Welcome back to The Breakdown with me, NLW.

It's a daily podcast on macro, Bitcoin, and the big picture power shifts remaking our world.

What's going on, guys? It is Tuesday, January 9th. Once again, it is more ETF hype. Before we get into that, however, if you are enjoying the breakdown, please go subscribe to it, give it a rating, give it a review, or if you want to dive deeper into the conversation, come join us on the Breakers Discord. You can find a link of the show notes or go to bit.ly slash breakdown pod. Well, friends, it is getting louder and louder and louder.

We have people involved in all of these applications, teasing on Twitter.

Craig Somm from Grayscale wrote dotting some eyes and crossing some tease.

Anthony Scaramucci wrote announcement Wednesday, trading Thursday.

And with all of this, the Bitcoin market has come alive. During Monday's trading session,

enthusiastic bidding pushed the price above 47,000. Last week's Matrixport Fudd has been completely erased,

and Bitcoin is back at new multi-year highs not seen since April 2022. In fact, I saw a statistic from

somewhere that Bitcoin has only been above this price for around

3% of days.

Now, during all of this trading, liquidations were relatively mild, with just 155 million in short

positions forced to close.

That's obviously still a meaningful liquidation event, but still much smaller than other

big price moves in recent months.

Open interest in Bitcoin futures markets increased by

around 9% across Monday to reach about 20 billion in notational value. That's broadly comparable

to the amount of leverage in the system heading into last week's trading, which indicates

that traders have entirely rebuilt their bullish position since the Matrix Port Flush last Wednesday.

Elmax Group marketing strategist Joel Kruger thinks that the ETF approvals will be a

by the news event stating an approval could trigger a 10 to 15% rally fueled by sideline capital.

The flip side, though, he added, if there's no approval, projections hinted a possible correction,

...