← The Wolf Of All Streets
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- [00:01]
A
Bitcoin peaked at around a 4.3 trillion market cap alongside the rest of crypto, which is now around 3.2 for all crypto, shedding a trillion dollars in market cap with a lot of people calling for an extended bear market. Now, obviously we had an FOMC meeting yesterday that was extremely divided and the odds of a rate cut in December have dropped on Poly market and other predictive markets appear below 50%. There's a lot going on, some reasons to be bullish like Nvidia earnings and a lot of reasons seemingly to be bearish. I don't think I've ever seen people this confused and divided. Luckily, when people are confused and divided, I just call David from Coinbase to come on and tell us what's going on with the market. So let's do that now. Let's go, let's.
- [00:59]
B
Foreign.
- [01:05]
A
Everybody. And welcome to the show. I've got David here joining. The two of us were opining before the show about how hard it is to be in your 40s and get Jet lag traveling. That's how old we are. But we also should probably talk about markets. Welcome back, David. Of course, this started with you saying your throat hurts and you were just on an international trip. So, yep, here we are.
- [01:29]
B
Thanks. So apologies in advance, like I'm.
- [01:31]
A
You sound great. Let's talk about the market. So let's bring up bitcoin market cap. Here we've got bitcoin trading right around 91,000. It went to a low about 88,6. Actually. 88 was just sort of a level I've been watching for six or seven months since we sort of broke out of a consolidation and got back above 100. So I had a lot of bids there. So now I'm a buyer and need you to confirm my bullish bias. But here we are. Altcoin still generally down more than bitcoin. Bitcoin down not much of a bull cycle in 2025 when we look back at the prices a year ago or even at the beginning of the year. How do you put this in context of all the sort of predictions we made and the expectation that we were going to have this booming Q4?
- [02:12]
B
Yeah, I think that there's a bitcoin exceptionalism thesis that's going around right now as well. And to be honest with you, I do think that probably we'll see bitcoin stand out more so than the altcoins because there's at least a lot of institutions that are playing in this in a way that I feel like all coins don't have a ton of liquidity in them at the moment. But I am still constructive. I feel like at this point I'm kind of encroaching on naive optimism kind of territory. But I kind of hold to my whole affirmed my thesis in part because I do think that liquidity, if as long as I I'm looking at the, the custom liquidity index that we have correctly, it's kind of showing that this is par for the course in terms of liquidity dipping down in November and picking back up in December. And I think that the inflection higher is going to correspond to a move higher with crypto more broadly, but bitcoin specifically. And I think that in barge part there's still a lot of institutions out there who have cash on the sidelines who are not invested yet but have done their homework and want to be involved in crypto. And when they say that generally they mean they want to buy some bitcoin. So I think that's going to happen. But probably we'll need to get through this kind of low liquidity kind of period. We just got good earnings data coming from Nvidia, so at least it seems like the tech bubble, for example, like a lot of people I think have gotten wrong. So very likely, I think that when we see that the Fed comes out on December 1st with the end of quantape tightening and then on December 10th, I still believe that they're going to come out with cuts and that is massive. That's a very big point for the macro side of things. Then we think, I think that like probably we can continue on with the rally as it is.
- [03:58]
A
So a lot to unpack there. I mean as you look at the bitcoin chart specifically, and I agree with you, there's bitcoin and everything else, we've been all saying that for years. Right. So there's clearly not much liquidity in altcoins outside of the ones that have ETFs or have treasury companies or however you want to look at the institutionalized altcoins. So we have a what I would call normal 30% bull market or Bitcoin's been in the bull market since a year ago. Right. Bull market retrace. So it's taken a lot of time going sideways in the hundreds, but here we are at 90,000, just under 30% down from the all time highs. We see that five to eight times every single bull market or cycle. Right. But on the flip side, the 50 ma on the weekly is broken which has Never happened in a bull market. And a lot of traders look to that and we have a lot of, I guess, concerns about the Fed and the macro. Do you think that that's why I see. Maybe I'm wrong, maybe there's anecdotal, but I see incredible division and we have for a while, but there's either it's obviously a bull market retrace, it's going to all time highs or the cycle is over. The Reddit post said October 6 was going to be the top and it was and we should start bidding 30 to 50,000 here. And it seems like people are diametrically opposed on that view.
