Anthony Scaramucci attributes the recent wave of Bitcoin selling to a round number. Many early holders regarded USD 100,000 per coin as their personal magic number and exited the market once that level was reached.

Who is Anthony Scaramucci

Scaramucci began his career at Goldman Sachs in 1989 and founded SkyBridge Capital in 2005. The investment firm mainly runs funds of funds — vehicles that invest in other funds rather than in individual securities — and ranked among the early institutional Bitcoin buyers. Outside finance, he became widely known in 2017, when he served as White House communications director under President Donald Trump for eleven days. Since 2009, he has hosted the SALT conference series.

His remarks came in an interview with The Block, a crypto news outlet, at the Wyoming Blockchain Symposium in Jackson Hole. Wyoming has enacted a series of blockchain-friendly state laws since 2018, among them a special charter for banks that hold digital assets. Around 500 investors, developers and regulators attended the invitation-only SALT event in mid-August.

The price context

Bitcoin climbed to an all-time high of USD 126,198 in October 2025. By June 2026, the price had fallen to roughly USD 58,000 — a decline of about 54%. Scaramucci nevertheless rates the drawdown as moderate: historical bear markets have cost Bitcoin between 75% and 80%.

OGs sold at USD 100,000 per Bitcoin

In the industry, OGs are investors who have held Bitcoin from the early years onward. Many of them sat on their positions for 10 to 15 years and rode out several cycles without selling. For a long time, six-figure prices remained an abstract goal for this group, serving more as a reference point than as a concrete price target. Once the price actually reached the mark, it turned into an exit signal. Round numbers also bundle attention and orders at a single point, so selling pressure came precisely from the circle of the most convinced holders.

Scaramucci described this mechanism to The Block:

"Honestly, a lot of OGs who held their position for 10, 15 years saw USD 100,000 per coin as a magic number for themselves - and they sold." — Anthony Scaramucci, SkyBridge Capital

A self-fulfilling prophecy

At the start of the year, the market was split. One camp expected a Bitcoin supercycle in which institutional demand overrides the old patterns. Many other participants stuck to the historical four-year rhythm tied to the halving — the protocol rule that cuts the new Bitcoin issued to miners in half roughly every four years, most recently in April 2024, when the block reward fell from 6.25 to 3.125 BTC. Both sides drew on the same price history yet reached opposite conclusions, and this split shaped positioning for months. When the market hit its turning point, the selling expectations won out — the expectation itself became the trigger. Scaramucci speaks of a self-fulfilling prophecy, tipped by a target that had been fixed in people's minds for years.

By June 2026, Bitcoin had lost around 54% against its high. Compared with earlier bear phases, that decline stayed mild, and the market absorbed this supply without the usual slump.

Institutions move into the place of the OG sellers

John Darsie frames this change of ownership as part of a maturing process. The CEO of SALT doubles as a partner at SkyBridge Capital and views the market from an intermediary's seat. In his account, long-term holders and libertarians are parting with portions of their holdings. Libertarians hold Bitcoin above all as a counter-model to the state monetary system. Institutions, financial advisers and family offices, meanwhile, increasingly add Bitcoin to their asset mix. Family offices manage the wealth of single families across several asset classes.

As a result, the group that moves the price is shifting. In Darsie's view, that shift has contributed to lower volatility: the holder base is growing and losing its ideological stamp along the way. He considers the development healthy, provided Bitcoin further establishes itself as a store of value — an asset that preserves purchasing power over long periods. For institutional investors, the counterparty question changes as well: supply moves from conviction holders to buyers with investment guidelines and a mandate.

At the symposium in Jackson Hole, the new buyer base showed up in concrete form. Darsie says sovereign wealth funds from Singapore and the Middle East travelled in, and pension funds, endowments and family offices likewise attended. These allocators want to deploy capital into Bitcoin, liquid crypto assets and venture investments — in short, their interest covers the full breadth of the sector.

Quiet price action and the view toward 2028

Scaramucci describes the price action of recent weeks as unusually quiet. In a CNBC interview, he pointed to nine weeks with the tightest volatility range in five years. Since the Iran war began in February 2026, the price has barely moved. At the time of reporting, Bitcoin traded at around USD 65,000. Shortly beforehand, a short squeeze had liquidated short positions worth USD 179 million. In a short squeeze, short sellers must buy back their positions, which pushes the price up further.

For the coming months, Scaramucci still expects a sideways move. He sees the next big catalyst only about 20 months out: the 2028 halving, when the block reward for miners halves again. From that cycle he expects the return above USD 100,000. A near-term breakout therefore needs a fresh trigger. Despite the weak first half of the year, his basic stance stays positive.

The market does not share this view uniformly. According to Forbes, some analysts expect a further decline into a range of USD 57,000 to USD 58,500. In the week before the symposium, US spot Bitcoin ETFs also recorded net outflows of roughly USD 390 million. These funds hold Bitcoin directly and track the price one to one; in their first year after launch, they drew tens of billions of dollars in net inflows and ranked among the fastest-growing ETF debuts on record. Such outflows show that the institutional channel works in both directions, and the range of expectations remains wide.

Earlier forecasts and his own positioning

Scaramucci's assessments can be placed in context. In April 2024, he named USD 170,000 as his Bitcoin target for that cycle, basing the call on the halving and the newly approved spot ETFs, which the US Securities and Exchange Commission had cleared in January 2024. The cycle then peaked in October 2025 at USD 126,198 — he missed his target by roughly a quarter. The parallel to his current statement is notable: his 2028 expectation likewise rests on the same halving mechanics.

His own positioning adds to that picture. SkyBridge's flagship fund most recently held 64% of its assets in digital assets. According to Bloomberg, it lost 18% in the fourth quarter of 2025 and shed another 12.9% in the first quarter of 2026. Its volume last stood at around USD 1.3 billion, compared with about USD 9 billion at SkyBridge's peak in 2015. Scaramucci's market comments therefore touch his own book directly.

Investors are also trying to get out of the fund. In a repurchase offer, they submitted around 792,000 shares, of which the fund bought back only about 64,000, or 8.1%. Previously, in 2022, SkyBridge had sold 30% of its own shares to FTX Ventures. A few weeks later, the crypto exchange filed for bankruptcy. Scaramucci had publicly backed its founder earlier and bought the stake back afterwards.

AI and blockchain as Scaramucci's next bet

Beyond the Bitcoin price, Scaramucci is betting on a convergence of AI and blockchain. He expects that AI agents will most likely settle future transactions over blockchains. Such agents act on behalf of users and trigger payments on their own — an agent could pay for computing power, data or services without a human step — so they need payment rails that work without manual approval. The SkyBridge founder sees the touchpoint of the two technologies precisely there.

Darsie points to a development already under way: Bitcoin miners are shifting part of their capacity into AI computing, with both uses competing for the same computing and energy infrastructure. He names energy, AI, robotics, fintech and digital assets as the big themes of the coming decade, and that list maps what the allocators who travelled to Jackson Hole are screening for. The capital providers at the symposium were not looking for Bitcoin exposure alone; venture investments sat on their list next to liquid crypto assets. Scaramucci's thesis thus meets an audience that already reviews such infrastructure bets. However, he gives no timeline for the convergence of AI and blockchain.