← The Wolf Of All Streets
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- [00:01]
A
A strategic bitcoin reserve has backing from the United States military. According to Cynthia Lummis, the Circle IPO went absolutely nuts. It's even trading up massively again today. Pre market. Musk and Trump are fighting like school children in the public square. Uber wants to adopt stable coins. So much has happened this week. Good luck thing. We have NLW here to unpack it all for us on the Friday 5. Let's go.
- [00:24]
B
Let's do. Let's do.
- [00:39]
A
We're gonna absolutely get right to it today because we have a lot to talk about. Good morning, sir. How are you?
- [00:45]
B
How's it? Better. Better than a lot of folks out there right now. Things that. Things are great. I'm excited, excited to chat. It's. It's not a boring one this week, I'll tell you that.
- [00:54]
A
No, I want to start with Circle because holy wow, man. This thing was being offered on Robinhood and in pre IPO shares a day before at 27 to 29 bucks. Ended up closing the day yesterday after a huge dip, trading at 83, but it's trading at 96 basically right now, pre market. I guess it's fair to say that Circle had a successful IPO here and successful for no one more than Jeremy Allaire, who've had on the show quite a few times, who now is a casual billionaire, I think $1.7 billion after this IPO at current prices.
- [01:26]
B
But he has played the long game for sure. I mean, you. It's hard to remember for, for people who weren't around. Like, people did not think that he was making a good move when he shifted Circles focus to be entirely about stable coins back in, you know, 2018, 2019. I think Alex Thorne from Galaxy Digital even said, you know, he, he was recalling, when he was told about it, he was like, that's an insane idea what you're making in crazy mistake. And. And now here we are. I mean, look, I think Circle is. It turns out that the story that everyone was paying attention to wasn't the important story, right? So there was a little while where everyone was analyzing circles financials, right? It was how much rev share they're giving to Coinbase and how it compares to tether and yada, yada, yada, right? That was sort of layer one of analysis and that's when things didn't look like they were going to go that well. Right. That's when we started to have rumors of, you know, or reports of Ripple and Coinbase potentially exploring acquisitions and, you know, comparisons to the failed SPAC in 2021. Right. So that, that was sort of like one layer of analysis is Circle as a company, as it stands right now. Second layer of analysis which started to take over clearly was momentum and an open moment window for crypto IPOs in general. EToro obviously was the key catalyst in shifting this narrative. But it was, it was very clear that there was sort of was an IPO window open. I think it's got artificial pressure and compression right now because Mark, you know, no one has any belief or trust in how long there's going to be a good IPO window. And so there's a little bit of that energy. But neither like th those things do not like the shift between those two things does absolutely does not explain this. What's clear that what their road show bankers missed and that what the analysis missed is how much demand there was for exposure to this category that doesn't really have other good options. This is not even really a Circle story, except insofar as Circle has very adeptly and adroitly over the last five years positioned itself as the U.S. you know, private domestic stablecoin. This is stablecoin demand. Right. There's very clearly being expressed is a belief that stable coins are going to be key financial infrastructure, monetary policy infrastructure. And look, you know, someone had a great tweet, I'm apologies for forgetting who it was, but they were comparing market cap to volume processed and it was like, you know, PayPal is like a 70 billion dollar market cap at 1.5 trillion processed. Visa is 500 billion at 14 trillion processed and Circle was like 6 billion at 12 billion process. Right. It's just behind, you know, and so there's a disparity there and the market clearly is seeing that, you know, so I do not think, I guess is that TLDR here that this is just exuberance of an excited, you know, IPO window. I think that this is category bet, you know that this is, this is the equivalent in the stablecoin space of, of the BlackRock Bitcoin ETF basically.
- [04:34]
A
Absolutely. And I think the timing was just perfect to your point. And nobody's ever been more excited in hindsight that their SPAC listing failed than Jeremy Allaire right now for First Circle because that would have probably been a disaster at that time and poorly structured. And now you have this oversubscribed massive success and likely as you said now just to carry momentum for other IPOs and for the crypto industry as a whole. I mean, and you talked about sort of this tailwind for stablecoins in general. I just want to touch on this quickly, but uber malls using stable coins to reduce currency costs. Right. So I mean we're on the grand stage now.
- [05:11]
B
Yeah, I mean look, the, the other piece of this from a competitive aspect is that Circle's life gets nothing but harder from here. And everyone knows that. And in fact that was another reason that people were skeptical of the ipo. But they have put so many more points in the self fulfilling prophecy column because of like they now have institutional momentum in a way that is going to be extremely like already they were going to be tough to dislodge given how anchored into existing stablecoin infrastructure. I mean they are, you know, onshore stablecoin infrastructure, you know, period, full stop. But the, the fact that they now have this sort of momentum with this buy in from Wall street means that all these sort of, you know, Johnny, come lately stable coins that are going to come next, their task just got a hell of a lot harder. So not only was this successful from a financial standpoint, it makes Circle's success for the future look a lot more likely than it did even two days ago.