- [05:18]
B
Yeah. So I subscribe to the idea that we're going through a K shaped recovery and this doesn't necessarily mean that things are going. In fact, it precisely doesn't mean that we're going to see a bounce back towards new all time highs again. Like I think that over the next, you know, six weeks it's going to be very difficult for us to Reclaim like the 126 level on Bitcoin, for example. But from probably early December onwards I could see us kind of grinding back again. And in large part that does depend on what happens with the Fed. And I hate this because there doesn't seem to be a lot of endogenous kind of factors helping us on the crypto side of things. I think regulation might be one of them and I think that's something that people are missing. Maybe that's also something that come in December, but it's so contingent of what happens on December 10th. If the Fed is able to cut another 25 basis points, and I think they will, very likely, I think that they could still continue with those cuts into the first half of 2026, but a lot of people discounting that at the moment. And I had an old boss who had a great saying, and this isn't his saying, I think this is an old, you know, phrase in, in Wall Street. But it's like bull markets are not, rather bull markets did not die on their own. Bull markets are slaughtered by the Fed. And what he meant by that is like, like these bull markets end only when those rate hikes really start to come in, when borrowing gets to become too expensive, that's where you don't see the liquidity anymore and that's where markets just don't move at the moment. So I think that if this happens, and honestly I think that it was more a case of Powell trying to reset expectations on what happens in December, although there's a lot of complications with Bureau Labor Statistics not having a lot of data because of the US Government shutdown. I think that all these things are contributing factors. I still think that that insurance company, 25 bips kind of leaves us with the ability to see more cuts in the first half of next year. And that could actually support a rally.
- [07:20]
A
Yeah, I mean, I'm looking right here at Poly Market. I hadn't actually brought it up. I just sort of seen the reports of it. But it looks like no change at 64% is leading in a 30 and a 25 bips decrease. That 25 cut, you're saying is 35. So actually your opinion right now, strangely, which was 88% at the last cut. Right. Has now dwindled, which is why it's so hard to look at these because they change in real time.
- [07:46]
B
Absolutely. And we saw the minutes yesterday, and I'll be honest, I was more surprised that like more than, you know, one board member is actually unsure about what the right decision is for December. I thought that, you know, Powell was going to say this in the last press conference, say like, okay, like we, like, you know, December cut is not a done deal. And I kind of figured this is what he has to say. Like, I kind of figured that like the probability of like 88, 90 odds that we've, that we're going to be at a cut was too high and he needed to reset that to 50. When he did that, I was like, okay, great. That means that markets have kind of reset. Here we are like, you know, we've de leveraged in the crypto space. We've kind of deleveraged in the traditional finance space as well. So actually, from positioning perspective, things were a lot cleaner. But the Fed minutes obviously have changed things and we've seen this drop now from like 50 down to 35 odds of a rate cut. And that matters. I mean, this is where we're not in an easy environment for borrowing. We saw that credit risk is still kind of an issue. Long end rates, you know, they're, they're teetering between that 4% and 5%. And people aren't sure, like, if the cost of capital is going to get too high for people. People are losing their jobs in the real economy. So I think there are a lot of difficulties in trying to read the tea leaves here.
- [09:10]
A
Totally agree. And the Economist, as much as I like to say, oh, it's a hit piece because it's against my thing, but, you know, crypto got everything it wanted. Now it's sinking. So I had three of my quote unquote normie friends who are maybe slightly interested in bitcoin because I am send me this article. So this, this isn't. This went around and it went around to the non crypto natives everywhere and it makes some very interesting points. Obviously it says that, you know, we secured our biggest victories spot. Bitcoin ETFs, clear regulation, institutional adoption, mainstream legitimacy. Despite these long fought wins, Bitcoin has plunged more than 25% from its highs and the market has shed over 1 trillion, revealing that structural fragilities, leverage, speculative flows and correlation to broader risk assets never went away. Now it's true obviously that we got the huge bump basically after the election and we've somewhat been sideways since even with all of this good news, leaving many to wonder what could be the next catalyst if we had all that. But I would also say it has not been correlated to risk assets as they're saying, because everything else gold's gone up, stocks have gone up, everything else is up and we're actually down. So where's that correlation? I'm just trying to absorb this and decide whether I'm just emotionally mad that they wrote it or if they're wrong or if they're actually right. Yeah.
