Did the Federal Reserve Just Open the Door to Bitcoin?

Jamie Diamond, the most powerful banker in America, just went on national television to kill Bitcoin

legislation. Hours later, a Bitcoin exchange walked through the front door of the Federal Reserve.

The same day, the president of the United States attacked the big banks for trying to sabotage

crypto legislation. The war of old money versus new money is hitting a crescendo. The most powerful

banker in America on one side, the president's own son on the other. Are we in the final act of the

then-they-fight-you-stage? One thing's for sure, something is breaking and it isn't Bitcoin.

Welcome to No Second Best, the show where conviction meets reality and reality points straight

to Bitcoin. I'm your host, Hurley. Now let's get into it. As war in the Middle East continues

to escalate this week, Bitcoin is holding its ground in outperforming gold for the first time

in well over a year. Bitcoin ripped over 14% in three days as it touched 74k yesterday,

overperforming stocks and gold since the war broke out. That matters. For most of 2025 and

early 2026, Bitcoin was treated as a risk on asset, something you sell when the world gets scary.

Gold was the flight to safety play, but this week something shifted. Bitcoin started behaving like

what it actually is, a neutral, hard monetary asset that doesn't care who's bombing who.

And the price spike wasn't random. It lines up directly with what happened in the infrastructure.

Yesterday, crypto exchanged Kraken received a Federal Reserve Master account,

which is direct access to Fedwire. The settlement rail where $4.5 trillion moves every single day.

Morgan Stanley also filed for a spot Bitcoin ETF with BNY melon as the custodian.

These are so much more than headlines. These are plumbing changes, and plumbing changes are how

you know adoption is accelerating. But the real story this week isn't Bitcoin's price.

It's the war that's been building behind the scenes between old money and new money.

In this week, the battle lines became impossible to ignore. On one side, you have Jamie Diamond,

representing the big banks and the banking lobbies, fighting to preserve their monopoly on money,

yield, and the financial systems plumbing. They've been spending millions lobbying against the

Clarity Act. They want stablecoin issuers blocked from paying yield to customers. They want the

rules written so crypto can never compete on equal footing. On the other side, you have Kraken,

Coinbase, Morgan Stanley, BNY melon, the CFTC, and the President of the United States,

all moving in the same direction toward Bitcoin, toward crypto-native financial infrastructure,

toward a system where the old gatekeepers lose their stranglehold. This isn't a philosophical

debate anymore. This is the war for the future of money. And to understand what's happening,

you need to hear it from the mouth of old money itself. Jamie Diamond, the CEO of JP Morgan Chase,

the most powerful banker in America, went on CNBC this week to make his case.

And keep in mind that this is the same Jamie Diamond who has been an outright adversary of Bitcoin

for over a decade. He's called Bitcoin a pet rock. He's called it a currency for criminals.

He says he supports blockchain technology and not Bitcoin itself, which tells you everything

you need to know. He likes the idea of a digital ledger that banks can control. He hates the idea

of money that no one controls. So when Diamond goes on national television to lecture us about

regulation, understand the context. This isn't a neutral observer making a fair point.

This is the king of old money fighting to keep his castle.

You and your peers have reportedly clashed with Coinbase's Brian Armstrong over the Clarity Act

and specifically this idea of crypto exchanges offering rewards for stablecoins.

And Armstrong was on CNBC with Sarah Eisen a few weeks ago from Mar-a-Lago.

And he said there's a path forward for the Market Structure Bill that's a quote win-win outcome

for everyone. How are you feeling about it right now?

Yes, so the banks feel strongly that there should be,

bringing awards to the same as interest. And that, you know,

a compromise would be that you could pay rewards on transactions, not balances.

If you are going to be holding balances and paying interest, that's the bank you should be

regulated by a bank. So we've been firm, one thing over here, yes. But if you want to be a bank,

become a bank, then you could do whatever you want under bank law. So I remind people,

and your viewers may not know, banks have restrictions and requirements. FDIC insurance,

AMLBSA, we have community responsibility act, which means we have to open 25% of our

LMI neighbors with social requirements. We have liquidity requirements, capital requirements,

transparency requirements, reporting requirements, board requirements, governments requirements.

