Paramount Skydance said second-quarter profit fell, even as the company was boosted by its streaming media and studios operations, while its large TV division shed ad dollars and subscribers. David Ellison, the company’s CEO, vowed that its deal to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery would close, despite legal setbacks that have slowed the transaction.
“While there is still significant work to be done, our confidence in the opportunity continues to grow, and we’re excited for the future of this company powered by storytelling and accelerated by technology,” Ellison said in a letter to shareholders Tuesday.
Paramount said net earnings fell to $41 million, or four cents per share, in the second quarter, compared with $57 million, or eight cents a share, in the year-earlier period. Revenue rose 1% to $6.91 billion, compared with nearly $6.85 billion a year earlier.
In the company’s TV operations, the largest part of its business, revenue fell 9%, to $3.12 billion, compared with $3.45 billion a year earlier. Ad revenue fell 14%, due in part to difficult comparisons with 2025 that involved more NCAA advertising. Distribution fees fell 6%, due in large part to erosion of linear subscriptions.
Revenue from streaming operations rose 9% to $2.5 billion, with revenue from Paramount+ rising 16%. The service added 2 million subscribers in the second quarter, ahead of expectations. The company cited FIFA World Cup telecasts in certain Latin American nations as as UFC broadcasts in the U.S., and said Paramount+ had its “lowest churn quarter” since launch.
Revenue from the company’s studios rose 16% year-over-year to $1.3 billion, owing in part to films such as “Scary Movie” and programming for third parties from its TV production operations.
Paramount said its upfront sales process had ended, and it had secured “double-digit growth in commitments across the company,” without offering further details about volume or pricing.
The company projected revenue in the third quarter would grow between 4% to 7%, increasing to $6.95 billion and $7.15 billion, with more growth from studios and streaming and “moderating declines” from TV. Subscribers to Paramount+ are seen as “flattish.”
Despite a recent legal setback that will delay the closing of its deal for Warner, Ellison said he remained optimistic it would eventually close. “We remain confident the transaction will be completed, creating a stronger, more competitive media company,” he said, describing the combined entity as a smaller player when compared with “tech giants such as Netflix, Amazon, Apple, and others.”
The judge overseeing a lawsuit from a coalition of 12 states looking to block Paramount‘s $111 billion takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery has scheduled a trial to start in March.
The decision marks a blow for the studio, which pushed to start the trial in November. Starting on Oct. 1, Paramount will have to pay a ticking fee of roughly $7 million per day to Warners shareholders until the deal closes. It’ll likely be on the hook for upwards of $1.5 billion, accounting for the time it takes for the court to issue a ruling on the antitrust trial.
Last week, Paramount urged the court to start the trial in November while the states proposed to set it for April.
The trial will last 12 days, beginning on March 2 and ending on March 19. It will run from 8:30 am to 1:30 pm. The final pretrial conference will be held in February, with both sides completing briefing by the beginning of April.
Paramount’s legal team is led by Beth Wilkinson, who successfully defended Microsoft’s bid to acquire Activision Blizzard after the FTC sued. She joined last month a deep bench of lawyers for Paramount that includes Jeffrey Kessler and Paul Clement.
Facing lawsuits from the states, the Writers Guild of America and Paramount shareholders looking to stop the deal, Paramount’s bid to acquire the legacy studio is in limbo. In a New York Times op-ed, Ellison stressed that the merger has been politicized, with the states primarily looking to stop him from owning CNN.
“I believe this fight is not really about market share … I believe a plainer worry sits beneath the briefs and the news releases: the news. The issue is whether I can be trusted as a steward of Warner’s CNN. There has been speculation about my politics, my loyalties, my intentions,” Ellison wrote. “Unfortunately, I can’t give anyone a view into my heart and mind, but I can share this: I have regularly voted for candidates of both parties; I hold some views that would be called conservative and others that would be called liberal, just like most Americans; and when it comes to our news operations, I do not aspire to lead these companies to bend their newsrooms to my views. I believe that news should be based on facts and truth.”