- [10:30]
B
So two things with this. Back in mid 2023, I wrote a paper about how bitcoin provides a diversification sleeve in your portfolio. And I get asked, oh, but like, you know, doesn't that mean then that when other assets are going up, like, no, like what that diversification means precisely is a moment like this where yeah, other things might be going up, bitcoin's going down, but like when those things are going down, bitcoin's going up. Like that's what it means to diversify your portfolio. And I don't think people get that. They think that like, oh, it means it goes up, but it goes up less or it goes up more. And it's like, you know, I think we're going to look back and use this as a data point and realize like, okay, bitcoin continues providing that diversification benefit to a lot of portfolios.
- [11:15]
A
The whole thing is Any portfolio is 5% of your allocation to something completely idiosyncratic. And bitcoin proving that it doesn't go up when other things don't go up is emotionally hard, but actually exceptional for investors. And sharpe ratios sometimes when your things uncorrelated, it goes down when other things go up, unfortunately. So number two. Sorry, I interrupted you.
- [11:38]
B
No, that's, that's exactly right. And number two, I would say that this is a great headline as far as I'm concerned. Come from the Economist. Like, I, I think that a lot of my normie friends might not want to admit this, but, but the, like, when something ends up generally on the COVID of the Economist, but even inside the articles, that generally means that is either the top or the bottom. Like, it, it doesn't make its way into the Economist until, like, it really gets to that inflection point. So when I see something that I'm like, okay, that's another line for me in terms of like a bottom indicator on where the market is. So I'm glad when I see something like that, to be honest with you. You.
- [12:20]
A
Yeah, it's like the Economist is like the mainstream investors equivalent to your Uber driver telling you about something or the guy cutting your hair.
- [12:28]
B
Right.
- [12:28]
A
Or in both directions. But usually those are, I guess, the euphoric tops more than the, the bottom, which I think is what they're likely calling here. I can tell you we have some interesting data that whales are definitely accumulating. And we knew that whales were dumping actually on the way down. That was a lot of the selling pressure. You see it on chain, hundreds of thousands of, of coins. Well now number of entities with a balance of 1bit 1000, Bitcoin or more has absolutely skyrocketed on this dip. So you got to wonder, like, you know, who's selling into all these? It's the same chart here. But yeah, you know, obviously every time there's a dip, if you're close to the bottom, you see, we can sell into strong hands. I mean, it is the mechanics of the market.
- [13:10]
B
Yeah. And if it's uncomfortable for you, then, like, that's probably a good sign. I would say that smart money is definitely trying to buy back into this at better levels. Like I said, I think that probably this is going to be selective. I don't think that this is going to be widespread across the entire crypto complex. Probably it's going to play into bitcoin, probably some of the majors. I think maybe some of the alts are going to benefit from this, but there has to be a good idiosyncratic story behind it. We're not in the froth period where everything is going to do well. But if you're saying, like, okay, all right, there's going to be a HIP3 development on hyperliquid, or like, oh, there's going to be a change up in terms of more buybacks and burns on Certain things or a fee switch on a uniswap. These are the things that I think are going to be supportive for individual tokens. But I think you're going to see a lot more players do bottoms up analysis rather than just kind of, you know, obliviously blind buying whatever kind of token that's out there.
- [14:14]
A
How are you viewing treasury companies right now? I mean, we've talked about this a couple times over their trajectory. I was obviously a outspoken and unpopular skeptic in the bitcoin community of the bitcoin treasury companies specifically, just because I didn't understand how you beat bitcoin without, you know, complex financial engineering. Do you think we're going to go into merger and acquisition season here? Do you think that this narrative is dead? Do you think that we see a few select winners? I mean, it's very clear that we had a very quick bubble and pop. I think we can all agree on that.
