← The Wolf Of All Streets
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- [00:02]
A
Bitcoin ETF inflows are once again exploding. Putting up massive numbers yesterday. 524 million in net inflows just to the Bitcoin spot ETFs. Of course, while that's happening, we are getting banks going all in on crypto and we're having a nice green day with prices trading back to levels not seen since checks notes yesterday morning. We've got Dave Weisberger with me here today to, to unpack it all because who wants to do a show alone when you have Dave Weisberger available? Let's go, let's do.
- [00:50]
B
Let'S go.
- [00:51]
A
Good morning everybody. Happy Wednesday. Going to go ahead and just bring Dave Right on. Much better to have you than to have to play plow through this by myself today. So I appreciate your last minute willingness to join. We've got a lot to talk about here. First of course the good old market, right? We've got Bitcoin trading 104,865, completely flat on the 24 hours. But when we're up around 105 or 106, we're making new all time high. When we're down around 101 or 102, it's all over.
- [01:24]
B
It's amazing. I did a video yesterday because people had asked me to do so to lay out the bull case for bitcoin and I'm not going to reprise it here except to say a couple of things. The first thing to keep in mind is when you're in a trading range and you get toward the bottom of the trading range, fear tends to spike and people tend to get panicky and all the stories and all the FUD that people have on assets get recirculated and so you get really bad takes. Now why are we in a trading range? That, that is kind of important for people to understand. Bitcoin had a rally to over a hundred thousand basically almost a year ago. I mean after the, after the, the election of President Trump. In point of fact, most of the reason it was rallying are things that he's already done. He's declared it a strategic asset. They have. You can argue they've stolen it, you can argue they've done whatever, but the fact is they've acquired 300,000 plus bitcoin in, in the United, you know, held by the United States. That is part of a strategic treasury. You have rules on stable coins done and momentum to get something on market structure, which we'll talk about why that matters in a bit. You have the ETF issuers You know, ganging up. You had this mini bubble in, in digital treasury companies that has since subsided. But now you have a firm foundation in creating a Bitcoin based banking system, which is something that is a very big future driver that I don't think people truly appreciate. And yes, I'm talking about strategy, but not just strategy. I'm talking JP Morgan talking about allowing Bitcoin as pristine collateral inside of loans once the accounting lets them do it. These are all major drivers. And so what does that mean? What it means is that institutional buyers, people that look more like me and with grayer hair than I have, are all saying, hey, this thing makes sense. We see the possibility of a 10x here and let's acquire some. And if I can acquire some on sale, I'll do it even happier than chasing, than fomoing in and chasing on the way up. So this year has been a godsend for all the people that look a little bit older, a little bit more grizzled and understand that they're buying Bitcoin for a 5 to 10x over the next, you know, n number of years as opposed to buying it for a 10 move because they're on 20 times leverage over the next five or 10 minutes. And so you have this very different dynamic where the bids are very, very real, very consistent. Not a wall of buying like people like to think of in crypto, but just consistent bidding as the market kind of comes in and when the market goes up, the bids kind of stop because they wait to see if it's going to stabilize there. And that behavior means that people who overextend during rallies get their noses smacked and lose. And that's okay. Now this is great for traders who understand we're in a range. It's horrible for people who just expect the range to be broken on the downside. So if you're trading the range this year, you're doing phenomenally well. If you're trading it based upon, okay, I'm pyramiding down. So let's just, just consider two things. Consider a trader. Just to explain to your audience what I mean by that. Consider a trader who when it gets over 115 to 120, starts layering in shorts. And then when it gets below, you know, 108 down to, you know, 102 buys it back and either goes long if they're smart or at least closes their short compared to somebody who starts shorting at 116 increase, you know, it increases it a bit more and it gets to 120 and then when it drops to 108, Go pushes even more into their short because it's in profit and gets themselves wiped out when it rips back up in their face. And by the way, we've seen a lot of all of that. The fact is, is that you need to understand it's a range. Now that's bitcoin. Anyone who's trading altcoins expecting a bitcoin rally to immediately fly into altcoins is not right reading the room. The people buying bitcoin don't give a crap about most of the altcoins. It is true that if you're a bitcoin trader, you might want to flip into something that is more altish. Now I'm excluding Ethereum from this because that's a different dynamic that, and we can talk about that if you want, but just assuming that you're buying every altcoins going to go up in tandem is just insane. Now that's very, very different than saying there are several altcoins which are building things that are really interesting and will hold up over the long run. And if you want to invest in those, that makes sense. That is logical too. And, and there you should just be dcaing and taking all this, this, this with.