When Richard Linklater released “Boyhood” in 2014, moviegoers had never seen anything quite like it. Filmed over the space of 12 years, the coming-of-age classic followed a Texas family living through divorce, moving and growing up, with the cast returning at intervals to film episodes as the children grew up. The groundbreaking result came thisclose to winning the Oscar for best picture, with Patricia Arquette, who played the family’s mom, winning best supporting actress, and Ethan Hawke, who played the father, nominated for supporting actor. But what happened to the boy of “Boyhood” — Ellar Coltrane — and Lorelei Linklater, who played his sister?
Lorelei Linklater, the director’s daughter, is a painter and actress who has appeared in several independent films since “Boyhood.” Coltrane, now 31, says he lives “in the middle of nowhere,” and is pursuing several interests: He’s a volunteer fireman, he’s doing EMT training and is gets involved in occasional independent films. But though he’s had a few roles such starring in the indie “Shoplifters of the World Unite,” he’s not driven to pursue film and TV stardom. “I’ve moved on,” he says.
Unlike many child actors who experienced too much fame too early, Coltrane thinks he was spared that kind of pressure because the world didn’t see the finished product until he was 18 — although even then the amount of attention was somewhat overwhelming.
Independent Film Company’s 12th anniversary release of “Boyhood” (representing the 12 years of filming) is currently playing in more than 100 theaters across the U.S. and in Canada through Mongrel, with a special filmed Q&A included this week. Additional live Q&As and special screenings will roll out throughout August.
Coltrane looked back on the experience of shooting “Boyhood” over 12 years, remembering the fun, scary and embarrassing moments along the way.
Ethan Hawke, left, and Ellar Coltrane onstage during the “Boyhood” 12-Year reunion Q&A in Austin.
Kelly Zhu
As a child, you went to theater classes through Zach Theater in Austin, and then met your aunt’s agent who became your agent. How did you end up auditioning for “Boyhood”? Do you remember much about what they told you when you were just 6 years old?
What I remember is meeting Richard. Both of my parents are performers, so I think they were definitely supportive and understood the idea of me going into performing arts, but it wasn’t something that they set up or pushed me into. It all just kind of happened. I remember them telling me about who Richard was to them, being artists in Austin. They knew a lot of people that were in “Slacker” and he was a real hometown hero. I remember them telling me, this is really cool, this is different than the other auditions you’ve gone to. I don’t know how many callbacks it was, but it was several, and there was no script at that point, so it wasn’t at all a traditional audition where I’m reading sides. I think he was just kind of getting to know me more than anything.
Do you think he had other kids he was considering?
It was an open casting call, so there probably hundreds of kids that they were considering. There were a number of homeschool kids that were being considered specifically, because he knew it would be easier to work with a kid who didn’t have to be in school five days a week. I remember in one of the callbacks, he asked me to bring in some of my art, my drawings. The piece of the drawing that I brought in was on the back of a poster for a band called Joe Rockhead that my dad played in, in the ’80s and ’90s in Austin. And Richard was a fan, and so I remember him looking turning the page around and being like, “What is this? Why do you have this poster? And I’m like, that’s my dad’s old band.
When did it dawn on you that you were going to keep returning every year, every couple years? Like, did you understand that at first, or did it take a little while to really get that?
I was a smart kid. I understood as much as a 6-year-old can. I understood that I would be returning every year, but there was no way for me to comprehend what 12 years is, or what that really represents in my life. It was much later, once I was 17 or 18, that I started to understand like how just how significant it was in my life. It was fun. It was like a summer camp. It never felt like a burden really.
What was working with Richard like? Were you ever scared or felt pressured?
Richard is very much an actor’s director, and he and Ethan had such an industrious working relationship at that time, writing the “Before” movies and they had a really powerful collaborative dynamic that they had built together, and it was really wonderful to be invited into that, and be taught how to partake in that process of writing collaboratively.
