February 24, 2026, the CEO of Goldman Sachs admitted he owns Bitcoin.
Let that sink in for a second.
David Solomon — the man who runs what is arguably the most powerful investment bank on the planet — sat on a stage at Mar-a-Lago and told CNBC he personally holds Bitcoin. He called himself “an observer” who is “still trying to figure out how Bitcoin behaves.” He said Goldman Sachs is actively exploring crypto market-making. And he called for the United States to codify a rules-based regulatory framework for digital assets.
This is the same David Solomon who, as recently as January 2025, said Goldman Sachs “can’t own, principal, or be involved with” Bitcoin and other crypto assets.
Something shifted. And he said it shifted “very recently.”
But Solomon wasn’t even the most important part of what happened February 18th. Because he wasn’t alone at that event. Sitting alongside him — in the same gilded ballroom at the President’s winter White House — were the CEO of Nasdaq, the President of the New York Stock Exchange, the CEO of Franklin Templeton, the Chairman of the CFTC, the CEO of Coinbase, the CEO of Ripple, the founder of Binance, and multiple U.S. senators.
Read that list again. That’s not a crypto conference. That’s the entire architecture of the global financial system, gathered in one room, discussing how digital assets fit into the future of finance.
And almost nobody in the Bitcoin world is paying attention. Because Bitcoin is trading at $64,000 and everyone is too busy being scared.
The World Liberty Forum
The event was the inaugural World Liberty Forum, organized by Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump through their crypto venture, World Liberty Financial. Now, before you tune out because of the politics — I get it. There are legitimate questions about conflicts of interest, about the Trump family profiting from the presidency, about the ethics of the CFTC Chairman attending an event hosted by the President’s sons’ business venture. I’m a CPA. I understand the optics.
But I’m not a political commentator. I’m a market analyst. And what I saw February 18th transcends politics entirely. Because here’s what the critics are missing while they’re busy writing ethics editorials: the people who actually control the financial system just told you, in plain English, where they’re taking it.
Let me walk you through the signals.
Signal #1: Goldman Sachs Is Coming
David Solomon didn’t just admit to owning Bitcoin. He laid out a vision for how traditional finance and crypto are merging. His exact words were: “It’s one system, it’s our system. We have to do it the right way… and there’s going to be disagreements and that’s OK.”
Think about what he’s saying. Not “crypto is separate from our system.” Not “crypto is a threat to our system.” He said it’s ONE system. That’s Goldman Sachs telling you the merger is already happening. The only question is the regulatory framework that governs it.
And on that point, Solomon was crystal clear. He backed Treasury Secretary Bessent’s push for the CLARITY Act and said: “If there are people who think we are going to operate in this environment without rules, they are probably wrong, and they should move to El Salvador.”
This is Wall Street and the White House aligning on a single message. Get the rules right. Get the CLARITY Act passed. Then unleash institutional capital into digital assets.
Signal #2: The CLARITY Act Has a Path
For those who haven’t been following the legislative saga, let me give you the quick version.
The Digital Asset Market Clarity Act (H.R. 3633) is the most important piece of crypto legislation in history. It would establish clear jurisdictional lines between the SEC and the CFTC over digital assets, define what counts as a security versus a commodity, and set the rules for exchanges, brokers, and custody. It passed the House last July with a strong bipartisan vote of 294-134.
Then it got stuck in the Senate. And the reason it got stuck is actually pretty simple: stablecoin yield.
Banks — JPMorgan, Bank of America, Wells Fargo — are terrified of stablecoins offering 3-4% yields when their savings accounts pay 0.3%. So they’ve been lobbying aggressively to ban all stablecoin yield under the CLARITY Act. They spent over $56 million lobbying in 2025 alone. The crypto industry, led by Coinbase, has pushed back. The result: a complete impasse.
A White House meeting on February 10 ended in deadlock when bank representatives showed up with a “principles” document calling for a total ban on stablecoin yield.
But here’s what shifted February 18th. Senator Bernie Moreno, a member of the Senate Banking Committee who was at the forum, said the bill could pass “hopefully by April.” Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong — the same guy who pulled his company’s support for the bill last month — showed up and said “there is now a path forward.” Ripple’s Brad Garlinghouse suggested that once the stablecoin yield dispute is resolved, the bill could move quickly.
The White House has set an end-of-February deadline for a compromise. The betting markets have the bill at a 70% chance of passing by year-end. And the most powerful players in finance are publicly aligned on getting it done.
Why does this matter for Bitcoin specifically? Because the CLARITY Act isn’t about Bitcoin directly — it’s about the entire infrastructure that institutional money needs before it can flow into digital assets at scale. Clear rules on custody, on exchange regulation, on what tokens are securities and what are commodities. This is the plumbing. And the plumbers were all in the same room February 18th.
Signal #3: The Stablecoin Yield Fight Is the Real Story
I want to zoom in on the stablecoin yield dispute because I think it reveals something much bigger than most people realize.