If they want to be a bank, so be it. So what we base is level playing field by product.

It can't be you have these people doing one thing, you know, without any regulation like that,

and these people do another. And if you do do that, the public will pay. It will get bad. So I

just, people should take a deep breath at what does you want to, and we want competition.

You know, we're actually one of the biggest users of blockchain. And, you know, we've created

the JPMORB deposit coin, we've moved money real-time payments, you know, we're moving a lot of

data now using blockchain. So we're in favor of competition, but it's got to be fair and balanced

level playing field. It can't be completely skewed. And the risk. For the safety of the system,

not just the fairness of competition. Right, to your point about FDIC insurance.

Well, AMLBSA, what about, you know, they, you know, we have money laundering requirements for

point requirements, you know, which I think is good, you know, to some extent is good because

you want a safe financial system as best you can make it. So Diamond says he wants a level

playing field, but what he's really doing is trying to make the playing field so expensive

that only banks can afford to stand on it. Think about what he's asking for. He wants crypto

companies to carry FDIC insurance, community reinvestment obligations, liquidity requirements,

board governance mandates, the full weight of a regulatory apparatus that was designed for

fractional reserve banks, not for companies holding one-to-one reserves back by US treasuries.

And that's the part he left out. Stable coins don't re-hypothicate customer assets. They don't

lend you deposits out 10 times over. They hold treasuries, dollar for dollar. The genius act already

explicitly forbids stablecoin issuers from doing the things that make banks dangerous in the first

place. So when Diamond says level playing field, what he really means is make them carry the costs

of our broken model so they can never compete with us. This isn't a call for fairness, it's a call

for protection. And it's coming from a man who has called Bitcoin a pet rock while his own bank

was paying 39 billion in regulatory fines over the last two decades. That's not a level playing

field advocate. That's a monopolist. As Matt Hogan put it, imagine if stablecoins were the status quo

and someone proposed fractional reserve banking, we would laugh them out of the room. Now before we

go any further, there's a reason this matters beyond banks and crypto companies, arguing over

legislation. This fight has reached the highest levels of government, and I'll be honest,

the way it's playing out is kind of hilarious when you think about it. Within hours of Diamond

CNBC appearance, President Trump posted a direct response attacking the banks for trying to undermine

the clarity act and the genius act. Eric Trump followed up even harder, calling the banking lobby's

efforts anti-American and anti-consumer. Now step back and appreciate the irony for a second.

Donald Trump of all people is the face of new money in this war. And I'd argue it's largely because

his own son, Eric has gone completely all in on Bitcoin and is actively fighting the big banks.

The Trump family, long associated with old money real estate wealth, is now the loudest voice

in the room arguing for a decentralized financial future. I didn't have that on my bingo card

five years ago, but here we are. Whether you like Trump or not, the political signal is real.

The president of the United States is publicly taking the side of crypto against the banking

establishment. This tells you the political calculus has changed. Bitcoin and crypto are a constituency

now. They're a voting block, and the banks are losing the political war just as fast as they're

losing the technological one. Now here's where it gets really interesting, because diamonds

whole argument rests on one assumption that the banking system he represents is the responsible

well regulated, safe alternative to crypto's wild west. But we all know that's a load of crap.

Jeff Snyder has been tracking the financial system's plumbing for decades. And what he's

been documenting this year tells a very different story about the system diamond claims to be

protecting. What Jamie Diamond artfully called cockroaches and the importance of the cockroaches

were not just that there's a bunch of bubble behavior over extended over leverage risk taking

in the private credit space, but there was just there was basically no controls over it.

