← The Wolf Of All Streets
The Wolf Of All Streets
Bitcoin COLLAPSES To $69K As ALL Markets Crater! Should We Be Worried?
00:42:48
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- [00:01]
A
Bitcoin price has collapsed to as low as $69,000, breaking support alongside all markets which seem to be under pressure. Silver had yet again another historic dump, moving from the 90s down to the 70s in just a matter of hours. Is it time to really start to worry about markets? There is so much bear posting. It is exhausting. But that usually means that the end is relatively near and that things are likely to get better. Remember, you know it, the the night is darkest before the dawn. I'm going to unpack all of it today with one of my favorites, David Young from Coinbase. Let's go. Let's do. Let's go. What is going on, everybody? I hope you're doing well. I hope you can hear me because we just lost sound from the video. I don't know if that was Streamyard glitching. I'm going to bring out Dave. Can you hear me? Yeah, I can hear you and I can hear you. So maybe it was the Streamyard had the entry music glitch going on there, which is spectacular. That's what we wanted. Hey, it's looking great out there.
- [01:19]
B
Yeah, yeah. Like, nothing. Nothing's wrong. Nothing's wrong at all. Just no worries.
- [01:23]
A
Are we really back at 70? No, that was just coin market cap not catching up. 69,000. $70,000. A healthy $70,000. I'm going to tell you, man, all coins look like the bottom has just fallen out. Like they've all hit an air pocket. Xrp, Solana, a lot of these. You can look at the chart and there's just not much support below. Not the best time ever right now for markets, though, we get to use this meme, the Bill and Ted 69 dudes. So that's cool. And someone responded with, we're going to 6, 7, so at least we can make some jokes. But what do you make of this market? I mean, it's savage.
- [02:01]
B
Yeah. I don't think we found adorable bottom yet. And that's the tough part. And I'm not trying to scaremonger. And I'm sure people will hate the message that I've got on this. I have no edge on this. But literally, I don't think anyone really does in terms of trying to figure out where we're going to settle here. I mean, it still doesn't seem like there's any support levels, at least national support levels for the time being. So I think that this is kind of where we're grasping with straws in the dark of like, oh, is it going to be 70 is it going to be a little bit lower than here? Like, we kind of form these nice psychological levels. But I think you had a good point about what's going on with the majors. For example, like souls, like funding rate, like if you're looking at the perps, I mean it's like deeply in the red right now. I think, like last I checked it was like negative 38%. So it's just like, it's just near complete absence of leverage, long demand here. And I think that's kind of the tough part. So I have nothing for you on this guy. I wish I did.
- [03:05]
A
Yeah, I don't have anything for it either. All I know is that it's always like this before things settle, right? That could mean that we're going to settle at 57 or 60. We could bounce from here. I really have no idea. The bigger problem for me is that crypto, many say leads. So we're already way down. If stocks really crack now, that would be highly problematic. Right? Because I don't think anyone expects bitcoin to magically rage if stocks kind of go over the cliff, which is what a lot of people are looking for. But like I said on the flip side, you take a look at this. Every bitcoin analyst is now bearish. So when you have consensus to one side and the bear posting and bearish euphoria reaches a fever pitch, maybe you're closer to a bottom than you are than you think, you know?
- [03:54]
B
Yeah, I think that's right. It's when you're most uncomfortable that you're probably close to that, you know, consolidation phase where, you know, actually you can look ahead and say like, okay, like probably there's going to be some accumulation that's possible over the next few weeks. But you know, you had a good point about what's going on in equities. I, I would say that I. We're, you know, we won't know until expost. But my guess is we're probably gonna look back on this and kind of say like, okay, like equities itself, we're kind of going through these like late cycle fragilities. You know, I don't think that it's a classic bubble in the AI world, for example, but probably it's forming and maybe crypto is just front running that. So I, I think that this is probably how we're going to look at this particular phase. Right now I am trying to think like, well, what could actually rescue us here? Because my thesis had been that there was still a very large Pool of dry powder out there. I saw it in the money market funds, for example, even in deposits. But it's only if you see the Fed come in and actually cut rates. And you know, right now I would say like, even though we've seen those 75 basis points of cuts in 2025, just real short term rates remain kind of high. I think it's still kind of trapping cash and that, that stockpile of liquid savings, like just inside of that 7 to 10 trillion dollars kind of like pocket. And until you see that policy easing this year, which I think would still happen, I think that for me would be the trigger to see this reallocation of liquidity into risk assets.
