Trading the Markets: November 12, 2025 | Kris Bullock and Bijan Maleki

0:00Hey, everyone. As you know, on this podcast, I bring the best guests in the world at that nexus of understanding of macro crypto crypto in the exponential age of technology. If you're enjoying the show, a quick five-star rating goes a long way. It helps us grow and keep these conversations coming with the best guests in the world. Thanks a lot.

0:43Happy Wednesday, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Trading the Markets. Of course, we're joined by Chris Bullock, aka BlastoPlast. This is the show where we break down what's going on in the market, talk about any trades we're interested in looking at, and of course, as always, take your questions live. We've got a pretty great show for you guys today. Here is what we're breaking down. We're going to talk about institutional Bitcoin holdings. We're going to talk about the apparent Bitcoin demand, U.S. liquidity versus global liquidity, the Aerodrome versus Uniswap showdown, and I guess hype showdown as well.

1:21They've entered the ring in that one. And we're going to be talking about the Monad token launch coming on Monday. It's going to be Coinbase's first ever token sale, and they're starting with Monad, which at one point was the most hyped chain to hit crypto Twitter. So we'll see how that goes and we'll break that down. And as always, guys, please like and subscribe to the show and share it so that everyone can get their hands on this, get their eyes on this, because we need to talk the markets, especially in times like these. Chris, happy Wednesday. How are you doing today? Doing well, thank you.

1:58Yeah. Yeah. It's funny. I didn't want to come into this show and just be like, oh, we're still waiting on the government to reopen. The prices are red. Everything sucks. What is there even to talk about? You know, it's just like so boring. And I get that. And it is. And of course, we are still waiting. We know the vote is scheduled to be at around 4, I think 4 p.m. today is what I what I last read. But it's likely to go late into the evening. It's not like we're going to know the outcome of it anytime soon. Obviously, we all hope that it will be positive and that they do reopen it and things, you know, kind of kick back on from there.

2:29So in the meantime, I didn't want to just, again, look and say, oh, Bitcoin's down today. Everything's down today. It sucks. So I wanted to kind of dig in a little bit deeper and look at some things that I'll be looking at for, you know, that have been going on over the previous month plus that it's been closed. And then what I think might happen and what I want to see happen going forward. And so I wanted to start by talking about institutional holdings because I keep seeing it's crazy. If you go on crypto Twitter or X these days, it's I feel like it's really bad right now. It's so polarized and everybody is just so insane and so angry and so aggro.

3:04And it's kind of a mess. But a lot of people are talking about institutions aren't buying Bitcoin. Where is this demand going to come from to sort of kick this off into the next year? like all the sort of four-year cycle doomsdayer people are just saying there's no institutional demand. And so I wanted to dig into that and be like, is that actually true? Like what's really going on there? And so I have a chart here that I wanted to show. This is basically, we've got three lines here. So this is a Bitcoin candle chart in the background. This sort of blue line is total aggregate institutional holdings.

3:36And then it's broken up essentially by ETFs and treasuries. And so we can see here that, yes, it did peak back coincidentally or not on about the same time that the government closed, which I think was on October 1st. So, you know, the week of basically it peaked. So, too, did the Bitcoin price. We can see, though, that it didn't really it's not they're not selling. Certainly they're not selling en masse. Yes, there's been a net outflow. Sure, obviously. But it's not like it's rolled over and is bleeding out. And it's barely back down to levels that it had like at the end of September, essentially.

4:13And it's even ticked back up. So, yes, institutions have sold some. Yes, the demand has maybe waned. But this is by no means a capitulation, you know, from an institutional standpoint. Obviously, treasuries haven't sold because that's in their nature. They're not really going to be selling. They generally just buy and hold for a long time. So you're going to see it reflected in the ETFs. And yes, again, the ETFs did come down. But again, really only back down to levels from like the final week of September, not even really a trend reversal, I would say. And so to me, this looks a whole lot more like retail sellers panicking and institutions just kind of sitting there on the sidelines waiting for the bottom so that they can buy it back cheaper, you know, if you ask me.