- [14:47]
B
Yeah, I think that what we are still in the middle of is that 1.0. And I think that there will be a DAT 2.0 cycle at certain point and hopefully. And I'll. Because I kind of sided with you on a lot of those names. I don't think all of them. Right. I don't think you can kind of throw the baby out with a, with a hand basket or whatever the saying is. But certainly we were in that PVP stage and I think that we're kind of going to the consolidation stage at the moment. You haven't seen a ton of that buying over the last few weeks. I mean, there was some Support coming from MicroStrategy on the Bitcoin side of things, but they couldn't even defend like a lot of the big levels that we saw, like in the 9800k zone, for example.
- [15:31]
A
Well, he doesn't really try. He buys way above them.
- [15:33]
B
Yeah, absolutely. So what will DAT 2.0 look like? I think DAT 2.0 will look a lot like the analogs in traditional finance. And I'm talking about, for, if you're familiar, your cargills, your trafagoras, like places that treat basically commodities and actually trade them in the sense of what's the duration kind of look like in terms of the risk? How do we hedge it? How do we protect ourselves? And so if you start treating crypto and block space as an asset for a lot of the dedicated companies that are out there who depend on block space for their business purposes, I think that there will be a subset of DATs that will emerge who are going to be there to actually trade that stuff and actually say like, okay, how do we not only hedge it but actually grow our position inside of these specific names. So I think that's what DAT 2.0 is going to look like and it's not going to be this pure accumulation play that we saw in DAT 1.0 and I think that's going to be a lot better for our space than kind of what we have right now.
- [16:44]
A
I think we've also seen a very clear differentiation of the pros and the amateurs when it comes to digital asset treasury companies. And to me that doesn't mean the amateurs can't catch up. But you look at Tom Lee and Michael Saylor and those guys have found ways to continue to buy as price goes down. Most of the other ones got some money bought very close to the top and have no ability to literally do anything because they didn't realize that if prices went down there'd be no thirst for their convertible notes or any of the engineering that they were going to try to do a strategy type technique. So now they're just holding on, you know, with Bitcoin 25 down or you know, Salon and Ethereum 30 down from their buy price and they can't do anything.
- [17:32]
B
Yeah, I, I don't know if they didn't know because there were a lot of people, I think yourself, you know, there are a lot of Tradify or Extra 5 folks who also point that out to them. So I'd be remiss to think that like they had no clue that that could happen. That like basically we said this law looks fine when the cycle is moving higher. But like I think this is part and parcel of what has kind of like led to the speed down like side that we've seen in our space. Like we saw that headline from a few weeks back of like one of the DATs actually buying as part of, you know, reallocation of their portfolio. And you know, like these things I think have a, you know, a knock on effect in terms of like how the selling pressure actually, you know, negatively affects us, our space in a, you know, leverage kind of way. And, and, and, and it takes a bigger hit to us. So I do think that some of these things are probably happening in the background as we speak. Like I don't think that all this is happening on exchange so we don't have full cloud clarity of it. It's probably happening OTC or other things. But you know, I think that the fortunate thing is at least since October 10, I think a lot of that speculative froth is now gone.
- [18:56]
A
Yeah, October 10th was brutal. We haven't even spoken since October 10th. Do you see that we're, do you think that we're going to see some bodies floating to the top still? We keep hearing rumors of either market makers or potentially some exchanges or hedge funds and such blowing up. Have you seen evidence of any of that? I mean that was a massive event. I know it was mostly retail traders on Binance, but it was still just a monster event. You have to imagine that there were some victims we don't know about that could be meaningful players in the market.
- [19:25]
B
And I think we have seen it to some extent. Some of this has happened in Defi, so we've kind of wrote it off a little bit. But things like Stream Finance, for example, I mean that was definitely a victim of, of the October 10th deleveraging. And I think that had it not been for that, you wouldn't have seen. I mean, be fair, you often have to question if you're offering 20 yield on stable coins or something, it's like, well, where you getting that yield? So already I think there were people questioning the premise behind something like that. But some of those kind of like defi, like victims of this, I think that they are starting to come to the fore at the moment. But if you're looking at just purely how much perp and option open interest is there relative to the total crypto market cap? I mean we were at levels of around like 10. We're now down the levels of like three and a half, 4%. So a lot of that speculation has now been washed out. I would say we've been flat since, since that point on October 10th. So yes, some bad things have continued to happen, price action wise, as well as some of these names. I would say that at the very least we're not seeing on, at least on the perpetual futures, open interest and other things front, like it doesn't seem like there's more like that that's coming off at the moment.
