Emergency: $19B Crypto Heist — My Bitcoin Game Plan

Okay, I'm gonna do an emergency press conference here on Bitcoin. We had the$19 billion crypto heist on Friday. It was unbelievably well. Executed, and I think the perpetrators could not have imagined such a success. I'm going to get into my theory on this based on what I see. The internet can tell me where I'm wrong later. But here's what I think these are the most important points.

for coin holders specifically. At the end of this, we're gonna have my Bitcoin Outlook, how that's changed, plus three cryptos to watch. So the first thing I think We all need to understand what happened Friday, just a high level overview. Trump talked tariffs, the market crashed, SP was down like three percent, five PM came around, he said the hundred percent tariff and the crypto market absolutely the bottom fell out of it.

And everybody's emailing me, DMing me, calling me, saying, why was crypto so impacted by tariff stuff? The answer is interesting. We're going to dive into that now. But first.

We need to come into this with a clean slate mindset as it seems, I believe. So first of all, you know, this I think was a coordinated attack that wiped out billions of dollars in cryptocurrency trading, there is an extraordinary amount of leverage available to people. Some of these exchanges For every one thousand dollars you have, you can open a position of ten thousand dollars, twenty thousand dollars, etc. Once you've lost the one thousand dollars.

Of your capital, the position gets liquidated, meaning you're forced to sell or close the position. You could buy twenty thousand dollars worth of Ethereum or Dogecoin or Solana, and all it would take is a five percent move against you. to cause that position to be closed and you get liquidated. So here's the liquidations that occurred on Friday. 19 billion in total, 10 billion at Hyperliquid. That was the main place where there's tons of leverage positions. Bybit, Binance.

billions of dollars of levered positions were liquidated. So what caused this? A lot of people are saying was the Trump family or Trump connections involved in this because there was some big positions taken short right before his announcement. It's very possible that Trump family connections profited from him talking about tariffs. I don't put anything past that, but there was more to it than that. This is USDE. This is a stable coin on the Binance platform, an enormous exchange.

You can see on Friday at the the top chart shows what happened to this. And this is supposed to be$1 flat. All the time and never really deviate from one dollar. There's algorithmic trading that happens to make sure it stays at a dollar. This is a stable coin people can use in their account. to represent dollars without exposure to a specific crypto. The top chart shows what USDE did during the Friday meltdown.

On all other exchanges other than Binance, it went down to point nine nine five seven. So it lost not even half a penny. of value and went right back up to a dollar. It performed the way it should have. But what happened on Binance itself on the exchanges because they had a known vulnerability in the way they calculated and reacted to changes in this stablecoin.

It went down. This stable coin that's supposed to stay at a dollar, that only went down half a penny everywhere else on Binance went down to 65 cents. Because someone sold millions of dollars all at once, specifically on the Binance platform. There was an eight day window where this could have happened. Binance announced that on Tuesday, the 14th, they were going to fix this.

Because it had become a known pain point. So there's an eight-day window where somebody could have pulled off this type of attack. This is really critical to understand. The value of your dollars in their dollar stablecoin fell to 65 cents. If you had a$1,000 balance on Binance and you opened a 20 to 1 leveraged position, one thousand to twenty thousand dollar position. All of a sudden, because of this attack on the Binance stablecoin.

That$1,000 of collateral on their end became worth six hundred and fifty dollars. Even without the twenty thousand dollars worth that you bought changing in price at all, your leverage has gone from twenty to one. All the way up to thirty to one. Or more. And now you get liquidated. They sell the$20,000 of the coin that you had, which pushes that price lower.

And that happens to thousands of users across the entire platform, pushing prices of cryptocurrencies lower while collateral is artificially manipulated, forcing liquidation after liquidation, dumping cryptos to the point that you get

This nineteen billion dollars worth of liquidations. It all started from this attack on the Binance stablecoin. By attacking that, the attackers knew. they would expand leverage to the point of liquidation on that platform. And then those liquidations would force crypto prices lower, which would cause other liquidations for people that were less left.

My theory is that This was the coordinated attack attack the Binance stablecoin, get these levered positions to liquidate, push crypto prices lower, etc. And before we do that, we're going to open a big short position on a lot of cryptocurrencies. And make millions, if not billions, of dollars. That's what I think happened. Now, where does the Trump tariff stuff come into play? This may have been.

the luckiest moment of a crypto attacker's life when Trump said, I'm going to be talking about tariffs at five PM after the typical New York exchange stock market. close. There's very little liquidity in the crypto markets at that point in time. So he's going to talk at five PM. What better time to execute this plan? We're the attackers. We've got eight days to do this. We've got six days left.