- [05:34]
A
Yeah, the money market one has been a great premise, but like you said, it requires money markets to be underperforming stocks, Right? So you need rates to come down and people to say, well, I'm not getting any money on this, I might as well go into stocks. But if stocks are going down 1% a day, people might just continue to sit in that cash. One of my close friends is a hedge fund analyst, said today is like, I'm only 35% in the market and I'm thinking about going to more cash. I was like, maybe our bottom signal, I would hope. But yeah, there's a lot of people that are looking now to go into more cash and not necessarily exit it. I just want to give us some perspective on what's going on out now right now. Absolute bloodbath in markets in the last 24 hours. Gold dumped 5.5%, silver dumped 19%. Wiping out 980 billions and P dumped 0.95%. It looks like the S and P is going to open at yesterday's lows. Even after it had bounced. Could open, right? The lows never good. Nasdaq 2.5% Russell 2002%. Bitcoin 8% total crypto 7%. That has to be wrong. There's no way that total crypto is outperforming bitcoin, but you get the idea. And then you kind of cook through this. I mean, it's over 22% in two hours, right? I mean, this is absolute insanity. We went from 120 to these levels in six days. By the way, that was the same drawdown that bitcoin had in four days, four months, 41% or something. And yeah, it bounced. But continuing down. I mean, these headlines are nuts. One trillion tech wipeout. As AI fears spread, stress in the US tech credit market is surging and it's just endless. It's endless, yeah.
- [07:08]
B
I think the only ones making money right now are systematic trading strategies. And that's probably exacerbating some of these moves as well because now we haven't had a ton of all for a while. And then like in the last few months now a lot of these CTAs and other kind of like, like systematic strategies can actually play more full throatedly. And so they're kind of piling in on either side. Silver is a good example of that by the way. It's not just our space that's happening in. It's definitely happening in equities, happening in commodities. Precious metals were a big kind of victim of this. And I say victim because, you know, I think at some point in time there was the debasement trade and that's probably what got the ball rolling on some of this stuff. But it's been a momentum trade now for at least six months on both silver and gold. And this is the thing, like when it's a momentum trade of that caliber, like it can easily pull back after you see like a two sigma move, like, and this is kind of what's happening in silver right now.
- [08:05]
A
But people pretended that because these were boring metals that have been around for, you know, thousands of years that they couldn't see that kind of volatility. And it's an important reminder that all markets rhyme and that if you see something irrational to the upside, you're very likely to see something irrational to the downside. I mean, silver bugs were freaking out every time somebody said anything negative. It was like literally like fighting with the link marines or the XRP army or even the staunch bitcoiners. And there you go off a cliff like 120 to 70. That is as bad as the worst altcoins like in a short period of time. And it's silver.
- [08:44]
B
Yeah, yeah. And then the idea of utility goes right out the window because people have often claimed on the altcoins have things like, well, I don't know what this does and I don't know what that does. And so when it declines in price, I think they're very like cavalier about it. But silver, I'm like, well we need it for semiconductors, we need it for other things. Like it has utility. But when you look at, you know, the like parabolic move that it's had over the last few months from like 1.5 trillion market cap to like 6 and a half trillion market cap, you're like, yeah, well you overshot like completely on this stuff. I'M not saying it's not important, but, like, there's a factor here where, like, you know, it's just nebulous and people can't put a finger on it.
- [09:23]
A
I've been having that same argument with people because everybody comes on the show and people I love and respect, and they're not wrong. As you said, like, silver is increasingly needed lithium batteries and all the different things. But I'm like, that doesn't account for a 5x pump in a matter of months. I mean, that's all important now because you need a narrative. But it was the same demand when silver was 20 bucks.
- [09:44]
B
Yeah, they attach a narrative to the price action. You know, it's like, that's the thing that I think most people don't realize. I mean, it happens in our space all the time, and not just our space happens in trad fi where people start attaching narratives to things. When a lot of these moves are much more technical in nature, that's kind of where I go. I need to look at both, but sometimes not the fundamentals. And I feel like that was the place that precious metals were in for a while, by the way. I feel like a lot of crypto people were looking at it, like, longingly. And I was like, no, that's not what we want. We don't want to see, like, hey, let's just start following gold higher. And when we were on the media, like, you know, like a lot of journalists would ask, they're like, what do you think about the digital gold narrative in Bitcoin? I'm like, well, there. There's no gold narrative in gold. Like, there's like, the narrative in gold isn't like, I'm protecting myself against dollar debasement. So, like, what are you talking about? And, yeah, I feel like we're better for it, but this is kind of what we. What we're left with instead.