Did you get to improvise?
There was very extensive workshopping every year. There was some improvisation in the writing room, but more so just a lot of requests for my input. So even if I wasn’t improvising in the moment, I was often using my words, and using pieces of my experience and what I was going through in the different years, and I was encouraged to manipulate my dialogue to be more natural for myself to speak as a child.
There were a lot of pretty tense scenes — do you remember being worried about the adults arguing, particularly with the alcoholic stepfather?
I grew up in a pretty tumultuous household, so it didn’t seem shocking at all to me. That was kind of just how adults were. The big one was the violence at the dinner table with Marco’s character. I remember that moment, with the dinner plate and just how viscerally scary that was. Even though I knew it was acting, and everybody laughs in between takes. There was a lot that was done, probably for our benefit, for the kids to try to break up the tension, and I think we didn’t do very many takes of that.
I rewatched the film for the first time in a number of years a couple weeks ago at the Austin Film Society reunion screening, and there were lots of things that I was stricken by that landed differently now. That scene definitely affected me more watching it than it ever has before, and I was a lot more aware of myself as a vulnerable child experiencing this traumatic thing. Even within the artifice of the film, it’s still scary.
Was there ever a time you wanted to quit? I know Lorelei wanted to be written out at one point.
No, not at all. I mean, when it released, when I became famous and was going around doing a million Q&A’s and parties, I didn’t enjoy that part so much. But I never wavered in production. I loved it. It was a really wonderful experience for me.
You said it was like summer camp, did you play with the other kids and make friends?
Really just Lorelei. All the other kid characters are so transient. More so Richard and Ethan and Patricia. I was such an odd kid. I I didn’t have a lot of friends my own age, even in my personal life, just being homeschooled and being raised by the arts community in Austin. Also Rodney Becker, the production designer. I went on to work under him in the art department for a number of years after “Boyhood” released.
What was it like as you got to be a teenager, since teenagers are figuring out so much stuff — were you ever self-conscious about growing up on-screen?
I was a pretty cocky teenager. Like around 14 or 15, when I have the bangs and everything, that was a pretty awkward phase. I think I was pretty self-conscious. But even still, with the kissing, I’m kissing Megan Devine in that in that episode, and I was pretty confident in that. One of the funny things about that phase of the film for me is that I was a really wild teenager, I was getting into a lot of trouble, and that is so peripheral in the film. It’s just kind of implied that there’s other stuff going on that we’re not seeing, that this person is experimenting with drugs and whatever else, but it’s not really in the film.
But I do remember I showed up to set probably when I was 17, very high on marijuana one time, and was extremely anxious and self-conscious, and that scene is terrible. Needless to say that scene did not make it into the final cut. I never did that again.
Was Linklater’s idea for Mason to be into photography, or yours?
That was me. It’s kind of funny because (unit photographer) Matt Lankes, rest in peace, outside of set, he gave me photography lessons and was a big part of that developing in my life before I was ever in the film. My interest in photography definitely was fueled, if not initially inspired, by being on set and watching Matt work. He made the book and so we would do those portraits every year and he was always working with antique film equipment and his work practice was very intricate, and I found that really inspiring.
What do you think about this experience of making a movie over so many years? It’s pretty unusual.
It’s fantastic. It’s magical. It’ll be interesting to see what comes of Richard’s new long-term project (“Merrily We Roll Along”), and if other people try to emulate that. Because it’s a gimmick in a way, and it also very much works.
It’s also kind of a crazy thing to sign a child up for.
Exactly — as smart as a kid as you were, how could you have really known what you were agreeing to?
I think I did pretty well in terms of navigating that and coming out the other side not too damaged, but it’s a lot. Being a child actor is always a strange thing. A big saving grace for me, in that context of being a child actor, and later interacting with the Harry Potter kids and other people who starred in a long-term project or started a career around the same time, for them there was something released to the world also in childhood. I didn’t have to experience that and I am grateful for that, because when I did experience celebrity, it was a lot. It allowed me to have the experience of acting and learning to do all these things and being on set. It allowed me to avoid being a child star, which is really difficult for a lot of people. I have a lot of compassion for people who really struggle with fame early in life.