- [06:17]
A
I'm, I'm laughing because you said, you know, there's altcoins with fundamental use cases worth dca, DCA into. And it brings me back to the greatest ICO of all time. Dave, think it's worth discussing. Coinbase says goodbye to five altcoins. Price collapse instantly. If you're wondering which ones. Ladies and gentlemen, the greatest ICO of all time, eos here from Jameson Lopp, arguably the most successful ICO of all time, raising 4 billion to develop a new layer one cryptocurrency. The market cap of EOS now sits at less than 500 million. But Block 1 still holds 160,000 Bitcoin from the ICO worth $16 billion. They also own quite a few other things like big chunk of bullish which went public. Here we are, Eos, the future of blockchains. Raised billions and billions of dollars and never did a damn thing.
- [07:12]
B
And this is where things I've been saying for eight years come home to roost. Now consider, first of all, when you say EOS is still worth, you know, whatever it is, $400 million check a few seconds ago, it's zero. It's just masquerading as 4 million just alone. That, that makes my head hurt. I mean, effectively eos, which has zero utility, zero value, zero potential. There's no reason for anybody to own it ever is is worth more than almost all of the Russell 2000 companies that we consider the small cap universe that are real benchmarks. So just that gives you something some an understanding of the overvaluation of the fat tail of crypto fat tails. For those who don't know what that means in a statistical. Basically if you have a curve, the way the valuation curve is you have this group and then this huge number of coins. Mike McGon likes to call them competitors to Bitcoin and I laugh at him every time he says it. But the fact that there are coins with multi hundred million dollar market caps that have absolutely less potential than the rights to the book that I'm writing. And by the way, I'm not joking about that. I mean lots of much less potential and trust me, I would sell the book rights to million dollar frat boys for 400 million right now. Make me a bid and it's yours. But the point is, it's just silly. But now consider why people like me, when I first saw the ICO boom, just thought of it. The three words that drove me absolutely bananas back then, and I know I was right and I used to piss people off, is non dilutive capital. That's what founders called it. So you, you, you're raising money to build a blockchain and you don't get your stake in the blockchain, you know, diluted and at the same time you get to hold the, the treasury if you're smart, you don't spend it. So this is the, the key. If I, if, if you went to a company, a normal investor, and instead of saying, hey, we're gonna, you're gonna get immediate liquidity that you can dump at a profit if you buy into this blockchain and seed it, which we're going to take it public and you're going to be able to use retail as exit liquidity. If instead of that, you said you're going to have to hold this thing, but you're going to have a right to anything we do with your Treasury. If the token doesn't meet certain usage characteristics, utility characteristics, then you would actually have done okay on your investment in EOS because it would have reverted to a Block 1 investment. Now it couldn't be done that way, even though it is a far, far better investment case. But it couldn't because the US SEC couldn't get their act together to agree with Commissioner Purse and create a safe harbor. Because such A deal would have been considered an investment contract, and there was no way to do it because it didn't exist before. There's never been a way to invest in a commodity project with a kicker that if the commodity fails or gets closed up, that it converts into equity. Now there should be, because it's good for investors, it's good for founders, but it's an exact example, a perfect example of why Paul Atkins says we need new rules, why, you know, people, you know, lawyers in the crypto community, whether. And there are so many of them that, that would agree with this, think this matters. And so if you think that it doesn't matter what the regulatory environment is, then you're not paying attention because investors would gobble up tokens where the founders are accountable to what happens to the assets that are invested. It would be such a stronger case. But it doesn't exist and it should exist. And this is, this is the classic example. And I'm going to be ranting about this for weeks.
- [11:01]
A
Shouldn't that $4 billion just be like, redistributed to the original?
- [11:07]
B
Well, it can't invest. They didn't buy that. Right?
- [11:10]
A
I mean, I don't just say it's like, rationally, it's so ridiculous that they can be sitting on hundreds of thousands of Bitcoin and all these investments without ever building anything. It's not their money.
- [11:20]
B
There are plenty of zombie Treasuries out there that are worth more than the original, that are worth something more than the tokens are worth. There are plenty of zombie chains that are sitting there that are basically been abandoned by their founders, that still have value. In pretty much every one of those cases, the proceeds of the ico, there's something left. Now, admittedly, most of it probably went into yachts and second homes for the, the founders, but, or the VCs that backed them. But the truth is that, that a real investment environment would have given something back to the, the original, you know, buyers. And there was just no way to do it. And I'm not yelling at the founders. I don't think they did anything wrong. I think that they did what they did. Of course they did do something wrong. They got fined. They. A whopping 24 million. That's million with an M, not billion with a B. You know, for, for it being an investment contract, which is the ultimate irony. They actually settled and admitted when they sold the tokens as an investment contract, but yet it, it contained no rights to the underlying equity. So it's, it's really A up story, Scott. I mean, there's just no other words for it.
- [12:28]
A
Good. The good news is, though, now we got ICOs coming back to Coinbase, you know.