- [10:46]
A
So who do you think is selling? I mean, when you take a look at this, you know, we obviously had the narratives about whale wallet selling that sparked the sell off above 100.
- [10:56]
B
Right?
- [10:57]
A
And I think that was very clear. We had tens of thousands in a clip going into the market and selling. I think all that made sense, but at that time, we were still sort of seeing inflows into the ETFs. Now, obviously, we're seeing outflows. I'm wondering if DATs are being forced to sell. I really have no insight on that. But I did see another article that, once again, it looks like some whale wallets are selling heavily Even now at these prices in the low 70s. So do you have any insight as to where all of this supply and selling is coming from?
- [11:27]
B
That's the tough part because I mean I look at the long term holders and there definitely was a decrease in long term holder supply in bitcoin over the course of Q4. That said, the early part of Q4 you saw like the bitcoin on exchanges going up, which would very be a, very much be a signal like they're bringing it on the market to sell. But it didn't really appear in the back half of Q4. Like what you were seeing was that long term holder supply was dropping. But you know, at least like bitcoin on exchanges, at least on our exchange wasn't necessarily rising. Now it could have been done otc, it could have been done on in Asia. It could have been done. There's a myriad of reasons why that could have been happening. But now if we're looking at it, it doesn't appear as if like there's a massive, like, like I would have said this in late Q4 it seemed like anyone who wanted to sell was probably already done here. But obviously there's something happening with price action. Leverage is still kind of contained. Like, you know, usually when I'm looking at systematic like leverage ratios, I E, like looking at the perps open interest relative to the market cap, I'm kind of like, all right, like we went down as far as like near 3% by the end of the year. Like we were at the highs of like 10% back in July of last year. So like there's a pretty big gap in terms of how much we dropped due to the events of 1010, yet we're still kind of getting this, this lackluster price action. So it's very hard to kind of identify like what's going on. And even worse, it's like if I could identify who the seller was, I don't know who the marginal buyer is right now. And that's I think like the most difficult part right now.
- [13:06]
A
The marginal buyer was supposed to be ETFs and DATs. I don't think that that's been the case. I had Matt Hogan on yesterday. I don't know if you read his article about Crypto Winter. His premise that we've bas started in 2005. January crypto winter started in 2005. Yeah, 2025. I think January was his point. But he basically said, you know, without the ETFs and DATs, if you look at the crypto market writ large, it's been winter, which to me says there was never a bull market at all. Like, if you agree with that, right? I mean, you had like a bitcoin sort of fundamental institutional move, but nothing else caught a bid at all. Which means that we've just not had a bull market since 2021. It's pretty brutal.
- [13:49]
B
Yeah, I read the article and I like Matt. I mean, I think it's an interesting premise, the idea that, well, all of this was propagated by debt buying and that's why any of the alts that didn't have a DAP behind it didn't necessarily catch up to what was happening with bitcoin, ether, Solar or the other things. And I mean, my take is a little bit different because I think that the perverse thing about DATs and I think that DATs or definitely a vehicle that helped our space to the upside. I mean like the other thing about it is when your price is going up, that's the. When your ability to buy actually grows, right? When your leverage actually picks up, that's when you're like, oh, I actually have cash to spend. It's very simple premise, but like for dads, that's when its stock price is going up. And when does your stock price go up? Your stock price tends to go up when bitcoin's going up or whenever the asset you're buying is going up. It's this kind of a circular relationship. So that was with their opportunity. But what does that do to your cost basis? If that's when your ability to buy is like, you are buying it closer to the peaks than you are to have troughs. So I think that this is kind of what we're reckoning with now. Like, all right, like DATS did it on the upside and that created this virtuous quote unquote circle cycle to the upside. But now on the downside we're kind of seeing like, well, hold on, that means their cost basis is far from where they would have liked to be. It's far from optimal. So I think that this is kind of the challenge now. I think there are a lot of talk right now, people going like, well, what's happening microstrategy? What's break even cost? I'm like, well that's the wrong way to think about this. Like it's. They're not subject to that. Like they are not under pressure to sell just because it hits a certain level. Like you do have to kind of look at, well, their convertible debt is somewhere like at around like 3.4. I believe their equity is somewhere around like 3.6. Like I think that balance kind of like at least supports them in a way where they don't have to like go into, out into the market right now. But not everyone is going to have those same conditions. It's just that MicroStrategy is like a little bit more transparent when we're thinking about this kind of setup.
