The HODL Report Live: Bitcoin Treasury Shakeouts, Strive vs. Strategy & Bull Market Signals

We printed digitally. There is no second best. Probably rat poison squared.

Hello everybody and welcome to the HODL Report. My name is Forest Huddle and in today's episode I'm going to be talking a little bit more about the Bitcoin treasury companies out there. I think they are making some moves and that those moves should be reflected in some of your personal decision-making and part of your understanding of what is happening to Bitcoin and we will take a deeper look at the metrics on the HODL Report website and kind of discuss what's happening a little bit with Bitcoin as far as price action. That's where we focus a lot of attention on this live show at and you know and then in the recorded videos we get down to some of the more technical aspects of Bitcoin security and so on. Appreciate everybody tuning in. Thanks for watching this morning, this afternoon, whatever time it is for you.

And we're going to get into the show right after we do a little wishing well game here with Bitcoin. Well, this is their reward program that they have for their exchange, which when you sign up, you get some free points. You can redeem those points for real Bitcoin. You can have a 1 in 10,000 chance to win a million Satoshi's. And I'm going to redeem 500 points right now to toss a coin in the wishing well for your guys sake so that you can scan this QR code and win 1,000 Satoshi's. First person to scan this QR code here wins 1,000 Satoshi's. So, we'll just allow that to win. And anybody that wants to support the show, likes what we do here, the fact that we show up every week to discuss Bitcoin, you can send some sats to this QR code above my head here and you can donate to the show and we read those comments off. You can attach a note over the lightning network, send some sats to the show, and when you do, I'll read that note next week. So, we do that every week.

All right. So, let's go to the HODL Report. Let's take a look right here. Here we go. Bitcoin sits at 85,134 as of right now and a market cap of 1.71 trillion. 86 businesses in the last seven days. This is another metric. As much as people think, well, this is really good to see more businesses accepting Bitcoin, you know, medium of exchange, this is also indicative of where we are in the cycle. As Bitcoin goes up in price, we're not just going to see the price go up, but we're going to see a correlation with all other aspects of Bitcoin. One of them being how many businesses accept Bitcoin. In a bare market, it's going to be harder to convince people to accept Bitcoin when they look at it and they think it's unattractive. They don't see the value proposition in it. So all of these metrics will juice up in a bull market and we are seeing this. Last week we saw I don't know maybe 50 60 something like that this week and of course this is just a you know not necessarily a trend reversal but we are seeing a more this week than last week of businesses accepting Bitcoin which I absolutely love.

So we'll carry on here again. HODL Report Live which you're watching right now. We are down one on the global asset rank. We have had a large relatively large drop off of nodes over the past week. A lot more than usual. We'll take a look at what that means. Hash rate is up. The ETF inflows in the last seven days is positive and we have more increase of perpetual open interest and price is 1.73% up over the week. Over the past week though we have seen a high of 86790 and a low of 82941. So a pretty big range between the two prices with some volatility increase in the implied volatility. So, Broadcom has gone past us again here and they will move up and down and all around. As right now, some of the volatility, some of the trading, some of the interest is still in a lot of the AI plays. Broadcom having sort of positioned itself closer to the AI market and some of those interests in there. Nothing really new to see here. This is one of those kind of metrics that's going to not really change too much.

One of them that will change a little bit here is the SATs per USD. You can still get quite a few SATs, right? We're still above 1,000 Satoshi's. We're at 1,175 Satoshi's per US dollar. And I think that it will only go down over time, right? You're going to get less and less Satoshi's for your fiat printed money. Estimated change going upwards as blocks are coming in a little bit quick over the last few blocks. We're only 17% through this epoch here of 2016 blocks till the next difficulty adjustment on the 17th of October. So, we got quite a ways away here. We're just beginning this epoch and or this block adjustment period. And yeah, seems like some hash rate has come on board.