Catch us up on what kind of things you’re pursuing now?
I live in the middle of nowhere, and I’m pretty far away from film. I’ve acted in a couple of short films. One called “El Fantasma,” which we filmed in Mexico City, where I play Lee Harvey Oswald, that’s really cool. And then I did a film in El Paso two years ago, a short film called “So, Who Was It This Time?” I’ve become kind of integrated with the independent film community in El Paso, which is really wonderful. I’m really inspired by the energy there and what my friends are up to. It reminds me of Austin 20 years ago. Really, in my life I’ve moved on. I do manual labor, and I’m a volunteer firefighter, and I’m working on my EMT license right now. But being back in Austin at the AFS event, interacting with film people again, I am missing being on set, missing collaborating.
I do very well collaborating with a director who has a passion project. When I can get into that head space with an artist and work closely with them to figure out how I can express what they’re trying to express, I think I can do really good work. But just showing up on a big set with a million producers as an actor, I don’t know how to do that. I was never really trained as an actor. I was trained by Richard and Ethan as a collaborator and part of the machine of the film. So I’m hoping for more small, independent passion projects that I can be a part of, because I have a lot to offer.
Jim Cramer says he is selling his Bitcoin after IBM CEO Arvind Krishna told him to get “paranoid” about crypto’s cryptography within three or four years.
The warning follows a July 30 IBM and University of Chicago demonstration of verified quantum advantage.
Traders invoked the “Inverse Cramer” trade, a pattern so established that a fund once existed purely to bet against his picks.
CNBC host and long-time crypto critic Jim Cramer is out on Bitcoin—again. This time it’s over fears of the coming quantum computing threat, and it sounds like he might be out for good. Which is music to the ears of Bitcoin investors everywhere who prefer to be on the opposite side of the “Cramer trade.”
“Should I be more careful?” Cramer asked late last week while interviewing IBM CEO Arvind Krishna, worried about whether quantum computers would be able to steal his coins.
“I think that you should give yourself three or four years,” Krishna replied, “and at that point, I would get rather paranoid about it.”
Cramer did not wait three or four years. “I realize I’m waiting. Ethereum, really, maybe even worse. So I think that people have to take this man seriously because they’re doing commercial quantum,” he said while commenting on his interview. “Arvind Krishna knows quantum incredibly. He knows Bitcoin and quantum. And I’m going to sell mine.”
“He’s the man,” Cramer continued. “Three, four years. David, you know when three, four years is going to happen? Like tomorrow.”
The clip went around fast, pulling 89,000 views on X, and over 9,000 views on YouTube.
“Thank you Jim!” read one of the top replies. “Letssss goooooooooooo,” went another. One user simply asked: “I thought he already did.”
That gratitude isn’t sarcasm so much as strategy. Traders have spent years tracking the “inverse Cramer” pattern—the running joke that the reliable move is whatever he didn’t say.
Somebody built a fund on it. Tuttle Capital launched the Inverse Cramer Tracker ETF in 2023, betting against his picks, alongside a Long Cramer fund betting with them. Both closed. The long version died first, the short version followed in February 2024 with $2 million in assets.
“We started it in order to point out the danger of following TV stockpickers, Jim Cramer specifically, and the total lack of accountability,” portfolio manager Matthew Tuttle said. “We feel like we have accomplished that mission.”
The Bitcoin record is why the meme stuck. Cramer said he’d sold everything and wouldn’t touch crypto “in a million years” in December 2022, with Bitcoin at $16,796. It gained more than 400% over the next three years.
Bitcoin rose about 1.6% on the day he announced the sale.
