00:00 Speaker A

Bitcoin is rising today after President Trump signed a bill into law reversing Biden era IRS rules that make decentralized finance platforms comply with the same tax rules as traditional brokers. The crypto market has been on a wild ride since President Trump won the presidential election, initially jumping to all-time highs passing the $100,000 mark and then falling along with the broader market as investors go risk off amid trade policy uncertainty. Our next guest correctly calling the current so-called crypto bear market here. We’ve got Kamal Mcadem. He is a general managing partner at finality capital, which is a venture capital firm investing in early stage companies primarily in the blockchain Eden Web 3, IT and Web 3 sectors as well. And before that he also co-founded OmniX, a trading technology platform acquired by Gemini. Also want to mention our executive editor Brian Sozi still here to add additional context. Now Kamal, full disclosure for our audience, you’re obviously a Bitcoin investor yourself, but you called this bear market. Talk to me about what you were for seeing and how it’s impacting your activity with crypto as an investor yourself.

01:51 Kamal Mcadem

Well, I’ve been trading crypto for a long time since 2013. You know, I started out with $500 and ended up with 50 million back in 2022. Um, what we’ve seen recently is that I have a quant macro signal that gives me key inflection points in the market. Uh it flipped from positive to negative coming into January. So I could top would be around there from the charts. You could see that you could narrow down to the week that it

02:43 Kamal Mcadem

the top would come in sometime between January 13th to January 20th. The actual top was January 19th.

03:01 Speaker A

Come on, why hasn’t Bitcoin be why hasn’t been seen I guess as a safe haven during these risk off day for stocks? You know, you go back in the past and people would would flock to Bitcoin.

03:56 Kamal Mcadem

Well, the number one driver of crypto prices is macro conditions and macro conditions were tightening for whatever reason and um, you know, that’s that’s what’s going to drive crypto prices more than anything.

04:40 Speaker A

And if that’s what’s going to drive crypto, then I I guess I’m curious how you maintain investing in this digital currency in the environment that’s so defined by uncertainty right now.

05:25 Kamal Mcadem

Yeah, I mean, that’s why you know our particular strategy is to take risk off at times when there’s macro tightening and uh to put all that risk back on so that we can capture all the upside without suffering the downside volatility.

06:01 Speaker A

Okay, so then let’s talk about this for from the perspective of like a retail investor who has $10,000 to deploy in this environment. Do you think that they should be buying Bitcoin if they do have a longer time horizon?

06:41 Kamal Mcadem

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, this is a great time to buy. Um, you know, it’ll probably be a little lower at the end of the year, but there’s often divergences where, you know, Bitcoin might be a little bit lower, but some of the alts that people might invest in might have already hit their lows early in the year. So you won’t regret buying anything here five years from now.