- [15:56]
A
Yeah, I mean let's talk about strategy a bit because you pointed out something that just made me shake my head, which is we'll get into it in a second but there are earnings calls tonight. Yeah, I had no idea. But here we go. Breaking losses on MicroStrategies MSTR Bitcoin position officially rise above 3.5 billion. The company's Bitcoin position has lost nearly fully 40 billion in four months. I wrote a long newsletter about this today actually. I think just a lot of people shocked that you can be dollar cost averaging into Bitcoin since 2020 and be down. But definitely shows you he deployed a hell of a lot more at the highs than the lows because he had a lot more money and a more refined strategy to do it. So obviously they're down, but here you go following that up. MicroStrategy struggles ahead of earnings after latest bitcoin crash. I mean, what does that call look like today? I mean, not the right day for this.
- [16:46]
B
I legitimately don't know. It's one of those things where like I said, the dynamics of how Dax are built kind of lend themselves to this kind of dynamic. It's because you're going to have the available cash on the way up, not on the, the way down. Like who's giving you cash to spend more when like markets are falling, for example. So like the deployment of capital just tends to be more on like one side of that curve than the other. Now I think that from the point of view of like, well, does this put them in a, in a bad position? They're not the only ones. I mean there was a headline about bit mine like last week as well. But how much Tom Lee's debt has, has kind of suffered. And I feel like these stories are going to continue coming out because of the way we are. We're at like this is just, this is that cycle in the market. But it's kind of what you were saying. Like this is like when all the stories are one sided, pointing and kind of like poking the bear at like these kinds of things. Typically at least like the silver lining is that this means that we're closer to the end than the beginning.
- [17:55]
A
I mean my favorite buy is when somebody says something's going to zero, that's obviously not going to zero. I think Nouriel Roubini actually wrote a long form article today, by the way, talking about the death of crypto again. I think he actually declared it dead again, usually yet again. Another bottom signal. But bottoming is a process, it could take a while. But here's what you were alluding to. Bitmind faces 7.4 billion Ethereum paper losses either yesterday or the day before. I dug into this and shared that this was, I think at the time it was about the fifth or sixth largest loss on paper that of history. Right. And now increasing, of course that would require him to sell and not be able to buy more. And to be fair, he still is buying more, much like Michael Saylor. So he, you know, he bought another, I think 46 million this week and Saylor bought, you know, tens of millions this week. So regardless what you think of them going to zero, whatever, they're, they're the few that are actually able to maintain their strategy, no pun intended, through all of this. Right. So you gotta be able to give them credit that they still have dry powder to deploy even at all these levels or at least ways to kind of pull those levers to get more money.
- [19:08]
B
Yeah, if you're a long only investor, which effectively they are, like if you liked, let's say ETH at 3000, well then you like it a lot more at these levels. And that's kind of, I think the mindset they have with it. They're playing the long game. They're not trying to like just you know, catch like the next few weeks. They have a 3 to 5 to 10 year kind of horizon and I think that's kind of why they're, they're playing it that way. And to your point about Neuro Roubini or Dr. Doom as some people call him, it's like dude, I think he's just like baiting at this point. Like it's so easy to just kind of like do a victory lap whenever like prices go down. Be like, look, I'm a genius because like bitcoin's down another 8% and I told you it was going to be down and that this stuff, it's like, well no, like what's your, what's your, what's your game? You know, like he's, he's clearly just doing this because he's trying to get more likes he's trying to like grow like the like you know, his base and he knows this caters his base. I don't know, I kind of ignore things like that.
- [20:10]
A
Yeah, I, I agree. I think it's, if anything, like I said, it's just they, they come out at the dead wrong time for them, right. When they're finally. Listen, it's like you look at the bitcoin chart and we've had nothing but higher highs and higher lows since FTX, right. And breaking 74 this week was the first lower low. So we've now technically entered a bear market from that perspective. But like is this when you finally turn bearish? When we finally break 74 and then you know, we bottom soon after and that it's like, yeah, if you weren't bearish at 126, what's the point now I'm a buyer because I, I want it to go lower, I want to keep buying, but I think bitcoin's going to eventually be way, way higher. Right. So this, it just feels like this is such an opportunity. Even if we go to 50, I think one day you're very happy you bought Bitcoin at 69.