- [12:32]
B
Right. But in Coinbase's case, to their credit, they're trying to at least create transparency into what you own and what the obligations of the market makers, other people on the platform are doing it. Could it be stronger? Yes. Should it be? Yes. Will ultimately rules end up making it stronger? Yes, but we have to wait for it. And, and the real, real thing, the thing that really grinds my gears and, and I know you, you're going to agree with this one, is how there could still be a political party dominated by members who think you shouldn't be able to create rules to provide investor protections. And we want it to stay as the Wild west, to be driven offshore, because literally, that's the policy that Elizabeth Warren and her brand of the Democrats believe in. And people that, you know, we'll see what happens with clarity. We'll see if Gallego actually honors his commitment to fair shake or not, and other senators. But the truth is that we still have a political party who believes investors should be hung out to dry in this emerging asset class. And, and to me, that's just sad.
- [13:37]
A
Yeah. I do want to touch slightly, actually, it wasn't news I was going to bring up, but we talked about it on Crypto Town hall yesterday and I think it's worth noting when laughing about previous ICOs, that Coinbase has this platform now for launching tokens. Their first one is going to be the very highly hyped for a very long time, which is already trading, I think, in futures markets. Monad, you know, yet another ETH killer here. But interestingly, I brought this up yesterday on Crypto Town Hall. I think there's two problems to be solved with ICOs. One you just dove into massively, and we've talked about endlessly, which is why does this token have value? Why should I invest in it? How does the value actually accrue to the token and not the company, et cetera? We've done that. The other side, though, is the actual disclosures as to what's going on, how these tokens are handled, why they're going up and down. Coinbase and Monad actually released here, and this is the first time I've ever seen it. A list of the market makers, exactly the duration of their market making services, how much the loans are. So to their credit, they are trying to bring transparency at least into how the tokens launch, how they're traded, where the liquidity comes from and exactly who, whether you agree with the tokenomics or not, is holding the tokens. How long the vesting is, all of those things, right? I think the release is 7.5% of the token supply to the public. I view that as very low. So that's a criticism. But they're transparent about it. That's up to you. The vesting lockups, I think are a year for the early people. That's when they start. But we are getting more transparency this time around, I guess is the note. That doesn't mean that there's a great value in the token itself. That's up to you to decide. But we are getting a clear understanding of what is going on at the mechanics behind the token price movements.
- [15:22]
B
This is a classic example of the market trying to, and arguably doing a better job than the regulators of doing what needs to be done. So, you know, we have These rules for IPOs that were written in the 30s, I kid you not, they haven't changed, you know, and for those, anyone who disputes that fact, just keep in mind that the reason we have a 30 day cooling off period in an IPO process is because that's how long long it took to get once the prospectus was written to get it actually published, because printers took that long in order to be able to get the printing presses to crank out enough prospectuses that they could sell. And we haven't changed the rules. So what Coinbase is doing is essentially saying, okay, you guys are giving me no guidance, we have no rules. We're going to come up with something that we think investors will want. The kinds of disclosures, the method of disclosing it on the Internet with people with all these things, you know, contractually bound. And honestly, it's a very, very good start. It is, it is something to be applauded. I think the legal team at Coinbase is doing a great job. I think they have been a leader in the industry and doing things that are bringing us forward. And you can criticize Coinbase all you want and there's lots of things you can criticize them for that people whine about. I personally think that if you want to understand what matters and why this industry needs to move forward, it needs leaders like Brian Armstrong who are pushing it and his legal team that are pushing it forward. And by the way, I will be similarly effusive in praise on the legal side with people for, you know, Ripple and what they're trying to do and, and Robin Hood, what they're trying to do. I mean, you know, Robin Hood's chief legal officer is, is. I mean, I'm friends with him. Dan Gallagher, he is a great. He was an SEC commissioner. He was my favorite commissioner when he was there. He's an awesome guy. And these guys are working tirelessly behind the scenes to push the markets forward and have been up until now, literally now fighting against an SEC that is just so slow to act. Now, the government shutdown took a lot of momentum away, but I think that we're going to start seeing it. But this is really, really, really bullish for what will ultimately be the altcoin market and the ability for founders to raise money, et cetera. It is extremely bullish for that doesn't necessarily benefit any existing tokens, but it is a very positive development. So I don't want to be overly effusive for the investment case, but I think, Scott, this is exactly the sort of thing that the industry needs to see happening and it should be codified as well.
- [18:01]
A
Jumping back to obviously something that's adjacent to the price action. So yes, we've been trading now in a tight range, we'll call it 100 to 107. After dropping down, we had some outflows on the ETFs. But yesterday, interestingly, even with price bouncing around this very tight range, US spot Bitcoin ETF saw the best day in a month with 520 million in net inflows. I believe Solana ETFs have not had outflow days yet. They're new. Obviously they have staking. Yesterday we reported that Atkins said we will be getting staking for the other ETF issuers. So we know that that's coming. We have bitwise link ETF listed on the DTCC website. This is usually a harbinger of future things to come that they will anticipate an approval. And of course, with the shutdown coming likely to an end today, now we get this big rush for all of these things to get approved. We're supposed to get a pure play XRP ETF likely debuting tomorrow. We had that one that sort of skirted the rules and got approved a few weeks ago. But this is pure play, just like the rest of them. So clearly the tailwinds are back on the docket here. If the government reopens and the SEC starts approving these things, I don't know if the inflows are indicative of that or we just got to a low enough price that things seemingly turned around, you know, 100,000. Obviously, if you're looking at the equivalent. You're an investor saying I want to buy a hundred thousand dollar Bitcoin. You're going to probably buy that ETF form to some degree. But I think it's time to get the bullish news going again and start to get some of these things launched.