It’s worth noting, though, that no one we’re aware of has confirmed the size of his position, or that it even exists. Cramer hasn’t publicly shared any Bitcoin wallet addresses, so there’s no way to check.
The part that isn’t a joke
The underlying research behind quantum is real, even if the timeline is arguable.
On July 30, IBM and University of Chicago researchers demonstrated quantum advantage with something previous milestones lacked—verification. Using 70 logical qubits and a new error-correction method, they ran a computation in about 15 minutes that classical methods can’t feasibly reproduce, and proved the answer was right. That’s the “Chicago study” Cramer kept referencing, and Decrypt covered what it means for Bitcoin.
Sampling circuits is not breaking elliptic curve cryptography. Those are different problems, and the second one needs machines far beyond anything demonstrated.
But the exposure is genuine. Coinbase’s quantum advisory council estimates roughly 7 million Bitcoin could eventually be vulnerable through exposed public keys and address reuse. Ark Invest and Unchained call the threat real but not imminent. Post-quantum standards exist, and Bitcoin developers have been arguing about how to adopt them for years.
So Cramer picked a legitimate risk and doubled down on a timeline that remains debatable.
The market’s response was to buy his exit. We’ll see who’s right.
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SpaceX (SPCX), Elon Musk’s space technology company, reported its first quarterly results as a public company on Tuesday, announcing second-quarter revenue of $7.8 billion.
That figure topped Wall Street expectations of $6.9 billion, while narrowing its quarterly loss to to $541 million as growth accelerated across its launch, Starlink and AI businesses.
The company reported a net loss of $541 million, an improvement from a $1.0 billion loss a year earlier, while adjusted EBITDA nearly tripled to $3.5 billion.
Crypto investors were also watching for changes to SpaceX’s bitcoin BTC$64,089.16 holdings.
The company reported $1.10 billion in digital assets at the end of the second quarter, down from $1.64 billion at the end of 2025.
SpaceX’s IPO filing disclosed that it held 18,712 bitcoin as of March 31, acquired for about $661 million and valued at $1.29 billion at the time. Tuesday’s earnings release reported only the value of its digital asset holdings and did not disclose the number of bitcoin held or explain the decline.
SPCX was down 6% immediately following the report after closing the session nearly 10% higher on the day’s trading, while the Nasdaq 100 gained 3.3%.
Hearst has set a deal to acquire Disney’s 50% stake in A+E Global Media, the parent company of Lifetime, History Channel, A&E Network and other assets in a deal that calls for Hearst to pay Disney $1.2 billion in cash.
Disney and Hearst have been 50-50 partners in A+E Global Media for more than a decade. Hearst also owns a roughly 18% stake in Disney’s ESPN but that is separate from A+E Global Media and unaffected by the transaction. The A+E Global Media deal is expected to close in September, with Paul Buccieri remaining at the helm as president and chairman.
The deal puts Hearst back into national media in a big way. The company has deep roots in newspaper and magazine publishing and it operates a strong group of 35 local TV stations, most of them Big Three network affiliates.
“We thank our Disney colleagues for decades of successful partnership,” said Steven R. Swartz, president and CEO of Hearst. “We look forward to supporting Paul Buccieri and A+E Global Media’s leadership team as they continue to make must-see programs and innovate around the great History, Lifetime and A&E brands.”
Paul Buccieri
Courtesy of Paul Buccieri / Jeff Katz Photography
The deal brings A+E Global Media full circle with Hearst taking full control of the assets. Hearst and Disney put the company on the block in July 2025. Starz was among the outside media companies that took a look at the company but it’s unclear if they ever got to a formal bid stage. With Hearst coming in, the A+E Global Media team will settle in with an owner that they know well.
The list of linear channels included in the deal includes Lifetime Movie Network, FYI and Vice TV. The assets also encompass content units A+E Studios, A+E Factual Studio, A&E IndieFilms, A+E Global Media Digital as well as streaming apps, games, FAST channels, AVOD and subscription-video services Crime 360, Lifetime Movie Club and History Vault.
