Why a new Bitcoin all-time high is inevitable, per Bitwise

2 Nov 2025 · 13:35

Matt Hougan, chief investment officer at Bitwise, and analyst Ryan Rasmussen explain why they expect Bitcoin to set a new all-time high before the end of the year. They dismiss the end-of-month book-balancing story as conspiracy theorizing and argue that traditional finance is now the marginal buyer of large-cap crypto assets, with portfolios adding Bitcoin and gold. They also weigh Trump tweets and the government shutdown as near-term risks.

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Is there any truth since you guys speak to these institutions to this balancing of order books narrative I've seen a few times because I always see if ever there's a dump of of of crypto in the last couple days of the month. I go on X and people are like well you know what it is. So all those traders they got to balance their books and I'm like I don't even I don't even know what you mean by that. Like why would they just offload stuff to just what to make the P&L look better cut the losses from the month? Can you guys speak to that a bit? Is that is that true? Are we going to see a balancing of books at the end of October? pump. Uh what what happens there for institutions?

>> Go ahead. >> I think I I think there's a lot of um like conspiracy theorizing that happens around market movements that can just be explained away around there's a lot of interest and participants in the Bitcoin market and that can lead to to funkiness in price action. You know, an additional element to that is that people who want to trade uh assets 247365 can't do that in traditional markets. Can't do that with traditional assets. Can't do that with things like hedge funds and other alts, but you can do that with Bitcoin and with crypto. And that just leads to some of these scenarios that I think people create conspiracy theories around. But ultimately, uh, you know, I think that natural forces are driving the market

rather than, uh, you know, coordinated forces. >> Yeah, I I couldn't agree more. Everyone wants to believe in this great, you know, like hidden oz controlling all sorts of markets, but all the explanations of it happen postfact. Uh, very few will predict it, you know, pre-event and that's cuz it's mostly nonsense. Um, obviously there are traders who need to match their option strategies against the physical and that may impact books. There are traders who don't want to go into weekends long or short an asset. So you can see reversions or you can see serial correlation if they want to position so they look like they were smart because they have their end of quarter reports.

All that happens on the margin but it's it's not the tail wagging the dog, right? These are uh these these are the imaginations of this this magical Oz. Uh they're traders. They they have an impact, but it's not they're not dictating what's going on in the market. >> The Dens need a story, man. We need a story to tell ourselves. At every at every 1K that Bitcoin moves, there's got to be a reason. There's got to be somebody pulling the strings. >> It's totally right. Yeah. I mean, yeah. My wife comes in and asks me how it's going. I say it goes up and down, which I think is a detailed technical description of what happens.

>> The only two guarantees, the price will go up and the price will go down without a doubt. Um, but I don't know if I I don't know if I got a clear answer from you guys on the November thesis, right? because that's um you know everything in this report everything from you know really intelligent people from like you guys points like Ryan you're saying Q4 still super bullish all our guys on the pro team all our analysts everybody feels the same way um and yet the sentiment doesn't feel that way you guys I don't want to talk about the sentiment because I think we just did that uh people just kind of making up stories for slow price action or or different price action but is like a very clear question for you guys will Bitcoin and he reached an all-time high in November.

>> I'll I'll go, Ryan. You're just waiting for me to jump in. I look, I think it will. I think there's a chance it goes lower. I think there's a chance it wicks below 100K. I don't think that's impossible. You see, Standard Chartered put out a note uh a day ago saying below 100K is inevitable, but I think the long-term thesis is still intact. I think crypto is not driving the bus. And I think that's why sort of crypton natives are so depressed because they're depressed. There's been no real alt season. It's been sort of a a disappointing cycle. Uh they're used to the 4-year turning over right about now.

But I think what they miss is that Tradfi is driving the bus here. Tradfi is the marginal buyer of the large cap crypto assets. And I think they're going to paint their portfolios into the end of the year to show that they have allocations to gold, to show that they have allocations to Bitcoin. And so we could well dip, but I do suspect we set a new all-time high before the end of the year. >> Yeah, I would just second that. I think that we will set a new all-time high before the end of the year. November seems like a prime candidate for that. I think last time that we recorded it was Friday of the flash crash October 10th and we like recorded >> in the morning. So we had had the initial statements but we you know

recorded hours before the chaos that ensued and I think had that not happened we would already be at new all-time highs. I think that was of course a minor setback but that flushed a lot of leverage out of the system. Most institutional investors have no idea what even happened that Friday because they were more concerned with the statements that were being made and how markets were going to move and how futures opened over the weekend and what happened on Monday. So I think that ultimately that just reset the market and will will allow us to push higher as more flows come in. And I also think that you have these uncertainty shocks from things that are tweeted out by Trump and then they end up not being as big of a factor. And I think without those tweets we would be at all-time highs. I think as we get desensitized to

these types of events over and over again and the recovery becomes quicker and quicker that we're going to continue to push higher and those forces that Matt mentioned which is professional investors and institutions are going to ultimately push us higher and we're going to churn through all of that seller uh exhaustion that we ultimately will see. Did you know you can earn Bitcoin without ever buying it? That's where the Gemini credit card comes in. Here's how it works. Earn up to 4% back in Bitcoin on gas, transit, and ride share, 3% on dining, 2% on groceries, and 1% on everything else. Use it just like any other credit card, and you're building a crypto portfolio at the same time. The best part, the Gemini credit card has no annual fee and works