4:54And so I don't see this as a drop off, a steep drop off in institutional demand or at all. I just see this as smart money, if anything, you know? So I wanted to kind of highlight this. I thought this was interesting. It's also reflected in this other chart called apparent demand is this indicator. And so first of all, what does this mean? What is apparent demand? I know it's kind of a weird indicator. So I'll just read this real quick, the description. Apparent demand is a commodity metric to gauge demand, which measures production, i.e. Bitcoin mining issuance minus inventory. And by inventory, it means supply inactive over one year.

5:37Positive values suggest rising demand. In other words, it's mining issuance, or it's sort of short-term buying activity outweighing miner issuance is kind of how I look at this. And yes, it did dip around the same time that the government closed, but we've seen it kick back up and actually set a new higher high from these previous peaks right here. So demand has increased above the rate at which Bitcoin is being mined, which I think is also a good sign. Also sort of, again, exemplified by this very slight, I think, uptick that we're seeing here in the ETFs. And then finally, I wanted to talk about liquidity because that's kind of another thing that we talk about a lot.

6:22And I've got it right here. We talk about global liquidity and how we see global liquidity going up. And this actually is sort of US liquidity in isolation. And we can see that, you know, it has been in a downtrend basically since July, effectively, it did kind of peak up right around when the government closed, and then it's had another steep drop off, and it's peaking back up again. So this is something I'm going to be keeping a close eye on once the government reopens? Because a lot of us have been saying, well, the government's closed and that's kind of why there's no liquidity. And it's like, I get that it's not quite that simple, but I'm definitely gonna be looking at this chart to see what and how much of a reversal we actually do get to sort of put some real numbers behind that statement, that notion that's going around that really is because of the closure that sort of we're seeing this negative dip in liquidity.

7:15So it's not showing us really anything in the moment, but this is something that I'm going to be watching closely, like even starting tomorrow, hopefully once things kick back online. And we'll see. This will sort of tell us when the sort of mechanics have changed, when the floodgates have been actually reopened and money is coming back into the system. It will be reflected in this chart here. So this is something that I will be reporting on going forward. But in the meantime, we've got sort of a baseline level to note and keep an eye on going forward.

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8:21With a simple and intuitive platform, you could trade anytime, anywhere. Experience the fast, accessible futures trading you've been waiting for with Plus500. With over 20 years of experience, Plus500 is your gateway to the markets. Visit us.plus500.com to learn more. Trading in futures involves the risk of loss and is not suitable for everyone. Not all applicants will qualify. Plus500. It's trading with a plus. all right well it's not all bearish right and i'm always also reminded by times like this especially when we're ticking into extreme fear uh wise men have said bye when others are fearful be greedy rather when others are fearful and i can't help but just think of that right now Chris, there's also a little bit of kind of an interesting, I guess, protocol, you know, company crypto showdown going on.

9:17You know, what started behind the scenes now playing out pretty publicly to the masses between Uniswap, Aerodrome, and I guess hype, which, you know, kind of triggered a lot of this to an extent. What's going on with Aerodrome and Uniswap right now? So, yeah, it's funny. You know how, like, we've talked about in a lot of our shows, I remember even on Monday, we were talking about the best alts that you want to hold are the ones that, you know, accrue value back to the token. And Hyperliquid really set a perfect example of that when it broke out of the gate earlier this year when they basically take 97 % to 99 % of their profits and continually buy back the token to reduce the supply and create price appreciation, basically.

10:07And so a lot of people started comparing them to Uniswap, saying, well, why would I buy Uniswap when it's effectively just a governance token? It doesn't do anything. Uniswap makes tons of money, arguably, you know, nearly as much as Hyperliquid, but they don't do anything with their, like none of their fees go back to the token. So why would anyone want to hold Uniswap over Hype? It makes no sense, you know. And I think they kind of got the message. And so they recently announced that they were going to flip on the fee switch, so to speak, and, you know, give some of those fees generated back to the token holders.