So, here we go with some node implementations. 857 in the last seven days of reachable Bitcoin nodes have dropped off. Now what could be the cause of this? Well, there can be a fair amount of Bitcoin nodes running as redundancy or as part of having a lightning channel on top of that. And we still are seeing this hardening happen of the Bitcoin ecosystem on top of the protocol itself. And when we see that, we see defensive actions taking place. And I wouldn't be surprised if you're running a node and you think that might actually have caused some sort of vulnerability within your setup because of what's built on top of it and you are sort of closing down the infrastructure that is vulnerable on top of it, then it makes sense to close down the node itself. So a lot of these nodes might be, you know, sort of run in the cloud kind of thing. That's my guess if I had to guess at why we're seeing some decline in nodes. It's also sort of my hope. I'm kind of hoping that we're not seeing just a massive decline of actual users, you know, running Bitcoin Core on their computer or running an Umbrel. I'm hoping those people aren't turning their devices off. And if I'm thinking it through, there's not necessarily any reason to do that. I'm thinking it's more of people who have spun up nodes to build on top of and those things that are being built on top of those nodes are sort of in question about how secure they are as there's more vulnerabilities found in core lightning and in LND and infrastructure on top of that. I mean even Blink Wallet I think is now in position to begin returning some funds that were exploited out of their wallet, which was sort of a lightning wallet as well. So it's all very interesting to see, but we are seeing a little bit of a decline. This can also, part of this could be relatable or related to just the unreliability of this metric and there might be some big updates that happen that push that down just kind of rapidly as it sort of is adjusting to the metrics as it sort of takes them in slowly and then maybe all at once. So that would be my kind of speculation as to why that's happening.

So let's take a look at the next metric here. This is market sentiment and cycle. Market sentiment is I think an incredibly important one to just think of where you are positioned within the market so that you can adjust yourself to benefit the most from it. We are still in greed territory but having backed off a little bit from last week where we were almost in extreme greed at 74. We dipped all the way down to 70 and I think even a little bit below 70. 65 has been the lowest this week. So up a little bit. Bitcoin had a nice little pump last night, you know, Sunday sort of fake out and we are 35% above the simple moving average of four years. So the four-year simple moving average brings Bitcoin's price to be at 64 and this kind of smooths out all the volatility that we see here in the actual price action and we are above that at 86,000 and this is a snapshot from yesterday. So we're slightly below what that snapshot was. So 35% above still puts us in this sort of light blue here going into green going into sort of fair value, but still undervalued at this current moment which is really good to see.

The coins are getting older. So this is the long-term holder net position change. We are seeing 35,666 Bitcoin being over the last 30 days moving into a position of having not moved for more than 155 days. This is indicative of long-term holders seeing the potential for price appreciation and wanting to hold for that reason. And usually what we see is after massive movements, we'll begin to see some of those coins move again as they sell into that strength. So in my opinion, this is kind of showing that we have not seen bitcoins move upwards yet. A lot of people are excited about having this potential for this bottom at what was it, 60,000 roughly having dipped below 60,000 not even closing below 60,000 but only for a few hours at a time within a daily time frame dipping below 60,000 and that sort of marking what we are now believing to be the bottom of this cycle and yet we are up at 85 and the long-term holder position change here, this metric is really showing that the move hasn't even happened, which is pretty exciting. If you're looking for higher prices on Bitcoin, for me, I would love to trade sideways for a lot longer, bore a lot of people out so I can accumulate a lot more Bitcoin. I don't need the price to go up. I don't need to be a quadrillionaire tomorrow in fiat bucks. I want to hold as much Bitcoin as possible. And the longer it stays lower priced, the more we can buy Bitcoin.

Speaking of price again, here we have another chart that shows realized price. We are 17% above that having never dipped below the actual realized price which we did in previous bare markets in 2020, 2019 and 2022. 2020 was just the sort of COVID crash. We dipped below the adjusted realized price which takes out the supply, takes out 26% of the supply of Bitcoin because they are dormant for seven plus years. And this is a metric that is growing in the distance between the realized and the adjusted. So we've dipped below the adjusted but we have not dipped below realized. And I'm thinking it less and less likely that we will as we continue on here. We'd have to go all the way to 52,000 right now, 53,000 to dip below the realized price, which is pretty interesting.