You expect that the big banks who have been who have been burned in the 2008 crisis and

repeatedly along the way, what at the very least have done a little bit of due diligence and

underwriting in extending credit to these shadow banks before they extend credit to the rest of

borrowing public. And what we found out in these cockroaches is that nobody cared to do even the

most minimum underwriting or due diligence. That's what this fraud these cockroaches uncovered was

stunning levels of fraud and just basic fraud. For example, a bank would lend funds to a like

tri-color or first brands expecting that they were basically safe in doing some because tri-color

first brands are now MMMFS issued collateral against those loans. So you think, okay,

worst case scenario, this little firm, this shadow bank blows up, but I've got collateral that I

can depend upon. I'm protected. But nobody ever checked the collateral. Was it real? Was it what

what they thought it was? And so in case after case, what became clear is that the collateral was

either fraudulent double posted. And what really suggests and what it really pointed to is that nobody

did any homework. The bubble behavior that went on for years was a lot worse than we thought it was.

And so the importance of the cockroaches is that one after another, it showed nobody has any idea

of what this what these credits actually look like. Whether it's the actual credit providers,

the shadow bankers themselves, the those who are providing the leverage in the funding through

the banking sector or even the hedge fund investors or the institutional investors who

seated these shadow banks to begin with. Nobody did any of the basic standards or due diligence

and underwriting. They just lent because everything seemed to be just fine. And if everything

seems to be just fine, then it's easy to buy into that fairy tale fantasy of high returns

with no risk. So that's the system Jamie Diamond wants to protect shadow banks running

billions through the system with zero due diligence double posting collateral outright fraud.

And the big banks, the ones with all those regulations diamond is so proud of, they were the

ones extending credit to these shadowy lenders without doing basic homework. So let me get this

straight. The most powerful banker in America goes on television and lectures us about needing more

regulation. Meanwhile, his own system is riddled with what he himself called cockroaches.

And the regulators he so fond of missed all of it. This is the hypocrisy at the heart of the old

money argument. They don't want a level playing field. They want to preserve the system where they

get to play by different rules and everyone else. Where they can take enormous risk with the

positive money, get bailed out when it goes wrong, and then turn around and lecture the rest of us

about safety. And just to drive this home two days ago, the Federal Reserve's ACH system went

down. The entire US banking system experienced a service disruption that delayed payments across

the country. The plumbing that diamond claims is so safe and so well regulated literally broke.

Meanwhile, Bitcoin's network has maintained 99.99% uptime since the first block was mined in

January 2009. No cockroaches, no bailouts, no service disruptions. As Nick Batia put it this

week, this is one of those days that changes the game again forever in Bitcoin's favor.

The USA is Bitcoin country. Now let's zoom out from the fight and look at what's actually

happening in the infrastructure. Because while diamond is on TV arguing about regulation,

the financial system itself is quietly rewiring around Bitcoin. Kraken's Federal Reserve master

account is not a symbolic win. It provides direct access to the same pipes that every major bank in

America uses. This is the plumbing. And the plumbing is how you know adoption is real.

Then there's Morgan Stanley's Bitcoin ETF filing. The world's third largest investment bank,

sitting on six trillion and wealth management assets, filing for a spot Bitcoin ETF with

BNY Melon as custodian. That's the institutional distribution machine gearing up. All of this,

along with the CFTC sprinting toward perpetual futures, is the system bending toward Bitcoin.

Not because anyone in charge woke up one morning and decided Bitcoin was right,

but because the math demands it. And I think this is what the then-they-fight-you-stage looks like

in its final act. The banks fight Bitcoin in public while the infrastructure absorbs it in private.

They lobby against the clarity act with one hand and build Bitcoin products with the other.

So you've seen the fight playing out at the national level. Banks versus Bitcoin. Old money versus

new money. But this isn't just an American story. It's a global one. In this week's escalation

in the Middle East, the strikes on Iran, the market shock, the fight to hard assets,

is a vivid reminder of why neutral money matters. Parker Lewis, author of Gradually Then Suddenly,

and one of the clearest thinkers in Bitcoin, connects the dots between currency to basement,

broken international trust, and why neutral money is inevitable. The problems with printing money

and the problems with the Fiat system that is inherently trust-based, two people to the trade,

and if you're trading with someone that you're potentially a foe of, you're having to use one of

in the Fiat world, you're having to use one currency or the other, right? So for the last 50 years,

more the dollar has dominated global trade. But if you are China or Russia, or if you're looking at

what the United States did to Russia kicking it off of Swift and functionally seizing

all of their treasuries, that puts the currency in the center of a political fight,

an economic fight, and potentially a what he would call a military fighter, a kinetic fight.