- [19:33]
B
I mean, yes, 100%, yes, although I have arguments with people about the magnitude of that bullish move and what does it actually mean and we can talk through a lot of that. But the truth is that the government shutdown had some very large effects that have not been anticipated or at least understood by people investing. So there are two major things that it impacted. It impacted the gears of government and that has impacts that people don't think about. One of them, for example, that no one crypto really cares or are going to cry, are going to cry crocodile tears for is the IPO market, which was setting up in the fourth quarter to be one of the best in years, came to a grinding halt because the SEC wasn't there to approve registrations. And now we're into Thanksgiving through Christmas, which is not, not when they wanted. The idea was going to be get IPOs going in, you know, toward the end of October through to November and rush to have listings every day, have people ringing those bells at the Nasdaq, you know, in the, the fake bell and ringing the bell, which I've been lucky enough to have done, done a couple of times on the New York Stock Exchange. That translates directly into bonuses for Wall street and, and billions of dollars to founders and, and initial investors. That isn't going to happen until 2026. So that was a very big effect that people don't understand. The same time if you wanted to get an ETF approved, you it also stopped for the, the five weeks of all of this. So you know, the gears of government that, that does matter. Now of course, the other thing that people don't want to think about is how much money didn't end up in people's bank accounts, right? How much money is sitting in the treasury general account that would have been spent already and will now get spent at double the pace. And that money will filter through the economy. And when money filters through the economy, some of it ends up in investments. It's that simple. I know it sounds obvious, but this is has to be the easiest to front run trade in history if you think about it. And it's just, it's crazy. Scott. I don't understand how, you know, I was on a space two days ago with James Wynne and he was going on about, well, he's long term bullish on bitcoin, but he sees that, actually.
- [22:02]
A
Had a conversation with him.
- [22:04]
B
Yeah, yeah, He's a, you know, it was funny because Mike Alfred and he got into a little bit of a pissing contest. Mike was very respectful. You know, Mike, Mike is a respectful guy. He, he doesn't engage in ad hominem attacks. He's just very methodical in the way he explains things. And as far as he's concerned, if you think he's wrong, God bless you, he doesn't care, but he's going to tell you that you're wrong. And the two of them got into it. It was actually really entertaining. But the truth is that everybody who is saying. All these people who are saying short, short, short, short, short, are basing it upon a myth. They're basing it upon a phantom. It's called the four year cycle. And they don't understand where it comes from. Right. I mean the four year cycle, you lived it. I came late. My first cycle was 2017. Right.
- [22:58]
A
But the first I know I started in late 2016, early 17.
- [23:02]
B
So, okay, so, so fine. So. But people need to understand history. If you don't understand history, you are doomed to repeat the mistakes or doomed to make mistakes. The first cycle, the first having in bitcoin that people talk about with reverence. Nobody knew if bitcoin was going to fail. When the miners got half the rewards. They didn't know if that if there was going to be a network that was going to be able to survive a 51 attack when that block reward dropped so substant, they literally didn't know. That's why it took six some odd months for people to say, oh, okay, the network is still okay. And that's when the rally started. The second having there was still fear of the same thing. The third having there was still fear of the same thing. But you noticed that the fear was less and the resulting rally was less. But still incredibly substantive today, when you cut the last having cut from a number that didn't matter relative to demand drivers to a number that mattered half as much, that is not the same thing. There was no fear after the bitcoin halving that the market was going to fail. The bitcoin chart of hash rate, as I've shown on every macro Monday, every time McGlone ignores it, is incredibly robust. It has grown geometrically since those days. It's now back to linear growth. But it was geometric growth for a while. That Means the four year cycle based on the having is nonsense. It doesn't mean there aren't cycles. Obviously we have bull and bear cycles in every single market. But the S P has more or less been with a couple of blips on an uninterrupted cycle since 2009. That's 17 years with a couple of blips. Why should Bitcoin, which is tracking other risk assets, be treated in any other way? It makes no sense. Yet that's the reason that people are calling for bitcoin to drop now. Because the four year cycle demands that it could. It's sort of like, you know, people, it's like the cargo cult. If you, if you go back and read about that. Because that one, I don't know. What'd you say?
- [25:10]
A
So that one I don't know.