- [21:02]
B
Yeah, I think that like that if you have a long term thesis and you're thinking about this, like I said earlier that I don't think 2025 was about the debasement trade and I stand with that. Like I think that even with the weaker dollar we've seen over the course of the last, I want to say like two weeks or so, I think people still are not thinking about it in those terms and that's fine because this is a multi year kind of thing. There's also stable coins and other things that might be propping that up. So it's really kind of hard to say but like over the long term, in terms of what I think will happen from a macro lens, what I think will happen in the world and how people are going to treat money, what, what I think will happen from a technological lens with AI agents. I still think that bitcoin crypto in general, I think has a very big role to play with these things and there's going to be value in this stuff. So I'm with you. Like, I think that it's more about trying to find the entry point right now. It's not about kind of like being like, oh man, look what did I suffer. It's like think about what it's going to be in 3, 4, 5, 10 years time. That's kind of what you're playing for?
- [22:08]
A
Yeah, I've been al. I, you know, I use the arch public algorithms. I've just been buying all the way. Unfortunately, the first day that I started was 126 when I first turned it on, and I still got a cost basis sub 90. So it feels, you know, like I've done pretty well there and I'm adding to it quite, quite a bit now at the lows. I'm trying to do the opposite, sailor, which is, you know, add a lot more when it's low instead of when it's high.
- [22:31]
B
Oh, so buy low, sell high. That's a very novel strategy.
- [22:34]
A
I guess to your point, though, you need to be able to define low. But, you know, listen, like I said though, I think low 69 is low. And, you know, you could have been buying at 125 just a few months ago if you had the same amount of money. And we're deploying it, and to be quite frank, we thought we'd be at 150. So now we're getting a 50% discount on expectation.
- [22:53]
B
Yeah, I mean, listen, I am not here to give advice to anyone. I'm definitely in no position to. But I would say that, like, oftentimes people think about, like just dca, and I think that's perfectly fine as a strategy. I think, in fact, DCA is a great strategy, especially when you're really agnostic to, like, what you think could happen in the very short term, but, you know, long term, where something's going to go. But, you know, there's also something very appealing about the idea of, like, well, if I DCA on the way up, like, I'm just catching all those moves. And I think that's kind of what's tough when I'm looking at just the technical chart. I don't always rely on technical charts, but when I'm looking at it, I'm like, okay, the next big kind of like, move that people want to try to catch is that move back up to the 79 to 82 kind of range. And that's where things are going to be, like, trending higher again. And I feel like that's what a lot of those systematic strategies are trying to catch. They're content to be on the short side of things, but they'll flip very quickly when they see things kind of move the other direction. Like I said, I think it's a trend following momentum strategy kind of like world right now. I don't think that's going to be the case forever. I think to your point, you're going to find that bottom and you won't have a huge opportunity to really kind of get in. When you do, it's going to be like short lived and it's going to be a bounce.
- [24:15]
A
Yeah, something really kind of interesting here. As you were talking, I just brought up kind of the monthly chart. There's some random circles on here that don't apply to the monthly chart by the way, but each time we've had a bull market and then it goes into a quote unquote bear market, it's revisited the high from the previous bull market. So here's you know, 19,000 in 17. We obviously went all the way up to 69 and then came back down and visited, obviously went below because of ftx all the way down. People didn't think that was possible. Right. You break 20, you're never seeing it again. Well, the top of that market was 69. And taking a look here on this monthly chart which obviously the bottom of this is today. I mean we're exactly at the previous bull market high. I mean it looks like, I can't tell because my eyes aren't that good, but it looks like almost to the penny. So this seems like an area in that rationale to be very interested.
- [25:09]
B
Yeah, I think we're definitely getting into like interesting territory, especially if you're a long term Hodler who has, you know, who wants to like buy the stuff for the long term. I think this is where like you kind of want to be, to be honest with you, which is probably why you see Michael Saylor actually like getting peaking his interest and actually buying here, you know. But I'm not going to say psychologically it's not, you know, it's not hard. It's, it's like it's tough when you're like, oh, if I buy in, you see it drop another like thousand or something, you know, like it drops another. It's like, like I don't want to catch a falling knife either. I could have had it cheaper, you know, like I was pretty excited by.
- [25:50]
A
Swan at 100 bucks the other day. Had to, you know, down another 12, 13% already in a matter of days. So let's on a more like I don't even know if it's more positive. But on a more constructive note, it's always good to look forward for potential catalysts, even if none are massively on the radar. Where do you think clarity stands right now? Because I would say it doesn't look very likely, but we're still getting pretty positive views coming from politicians. I think the White House has now said I might actually have the article, but I think the White House said, said this was. Mike Belshi said this, but White House has set an end of February deadline for stablecoin yield agreement clocks ticking. I, I think Patrick McHenry was on TV and, and Patrick Witt all saying, you know, by Memorial Day we should expect to have clarity. Feels like the goal posts are ever moving.