A+E Global Media is one of many traditional media companies that has faced challenges amid a changing pay TV ecosystem. The company’s core revenue base is shrinking amid cord-cutting and the rise of streaming options. Under the leadership of Buccieri, A+E Global Media has been actively diversifying its operations with the addition of A+E Studios to produce high-end shows, such as the Netflix drama “The Lincoln Lawyer,” as well as through the launch of FAST channels and niche subscription video services.
“In a media environment defined by fragmentation, A+E Global Media’s advantage is the strength and versatility of our brands, our strong partnerships and our vast library of owned assets,” said Buccieri. “As we continue extending our storytelling globally across all platforms with IP that travels to every screen and form-factor, we believe we are well suited for whatever opportunities may come next. I also want to express my deepest thanks to Hearst, The Walt Disney Company and to our board members — both recent and past — for their guidance and support over the years.”
The company has its roots in the fertile ground of early 1980s cable in New York. A&E Network and Lifetime were launched in early 1984 at a time when the overall cable channel lineup was still pretty thin. History Channel followed in 1995. All three channels have yielded numerous spinoffs over the years. For its first 20 years, A&E Networks was jointly owned by ABC, NBC and Hearst. When Comcast acquired NBCUniversal from General Electric in 2011, the cable giant had to sell off its stake in what was then A&E Networks to comply with federal merger conditions.
Researchers have tied the faulty randomness code at the center of the Coldcard wallet breach to Coinkite co-founder and CTO Peter Gray, who Bitcoin developer James O’Beirne says brushed off a warning about the defect in May 2025.
The exploit has now drained roughly $114 million across more than 5,200 Bitcoin addresses, and Coinkite says it is still live.
The GPG signatures that point at one person
The buggy library, called libngu, was published on GitHub under a pseudonymous account named Switch. An analysis posted on August 4 by Bitcoin developer James O’Beirne laid out cryptographic evidence that the account belongs to Gray.
O’Beirne’s write-up rests on GPG commit signatures. According to the analysis, there are 58 commits that are authored as “Switck” that carry valid signatures from Gray’s personal key, the same key that signs his commits under the name Peter D. Gray in the same repository.
The Switch account, by contrast, has uploaded no key of its own. The analysis states that it has been cryptographically proven that the two identities are one person.
The connection matters because Coldcard’s production firmware pulls libngu in as a dependency, according to O’Beirne’s analysis, which also cites security firm Wizardsardine’s finding that the library is one of three repositories involved in the vulnerability.
A report from May 2025 that went nowhere
O’Beirne flagged the risk more than a year ago while auditing Coldcard’s firmware in May 2025.
He said that he wanted to pin down where the wallet sourced its randomness and traced it back to libngu, after which he informed Coinkite about the possible defect at the time.
“This is the same guy that shrugged off my report of the possibility of the defect in May 2025,” O’Beirne wrote, referring to Gray. He added that he had not yet told the full story of that exchange.
Coinkite has yet to respond to the identity claim of the report.
One commit in 2021, unnoticed for five years
Block’s Bitcoin engineering and security teams traced it to a commit dated March 1, 2021, that changed how Coldcard built a wallet’s seed. The change swapped a call that pulled from the device’s hardware random number generator for one that fell through to MicroPython’s software randomizer.
The mistake hid in a single preprocessor check. Firmware version 4.0.0 shipped with the flaw on March 17, 2021.
The seeds were built with too little entropy, so attackers could regenerate them offline and drain funds without ever touching a device. None of the thefts involved stolen hardware, phishing, or malware.
Coinkite tells owners to move funds now
Coinkite has told users to act with urgency. “Please treat this as urgent. Migrate your funds,” the company posted, while confirming that the exploit is still in progress and asking holders to alert others who are “less online.”