- [25:11]
B
Yeah, it's a, it's a lot. You could, you could Google it. It basically cargo cultists in the Polynesian islands, they were given for a while, they were, they were, they were given aid packages and things and they felt that, that, that was, it was on some sort of time period and people kind of thought that it was going to continue forever. There's all sorts of examples throughout history. Just because something's happened a few times doesn't mean it continues forever. Right. And, and that's why I, I posted yesterday my favorite indicator. It's actually not my favorite, it's a bunch of. But the McRib indicator, it actually has more probative value. It has a higher statistical correlation than the four year cycle. Yet we all know intuitively that McDonald's.
- [25:57]
A
Putting out the McRib pumps Bitcoin. It's fact. You can see it right now.
- [26:01]
B
Seriously, Scott, I mean, come on. There is no more intuitive explanation for it for the McRib indicator than there is for the four year cycle. And it has happened more often. So honestly, does that mean you should buy based on the McRib indicator? No, but it means that you should ignore things that have no statistical significance and understand have an investment thesis that makes sense. Okay, I got that rant off my chest. Is that okay?
- [26:32]
A
It's very good. And the next half of the title was UX Banks Go all In on Crypto and pretty big news. We discussed it yesterday, so I don't want to dive in too deeply, but SoFi bank becomes the first and only nationally chartered bank to launch crypto trading for consumers. So we know that if they're doing it, everybody else is going to be doing it. Right? Because you can't just have one. So I think interestingly in the interview yesterday that we watched on this show with the CEO of SoFi, he was asked the question, you know, why would someone choose you over Robinhood or Coinbase or any of those others? And he basically laid out all the reasons you want it to be an actual chartered bank to do this. It's mixed with your checking savings account. He didn't go as far as to say they were necessarily fdic. FDIC insured on the crypto assets, but they are FDIC insured as a bank, obviously. So we have two approaches here. We got the banks coming in one way and then we have the Robin Hoods and the Coinbase and everybody else trying to become banks.
- [27:28]
B
I mean look, it's all merger of.
- [27:30]
A
The models, but when you see that happening, this is big news because they already have the bank charter that these companies, I mean Robinhood is bank adjacent, but they already have the charters that they're looking for.
- [27:42]
B
So here's the real kicker. With the genius act and people building, you can bet, take this one to the bank and yes, pun intended, that every platform that allows trading of tokenized assets is going to end up with easy, simple payment rails for consumers to use using stable coins. Now the consumer may not even know that it's stable coins. But think, imagine a world that is inevitable. By the way, this is not. This is. I'm not talking flying cars here, although those are probably inevitable too. I'm talking. It is going to be true that you're going to be able to have an account where you can have all your auto pays going through it. You can pay all your bills that can go back out through Zelle or a Venmo type thing or writing a check with bank partners via stablecoins. At the same time as your account can have automated sweeps from the payment account back to an investment account which can hold any tokenized asset. And one of the tokenized assets, obviously one of the larger ones will be Bitcoin. That is the future. It is undoubted that that's the future. Now if you're sitting at a depository institution that's paying half a percent interest and you're not thinking about offering trading crypto and ultimately tokenized equity is trading everything on your platform. Then you are destined to become Kodak or Polaroid and see your monopoly or your oligopoly go poof before your eyes. Because within five years that is going to be the state of play. So you should expect every single financial institution that takes deposits to be able to offer crypto trading services. Now I love this because, you know, you know, as you can see the logo here, I mean, you know, companies that provide institutional grade trading will, will be eventually be worth an enormous amount of money. Why? Because right now people don't care if they're paying half a percent or, or more to buy or sell these things. Whereas if you consider equities, people pay nothing on commissions and have the tightest spreads known to man. You know, and, and that, that's what's coming to crypto as well. So you're going to see this, this mad rush of M and A, you're going to see this mad rush of adoption because it's not that expensive for them to do it. And to not do it risks an existential loss of business. They don't talk about it this way in the public facing stuff. But trust me, that's what's happening. And when I say trust me, I'm not guessing. I remember because I literally was nominated by the senior management of what was Solomon Smith Barney at the time before it became Citigroup to run our Internet operating committee and to completely rebuild our trading infrastructure because of this Internet thing that, that the senior executives didn't know what it was, but they knew that if you didn't have a website you weren't going to do well. Seriously. And so if you think the same thing isn't happening now at every bank, that there isn't somebody who's responsible for the technology to start modernizing their systems and get ready for this, then you're just not paying attention. This is an absolute certainty.
- [31:02]
A
Agree. And there's a lot more news that supports that we have. Not surprisingly, JP Morgan rolls out deposit token, jpm, COIN and Digital Asset Push. So this has already existed but interestingly they're now rolling it out publicly more to for institutions, institutional clients. And it's being done on base, which I find very interesting that JP Morgan is working this closely with Coinbase to do it on base Blockchain of all the blocking blockchains they could choose. Visa launches Pilot for Direct USDC payouts to Power Instant Global Payments we obviously know this is coming because what happened?
- [31:36]
B
I, I haven't heard XRP mentioned yet. Keep going.