So a lot has happened in the perpetual future market. We're going to zoom in a little bit here. You can actually see here that last week when we went up to that high 86,000 that there was a lot of short leverage here. Cluster density of 61% with a 50x short leverage and these people got wiped out. So after this wick happened, this is all blue. There's not as much clustering of shorts within there and that's because they got wiped. It did not wipe the larger cluster of short leverage here at about 87 88,000. And you can see that the price tried multiple times. There's all these wicks up there, but just hasn't really wiped out that leverage. And a lot of that leverage has actually unwound itself as it goes from a more density to a less dense cluster.

Here you can also see lots of longs. Lots of longs getting emboldened here with their leverage at 79,000 and becoming denser and denser up to the 81,000s. Still leaving a little gap here between 82 and 83 of a lot of leverage or lack of leverage. So leaving a gap in between there. Not super super emboldened yet as the shorts are right here. Still either emboldened or kind of just gambling and risking and maybe they're using it. A lot of leverage is used as hedges and things like that too because you can do large leverage positions to hedge a much larger say spot position in the other direction. So you can use a lot less capital to hedge if you're using leverage is the idea there. So, I would actually say that maybe we'll kind of retest this 84 83,000 and then build up a lot of momentum with the lack of liquidity that could happen in a short period of time because we're sort of a little bit down. There could be some more emboldened shorts that apply shorts at 86 85 and that could be the fuel to actually wipe out the larger cluster of leverage at 88,000. So that's kind of if I had to predict the next week, that's what I would suggest is going to happen that we dip down to yeah 84 maybe high 83s for a couple of days and then spike up to 88,000 basically. We'll see if that happens. I'm not placing any bets on it. That's just what I see with the leverage happening right now.

So we'll pull all these metrics together here and take a look at this chart. We'll look at the three-month. We can see a nice little adaptive edge over the past three months of 4% with a 23% gain over the 19% of just doing a regular dollar cost average. That's this idea here of doing a two times, three times, and four times accelerated based on the metrics that we've just gone over.

So let's take a look at the corporate treasuries here. This is what I wanted to focus a little bit of the show on and specifically I wanted to talk about Strive a little bit. Strive has been making some serious moves up. You can see here this stairstepping pattern as they accumulate more Bitcoin per share of their common stock. This is just SATs per diluted share. And you can see this massive accumulation of sats per common diluted share and it's stairstepping because it's happening every week when they announce it. So throughout the week their SATA preferred which is what they use to apply leverage or what they call amplification, essentially how they are able to get money today that they pay off over time, which is the same thing as a loan in lots of ways although there's different covenants and caveats with the way they do it. And they're paying you know that 13% per year and they expect the Bitcoin they buy with that to outperform that. Now, what's interesting about that is they also need to balance how much cash reserve they have. So, this is more complicated than just leveraging all out. They're building a cash reserve to pay that 13% per year off. And part of that is not going towards leverage. So, I believe they're about 60% amplified right now or 50% amplified, something like that. But you can see that they have a pretty good Bitcoin yield if you're just looking at the SATs per share, right? 66% over the last year. Whereas MSTR's Bitcoin per share is minus 3.69 this year. So, they had an all-time high here of 220 and now they are at 187,000 Satoshi's per share. And if you start to look at again sort of the common equity Bitcoin exposure, it's looking a little bit more favorable. And you can see the STRC price has continually gone up over the past time since it went to 78,000. Strive is a lot more amplified and actually has the ability to increase the amplification at a rate that they want to, which is shown here essentially in the latest SEC filing of them having purchased 2,000 Bitcoin last week or I suppose actually it was today that they announced that and then MSTR only purchasing 334 but also buying back a bunch of their STRC I believe another 170 million dollar worth around.