- [20:50]
A
So then going back to the Economist and sort of the view that we've had all of the catalysts and we haven't seen the market really react. Do you think that something like the Clarity act or some unknown catalys that maybe you have on your radar could be the thing that sort of ends this correction and sends things back up.
- [21:10]
B
So I, I kind of pushed back against the idea that like we got all these positive things and the market didn't move up it, they did move up. I mean did people forget that we did get an all time high. It was just that it happened in July and to be fair, it lasted for a few days. It didn't last long or long enough for us to, to kind of be able to enjoy it. So I definitely appreciate that fact. But, you know, there are things like the genius act and they're positive. And yes, genius act had more to do with stable coins. It doesn't. But tangentially, it does affect our space because these things happen on crypto rails and we care about that. I do think that now, like, a lot of people have been concerned about whether we would see progress on a market structure bill, and that was because of the US Government shutdown. And I think that that was the wrong way of looking at things because we were kind of saying like, oh, well, nothing's going to get done during the government shutdown. I was like, actually, probably the best things that could have happened for us at least on the crypto side of things, was that we had a government shutdown because effectively had all these congressmen, all these senators sitting on Capitol Hill, twiddling their thumbs, not being able to do anything because the government was shut down. So they had their staff, their skeleton staff, like 10 people or whatever, and they're just kind of sitting around a room going like, oh, let's, let's look at this crypto market structure bill. Let's see what's going on. We got some headlines out of it. People might have forgotten from, like two weeks ago, they weren't the best. But I think ultimately what's coming out now is that, like, we actually have bills coming out of the Senate that correspond to the Clarity act in the House that was passed. This is now going to go through the Senate Banking and Ag Committees probably over the next few weeks. And I think that the odds of something happening over the next two to three months and in terms of getting to the Senate floor, getting a reconciliation with the Clarity Bill, and getting this to President Trump's desk, I think are very high.
- [23:00]
A
Yeah, I agree. I think that we get this done. I think it's still a priority. I'm just wondering if maybe that's what shakes the tree and wakes up altcoins.
- [23:08]
B
Yeah, well, I think that's what we are going to find out next. Who are the winners and losers of all these things, or who are the winners and the bigger winners of all these things? Certainly if you were on the fence about being a security or commodity, I think, like, the clarity that we're going to get from this like forming from a market structure Bill, the fact that the CFTC is going to be the likely regulator for cryptocurrencies, I think all these things are going to benefit that cohort of tokens.
- [23:37]
A
So speaking of some of these amazing things that have happened, we obviously got the Solana staking etf, which set a precedent that we're likely to get staking for other ETFs. BlackRock forms new trust amid early uptake of stake staking focused Ethereum ETFs. We had seen a number of issuers with existing ETFs already file to change them to staking. How important do you think this is? Also an ETF news? Fidelity Launched spot SOL ETF. FSOL had 2.1 million inflows on first trading day. Not massive, but nice to have inflows in a kind of bearish trend I think going back to bcl, which shows just how important it is to be first at 58 million or something like that in the first day. And the XRP one was 1 million more or something like that. I guess still there's a pretty big thirst for altcoin ETFs as they launch. They've all had inflows in a period where Bitcoins had outflows but like, you know, just frame kind of, I guess the ETF progress and the staking specifically.
- [24:33]
B
Yeah. So we of course have seen staking ETFs or Solana come out already. You know, we've had the Rex Osprey, we've had bitwise. And a lot of people thought that once those things launched that we would see inflows into Solana. It didn't necessarily materialize because of the market environment that we're in and people have kind of just given up on that. I don't think that's the right approach. I think that there's still going to be an opportunity set for these other names that are to be coming out. And obviously the SEC has a new general standards as far as the approvals for these things. So they're going to run a lot faster than they did previously because previously you had to wait 240 days max before like you got an announcement from it. And the SC has been very clear, hey, pull those 19 before filings. Like actually like we're gonna have a whole new like system where these things are going to be approved within 75 days. So I think that was good news, but it wasn't necessarily priced in my markets. And I think now that we're starting to see Some of these headlines come out. People are starting to realize, actually the real inflows coming into Seoul or other altcoin names. And, you know, you had to abide by certain rules. You have to make sure that you have a futures product for at least six months, for example, which exists for a lot of these altcoins, you know, Coinbase.