Banks want to ban stablecoin yield because it threatens their deposit base. If you can hold a digital dollar on Coinbase that pays you 3.5%, why would you keep your money in a Chase savings account paying 0.3%? The answer, of course, is you wouldn’t. And the banks know it.
This fight isn’t about stablecoins. It’s about who controls the yield on your money. For 90 years — since Glass-Steagall in 1933 — banks have had a near-monopoly on offering interest on deposits. That monopoly is ending. Not because crypto is “disrupting” banks in some startup pitch-deck way. It’s ending because the technology exists to pay people a fair rate on their money, and the political will now exists to let it happen.
The compromise that’s being discussed — banning idle yield but allowing activity-based rewards — is the kind of middle ground that actually gets things done in Washington. Ban paying people just for parking money in stablecoins (which would look too much like deposits), but allow rewards tied to actual use of decentralized protocols. It threads the needle.
If this compromise comes together in the next few weeks, it removes the final obstacle to the CLARITY Act. And the CLARITY Act opens the door to a regulated digital asset ecosystem that institutional capital has been waiting for.
The Planetary Backdrop: Something Bigger Is Shifting
Now, some of you know I study cycles. Not just market cycles — Gann cycles, time cycles, and yes, planetary cycles. For those of you who think that’s insane, I totally understand. Feel free to skip this section. For those who are curious, let me connect a dot that I find fascinating.
February 20, 2026 — Saturn and Neptune formed an exact conjunction for the first time since 1989. These conjunctions occur roughly every 36 years. And while I’m not going to pretend the planets cause anything to happen in financial markets, the historical correlations with these conjunctions are hard to ignore.
In broad strokes, every Saturn-Neptune conjunction of the past 180 years has coincided with a window in which the prevailing financial order gave way to something new. In the mid-1840s, it was the financial crises and revolutions that disrupted the old European monetary system. Around 1917, the Federal Reserve transformed from a passive institution into a true central bank, the dollar began replacing the pound as the global reserve currency, and the gold standard started its long death. In the early 1950s, the Bretton Woods system was fully operational, locking in the dollar-gold peg and the post-war institutional financial architecture. And in 1989, the Berlin Wall fell just days before the third exact conjunction that year — communism died, capitalism won, and the era of financial deregulation that would define the next 36 years began.
I want to be careful here. These aren’t precise date-to-event correlations. The conjunctions mark windows — sometimes spanning a year or two — where the old gives way to the new. The exact date of the conjunction isn’t when the old system dies. It’s more like the hinge point around which the shift organizes itself.
But here’s what I find remarkable about the current one. This conjunction is at 0 degrees Aries — the very first degree of the entire zodiac. According to the research I’ve done, this specific configuration hasn’t occurred in approximately 6,000 years. Whether you believe the astrology or not, the symbolism of a “reset” is hard to miss.
And what happened February 18 — two days before this conjunction went exact — is that the entire financial establishment gathered to discuss the integration of digital assets into the regulated financial system.
Call that a coincidence if you want. I find the timing noteworthy.
The pattern from history isn’t that old systems vanish overnight. It’s that they evolve under pressure, and the conjunction marks the window where that evolution becomes irreversible. If the CLARITY Act passes in the next few months, if stablecoin yield gets resolved, if Goldman Sachs starts market-making in Bitcoin — that’s the irreversible moment. And we’re watching the foundation get laid in real-time.
What This Means for Bitcoin’s Price
Alright, let’s get to what you actually care about. How does any of this affect the price of Bitcoin at $64,000?
If you’ve been reading my work — especially the February 10 article, “You Are NOT Prepared” — you know my primary thesis: the decline from $126,000 (October 2025) to $59,600 (February 3, 2026) was a corrective A-B-C wave, not the start of a new bear market. The evidence for this includes time/price symmetry between waves A and C (wave C completed in exactly half the time of wave A with a similar percentage decline — textbook corrective behavior), a macro regime that is the mirror opposite of the February 2022 top (Fed easing instead of tightening, dollar falling instead of rising, M2 expanding instead of contracting), and ISM Manufacturing at 52.6 heading toward 60 — the level that historically marks Bitcoin cycle tops, not bottoms.
The price action since the $59,600 low has been… boring. A bounce to $73,000 around the February 10 Gann date, then a slow bleed back to $62,500. No fireworks. No dramatic reversal. Just grinding, choppy consolidation that makes everyone uncomfortable.
I’m looking at three charts as I write this, and they’re telling a consistent story.
My 2-hour wave count from the October 2025 top shows the full A-B-C correction completing at the February low, followed by what appears to be a developing impulse structure off the bottom. From $59,600, price has traced out an initial move up and is now pulling back in what I’m labeling as a wave [2] with questions — I’m honest about what I don’t know. But the structure is consistent with one more push lower into the $60,000-63,000 zone before wave [3] launches (which may have occurred today).
The 4-hour Gann chart tells a similar story. Price is compressed between a descending Gann angle from the highs and a rising angle from below. That triangle is narrowing and must resolve soon. The RSI at 43 is neutral — not oversold, not overbought. There’s room for one more flush before the breakout.