So, both of these are beginning to fire again the ATM standby here, but they are using some of the cash to buy Bitcoin sort of to bolster their reserves, build their balance sheet. This is an asset that's going to out appreciate the US dollars that they hold on their balance sheet. And it's better to own Bitcoin than dollars, especially going into a bull market, right? Going into a bare market or in a bare market, those kind of things can be discussed and people can think, okay, well, Strategy is going to go bankrupt and all this and all that. And really, none of that is ever going to really be the case unless something drastically changes with how these operate. But right now, going into a bull market, you want to own as much Bitcoin as you can because that's where your gains are going to come from.

In fact, let's take a quick look at I think it was Saylor that posted this today. Strategy reports a $21 billion gain on digital assets in Q3 2026. Last week we acquired 334 Bitcoin and repurchased $176 million of STRC. So they hold this nice even number there of Bitcoin and they have 5.7 billion of US dollar assets which is interesting. 5.7 billion of US dollars on their balance sheet is quite a lot of dollars, right? And that should be seen as melting ice cube. And really it's only important to the STRC holders, the sort of institutions that might be interested and become more interested in these products as most of it is retail at this point. These things still need to develop a lot. I think I did a video on this idea of strategies where they're voting to change all of their preferred to do daily dividends. I think that it's a massive step forward, but these things still have issues with them, right? And even if it's perception that is an issue. Anybody saying these are perfect, these are great, all of that: they're better than a lot of things, but they are still young. And I think that is very hard for retail to wrap their mind around and really understand that these things are going to take a long time to actually have institutional interest at a serious level and be taken very seriously.

The reason I wanted to talk about these companies and what they're doing in this episode of the HODL Report is because it's incredibly indicative again that we are back in a bull market, right? I'm looking at every metric I can: businesses being onboarded, Strategy and Strive buying as much Bitcoin as they can, the other companies that had the lack of conviction. There's just so many little things that are pointing at the fact that we are absolutely in a bull market. And I don't think that there's tons of people saying we're not anymore. Every single little stone here is pointing in another direction and building up what the bull market will be. Strategy a couple months ago were sitting on a massive Bitcoin unrealized loss, were selling Bitcoin to take advantage of tax loss harvesting, building up a US dollar reserve after the STRC product had a deleveraging event that brought it to 78, and now they're posting a $21 billion unrealized gain on that. Every thousand dollars that Bitcoin goes up by, their balance sheet increases by 848 million. An incredible amount of unrealized gains happening.

Price is a combination of all of those things in one number. Price is people putting their value into something or taking it out. And to see a $21 billion gain based on just the balance sheet of a company is probably going to be another interesting point for other companies. We've seen a consolidation, a strengthening within the markets of the ones that are serious and have survived and thrived and built through the bare market. People say the bare markets are for building. The ones that do build through the bare market see the benefits of the bull market. So that's what we all should have done throughout this. Strategy and Strive built through the bare market. There were mistakes that they made: not having a large enough cash balance to offset and to have the buyback program already announced to strengthen STRC so that a delevering event wouldn't happen. Now they have the buybacks, the daily dividends, and both are learning from each other.

And all of this is less important for you than what you did during the bare market. Did you stack below 80,000? Did you think about how you could purchase more? Did you plan and build in the bear so that you could benefit from the bull? That's the question. And the bull's not in full throttle right now. The bull's not bucking. It is just in its little chamber there. The guy's on top of it, but they're about to pull the gate and let that bull just go nuts in the rodeo. So hopefully you strapped down and got yourself some Bitcoin. We still have a little bit of time, but that gate is getting lifted. The bull will go nuts and you better hold on at that point. So thanks everybody for watching The HODL Report. Just stack as much as you can, improve your life into the future, and that's all thanks to Bitcoin. Thanks everybody for watching and we'll see you next week.