10:40But in doing so, they've opted to pull some of those fees away from what they were giving to the liquidity pool providers, the LPs. And so now the LPs are like, well, hey, wait a minute. That's great for the token holders, but as an LP, what's my incentive to stick around here on Uniswap when I can go over to, say, Aerodrome, for example, which is crushing it on base chain, which basically dominates the trading volumes on base chain. Meanwhile, Aerodrome is giving away three to seven times higher returns for LPs than Uniswap is. Aerodrome basically distributes like 100 % of their protocol revenue back to stakers and liquidity providers.

11:23And so suddenly the Aerodrome liquidity providers are like, well, I'm going over to Aerodrome, you know, because like that's where the money's at. And so not all of them. It's not like it's a mass exodus or anything necessarily. But enough of them have said, hey, why stick around on Uniswap when I can go make three to seven times more money on Aerodrome staking, you know, in LPs over there. So suddenly, if we look at the charts here, we can see Aerodrome. Meanwhile, while everything is basically in a massive downtrend and barely holding on to support levels, we've got Aerodrome just crushing it in an uptrend, well above its bull market support band, above its 10, 20, and 50-day moving averages.

12:08It's doing well because they're seeing a big influx of people buying the Aerodrome tokens so that they can stake in these liquidity pools and things like that. So Aerodrome is sort of benefiting directly from this switch that Uniswap implemented on their end because of the way Aerodrome gives, you know, more of their money back to the LPs. Meanwhile, if we look at the Uniswap chart, initially it blew up on the announcement because everybody was like, finally, fees coming from Uniswap, you know, go back to the token. That's great. But then once it kind of became more clear what the dynamic was, between Aerodrome and Uniswap and how the LPs on Uniswap are being negatively impacted by this change of events, we've seen a bit of a correction as all of this realization has sort of taken hold.

12:58So it's going to be interesting to see how this plays out. I think another thing that is worth noting is Aerodrome has been hinting that they've been wanting to break out and kind of go multi-chain and exist on whatever, Ethereum, Solana, any other major blockchains like that. And I think if that happens, then there'll be much more of even a direct competitor to Uniswap with better returns across the board for both stakers and liquidity providers and token holders. So interesting. In a way, I kind of give the advantage to Aerodrome a little bit because again, their market cap is lower. They've got more upside.

13:35It takes less money to move the needle. So in terms of like an investment, I can see Aerodrome continuing to run a decent bit from here. particularly if they do, in fact, launch a multi-chain initiative and, you know, operate on these other blockchains. I think that, you know, that's going to serve to juice the price pretty good. I'm not going to say it's going to go to a certain number necessarily, but I just think that that gives it reasonably high upside potential over the coming months, particularly if the market as a whole resumes back to the upside. Meanwhile, you know, outside of that, we know Aerodrome is benefiting just from being the kind of the behind the scenes major DEX partner with Coinbase right now.

14:13And so anytime you buy some of these Coinbase or these assets that aren't listed on Coinbase, but sort of trade on the Coinbase decks behind the scenes, it's all happening on Aerodrome. And so Aerodrome has a lot going for it right now. And they're pulling the right levers, so to speak. And I think doing the right things and benefiting off of Uniswap's potentially strategic mistake. It's like Uniswap tried to sort of flip the switch to become competitive, but they didn't maybe execute it in the best possible way. We'll see how that shakes out. It will be interesting because, again, Uniswap is now giving fees back to token holders.

14:51So I do think that we will see at least some price appreciation there as a token holder. I don't know if it will be offset by the LPs moving away, and some of that trading volume will be offset by that. So it'll be interesting to see. But it does look like, in the short term at least, that Aerodrome is benefiting more from this change than Uniswap ultimately will. So it's an interesting dynamic. Yeah, for sure. I mean, not just the liquidity providers on Aerodrome are benefiting, but the holders of Aerodrome are benefiting to 30 % up in the last seven days. So we're definitely going to keep an eye on this, right?