- [26:41]
B
Yeah, it was funny because I was looking at prediction markets on this just yesterday. I don't know if they've shifted but like while I was looking at it yesterday, it was crazy because it went from like sub 25 on cal sheet to like 74 that this was done by May. And I don't know, maybe like someone has an edge there on trading this stuff and knows something I don't. But I will say that so far the signals have been fairly positive. I mean we saw it get out of the Senate Ag Committee last week, last Thursday, like into markup. The Senate bank committee still needs to come kind of deal with their side of the bill, but for the most part I think that there was progress on Tuesday when the White House, I think Patrick Witt brought in like some crypto protocols and crypto companies and the banking lobbies and said like, we need to figure this out. What do we need to do to get to a compromise on stablecoin yield? Of course, there's other issues that I think we're, we're thinking about. There's at least six that I can count in terms of. Well, what, what about the like SEC exception clause and other things. We don't want to have a Paul kind of hanging over Defy or you know, crypto custody and other things. So I think that those things still do need to be hashed out. But I mean, I said it on a different podcast like two weeks ago when everyone was down and thought this wasn't going to happen. I was like, I think the odds are around 60 that we can get something done before like the, the midterms in 2026 and everyone like thrashed me and was like, no, you're wrong, blah, blah. Of course that was like right after the Coinbase news. But I haven't changed my view on that. I haven't moved it to the upside or downside. I still think the odds are around 60 that something can be done in the cycle.
- [28:31]
A
Are there any other potential catalysts on your radar?
- [28:35]
B
This is the big one, the big idiosyncratic one. The other Ones unfortunately are probably going to be more macro driven. It's going to be more like, well, what does the Fed do if Warsh comes in for example, is he gonna pull back from QE and we need qe? Like that could be one to the downside, you know, unfortunately. But if he comes in and he, he does what I think the administration wants him to do, which is to cut rates, be adamant about that. I think that could be very positive for risk assets more broadly and definitely probably breathe some new life into the crypto space. But yeah, I feel like it's tough right now in terms of trying to figure out like it's unfortunately not idiosyncratic things of like oh, what if Ethereum has another upgrade? Or what if we see a consolidation of the validators. It's like no, it feels very big, picturesque. Not right now, not like micro.
- [29:34]
A
That feels bottomy to me. I think I'm just a glass half full guy. There's no bear in me because even I can be appropriately bearishness I think for short periods of time. But because I just have such a wide lens as to my timeline, it just seems like an opportunity because it's always something we don't expect. I mean you remember Silicon Valley bank, everyone was doomed and despair and bitcoin was never going up again. And then out of Nowher, you know, Bitcoin went from like 19 to 25,000 because Silicon Valley bank collapse and that was not on anybody's radar.
- [30:06]
B
Yeah, I completely agree. And it wasn't a crypto generated event. Crypto adjacent maybe, but like I think being an optimist isn't a bad thing. And what I mean by that is like I don't know if people know this or they don't, but like for the most part you make more money on the long side of things than you do on the short side. I think that short sellers make headlines like Michael Berry or whomever and you know, like Peter Schiff and like they get the attention. But the reality is you could be sitting on losses for a very long time before you can turn profitable on your positions. Whereas oftentimes when they're saying like oh you guys need to like sell AI or tech stocks, blah, blah, it's like, well okay, you're gonna miss out on the all the upside while in the time you're holding on to that short position now I think that on the other side of course you still have to be discerning about what your entry and exit levels are. But from the point of view that we've had on this call so far, it's like, yeah, I'm with you on the. I think if you're excited about this long term, it's a good opportunity.
- [31:13]
A
I mean, is it proof that we're obviously in a simulation that the dead top of the last bull market was exactly $69,000 to the penny on Coinbase, right? Not, not literally to the penny. 69,000. And I think that's the exact dead bottom of this move today on Coinbase. Like what if literally the top of the last bull market was 69,000 to the penny and the bottom is 69,000. I mean the Skynet, it's. We're in a simulation. This, this can't be real.
- [31:43]
B
I mean we're. It's people trading and people have a sense of humor. You know, find like this is where it's been because once upon a time this is kind of. I mean that could be anything but. Or a simulation. I don't know. I feel like it's a simulation.