Friday, here comes this gift of the president of the United States talking about China tariffs on a negative down day for the stock market. We can execute this plan that will create massive waves of selling in the crypto market. That gives us Cover? an accelerant and some external source to blame for all this selling. And it gives people even more reason to sell and be fearful to make this position more profitable. I don't think the Trump family

Or connections had anything to do with this. I think it was a sophisticated attack by someone who knew how the Binance system worked. Uh, it's possible that. i it it's always possible that someone in a position of power in the Trump family, you know, we know that they like to make money. We know like that they like to use uh their pulpit to make money. It's very possible that they were

tangentially involved or had a part of the timing. I don't know, but they didn't need to be part of it for it to work. How did Bitcoin do? Bitcoin did pretty well during all this. You can see Bitcoin versus Ethereum versus Solana versus Ripple. Purple line, Bitcoin got knocked down, is now down seven or eight percent from before where where the attack happened. The others down 11, 14, 12%. Bitcoin's the best in turbulent time.

Gold was even better. It was positive. Bitcoin's the best of the cryptocurrencies. Gold was the best asset to be in during all of this. What I like about Bitcoin. Is that it did what it's done for a very long time. For the past year. Bitcoin up eighty-one percent, gold up fifty-two percent, silver up fifty-two percent, while the indexes, Nasdaq, SP, and real estate all performed worse. Two-year, three-year, four-year, five-year annual returns.

Bitcoin and gold at any level, one year, two year, three year, four-year, or five year, Bitcoin and gold beat the Nasdaq, beat the SP 500, beat real estate. Pretty awesome. So Bitcoin is king. We know that. But the biggest lesson of this whole thing, in my opinion. is that leverage makes your position a target. When you take a position using leverage, say ten to one leverage, I as a potential attacker know.

And if I can move the asset price down ten percent or your collateral value down 20%, I can create a situation where you must sell for a complete loss. I don't like being in those positions, so I don't use leverage. I use cold storage. I keep my Bitcoin in cold storage. When this whole thing was happening and everybody was worried, you didn't have to be using leverage to be worried. Because if you're on an exchange that offers leverage,

Your exchange you're worried during this entire thing that your exchange is going upside down.$19 billion is being liquidated. Can your exchange sustain this and defend your capital? Because they're lending your capital to others. to provide this leverage. So exchange users, especially those leveraged trading, were liquidated or very worried during this entire thing. But if you have Bitcoin, the best asset in cold storage.

It can't be touched. Only you can move it. No one can reach in and grab it. It's yours. That's the biggest takeaway from me. Cold storage wins again. It's not your keys. They're not your coins.

My Bitcoin outlet. I think this event probably took some trust. out of the market. Bitcoin still gets lumped in with cryptos. There's no way around it. And that's the truth. I think a lot of people read about these massive crashes. They see that Bitcoin moved down Fifteen percent within an hour, it had a twenty thousand dollar. I think it was twenty, it was at least ten or fifteen thousand dollar hourly bar.

Daily bar, insane amounts of movement and all the other cryptos, some completely wiped out. You read about people that lost millions of dollars because they were levered and I'm in cold storage. I'm still affected by that story. So I think Bitcoin is going to grind here. I think it probably drifts lower because there's less trust. It needs another catalyst higher. So what am I doing? I'm buying Bitcoin. I'm doing the same thing I've done for years.

adding to my Bitcoin position every single day and putting it into cold storage. Because I think Bitcoin eventually becomes what gold's market cap is, which is over ten X from here. Aside from Bitcoin, what cryptos are we watching? I think there's three that I really am getting very interested in here. Of course, Bitcoin's always going to be on the list. Bitcoin is an infinite hold for us with an infinite price target. But I'm also starting to like Solana a lot.

I like the liquidity pools on Solana. Solana could be the rails of the future. I think it's probably better than Ethereum, although Ethereum has a big moat and is way ahead. Solana's definitely worth looking at. That's right around one ninety five, one ninety six right now. Very volatile. I think it's worth adding a little exposure, potentially getting into a liquidity pool, that kind of thing. I like Solana. I really like the tech there and what you can build on top of it.

Other than Bitcoin is World Liberty Financial, W L F I. This took a tank down, I think it got as low as eight cents. I think it's trading at twelve or thirteen cents right now. If you think the Trump family is out to enrich themselves, then You gotta think they're going to get their own coin, uh, their own platform pumped up, and they're going to use their connections to do so.

So on a dip from twenty cents, twenty so twenty one, twenty two cents, uh down to twelve or thirteen here, I think it's worth a look whether you're pro Trump and think they're earnestly trying to change the ecosystem of the economy for the better. Or if you just think they're corrupt. Either way, I think This is one that could benefit quite a bit. Really risky. I wouldn't put a lot of money into it, but I think it's at least one to watch. World Liberty Financial.

Bottom line, I think there's a lot more to this story than just the tariff talk. This was a coordinated attack where the attackers used the tariff press conference. As a smokescreen, as a accelerant for what they wanted to do. And that was Steal a lot of money from a lot of people by manipulating the market. We're not going to use leverage.

We're not going to keep our coins on exchanges. We're going to keep them in our own wallets that we control. That's the big takeaway here. I hope you enjoyed this. Hope you didn't get wiped out. I don't think any of you did because you've been listening to us, but We're long Bitcoin and we love it from here. We'll continue to look for other opportunities as we move forward. That's it for today. We'll see you again. I'm Andy Swan. Appreciate all of you.