15:29Uniswap was at one point the premier DEX, seems like basically the only DEX people were using. So now that they have competitors, they have to pivot, and that's what competition does. So hopefully it's ultimately good for us, the market participants. But, you know, we'll just keep an eye on that. So a quick break in your regular programming. If you're serious about your future, grab my free report called Prepare for 2030. I think you've got five years to make as much money as possible. And this guide will help you navigate what's coming. The link is in the description. Download it now. So, Chris, this is trading the markets, right?

16:06And we like to talk about, you know, trades that we're taking, you know, or interested, at least in diving into further. And we talked about, you know, I mentioned this at the top of the show. Monad is launching officially on Monday, November 17th in collaboration with Coinbase public token sale. Coinbase is first ever. So firstly, what are you thinking about how this public token sale is going to go? And then also, how do you feel about Monad in general off of the back of this sale? Obviously, it was very hype. That hype died down due to delays. And now we're potentially finally here. What are your thoughts on this?

16:54And how are you going to play it as well? Well, it's funny. Monad as a technology, I'm a little jaded. just in terms of these types of projects over the years, because so many have come out so hyped, saying we're going to be the biggest and the best and the fastest and the cheapest and all of this. And so many of them just amount to nothing in the end. So really what it's going to come down to is, for Monad to be successful, is does it get developer adoption? Does it get usage? Does it develop an ecosystem? It's kind of, we're seeing SWE struggle with that right now too. SWE came out of the gates ripping, and have done well, have sort of made inroads, but they're still ultimately struggling to have that sort of massive kind of mania that like, say, for example, we saw with Solana back at the end of 2024.

17:47You know, people were even questioning Solana a little bit at that point, but they kind of hit a home run with the launch of the likes of like Whiff and Bonk. And that sort of started that meme coin craze, which got a lot of attention onto Solana. And that kind of became their big, you know they were they were in the zeitgeist then at that point and that captured the broader crypto mind share and then you know it it they were able to further that momentum with you know jupiter coming along and having this amazing defi product and having it be so easy to transact uh in defi on on salon and things like that so sui hasn't quite captured that and sui is actually doing you know sui is still considered a relative success so for something like monad to come on right now at this point in the game i'm not saying they're not going to be successful but I'm just saying, you know, the odds are stacked against them.

18:34I mean, arguably, you know, and so it doesn't really matter what they look like on paper. It's ultimately going to matter if do they gain adoption. And that remains to be seen as with any new layer one. Now, as far as the token launch. Yeah, it is interesting. It's a new. So Coinbase has this new ICO platform, they call it, which which will be interesting to see. This will be the first sort of debut of it. I'm a little, as I talk about a lot, I generally try to avoid any kind of, I just call them VC tokens for, you know, to simplify it. But basically tokens that have a lot of money coming in, pre-sale buyers, you know, airdrops, things like that.

19:13Because what happens is inevitably, there's just so much selling pressure when it comes, when it launches, you know. And in the case of Monad, my research has shown there's going to be roughly 10 to 11 % of the of the supply will be liquid and, you know, from pre-sale tokens and airdrops that will likely, I'm not saying everybody's going to sell, but there will be selling pressure that will come from that. So I expect probably a decent dip right out of the gate because that's pretty common. Most of that stuff launches, especially on a big high profile exchange like Coinbase. And likely a lot of those people are going to sell.

19:48A lot of people who have no stake or no vested interest in the long-term outcome of Monad that just got free airdrop tokens, they just look at it as free money and they know historically a lot of the times when you get an airdrop if you don't sell it right away you know eight times out of ten you end up not being able to sell it for as much as you could have you know and so a lot of those people that again don't care they're just going to sell it so we will see selling pressure i feel like there always is but i do at the same time think that it's it's reasonable to think that monad might find a decent floor relatively quickly.