Not every wallet is exposed. Reports say that Mk3 devices set up on firmware 4.0.1 or later are at risk, while Mk4, Mk5, and Q owners running firmware below 5.6.0 or 1.5.0Q should update, create a new seed, and move their coins.
Wallets built with the device’s dice-roll option, where a user enters at least 50 physical rolls, never ran the broken path and are considered safe. A strong BIP-39 passphrase and multisig setups where the Coldcard key is only one of several signers also held up.
Losses near $114 million across four waves
The theft has come in bursts. The first wave on July 30 moved about 1,083 $BTC out of 1,196 addresses inside 41 minutes, worth roughly $70 million. Three more waves followed over five days, with Galaxy Research counting a fourth sweep early on August 3 that pushed the running total to about 1,816 $BTC.
Some reports put the value near $116 million, while others cite $114 million at prevailing prices.
Bitcoin itself has barely moved, trading near $63,800 during U.S. hours on August 4. Vincent Bouzon, a cybersecurity expert at rival wallet maker Ledger, stated that the episode was “a failure of one implementation rather than a verdict on self-custody,” adding that entropy “must be anchored in secure hardware.”
The US economy slowed more than expected, but it’s not because Americans stopped spending. So what really happened? The answer lies in how economic growth is measured, and America’s massive investment in artificial intelligence.
Marco Rubio, US Secretary of State, said there has been progress in negotiations to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. The update was provided during a meeting with Paraguayan Foreign Minister Rubén Ramírez Lezcano to sign a Memorandum of Understanding on nuclear cooperation.
In an interview broadcast on “The Wolf Of All Streets,” a well-known channel in the sector, the institutional transformation that the cryptocurrency market has undergone and the price dynamics of Bitcoin were discussed in detail.
The program, moderated by Andrew Parish, featured Bitwise Chief Investment Officer (CIO) Matt Hougan, Bitwise Research Analyst Ryan Rasmussen, and Arch Public CEO Tillman Holloway. The broadcast discussed the reasons behind Bitcoin’s lack of reaction to the $100 million security breach in the individual cold wallet ecosystem, and how Wall Street dominates the sector.
At the program’s opening, Andrew Parish questioned why the $100 million cold wallet vulnerability didn’t cause any market crash, noting that a similar incident a few years ago could have caused sharp drops of 10% to 20%.
Commenting on the situation, Bitwise Research Analyst Ryan Rasmussen stated that the market has clearly matured from individual Bitcoin holders to institutional investors. Rasmussen said that the vast majority of new investors are entering the market through spot ETFs or licensed and regulated custody services such as Coinbase and Anchorage. Therefore, he added, vulnerabilities focused on individual cold wallets affect only a very small fraction of the total market participants and do not create widespread panic.
Related NewsJim Cramer Announced That He Will Sell All of His Bitcoin
Matt Hougan, Investment Director at Bitwise, stated that the market has become resilient to negative news in the current cycle. Hougan noted that sellers have been exhausted and the remaining investor profile is exhibiting an unwavering stance, adding that the presence of institutional capital is reducing the pressure of bad news on prices.
Arch Public CEO Tillman Holloway stated that a “changing of the guard” is taking place in the cryptocurrency sector. Recalling that in the past, price movements were driven by miners and individual crypto exchanges, Holloway said that today, control has completely passed to Wall Street and institutional capital.
Commenting on market expectations, Matt Hougan argued that there is a huge gap between the pessimistic atmosphere on social media and the approach of Wall Street financial giants. He noted that giant institutions like Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo, and UBS operate with long-term, 10-year strategies, and that the traditional financial world views the current price pullbacks not as a collapse, but as a normal buying opportunity within a four-year cycle.
Ryan Rasmussen reported that portfolio managers with decades of experience are beginning to include crypto assets in their portfolios, similar to past technology revolutions. Rasmussen stated that research teams at major banks are recommending Bitcoin allocations of between 1% and 6% to their clients, and that the risk factor has decreased at the career and institutional level as the asset has become integrated into traditional financial indices.