And on the daily Ichimoku chart, price remains below the cloud — which is what you’d expect during a correction. But the M2 Global Liquidity Index overlay at 104 and rising creates a glaring divergence. Price is falling while global liquidity is expanding. That divergence has to resolve, and historically, when it does, it resolves in the direction of liquidity. Which is up.
I think there’s one more push lower coming, which have occurred today. Maybe into the $60,000-63,000 zone. Maybe a quick wick toward $60,000-61,000. And I think it resolves within the next 48-72 hours, right in the window of the planetary dates and the approaching CLARITY Act deadline.
Here’s the key: that push lower, which may have occurred today, would be the final shakeout. The last scare before wave 3 launches. And the catalyst for the reversal could be the very regulatory progress that was signaled February 18th at the World Liberty Forum.
Think about the sequence: price dips one more time, shakes out the last weak hands, the media writes another round of obituaries. Then the CLARITY Act compromise emerges. Institutional money gets the green light. Goldman starts building its crypto desk. And Bitcoin begins a rally that takes it to $170,000 on the conservative end and potentially above $200,000 before year-end.
This isn’t a prediction I’m making lightly. I laid out my scorecard in the last article: if the bounce from here is impulsive — five-wave structure, accelerating momentum, blasting through $70,000 and then $76,000 without looking back — the bull thesis is confirmed. If it’s choppy, three-wave, and stalls at $70,000-73,000, the bears have a case. And if it’s impulsive but downward — if price breaks $59,600 on heavy volume and the decline accelerates — then the entire cycle extension thesis is wrong and I’ll own that publicly.
The line in the sand remains $59,600. Below that on volume, and I’m wrong. Full stop.
But what happened February 18th at Mar-a-Lago tells me the foundation for the bull case is being built in real-time. The people who actually move markets — the Solomons, the Armstrongs, the Friedmans — aren’t positioning for a world where Bitcoin goes to zero. They’re positioning for a world where Bitcoin is a regulated, institutional asset class within a clearly defined framework.
That framework is weeks, maybe months, from being codified. And when it is, the price of Bitcoin is going to reflect it.
The Disconnect Between Sentiment and Reality
This is the part that fascinates me the most. While the Financial Times published a “Bitcoin death knell” article on February 10 — literally on my Gann date — Goldman Sachs was preparing for a forum where its CEO would admit he owns Bitcoin. While Robert Prechter released research calling for Bitcoin to go to zero, the CEO of Nasdaq was sitting at Mar-a-Lago discussing how to regulate digital assets. While the Fear & Greed Index sits at extreme fear and ETF holders are down $15.97 billion from their average cost basis, Senator Moreno was telling CNBC the CLARITY Act could pass by April.
This disconnect between what the media is telling you and what the actual decision-makers are doing is exactly the kind of setup that precedes massive moves higher. The sentiment is capitulatory. The positioning is defensive. And the people who actually control the levers of finance are building the infrastructure for the next leg up.
I’ve been doing this long enough to know that markets don’t bottom when everyone is bullish. They bottom when everyone is scared, the news is terrible, and the smart money is quietly building positions.
I think we’re in that window right now. And what happened February 18th at the World Liberty Forum was the clearest signal yet.
What I’m Watching Next
Over the next two to four weeks, I’m watching for three things.
First, the CLARITY Act stablecoin yield compromise. The White House deadline is end of February. If a deal emerges, the bill can move to markup in the Senate Banking Committee. That’s the catalyst that unlocks everything.
Second, the ISM Manufacturing PMI on March 2. If it prints above 53 and new orders stay strong, it confirms the manufacturing expansion is accelerating toward the 60 level that has historically coincided with Bitcoin cycle tops — meaning the top is ahead of us, not behind us.
Third, and most importantly, the character of Bitcoin’s price action. If we get one more push lower (which may have occurred today) and then a sharp, impulsive reversal — that’s the signal. If the bounce is weak, corrective, and rolls over, then the bears deserve more respect.
The market will tell us. It always does. But after February 20th, the weight of evidence tilts heavily toward the bull case.
The old financial system isn’t dying. It’s evolving. And the people running it just told you so, on camera, from the President’s living room.
Pay attention.
The next few weeks are going to be decisive. Either the regulatory framework comes together and Bitcoin launches into the wave 3 rally I’ve been building the case for since February 10, or it doesn’t and the bears get their day. I’ll be here either way, showing my work and being honest about what the price action is telling me.
But I’ll say this much: I’d rather be positioned for the upside and wrong about the timing than positioned for the downside and miss a move to six figures that the most powerful people in global finance are actively constructing the foundation for.
Your move.
For a deeper look at how I use Gann cycles, Elliott Wave analysis, and macro frameworks to navigate these markets, check out my upcoming book Accelerate Your Money and Prosper at coast2coastfinancial.com. And if you want my real-time updates as this setup plays out over the next few weeks, make sure you’re subscribed to the CPA Gone Mad newsletter. This is the kind of window where being informed matters.
Not financial advice, educational purposes only.