When I sat down to talk to David Yaffe Bellany, I pulled up a chart of Bitcoin's price this year.

So you can see that back in January of 2025, the price of Bitcoin was at around $100,000.

But that today it's actually down closer to $90,000.

David covers the crypto industry for the New York Times, and I wanted to start with the price of Bitcoin, which has dropped roughly 16% in the past month, because it's telling us something about the

crypto market.

Bitcoin is usually a pretty good bellwether for the general health of the crypto industry

and all the other cryptocurrencies. It's not perfect. Sometimes there'll be moments where

the prices of what are known as altcoins, the more obscure

cryptocurrencies, either rise or fall a lot more dramatically than Bitcoin.

But overall, yeah, you look at Bitcoin as a kind of barometer for how crypto writ large is

doing.

Crypto writ large is in a complicated place.

Falling prices have made some people in the industry nervous, even as the Trump

administration and the Trump family are deeply intertwined with crypto and need it to succeed.

I wanted to know how David thinks about this particular moment in crypto.

This is definitely a distinct era in the history of crypto. And I always tell people that covering

this industry, it's like 100 years of financial history squished into a relatively short period

of time. These eras come and go really quickly. I've been

covering the industry since late 21, early 22, and I can think of at least three or four

kind of distinct periods. But this is definitely an era of a lot of optimism for crypto.

You know, notwithstanding the recent fall in Bitcoin's price, it's still a kind of bull market moment where, you know,

by and large, these coins are going up and crypto companies are doing well.

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