But a root problem of the impairment of effectively like trade as the other side of war is the money,

and the problem of money printing. If you knew that the person that you were trading with and

whose currency you were taking was constantly printing it, and you owned a bunch of their

treasuries because you were offsetting the debatement and the currency by the yield of the treasuries,

but they kept printing it and then they kept threatening you, well, you don't really want to

continue to trade with your currency. And one of the things that China has been doing and Russia

really out more so out of force. And again, getting into the details of that these geopolitics

is like, I am certainly not the experts of experts, but I can diagnose the problems of the currency

is that they're all looking at the same problem, which is if you cut Russia off of Swift and now they're

having to resolve that, then no one wants to trust the other's currency. Russia wouldn't want to trust

China's currency, China wouldn't want to trust Russia's currency, neither of them want to trust

the United States currency, even the other talks about Russia getting back onto the dollar system.

It's like that that bell has been wrong. The fight between banks and Bitcoin isn't happening

in a vacuum. It's happening against the backdrop of a global monetary system that's losing

legitimacy in real time. And you can see it playing out right now with what's happening between

the US and Iran. When every nation is printing and debasing and every currency can be weaponized or

frozen at will, the only answer is neutral money. And that's not gold. Gold has been confiscated

every time it became too effective as an escape valve. It's not stable coins or CBDCs. Those are

just digital versions of the same broken trust. It's Bitcoin, open, neutral, auditable, no nation

controls it, no central bank can print more of it, and it's not subject to ACH outages or shadow

bank fraud or cockroaches hiding in the plumbing. The old money order isn't just losing to Bitcoin

companies in a legislative fight. It's losing credibility on a civilizational level. The Iran

conflict is just the latest proof that the monetary system built on trust between nations is breaking

down. And the only asset that doesn't require trust between nations is Bitcoin. And this is

exactly why having a long-term strategic approach to accumulating Bitcoin matters more than ever.

The noise is louder than it's ever been. The volatility can shake even the strongest

conviction, but underneath all of it, the structural case for Bitcoin has never been stronger.

And this is what Swan Private is built for. If you're serious about building generational wealth

in Bitcoin, not trading it, not timing it, but positioning yourself for where this is all going,

Swan Private gives you a dedicated team. Real people, concierge level service,

tax advantage accounts, advance custody solutions, everything you need to build and protect a

meaningful Bitcoin position. To learn more about Swan Private, visit swan.com slash no second best.

So let's bring this all together. Bitcoin is winning. The banks are still fighting,

but they're fighting and surrendering at the same time. They lobby against crypto legislation

with one hand and build Bitcoin products with the other. They lecture about safety

while their own system crumbles from the inside. And meanwhile, Bitcoin just sits there.

Open ledger, fixed supply, no cockroaches, no bailouts, no permission required. The old money

versus new money war is already decided. The castle doesn't get stormed. The castle installs

Bitcoin because the spreadsheets demand it. And every day, the distance between Bitcoin in the

center of the global financial system shrinks a little more. Bitcoin has already won this fight.

Most people just don't see it yet, but the plumbing, the politics, and the macro are all

pointing in the same direction. And none of it is going backwards. But now I want to hear from you.

Do you think the banks can actually stop what's coming? Or is Diamond CNBC appearance the banking

elites blockbuster moment? Drop your thoughts in the comments. Like this video if you got value from

it. Share it with someone who still thinks the banks are in control. And don't forget to subscribe

to the Swan Bitcoin channel so you don't miss what comes next. Thanks for watching and remember,

in the game of money, there is no second best.