly good, and it's only getting better. And so if decentralized models, like there's actually a really strong case for this There really hasn't been even over the last couple years. Like we're only
we're really saying, "Wow, like this is crazy. It might be that the models don't thought." And I think, you know, most people would actually prefer if models were decentralized and no one company or government kind of held all that power,
but if it was kind of like democratized power, a little bit more spread out, think with their money. And that really opens up the crypto space to be transformed into something completely new. Crypto space has always been trying
we're a decentralized app store and and all these different things that crypto's tried to latch onto outside of finance. And so far, you know, not a lot of those things have panned out. But, I think decentralized AI could be the the
revitalization force for crypto in this next leg of the cycle, where we really see a lot of interest in crypto for that re- just specifically for that reason. they won't be interested in DEXes, but they'll be insanely interested in
decentralized AI models and infrastructure built within the crypto space. And so, those three forces, I think, really have the potential this next leg of the cycle to send crypto not only to 10 trillion, but I think even
potentially beyond that. And I think too many people have kind of sur- succumbed for Bitcoin? Like, what's left for crypto? We exhausted all the narratives think actually we have some of the most exciting narratives ahead, really
exciting institutional flows coming, and I think crypto AI narrative it is just it first started, to be honest. Um I think it was it was crypto trying to didn't really make sense to me back then. But, now looking at it today, I
narrative fits a lot better and is a lot more real than it ever has been. And I kind of combined coming together are really prime set up for what could the most interesting crypto cycles we've ever seen. And if you're curious about
seeing my entire portfolio, or you want to see every time I buy and sell various video market updates, the Obsidian Council is currently closed to new have been asking when I'm going to open it back up. I opened it back up midway
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