- [31:58]
A
I mean, what about this? I want to go back to treasury companies. I know kind of circle it circling on all these topics, but it's all the same, right? So Kyle Simone announced that he's leaving multicoin. Obviously he was Ford Industries who raised over a billion dollars and bought Solana. All of it. Deployed everything in one clip at the dead top. Right. I mean it happened to a lot of treasury companies. I like Kyle, nothing against him. They said, listen, I'm leaving multicoin, but I'm taking all my multi coin like payout in forward shares as opposed to taking it in cash. And he's saying I'm aiming to increase my ownership and therefore I implicitly saw as a result of this transition. So listen, great. I think you should definitely, if you bought it, if you loved it at 220 or 230 or wherever they bought it, then you should definitely love it at 80. As you said, like what happens to these treasury companies in general that did deploy everything at the top? How are they even alive? Like, and, and how did you not. If you wanted to be increasing your exposure to soul, why did, why did you deploy it all at once? I mean, hindsight's 20 20, but come on.
- [32:59]
B
Yeah, I mean, it's kind of like, like the Trad 5 version. Like what happens on decentralized exchanges somewhat like when you broadcast your. Your intentions and someone like snipes you with mev, which, you know, we don't talk about MEV anymore. But remember those days where like this happens and it happens because everyone knew your intentions. Well, it was very clear that from the DAP perspective, like, you're just doing one thing. So, you know, like everyone knows that you're going to come in and buy in the market. And so, yeah, there were going to be people who are going to try to like, come in there and, and get ahead of you. And I think that's kind of, you know, the whole point about like, like was the debt strategy kind of like, I think that like they learned later but not in the beginning that like, oh, we need to like figure out how do we employ like a vwap strategy or T wop strategy instead to kind of obfuscate some of these things. And I think that probably today those kinds of things happen, but not, I think, in the beginning of the dads. But to your point, what are these dads going to do? Like, like, if, you know, this is what happened and that's kind of the thesis, I'm like, what's going on now? I don't know. I'll be honest. And I'm not sure what Kalamani's ultimate approach is, but I do know that this is the conversation a lot of people are having. It's not just about the tokens themselves. I feel like we strayed so far away from that initial conversation that we had in crypto a year or two years ago. We're in this world now. We're like, oh, we're competing against prediction markets, we're competing against equity. And if I want exposure to stablecoins tokenization, maybe I don't do it through just like straight up buying eth, but I, I do it into like investing in like in some equity proxy instead. I feel like this is kind of the world that we're in right now. And honestly, there are no easy kind of answers to like these questions.
- [34:57]
A
So Novo was on TV and he said bitcoin was not supposed to act like this. Something went wrong. I think we're getting close to the bottom, but we'll see. And then my friend John Deaton went on kind of a rampage here, saying that we saw years of banks like JP Morgan basically utilizing the paper silver market to manipulate the price and keep it down. I mean, I know we're all just searching for narratives or maybe a healer enemy to blame for this price action, but do you think there really is a chance that this is purposeful suppression by banks to kill the digital gold narrative? I.
- [35:34]
B
Kill the digital world narrative. I'd be surprised by that. I mean like my own, like Tinfoil hat theory is that the banks have been slow rolling all the legislative stuff for a long time because they knew they weren't ready to kind of get into the space. But I did think that they wanted to be involved, and I still think that that's gonna be the case. You know, I was at a conference the other day that was mainly institutional, and you can see a lot of the banks and large financial institutions kind of showing up and talking about tokenization, Talking about tokenized equities, 24 7, all that kind of stuff. I mean, the number of times, like, if you had a drinking game where you're like, how many times at the day? 24 7. Like, you'd be completely passed out by the end of it. So I, I do think that they, they want this kind of stuff, but certainly, like, I, I think they were not ready in 2020, 2021. They're probably closer to being ready now, although I doubt they have some of the infrastructure they need on the custody side or other things. They're probably gonna need to partner up with someone in order to get that done. But, you know, like, I don't think that they're here to just kind of outright suppress Bitcoin because they hate it for some irrational reason.
- [36:46]
A
Were you at the ANDO conference? Is that where you were?
- [36:49]
B
I was at the annual conference, yeah. Yeah.
- [36:51]
A
First of all, like, I crazy the draw to the Ondo conference, it seems like out of nowhere, that kind of a nascent project like that has seemingly the heads of every institution, government, agency, they're talking. But what was the vibe there with prices kind of being suppressed? I mean, we can actually kind of, I think, extract some information from what it's like at these conferences. Are people down on it or institutions licking their chops because price is lower? You know, is anybody saying, oh, well, I thought this was, you know, the next coming of financial markets and now it's dead?
- [37:25]
B
No, it's the opposite. I think things are going up. I mean, I was talking to Ian the Bode, the president of Ondo. I was talking to Katie Wheeler, who was, who set up the whole event. And they were telling me that, like, the number of people who are showing up increased over last year. Now, I think for people who don't realize it, at the conferences that we're seeing lately, attendance has been dropping. I'm hearing whispers that East Denver, for example, is going to get fewer than they had last year, for example. And given the price action, I don't think you can be entirely surprised by that.
