sport football: Bitcoin Is Destined to Dominate Global Trade

Bitcoin Is Destined to Dominate Global Trade

On April 2, 2025, President Trump announced his plans to reset the entire global trade regime.

In doing so, he sent a shockwave through the markets. And set in motion a challenge to U.S. dollar supremacy.

Over the coming months, you're going to see a lot of press about trade and tariffs. Some will make sense. Some will be nonsense.

Nearly all of it will overlook what I believe will be the biggest story to emerge from the escalating trade war.

The rise of a new global trade settlement currency.

Friends, we could be witnessing the greatest restructuring of global trade since the Bretton Woods Agreement in 1994.

To understand why, I have to take you back nearly a decade ago to a paltry (yet significant) trade involving nearly $100,000 worth of Irish dairy products…

The Trade Heard Around the World

On September 7, 2016, Barclays Bank guaranteed the export of $100,000 worth of cheese and butter from an Irish co-op to the Seychelles Trading Company.

At the time, it didn't seem like a big deal. After all, $100,000 is barely a drop in the bucket when compared to the annual $94 billion trade finance market.

But I knew this trade would be an absolute game-changer.

You see, in trade finance deals, banks provide the funding that lubricates the wheels of global trade. But they need inspectors to confirm the provenance, authenticity, and quality of the goods and products involved in the trade.

This results in a mountain of paperwork that needs to be mailed across oceans. It's an archaic, time-consuming process that takes as much as 10 days.

But on September 7, 2016, Barclays closed the entire $100,000 butter and cheese trade in just four hours.

Years from now, when future historians look back, I believe they'll view this tiny trade as a paradigm shift… That's because it was the first ever use of blockchain technology to settle a cross-border trade transaction.

As I told my readers back then:

You don't need to know all the technical details about blockchain tech. Just like you don't need to know how the internet works to profit from tech stocks. All you need to know is, it's a game changer.

Trade finance is just one small application of blockchain technology. There are many others that will be disrupted by blockchain.

Friends, over the last decade, I've predicted every major stage in bitcoin's development – from Wall Street creating financial products like exchange-traded funds (ETFs) to governments establishing strategic bitcoin reserves.

Now, did each development happen overnight? Of course not. Just like bitcoin's ascent from about $400 (when I first recommended it) to nearly $110,000 (at its peak earlier this year) per token didn't happen overnight.

It has taken 10 years to get here. But over those 10 years, investors have compounded their money at an average rate of 75% per year.

Bitcoin becoming a global trade currency could happen much quicker than you think. And it's a much bigger adoption story than bitcoin ETFs or strategic reserves.

Losing Faith in the Dollar

I've been covering markets as a professional for 36 years. I've seen just about every type of market panic and crash you can think of.

And whether it was the First Gulf War in 1991… The 9/11 terrorist attack in 2001… The 2008 Great Financial Crisis… Or the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020…

When stock market investors panic, they have always fled to the perceived safety of U.S. bonds and the U.S. dollar. Always.

But for the first time in my career, I didn't see that flight to safety after the stock market sold off earlier this month. Instead, we saw bond yields explode higher (this meant people were panic-selling bonds) and the U.S. dollar collapse in value.

Here's why that is very troubling action…

When the stock market panics, investors generally flee to the safety of the U.S. bond market. When they do, bond yields fall as bond prices rise due to heavy buying.

On the flip side, when they sell bonds and go back to stocks, bond yields usually rise because as bond prices go down, yields go up.

However, we didn't see that pattern play out after the April 2 market rout. Instead of dropping, the yield on the 10-year Treasury ballooned. Over the past week or so, the U.S. 10-year Treasury yield has surged from 3.86% to as high as 4.59%. The U.S. Dollar index, which measures the value of the dollar against a basket of foreign currencies, dropped as much as 8%.

Violent moves like this aren't normal in the U.S. bond or dollar markets. When they occur, it often signals grave stress in the financial markets.

So what's the market telling us?

This is telling us the world no longer views U.S. Treasuries and the U.S. dollar as safe haven assets. They view them as a risk asset.

That is a fundamental shift in investor behavior, and it's one you ignore at your own peril… because the selling is not over.

This action is telling us our trading partners have lost faith in America.

Now, I'm not saying whether or not this loss of trust is valid or justified. I'm simply reporting on why the market is behaving the way it is.

The market is acting as if the era of American exceptionalism is over. But I believe the market is making a mistake. It's a huge error to ever bet against America.

But right now, that's exactly what is happening in the U.S. Treasury and dollar markets. So where is the rest of the world putting their money?

To answer that question, let's look at what assets have moved up in price since the close of business on April 2, when reciprocal tariffs were announced.

