Galaxy Digital chief executive Mike Novogratz sketched out a constructive case for risk assets and a brutal one for legacy software in the latest All Things Markets episode with Anthony Scaramucci, telling viewers Bitcoin is poised to push back through US$100,000 once a key technical level breaks and that AI is about to tear through the SaaS sector.
"Bitcoin is sitting at US$80,000 on my Bit Block clock right now," Novogratz said as the discussion opened. "We've been rangy for a while. We keep knocking on the 80,000 door, but that's with, you know, Hormuz and the war and oil higher. And so you get any relief there, crypto's going higher."
The Galaxy boss laid out a clear technical roadmap. "I would actually I would kind of say 83, 84 is more important than 80 even though we've been stuck at 80," he told Scaramucci. "If you kind of draw a trend line across the bottoms of that much earlier period in the year and last quarter of last year, you know, 84 was kind of the base and so that becomes the ceiling. So we got to take out 83, 84 and then I think we go to 100."
Novogratz pointed to a thinner pool of forced sellers as the core reason for his optimism. "What I've noticed recently, there just not a lot of sellers," he said. "People that needed to sell sold. We got all the way to 60. We kept selling every uptick. And like what we're seeing in Galaxy is less sellers. And you're seeing a lot of buyers in the retail market. ETF volumes are big, MicroStrategy volume is big."
His flag for the Clarity Act, the long-stalled US crypto market structure bill, was equally bullish. He told Scaramucci his personal odds of passage now sit at "70, 75" percent. "Both sides — Republicans need to get it done because they kind of campaigned on it," he said. The bill matters, he argued, because it lets US capital markets export tokenisation. "Crypto and this bill is going to be part of the way we sell our great brands to the rest of the world through tokenization of mortgages of equities of privates," he said. "There are probably five and a half billion people that can't call a broker, maybe more, six and a half billion people that can't call a broker and buy a share of Apple stock."
"He was talking about two companies they almost bought. One was a US$300 million company, one was a billion dollar company. They hesitated and paused and realized they could pretty much duplicate those companies with four or five employees in Claude and they're racing at both of those," Novogratz said. "He thinks they'll have both those companies built internally within a month. It's going to be worse for software than VC companies because this idea of a business plan and capital and I'm going to have to put money in and the guy's going to do it. These are all capital light. It's literally how many tokens you need to build this stuff. Software is just going to be under attack non-stop."
Novogratz remains positioned for a productivity-driven equity melt-up. "We are going to go through a productivity miracle rally at one point. We're in it to some degree. Companies are going to cut cost and cut cost and cut cost and that just drives things to the bottom line. So profits are going to be great," he said. He is short the 30-year Treasury, telling Scaramucci, "It does feel like we're going to take 5% out, but if that accelerates fast, that could be bad for stocks."
Scaramucci pushed back with the bear case, citing oil at US$107 with potential for US$130, a global GDP forecast cut to 0.4% from 2.4%, an eight-to-four split Federal Reserve decision he called "the most fractured Fed since October of 1992" and a first-quarter PCE print of 4.5%, more than double the Fed's 2% target. He invoked Warren Buffett's recent line that the market has "a church attached to a casino, and there's more people in the casino than the church right now."
The pair flagged a looming "supply wall" of mega-IPOs. Novogratz sees Anthropic, OpenAI and SpaceX all coming to market within the cycle and warned the trio could mark the top. "That's like four years of buybacks. It is so much supply coming into the market and I can see us rally into that and that being the top," he said. "This AI chapter, which might have three months, might have 24 months — are we '98? Are we '99? Are we 2000? — is going to be one of the defining chapters of everyone's career."
Novogratz's single highest-conviction trade for the next twelve months: "Short dollar China. China is in such deflation. It is so much cheaper. The currency's at the wrong price. There's political pressure to get it lower and so dollar China will be lower in a year."