- [37:59]
A
But And Vitalik's out here talking about like L2s being a complete failure and because of the prices on the L1.
- [38:06]
B
So.
- [38:06]
A
Yeah, maybe, yeah.
- [38:08]
B
But at the ANU conference, I think they increased it by 25. I'm making up a number, but I do think it was like they increased by 25 over last year. So attendance is up. And, you know, like, I was listening to City and Franklin Templeton and Blackrock and everyone and like, yeah, there. There's still a lot of excitement about this and it makes sense, you know, like, you're still seeing headlines of like nicey going out and like, they want to have a 24. 7 tokenized equity market that they want to launch. I think that people still see it as a future and a ton of people again, like, I, I wanted to create a bingo card for these things. I was like, 247 was on the list. Collateral was on the list. Like, yeah, equity is collateral. What's up?
- [38:54]
A
Stable coin yield. Stable coin yield. You had to hear that a million.
- [38:57]
B
Stablecoin yield was lower on the list. I think you would have lost if that was on your bingo card. I think that, like, some people are more sensitive to it given what's happening on Capitol Hill. But yeah, you know, like, and it makes sense. These are things that I think from our space, people were not as familiar with because people didn't realize how costly it was. Kind of sit on collateral for T plus 2, like now, like with, you know, the potential for atomic settlement with collateralized, tokenized assets. I think people are like, oh, shit. Like, we're not just talking about like loan to value ratios of like 75, 80%, which itself, by itself, like, it would be magnificent because you're capped to like sub 50 in traditional finance world. But you're talking about the fact that you also atomically settle that. So your turnover rate is so high that your efficiency gain is like 3x, which is going to be magnificent. And I think that, like now people are catching on to that. Okay.
- [39:53]
A
I think that's just a very clear bifurcation between the institutional and the retail view, which we can see everywhere in the market. Right. Like Eve Denver is a retail conference.
- [40:02]
B
Right?
- [40:02]
A
I mean, you know, it's a. People go. It's kind of like Eve Coachella. Right? And so if interest is down, obviously attendance is going to be down. I'm interested to see what will happen at Bitcoin Vegas or where the market will be when that happens, or consensus for that matter. But then it makes a lot of sense. It's very encouraging that the non retail focused conferences are booming.
- [40:21]
B
Yeah, I think that there's still a lot of institutional interest in this stuff. You know, I did a survey where like I get both views, like both institutional as well as retail survey. I publish this. It's available. It's a little late now to be honest, because I did the survey in like late December, early January. But like you could see that institutions were still on the side of, hey, I think we are looking for opportunities to deploy capital here, whereas retail is very gun shy. I mean most people still did believe that we were in a, either a late cycle bull market or an outright bear market even like at that time. But I think a lot of people were like on the institutional side anyway. We're looking for the opportunities to be able to find something cheap here.
- [41:08]
A
Well, everybody will be happy to know that bitcoin is pumping. It's at a price of 70,300. So the bull market is back.
- [41:14]
B
It's because you were talking earlier and.
- [41:17]
A
I can't even imagine what happens when we end this. There might be no bottom, but yeah, listen, I, I still stand by the, the, the bottom is probably close, whether in price or time. But you know, we're closer to that than we are to, you know, a five year bear market of doom and despair. And you know, I think even when we start to get exhausted and we look at this every day, it's probably a good signal that things are ready to turn around. Hopefully I might see you in New York next week.
- [41:45]
B
Yeah, that'd be great.
- [41:46]
A
That's a positive. That's bull market stuff right there for life. Life bull market at Pomps Bitcoin Investor week. I'm trying to, trying to get out there for a day, but otherwise, man, I think that's all we got for you today. David, thank you as always for, for joining and for giving your insight. I know it's like we're all like just stepping in front of like moving trains at this point to give opinions. So yeah, appreciate everybody showing up and.
- [42:10]
B
I did not want to see my social media after this, man, but it's gonna be fine.
- [42:14]
A
Give Dave a follow on Twitter.
- [42:16]
B
Go, go.
- [42:17]
A
It's called X. You just go troll him a little bit. Tell them how wrong we all are. It's a good time now. My, my, our watchers would never do that. All right guys, that's all we got for you today. Be back tomorrow for the Friday 5. Thank you, David and see you guys soon.
- [42:29]
B
Bye.
- [42:31]
A
Let's do.