- [31:39]
A
Okay, that's not the use case of xrp, Dave.
- [31:44]
B
The use case isn't painful.
- [31:46]
A
For all those years it would be replaced swift and be used for cross border payments. But now it's the liquidity layer that allows you to transfer one to the other in a decentralized. Okay, Anyways, latest, the UAE just completed its first digital Durham transaction under the CBDC pilot. That's a big one. Yeah, these are. We're talking about adoption of tokens which are all effectively stable coins one way or another. Boy.
- [32:13]
B
Well, I mean understand that that one is so important and I'm going to tell you why. And, and why what drives me crazy about the. The XRP army. Now I am not against XRP as an asset growing in line with the crypto ecosystem. I think people who think that it's going to outperform the rest of the crypto ecosystem need serious counseling. But, but that's a different story. But why do I.
- [32:36]
A
Well, if you believe that the ecosystem moves tokens based on community, then they might not be crazy at all because.
- [32:42]
B
Well, I don't want to go down that road, but I do want to make the point. So the UAE doing a digital Dirham is something that's going to happen in every single currency. Understand? Why do I mean that? Today you need, if you want to make a transaction between, you know, between dollars and Durham, it is a pain in the freaking ass. How do I know this coin routes? Big office in Dubai. We have, you know, most of our profits end up one way or another in dollars and we have expenses in Dirham. We know this is a painful process. When this pilot is done, it's going to make our lives easier. Instead of having to go do two transactions, which is, which is a stable coin, dollars across and then convert the stable coin back into an FX transaction, you're gonna be able to do a single swap from usdc, Tether, JP Morgan, coin, whatever, it doesn't matter. From a dollar coin to a Dirham coin, you're gonna do the same thing from a dollar coin to a Eurocoin. You're not going to need a liquidity layer in between the two because why the hell would you interpose another volatile currency or asset in between? Is it going to be a direct swaps? It's the same reason why Tether grew to be the most valuable company in the world. Remember, it wasn't all that long ago that every altcoin was denominated in Bitcoin. And so in order if you wanted to buy an alt, you bought Bitcoin and then you flipped it. Today you buy Tether. If you want to buy Bitcoin or Altcoins and you do direct swaps back and forth, you don't have that extra layer. Bitcoin is no longer used as an intermediary asset very often for people because there's no need for it to be used that way. And so the same thing is going to happen with payments, same thing is going to happen with global money. And this story is exactly what I've been talking about and chirping about for the last six months, that it was inevitable. I'm glad to see it's in the UAE because they're one of the most forward thinking governments in the world when it comes to finance. So I do think it's important.
- [34:45]
A
Yeah, let's just hope that it's not the dystopian privacy violating social credits version that we're going to get in China. But as you said, there's all CBDCs are not created equal. That's the bottom line. CBDC in a communist country is used for control. A CBDC in a lot of these other countries will literally just be used like Fed Wire.
- [35:05]
B
Well understand and it won't be consumer. I, the world gives people choice. If you choose to live in the uae, you know you have no privacy, full stop. You go there, you, you go there, you, you get your, you get your retinal scan in order to enter the country. You, they have north of 90% of all public spaces covered by, by cameras. You make a choice that living there, you prioritize safety. You prioritize safety. That's what you prioritize. There's nothing wrong with that. So them having a CBDC makes perfect sense. Now will they implement social credit scores, the other stuff that the communist governments are doing? Almost certainly not because then they would lose their entirety of their economy because most of the people would say would, would throw up an absolute shit bit about it. And they're not dumb, these are very smart people. But the difference is, is if, and there are governments which are straining to get power and the CBDC would give them that power, namely the European government, the European Central Government is, is straining for power and they, and, and that's something they want. The US government, you can make an argument that that's what they're doing and that's why those of us who are anti CBDC think that private stable coins are so much better. But that's a totally other other topic. But it is important to understand that not all CBDCs are created equal and not all governments are created equal.
- [36:31]
A
I mean isn't JPM coin just a stable coin by another name to some degree?
- [36:36]
B
Well, but of course they lobbied. The government said a stable coin can't pay interest but a depository token can. And if you think that that that, that there aren't lawyers who are. Are absolutely stone cold serious when they make that distinction. You, you haven't haven't sat in meetings at banks, trust me, lots of years at Citigroup, I can tell you with an absolute fact that there are lawyers who have told their business people that if you damn well ever call this a stable coin, you're going to face severe consequences. By the way, I had a conversation with people from Franklin Templeton years before Genius. That the Benji, their token, which is effectively a fund, a tokenized fund. I said, well, that sounds like a stablecoin that pays interest. Again, they got really indignant. They were like, well, one of them laughed, but the other one got really indignant. No, no, no, no, it's not a stable coin because, you know, that will have been, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, legally. But yeah, it's a distinction without a difference.