20:21I don't necessarily see it bleeding out for weeks and weeks on end. I think it'll find a floor and it might actually, you know, have some traction. I mean, again, ultimately it's going to, it's going to require adoption, real world adoption for it to, for it to ultimately run. But I don't know that there's going to be that much selling pressure right out of the gate. And I think the, I looked at like the, the market cap of the available circulating supply will be somewhere around 200 million, which is quite a bit lower than some of the multi-billion dollar launches that come out. And so I'm reasonably optimistic.

20:56I'm not saying I'm going to go buy Monad, you know, on day one or anything like that. I'm still going to like look for and expect a decent dip. But I, you know, I'll be, maybe once it does establish a floor and I feel like we're starting to see technical bottoming patterns on the chart, I might take a punt, you know, and buy a little here and there. I don't know. We'll see. Yeah. Listen, Chris, if Monad opens up at a 200 million market cap, I'm not even going to touch my airdrop and I'm just going to wait because that would be extremely bullish for me just based on what I know about Monad's marketing machine and all the KOLs and just all the kind of attention that they're able to generate on crypto Twitter.

21:40that that leaves a lot of upside for them as opposed to if they launch at that like five billion six billion dollar valuation i would be much more inclined to sell right out the gate because again when you're launching at an eight billion dollar valuation you're already essentially in the top 30 uh how much more are you gonna are you gonna go at that point um so that that would be pretty bullish to me i guess we'll see how it goes um when they launch but we have actually we actually have a few questions right now because you did mention SWE. So Alfie Hollins wants to know when the entire market rallies, most things go up.

22:18That's safe to say, Alfie for sure. Is SWE going to recover though? What do they need to do to regain momentum or on-chain metrics, Chris? I mean, I suppose that's the million-dollar question that we're all wondering is, do they go back up? I don't know. What I can say, at least for now, is it's tracking with the rest of the market. Well, I mean, it's not in an uptrend like the last chart we looked at here, but it is tracking with the rest of the market. And the price action looks basically identical to, I could pull up 10 other charts and it would show the same bottom, the same bounce, the same dip today.

22:56So in that sense, it's not like it has decoupled and is just bleeding out, bleeding out, you know, necessarily. So I'm reasonably optimistic that it will bounce. How high it will bounce, I don't know. And what do they need to do to regain that? I mean, really, they just need to, they need some wins. They need something that captures the mindshare, kind of like that example I gave of Solana just a little bit ago. And I don't know what that's necessarily going to be. I mean, they've tried things like that. They've tried doing meme coin, you know, meme coin launches, NFT launches, various things to help sort of get off the ground.

23:33And it's caught some attention, but in the end, it was just a bit of a copycat to what ultimately Solana had been successful with, you know, six to eight months prior or whatever, you know. And so they need kind of their own thing. And I know they've tried it with the gaming, with the gaming device, with, you know, the storage, and they've got some unique attributes for sure. I don't disagree with that, but none of them have, for whatever reason, been the thing that got everybody's attention. You know, there's not been anything on SWE where it's like you open crypto Twitter and literally everybody is talking about what's going on on SWE.

24:11I've not seen that once yet. And that's what needs to happen. And it can be, sometimes that can happen by virtue of marketing efforts and KOLs and things like that. But ultimately it's gotta be something that, you know, catches on and runs from there. They can help. They can help launch things like that and spark things like that, just like how Solana did with Bonk. But it's got to take off from there on its own and have its own momentum that carries it really up and sort of into the stratosphere. And so I don't know. I don't know what that thing ultimately will be. But that's what we're waiting for.

24:52All right, everyone. That's going to do it for us today on Trading the Markets. We'll, of course, see you back next week and on Monday for our live show in TA. Until then, don't fuck this up, everyone. You obviously enjoyed the episode because you're here with me at the end. But listen, don't forget to go to realvision.com forward slash join and grab a free membership. It's an incredible community packed with alpha, great investment ideas, and the research that you need to help you unfuck your future. So get started now. Go to realvision.com forward slash join. Have you ever wanted to trade Bitcoin but haven't dared try?

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