Welcome to the Forward Guidance newsletter, brought to you by Casey Wagner and Ben Strack. Here’s what you’ll find in today’s edition:

• Everyone has 2025 crypto predictions. Ben highlights a few to keep an eye on. 

• Is the Elon Musk-SEC situation “a misguided scheme?” 

• The FOMC rate decision headlines a week full of economic data.

Taking stock of crypto predictions for 2025

2025 is fast approaching and industry commentators are busy offering their two satoshis on what’s to come. 

With price predictions aplenty as bitcoin posts new all-time highs, we’ll stray away from those this time.

One stock price expectation: Per Bitwise, Coinbase (~$324 Monday midday) will hit $700 as it surpasses Charles Schwab as “the most valuable brokerage in the world.”

The investment firm correctly predicted MicroStrategy’s addition to the Nasdaq 100 index (announced Friday night) and believes COIN will join the S&P 500 next year.

BLOK portfolio manager Dan Weiskopf told me he thinks MSTR’s ascent to that index in 2025 might be “a reach.” Still, it’s only a matter of time, he says.

Weiskopf and the Amplify ETFs team detailed a “fun hypothetical” (should BTC move north of $200k) that MSTR could one day have a larger weighting in the S&P 500 than Bank of America. 

Moving on, VanEck’s Matthew Sigel and Patrick Bush wrote that President-elect Trump’s appointments — Howard Lutnick, David Sacks, Paul Atkins, etc. — signal “the start of a policy framework that positions bitcoin as a strategic asset.” 

What they really mean: the national bitcoin reserve Sen. Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming floated earlier this year.

When asked about a US crypto reserve materializing, Trump himself told market prognosticator Jim Cramer, “Yeah, I think so.”

He added: “We’re going to do something great with crypto. …Others are embracing it and we want to be the head.”

With more companies holding BTC, bitcoin yielding strategies could become “a new corporate finance norm,” the CoinShares team posed. 

More on the regulations/policy front: Bitwise is forecasting the US Department of Labor to relax its guidance against crypto in 401(k) plans in 2025. This would fit the flood-of-new-buyers narrative spurred by crypto-friendly regulation, with some pension funds and RIAs already making moves. 

A repeal of SAB 121 (a bipartisan effort blocked by President Joe Biden) might not even be necessary in 2025. Ava Labs deputy general counsel Wee Ming Choon told me he believes that particular bulletin will be an easy one for a new SEC administration to rescind (more thoughts from Choon are coming in a future Forward Guidance edition).    

Let’s conclude with a shared prediction from Bitwise and VanEck: The tokenized RWA space will surpass the $50 billion mark. 

Securitize’s Eric Ervin said during a panel moderated at Permissionless in October that he thinks BlackRock’s tokenized fund BUIDL, backed by US Treasurys, could grow to $50b on its own in the next few years.

— Ben Strack

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The year-to-date inflows tallied by crypto investment products, per CoinShares. This is 4x more than any other year, according to the firm.

US spot bitcoin ETFs alone have brought in $35.6 billion, with $11.5 billion of that entering post-election. 

Ether products have raked in $3.7 billion during seven consecutive net inflow weeks.

Newly minted Trump insider Elon Musk revealed last week that he’s been talking with the SEC over alleged disclosure violations related to his 2022 purchase of Twitter, now X.

In a letter posted on Musk’s X account, attorney Alex Spiro wrote to SEC Chair Gary Gensler, claiming the agency had “demanded” Musk either pay a civil penalty or “face charges on numerous counts.” 

SEC staff members, Spiro said, have conducted a multi-year investigation of “certain purchases, sales and disclosures of Twitter shares.” The entire situation is a “misguided scheme,” Spiro added. 

Reuters reported over the weekend that Musk has until Monday to respond to the settlement agreement.

The drama comes amid speculation about what Musk, as incoming head of the soon-to-be-created “Department of Government Efficiency,” may recommend with respect to the SEC. Musk and co-DOGE lead Vivek Ramaswamy have expressed interest in drastically reducing the staff of many agencies. 

Ramaswamy, a former presidential hopeful, previously said he’d drastically shrink the SEC if elected. 

“The problem with agencies like the US Federal Reserve, or the SEC, is when you have a bunch of people showing up to work who should have never had that job in the first place,” Ramaswamy said in a 2023 appearance. 

As of 2 pm ET today, Musk had not publicly announced his decision and Spiro had not returned Blockworks’s request for comment. 

The SEC declined to comment.

— Casey Wagner

Happy Monday! It’s the last full business week of 2024 and we have a lot of economic data on the horizon. 

The headline event, of course, is the FOMC’s interest rate decision on Wednesday, plus jobs data and November’s PCE report. 

Also on tap: 

• Fed funds futures markets are more certain than ever (99.1%, to be exact) that committee members will opt for a 25bps cut this week, even as the economy continues to show signs of strength. As we wrote about last week, the real question now is what will be the pace of interest rate cuts come 2025? 

• Initial jobless claims for the week ended Dec. 14 are expected to show 229,000 first-time claims. This would be a decline from the week before, when 242,000 new claims were filed. 

• November’s PCE report, the Fed’s preferred inflationary measure, will be published on Friday. Analysts expect a 0.2% increase from October and a 2.5% increase year over year, which would be an increase from October’s annual figure of 2.3%.

— Casey Wagner

• As noted earlier, Nasdaq revealed MSTR’s inclusion in the Nasdaq 100 index starting Dec. 23. Benchmark’s Mark Palmer reiterated his buy rating for the stock on Monday. His price target for MSTR is at $650; the company’s shares were trading around $430 at 2 pm ET. 

• Bitcoin’s price rose to a new all-time high above $107,800 today. The asset was trading around $107,000 by 2 pm ET — up 2.4% from 24 hours prior.

• The Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee appears set to vote on SEC Commissioner Caroline Crenshaw’s renomination on Wednesday. That vote, originally scheduled for last week, was delayed.