- [37:39]
A
It is and it just shows exactly what's coming, right? I mean, whether it's going to be the prop. It's interesting that they're doing it on base, right? So it's not on J.P. morgan network, so I find that very interesting. There's clearly a relationship with Coinbase for them to be doing that. But I mean, of all things jpm, token, right. It just, this is just further proof Visa, you know, direct payments with USDC utterly disrupting their entire business because there's something better. And once again, they just don't want to be completely displaced.
- [38:10]
B
Why are you surprised? You know, less than a week.
- [38:13]
A
Lessons of the past they learned.
- [38:14]
B
When was it, was it two weeks ago that MasterCard, who Visa kind of competes with, announced a. A $2 billion purchase, right, of. Of 0/7 in order to be able to build their own tokenized structure?
- [38:27]
A
I like that's not worth $2 billion, but I guess it's a race.
- [38:31]
B
I don't know. Beauty's in the eye of the beholder. I mean, I, I can think of a lot of tech purchases that, that didn't make sense based on revenues, but did make sense based on tech. And I'm not going to say boo or, or, or, or, or, or, or who on, on whether or not what zero hash was worth. What I will say is once MasterCard says I know I'm going to get my model disrupted, I need to have this core technology. To think that Visa wasn't going to do something similar is, is, is nuts. Of course they're going to. The real question is, are they going to unbundle their services? Are they going to charge separately for Credit versus you know, versus just straight pay, you know, very versus straight payments. They're going to charge for being able to dispute transactions versus potentially offering a service where you don't have disputing. My guess is they won't. My guess is they're going to still charge a premium. Probably have to go down a bit for extending credit bundled with being able to dispute transactions. Because there are a lot of people who really depend on the fact that when they do, when you sign up for whatever service and you cancel it, and then the people who you're trying to cancel it from don't let you cancel it because they make you go through 16 hoops, cross your fingers, jump up and down on one foot and howl at the moon in order to get it canceled. That the ability to go to the credit card company and say, listen, I tried. Here's the email. Please dispute this discharge and all charges going forward. That's a service people are willing to.
- [40:00]
A
It was actually a news today. I don't have it brought up, but Bybit put out a report that said 16 blockchains have rollbacks and can be frozen and all these things which we know, right? But that's not even unique to JPMorgan coin. And the institutional tokens, like most of our favorite decentralized blockchains, can also be rolled back, forked, fixed, reversed, frozen, etc. So of course, I mean as bad.
- [40:30]
B
As it sounds, it is very simple. Everybody who said, and I'm not going to name names, but lots of people over the last five years that blockchains are just a database don't understand the core that of what's actually happening. All of this is going to move to Rails that we know and love. Now the real question for crypto investors, for your core audiences, is there a value proposition where the owners of the tokens get at the revenues that are going to move onto those chains full stop. And if the answer is yes, question.
- [41:05]
A
We were asking before with the token launches, Correct.
- [41:08]
B
If the answer to that is yes, it's very investable because the total addressable market is going to explode. If the answer is no, then stay away. And moreover, if the answer is yes, it's going to appreciate. It is just something I want to make clear. If you can get an investment that you expect over the next five years is going to double, that is a great investment. If, if you remember when that was 100x, that is a lottery ticket market and that is not an investment that is I wanna, I want someone stupider than me to buy me out at a ridiculous price. And so it is not bearish to say that the, to say that substitution effects mean that the better blockchains that have a value proposition and win business can only go up so high because if the prices go up too much then it becomes too expensive to use, then people will substitute away that that is not bearish. I know people think it's bearish, but it is not bearish. It means that economics still works even in the crypto system. So I think it's important to understand that particularly on a show where you have one of the better blockchains sponsoring you, that if someone like me who is more skeptical than others says, you know what, this thing probably can double or triple in a period of time, that to me is a ringing endorsement for an asset. That is not bad. And yet there are people in crypto that are like, you know, I was on a spaces last night, you know, I want to Mario spaces and one of the guys said well I don't care. I only want my bags to go up 100 exits. If I can't get that, it's not, it's, it's not venture. Investing in blockchain technology shouldn't be at a level at least for something it shouldn't be venture unless it's brand new. And if it's brand new, then sure.
- [43:04]
A
It could go up 100x because you should be expecting it to go to zero.
- [43:09]
B
Exactly.
- [43:10]
A
You, you can invest in something that you think can pull 100x but the downside risk of that should be 90 chance you lose your investment like any VC and then you're just spray and pray and you're taking 10 bets and hoping one goes up and nine die and the other one accounts for the nine that died.
- [43:25]
B
That's right.
- [43:25]
A
And everybody thinks everything they hold is going up 100x when they're retailed. So it doesn't work, Mark.
- [43:30]
B
Right, well, and that's the problem. So I, I, if there's one thing to take away if you're a retail investor is moderate your expectations and invest for your actual family and actually growing wealth. And you can do that in crypto, but you can't if you over leverage yourself or if you have unreasonable expectations because or if God forbid, you see the your use case, your thesis unravel before your eyes. And this brings us back to the first story which was eos.