- [25:49]
A
Yeah. There's like 12 that are already listed that now qualify on Coinbase alone. Some of them even like, Shiba Inu. Right. So, I mean, there's some pretty exotic things they can do right now if they want to.
- [25:59]
B
Right now, is this going to be the, like, you know, same as what we saw for like the ibit or Bitcoin ETFs probably is going to be a fraction of that. I mean, like, if you look at eth being like 10 to 25 of the flows that we saw for Bitcoin, it's very likely that these things are going to be a similar kind of like, fraction of either ETH or of. Of Bitcoin itself. But I still think that it's going to be a positive kind of catalyst for a lot of these altcoin names that we have.
- [26:31]
A
First of all, did your title change? Are you now a global head of Investment Research and did you used to be head of Institutional Research?
- [26:39]
B
So we started putting out our research to our Coinbase One subscribers. So we made it like, basically we have a title that I think is a lot more clearer to people in terms of, like, every time I would say to people before, like, oh, I'm the head of research at Coinbase. What does that mean? So I was like, okay, head of Investment Research, to make it very, very, like, very plain.
- [27:01]
A
Yeah, I just happened to notice. I was like, it was always institutional, now it's investment research. But it was going to lead to the next question, which is, I know we never talk specifically about any inside baseball with Coinbase. Right. But obviously Coinbase is pushing the envelope in a lot of directions, one of which is buying Echo and then having the launch platform, which I believe Monad is live now.
- [27:25]
B
Right.
- [27:26]
A
Is there institutional interest in these other more exotic crypto native things that are being built elsewhere and on Coinbase, or are those primarily, right now retail plays? Like, are treasury companies going for ways to find yield? Are institutions participating in private sales?
- [27:46]
B
Right.
- [27:46]
A
Like, these things that are. I mean, I did. We were shocked. Who was it that did. JP Morgan and Bass recently had an announcement together and I was like, wow, bass got the J.P. morgan.
- [27:58]
B
So there's.
- [27:59]
A
There's some things There for sure. What does that look like?
- [28:01]
B
Yeah, yield for sure is a massive consideration by a lot of the institutional players. And like we said at the beginning of the call, I was out in Sydney and Singapore over the last week and I had dinners with a lot of these institutional clients and many of them are invested in DATs and other things. And you know, they are cognizant of the fact that they are sitting on a ton of Bitcoin or ETH or whatever kind of token and they are trying to find ways to get yield from it. Whether that is, you know, playing, you know, more tradfi things like asset lending or agency lending kind of models or playing directly in DeFi. I will say that. Is there any institutional interest in some of these tokens further out the risk curve? I think yes, there definitely is. You brought up monad, but I would say that, for example, the privacy theme that we saw play out over the last few weeks and right now it's kind of trading in the middle of the range, at least the middle of that. Like if we're looking at Zcash, for example, it's between that 500 to 700 kind of these levels. I would say that you saw a lot of institutions actually talking about it and many of them brought the same ideas that we saw on the retail side of things. Okay, is there too much centralization of holdings among institutional names for things like Bitcoin, for example, which is very public about its ledger and other things like does that mean that we need to consider what's going to happen in the EU by 2027 when they start implementing more of these KYC AML kind of procedures, when they start banning like, you know, private like privacy wallets and other things like do we need to kind of care? And is this a big theme that's going to develop in our space? So I would say very much institutions are thinking about these kinds of themes.
- [29:48]
A
Really interesting. And do you think that they are participating heavily in these altcoin ETFs that we talked about in the staking or you think that's just a bunch of retail like the XRP and the Solana ETFs launch? They're doing well. Is that a bunch of people who just love XRP and Solana who are buying those because they want to support their thing?
