Brian Sullivan (Senior National Correspondent) 00:00.000
Swan Bitcoin CEO, Corey Clifton. All right, Corey, so obviously you're exposed to Bitcoin, you want it to do well, you're not coming in as a a neutral party, make the bull case for Bitcoin and other cryptos right now.
Corey Klippsten (CEO and Founder) 00:16.200
Brian, uh you're the lucky charm for Bitcoin and uh and we're here to usher in a a nice new rally in 2026. So yeah, it has been it has been a rough fall uh right after a nice rise. Remember we actually touched 73K before that rise up to 126, and now we're settling into kind of
Corey Klippsten (CEO and Founder) 00:34.960
the high 80s. It's been bouncing between 85 and 90, maybe 91 for a couple of weeks now. I think the bigger story if I zoom out is these four-year cycles that we got so used to in the Bitcoin space where there was a bull market peak in 2013, 2017, 2021, followed by the price
Corey Klippsten (CEO and Founder) 00:53.520
never actually reaching that level the following year. So there was never a time in 2014 where the price surpassed that high 2013. Same thing for 18 versus 17, same thing for 22 versus 21 with the FTX collapse and all of that. And I think because we didn't see this astronomical
Corey Klippsten (CEO and Founder) 01:09.920
price rise in 2025 that you might have expected if you still believed in those having driven cycles or liquidity driven cycles or whatever it was that was causing that 4-year cycle. Because there wasn't an astronomical rise, it's hard to imagine some precipitous fall from here.
Corey Klippsten (CEO and Founder) 01:27.000
It seems like there's plenty of institutional money and government money on the bid and lots of people buying and more and more people coming in. Adoption in Bitcoin is kind of a a a one-way motion. People don't tend to get into Bitcoin and then get out of it. They generally
Corey Klippsten (CEO and Founder) 01:39.400
stick. It's just a matter of how much they buy. And so I think I think we have more than a 50% chance is how I handicap it of a new all-time high in 2026. So I actually do expect that we'll see above 125k next year.
Brian Sullivan (Senior National Correspondent) 01:55.120
Above 125k. Uh this might be a little bit off topic and by the way I love being a lucky charm better than the Grim Reaper. Yeah. Right? No. Uh which is this. A lot of these Bitcoin miners, the Cipher's of the world, Terra Wolves, Hut 8, whatever they are, they've gone more and
Brian Sullivan (Senior National Correspondent) 02:10.280
out to AI power. They're kind of They're not leaving Bitcoin mining, but the focus has been elsewhere. Does that actually help or hurt the Bitcoin case if fewer huge industrial miners are going after that ledger?
Corey Klippsten (CEO and Founder) 02:24.920
Look, the Bitcoin mining space is always so dynamic and there is a nice interplay between between smaller scale miners and these larger institutional industrial scale miners. And yeah, you are absolutely right. There has been tremendous stock performance by the Bitcoin mining
Corey Klippsten (CEO and Founder) 02:39.920
stocks that have leaned into AI over the last few years. And you see even some of the larger ones like CoreScientific which came out of bankruptcy famously and has had a nice little run here. I think they've just come out and said that they're going to be 100% HPC by 2028 or
Corey Klippsten (CEO and Founder) 02:54.680
2029. So they want to get out of Bitcoin mining completely. All this does is just create more opportunities And remember, just because hash rate might fall or go up or whatever, it doesn't really change the security model of Bitcoin, and it really doesn't change anything about
Corey Klippsten (CEO and Founder) 03:10.960
the price. The the hash rate and sort of what it costs to mine a Bitcoin is a lagging indicator. It's something that actually follows the price, not the other way around.