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government's still shut down right now. Uh I think I haven't checked the poly market odds, but they're not they're they're I don't think they're great for I think they're maybe end of October looking like that might end, but that's still just polyarket. Um uh Ryan or Matt, how how big of an impact would the Clarity Act passing have on crypto? And let's say the government opens reopens at the end of the month. How soon would something like that happen? I think the long-term impact of the Clarity Act is tremendous and greatly mispriced by investors. I think that we have this regulatory flywheel that's already in motion. And it's easy to forget all of the regulatory advancements that we've made since the election last year because there was a

period where every single week some new regulatory or legislative win was up on the leaderboard and you were like, "Oh, awesome, great. Oh, awesome. Great." And you kind of got used to it. But if you think back at like the 10 biggest wins that we've had, they are massive. And the Clarity Act would be right up there with those wins. And so I think over the long term, this pushes crypto significantly higher. And I think short term, you'll have some price action. But I view the Clarity Act passing as more of a multi-year tailwind to crypto that continues to to fuel this regulatory flywheel, which is certainly helping push markets higher. It's helping institutional investors come into the market and allocate to crypto. It's helping institutions and corporations

come into the market and build crypto services which drives investment in the space which ultimately drives prices higher. So I think that it will have a major impact but it'll be a longer term one than people are thinking and people are mispricing it. >> Yeah, I think that's right. For what it's worth, Poly Market is not optimistic. It thinks we're going to be shut down until at least like mid November if I'm looking at the right Poly market. They're probably multiple, but the one I'm looking at puts a 50% plus odds on after November 12th, which is a while, which is crazy. Uh, yeah, it's it's such a commentary on what's going on now. Um, my my view of the Clarity Act is that the market has priced in it not happening.

>> And uh, the reason for that is that you have the government shutdown and you have the Democrats pushing against the Republican version and a big conflict there. And I actually I suspect there's a chance it won't happen. Um but I think if it does happen, it's a major positive catalyst. So I think it's important to think about where the market is versus the probability. If it if it truly fails, there's probably a little bit of downside, but if it does happen, I think it's a huge catalyst, particularly for ETH Salana on down more so than Bitcoin. But generally speaking, it's one of the things that could drive us to new all-time highs. It it feels to me like people are also you can get very focused on the legislation side and say okay we have two legislations we have Genius Act

passed we have Clarity Act coming and you think okay well we might shoot 50% which feels like crap right okay that's bad right that's you know that is a very easy story to tell but people aren't focusing enough on what's happened on the regulatory side as a result of the Genius Act we have had so many wins that you guys mentioned in the report goes into detail on that. That is there's wins every week, every month there that like nobody reads those documents or really pays attention and it's difficult to really feel the impact of that because that's also the the impact is never felt immediately. But to me, you can't look past, you know, the SEC crypto framework, all the things that have happened. You know, Matt, you've

been calling for ET Paloo ETP Palooa for a while, uh, as a result of everything that's happened with the SEC and the listing standards. And so, it feels to me even if we don't get Clarity Act, like that regulatory tailwind is still there. >> Yeah, >> I agree with that. It's absolutely >> Oh, go ahead, Ry. I I was just going to say there's a there's a page in this report uh it's page 72 which highlights just the regulatory developments in the US only over Q3 right so it's a three-month period in the US and yeah I think you brought it up right there thank you you have project crypto launched by the SEC which was basically a road map by the highest ranks of the SEC on where markets are headed with

tokenization and the integration of crypto into traditional financial markets and a generational opportunity to improve the way that finance finance is conducted and investing is conducted in the United States. You had Trump signing the Genius Act. You had generic listing standards which is going to lead to the ET Palooa that Matt mentioned. We had green lights on crypto staking on spot trading from the CFTC. We had a fair banking order. We had a reverse on crypto 401ks uh by the Department of Labor and by Trump. Like those are all individually huge developments and things that two years ago everyone would have been doing like back flips and shooting confetti and cartwheels over. if one of those happened over a given 12-month period and yet all seven of these happened in

the last three months and this ignores the things that happened in the three months preceding that and the three months preceding that. I think that's part of this flywheel that people are just getting wrong and I think that the you know clarity act going back to where we started on this is going to be massive. It's going to be as massive if not more than project crypto and the genius act and other elements that we've we've seen fuel markets higher and it gives comfortability to traditional investors that this is a market that's here to stay. It reduces risk of them allocating. It reduces you know all kinds of other market risks for participants in the market. I think that is a huge catalyst.

>> Okay. So you guys are saying that I shouldn't take this 19% chance on poly market of the clarity act being signed into law in 2025. Could it not would could this not just double when the government shutdown ends though? Even even like it doesn't have to be it doesn't have to resolve to 100% but it could just go back up to 40 or 50%. Right? That's all you need. That's that's the beauty of these prediction markets. You just need the trend to change a little bit. >> It was in in July it was at 87% on July 17th that that this would pass in 2025. Now it's at 19.

>> Yeah. Yeah. I I would add there there's been two things to do with the Trump administration that consistently have worked. And the first is to fade his tweets, right? Because it doesn't end up being as bad as the initial tweet happens. That that's what happened uh a few Fridays ago. And the second is to count on them delivering on their core promises on crypto. They've actually done that pretty consistently. And so I suspect that 19% bid on Poly Market is a good bid to hit. Like that's my guess. My guess is that will go up by the end of the year. Uh, I could be wrong, but I think there's my personal read of the probability there is that it's higher than one out of five.

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