We can see that the two biggest winners of this flight from U.S. assets have been gold and bitcoin.

Gold has been up as much as 7%, and bitcoin has been up as much as 4.78% since the close of April 2. As noted above, bonds and the dollar have been down as much as 7% and 4.5% over the same period.

The market is telling us that it sees gold and bitcoin as neutral, safe haven assets. For gold, that's nothing new.

But for bitcoin, this is a historic moment. Usually when markets get slammed, bitcoin goes down even more than the main markets.

We saw that in March 2023 during the regional banking crisis. The S&P 500 fell as much as 6%, but bitcoin fell as much as 12%. We saw it again in March 2020 when COVID-19 knocked the S&P 500 down 36%, and bitcoin fell more than 50%.

So what's changed? Why is bitcoin now considered a safe haven asset? To see why, let's go back to the butter and cheese trade…

Why Bitcoin Is the New Gold

When I wrote that essay on the butter and cheese trade going over the blockchain nearly a decade ago… It marked the beginning of what I knew would be a wholesale remaking of the financial system.

Back in 2016, my readers and myself were getting our banking rights confiscated from us for buying bitcoin. Today, banks are being punished by regulators for not opening their doors to crypto.

In 2016, the establishment told us bitcoin was for drug dealers and money launderers. Today, the United States of America has determined that it wants to own as much bitcoin as it can in a strategic reserve.

So what's next for bitcoin?

In two words: Trade settlement.

For thousands of years of human history, gold has been used to conduct trade. What was great about gold is that you didn't have to trust in the other guy's currency.

We all agreed on what gold was… What purity levels had what value… And we all traded with each other without giving the other person an advantage.

That all ended when fiat currencies started to dominate trade.

Gold is just logistically too difficult to settle trades in anymore. That's where bitcoin comes in.

As I pull back the camera on the world we live in today, it's obvious to me that many of the world's major trading partners will begin to migrate part of their trade settlements from fiat currencies like the U.S. dollar… to bitcoin.

When you think about it, it makes perfect sense. By shifting your trade settlement to bitcoin, no individual country receives a currency advantage.

Part of the reason why the United States can run massive deficits is because almost all trade is priced in and conducted in U.S. dollars.

This creates massive demand for dollars and U.S. bonds. Banks, trading firms, importers, exporters, central banks, etc. – they all need to keep a huge supply of dollars in order to settle trades and pay bills.

Over the course of my lifetime, no matter what has happened, the rest of the world was happy to take dollars. They might not take Argentine pesos, Chinese yuan, or Russian rubles… But they would always take U.S. dollars.

That's changing now. I believe we are moving into a world where countries will settle their transactions in bitcoin, then convert the bitcoin into their local currencies. This is the future of global trade.

Think about the benefits the bitcoin blockchain offers. It's designed in a way that makes it tamperproof. No one can go back and change the data in a blockchain the way they can in a centralized computer or paper-based system.

Every step of the transaction process on a blockchain is tied to a specific individual who is held accountable by computer code.

Blockchains are designed to operate without the need of a central, trusted third party. That feature, along with the tamperproof nature of a blockchain, makes it revolutionary for global trade.

So why hasn't the world already adopted bitcoin as a settlement currency?

The answer is simple: The U.S. dollar is the healthiest patient in the cancer ward. And for nearly a century, it has sufficed.

But the new tariff regime has upset the apple cart. The world is looking for an alternative. And bitcoin fits the bill. It has all the strengths of gold and the dollar, but none of the weaknesses.

Like gold, the number of bitcoin mined each year is finite. You can't print bitcoin out of thin air. It's also more liquid than gold. Trades settle in minutes rather than days or even weeks. And the transaction costs are paltry when compared to bank wires, foreign exchange fees, and physical logistical costs that transacting in gold requires.

Bitcoin became a $1 trillion asset faster than any other asset in history. It did that when the most powerful government in the world, the United States, was actively trying to thwart its adoption.

Imagine what it will do now that every government in the world is starting to wake up to all the benefits bitcoin offers as a medium of exchange that isn't controlled by any government.

You can't impose tariffs on it. You can't impose sanctions on it.

That creates a level playing field between trading partners. By settling in bitcoin, they don't have to rely on trust that another party won't devalue their currency.

Friends, the trust between countries is eroding at a faster pace than I've ever seen before. In an environment like this – where trust is low, yet people still want to trade with each other – you'll need a convenient and trustless settlement mechanism.

It's not an American asset… or Chinese asset… or Russian asset. It's a neutral asset the entire world will grow to trust.

How much do you think that trust will be worth in the coming years?

I believe it will be worth tens of trillions of dollars.

Let the Game Come to You!

Big T