- [44:02]
A
Yeah, absolutely. So as I said, that's one topic I just want to touch on here. The story. BTQ Technologies acquires option to acquire exercises option to acquire Q Perfect, a leading neutral atom computing company, strengthening BTQ as a fully integrated quantum company. This was basically just an excuse for me to ask you about quantum. I mean this, this company has a full stack for protection, protecting mission critical layers. Obviously that then goes down to cryptography and blockchains. Just a good moment to kind of take your pulse on how fearful you are of quantum or how much of a real threat you view this as. Because there are people spending a ton of money to develop technology to protect us from it.
- [44:52]
B
I mean I have no expertise in quantum entanglement. I have lots of friends who were physicists mostly because they all went into finance instead of physics. But the ones who stayed in physics could explain it better. What I can say is the best sources that I have seen tell you that going from theoretical breakthrough to actual product takes time and you'll have warning. And so in every investment in everything, you need to understand what this means. I will tell you the people who should be terribly afraid are the cybersecurity folks in the traditional financial systems which are far bigger, have far bigger surface areas of attack vectors than most crypto.
- [45:40]
A
And some of them, some of them. And government agencies are still trying to Update tech from the 70s and 80s, right. So I, I would be more fearful of what happens to ach, Swift or fedwire than I would to what happens to the bitcoin network.
- [45:53]
B
Well, the bitcoin network will be fine. It's designed, you know, with difficulty, adjustments, etc. There are old wallets and don't, don't dispute the fact that some number, don't know the exact number, some meaningful percentage of bitcoin could be stolen and dumped on the network. So it is not like it's an irrelevant fact. But if whatever that percentage was, that is not an existential threat to the network, an existential threat to the banking system. If all of a sudden all the encryption on everybody's account, most of which using SMS and other sort of stupid things now, you know, to the two factor, which could be SIM swapped, etc. You know, if the existential threat is to the existing financial system, that's where you really should be worried. Now does that mean that you should ignore it? Of course you shouldn't ignore you.
- [46:44]
A
That makes me bullish on those who are developing the quantum tech to make sure that it's not a problem and evolving as we get closer to it becoming a problem.
- [46:53]
B
Absolutely true. You know, there are people, we still have firms out there using compliance systems based upon, you know, older technology that effectively throws up 95% false positives or 98% false positives. I mean, that's how most of the banks work. Despite the fact that there's companies like, for example, a company that, I don't know if you know them, Solidus Labs, which is, you know, started in crypto, which had to therefore understand and use AI in order to decrease false positives and make the compliance part more specific. But that extends to threat detection as well. On cyber security, there are people who are using, who basically put their, their cyber locks in place and have no monitoring software that has any intelligence behind it, you know. You know, everyone's talking about the AI boom. And well, yeah, it's a big deal. LLMs are really cool. We, you know, I ask rock stuff all the time. You know, it's. And it's incredibly useful. But the truth is the real use cases, the ones that are driving actual adoption are, you know, the, you're going to have AI agents scanning for cyber threats, including quantum. And, and all of this stuff relates. And so if you think we're going backwards, impossible to go backwards, but going forwards has very investable implications. We just haven't seen them yet. I mean, yeah, obviously invest in data centers and power, you know, to be able to create AI or quantum companies. All of those make sense if you believe they have the secret sauce. Right. You know, it's going to be massive. I mean, the first quantum chip company is going to make. Because everything is bigger the second time around or the third time around is going to make Nvidia look like a tinker toy. But we're years away from that happening.
- [48:39]
A
Anything else on your radar before I let you go? We have crypto town hall in 20 minutes. Do you know?
- [48:43]
B
Yeah, I mean, it's, I run it all back. We're talking too much. So this morning for people, I hope somebody else is going to talk more on crypto Town hall because I've kind of said what's on my mind.
- [48:54]
A
Some days it's tough, man. Some days we get on there and it's just, I mean, look, you know.
- [48:59]
B
We'Re getting the market opening fall in bitcoin. That happens every single day when people, you know, when people short the initial etf, you know, holding ramp and you get this, and then it'll stabilize around sometime in crypto Town hall, yada, yada. But just remember, repeat after me, Scott. We are in a trading range until proven otherwise.
- [49:20]
A
Yeah, we are. All right, guys, that's all we got. We're at 104,000 everybody likes more Dave. So thank you for showing up. I would have. I would have struggled to plow through that one on my own. Much better when we can talk it all through in real time. That's what we've got. We will be on Crypto Town Hall, 10:15am Eastern Standard Time on X. You can follow that on my X or Dave's X or Crypto Town Hall X. Otherwise, I'll be back tomorrow and Friday and Dave will see you here on Monday from Acromonday.
- [49:49]
B
Yes, sir.
- [49:51]
A
Thank you, sir. See ya in 20.