- [30:06]
B
So until those 13F filings come out, I would say we were just kind of guessing. I'll be honest with you. My guess would be it's probably more retail than it is institutions. So we'll Find out when it kind of comes out. But I don't think that's like going to be forever. I think that's probably the first instance of these things. And then as they mature, probably you'll see a lot more institutions playing them because they have the optionality of like, okay, how can I hedge myself by owning this, you know, xrp, ETF or whatever, like all Coin ETF because it's high beta. I can either like, like, you know, go long, short it, like in, in a way that kind of protects me against my other positions or I can play options on it, or I can have like other instruments I can utilize for it. So I don't think we're at that stage yet, but I think we're going to get there in the future.
- [31:01]
A
Before I let you go, what else is on your radar? I mean, is there anything else I might have missed that you're excited about? We kind of talked about potential catalysts being the Clarity act. But anything even into 2026, maybe even an appropriate question, is 2026 going to be a good or bad year? Do we believe in the four year cycle, which means it's terrible, or have we broken free of those chains and can expect that some of these tailwinds will finally kick in?
- [31:28]
B
So my view, and I think it's becoming slightly more popular, although not really the mainstream one right now, is that like the four year cycle doesn't necessarily lend itself very well to the current environment. And in large part that has to do with where demand comes from. Now a lot of demand comes from institutions like ETFs or DATs or other places. And I don't think that's going to end yet. Like I, I think that some of the discretionary selling pressure that we got from miners no longer will be as meaningful as it once was. So I would say that I'm not necessarily using the four year cycles and analog, although there are a lot of psychological kind of effects to that. So I tend to think that we are going to be dependent a lot more on liquidity and what's going to happen on the macro side of things. And I think that people are focused just on what's happening in the US which is important. I'm not going to say that it's not. And by the way, like, if you're looking at that, and you know, think about liquidity from the perspective of the Fed balance sheet, you know, us minus tj, like a balance minus versus repo facility and liquidity has actually been picking up over the last few weeks in the U. S but thinking about what's happening in Asia and other places and I'd say that right now it's kind of hard because the picture is a lot hazier than it used to be. Like let's take China, M1 versus M2 money supply. Like it's telling you some very, very different things. But I think ultimately it's going to hash out in favor of, of crypto markets. Now the other positive thing is I think that at least this is also giving people the COVID to start working again because so much of us, I mean myself included yourself, like we all focus on the price but then we don't think enough about like, well, what's actually getting built here. Because I'll be honest with you, like for the last year we've been kind of focused on stable coins and other things that the tried five contingent has wanted. And not enough about privacy, not enough about prediction markets, not enough about gaming. I mean like all the things that I think are still important to our space that have kind of fallen by the wayside and I'm kind of being like, like hyperbolic here. I don't think a lot of people forgotten about all of them. Like prediction markets have still like kind of had their, their day in the sun. But like I think these things are going to become a lot more important in 2026. So I want to, I want something to happen on the AI crypto theme. I want something to happen on prediction markets. I want something to happen on tokenized equities. Like I think that this will happen and probably we're just kind of going through a blip right now. And you know, this is the flip side of what happens when price action isn't the best.
- [34:01]
A
Yeah, we start questioning the bear market and thinking that we're going back down to zero good times. And then everyone says nothing's being built and it's horrible and there's no mainstream adoption and the yada yada yada, we know the narratives. David, thank you so much for, for joining. Really appreciate your time. Hope you feel better everybody. You can give him a follow on X air at David with a one young right d a v1 d d u o n G Not even bring up the old one. I just did. And that's all we've got for you today, David. Man, I hope we catch up soon in person and have a great day.
- [34:34]
B
Thanks Scott.
- [34:35]
A
Thank you everybody. We'll be back tomorrow for the Friday 5. Have a good one. What's up Wolfpack? Scott Melker here and today's show is powered by Easy Bitcoin App, the app that rewards you for buying and holding Bitcoin. Set up a recurring buy and 1% extra in Bitcoin automatically. Then let that stack sit tight and start earning a 2% annual Bitcoin reward dropped into your wallet monthly after a three month recurring buy streak. On top of all that, earn up to 4.25% on dollars you keep in your USD interest account. You can even opt in to have the interest auto converted to Bitcoin. It's friction free. Set it and forget it. The best way to let you grow both your Bitcoin and your bucks Easy Bitcoin is live right now on iOS and Android. Hit pause, click the link below, download the app and start stacking sats the smart way your capital is at risk. Crypto markets are highly volatile. This content is informational and not financial advice.