- [06:09]
A
Agree. And listen, the only thing that may have overshadowed a story like this on a day like yesterday is of course that Trump Musk spat sees Bitcoin tumble liquidating 308 million in longs. I think we all know that bitcoin bounced right back after anyone who was dumb enough to sell their bitcoin because Musk and Trump were arguing decided that that was probably a bad idea. But clearly this was like the fastest turnaround ever. I don't know if you saw that. J. Kramer actually tweeted, I think literally yesterday that he loved the bromance between Trump and Musk. And of course then they started fighting. I mean, unbelievable, but I mean Musk, you know, full scorched earth here. As I said, Trump's gonna cause a recession. He should be impeached. He's in the Epstein files like the insane bomb after bomb after bomb. Here you go on the recession. And then of course, you know, it just escalated to Trump responding, saying that his patients was wearing thin, that Trump, that Elon basically lost his mind when his subsidies were not included, that he'd already seen the bill. You can see here that the easiest way to save money in our budget, billions and billions of dollars to terminate Elon's government subsidies and contracts. Was always surprised that Biden didn't do it. Okay, you get the idea. And on the tail end of this spat, we're just gonna do everything Trump the cease and desist letter. We'll talk about the etf. We're just gonna knock it out sort of in one big tranche here.
- [07:29]
B
Yeah, so, okay, so let's, let's actually go back to before the, the explosion, which I will quote Elon himself. In retrospect, it was inevitable. But what we had all week leading up to this was to a couple things, actually three things happening in and around the Trump Organization as relates to, to crypto. First of all, we had just absolutely deepened engagement, you know, just a, a flag planting left and right that screw you Democrats, screw you criticism. Like they were going all in. Right. And so Truth Social applying for the etf, which notably and interestingly did not use the Trump name, even though everyone knows who, who owns True Truth Social. Maybe some amount of sort of respect for the political process going on, but, you know, filing for an ETF was one. Lots of debates around that obviously. Like what, you know, where, where the, where the value of the 12th ETF is. I thought those analyses were, you know, a little short sighted. Like everything's about brand and this is a big brand and this is, you know, they have a captive audience of people who might want their version of the ETF, not BlackRock. So like, you know, I, I think that there's a, you know, conceptual argument for it at least. So you had that going on, but then you also had this spat between the Trump Media Organization and Magic Eden because Magic Eden came out and said, hey, we've got the official wallet of. I don't even know exactly what the, the phrasing was, but basically it appears as though the folks behind the Meme Coin were collaborating with Magic Eden on something. And the Trump Organization went off, Eric and Don just, just dumping on Magic Eaton, threatening lawsuits all day on, on Twitter. And interestingly, hold aside all that it the Trump or don and Don Jr. And Eric had clearly made a decision some point over the last few weeks, a few months to start moving back away from, from, from the Meme Coin. They were on at a squawk box or something earlier this week where they were explicitly kind of talking about their bitcoin investment, the ETFs, you know, their mining investment, things like that, not, not the Meme Coin and kind of trying to disavow that whole piece of things. So it came at a time when they were explicitly trying to remove their association with that particular side of things. You know, meanwhile Democrats are just, you know, going off on their side. We'll talk in a minute about Some of the more the specifics of the market structure, Bill. But the point is that coming into this spat, we really were seeing Democrats, even, even nominally pro crypto Democrats, really, really having trouble getting behind any sort of crypto legislation right now because of Trump's involvement, you know, the Trump family's involvement with, with crypto. And so here's the interesting question that I don't exactly have an answer to, but it's what I'm thinking about sort of in our context for this whole Elon Trump spat. Does, is there, like, how could it be good for, for bitcoin and crypto? Right. And so I think that there is a possibility that a weakened, not like a impeached Trump, but a slightly weakened Trump is actually a net positive for crypto, at least policy to get through. Because to the extent that crypto policy is no longer a Trump administration and Trump organization forcing it through despite conflicts of interest, but is instead sort of a, a common sense bipartisan thing where, you know, Trump's political capital has been sidelined as the main political discourse for a little bit. Like, it seems to me that it could be positive on that light now. Way too early to tell. You know, chaos can go either way. But I don't necessarily think that, given how much Trump had become the barrier to crypto legislation, a week in Trump could be good if you are going for crypto legislation. So we'll have to see how it.
- [11:27]
A
All shakes out if you're throwing on tinfoil hats for speculation. I think there's also the chance that with Elon making such a big stink about this bill and about fiscal responsibility and about the national debt and showing that that's what he really cares about, that he also comes back to bitcoin to some degree. Right. And I think that that also could be a net positive. I mean, he's out there screaming like a bitcoiner and all the things that bitcoiners have been screaming about the government since inception. So it wouldn't surprise me to see him come back. Honestly, like, the most entertaining thing of all of it was me in my mind imagining what it was like in, in the newsroom at CNN trying to figure out who to back and how to cover this story, their head just must have been exploding.
- [12:09]
B
Did you see Zach Foes tweet? One of, one of our own crypto folks had had one of the, I mean, there's a million.
- [12:14]
A
Oh, his brother with the Tesla, 75,000 likes.
- [12:19]
B
Yeah.
- [12:20]
A
He basically said now, like it was a, it was a screenshot of his brother texting him, saying now like Republicans and libs are going to key my Tesla.
- [12:27]
B
Key my Tesla.
- [12:28]
A
Yeah, but literally perfect. I mean, so let's continue on with the Democrats. I don't think we need to beat this feud to death. It'll probably resolved in some way, shape or form, but good entertainment at the very least. But we have Dem say they're blocked from info on verge of crypto market structure bill hearings as the House is about to discuss its crypto market structure effort hearings staff for Democrats said the SEC has shut them out from technical information. And you got screaming Maxine Waters angry Maxine Waters. You can be like crying Jordan with this picture.
- [12:56]
B
Yeah, so a couple, couple things here. A few days ago there was supposed to be sort of like a technical assistance hearing around this bill was. Which is basically where the SEC makes itself available to explain specific parts of the bill. And this is supposed to be not a partisan thing, right? This is just entirely mechanical, historically speaking. And the people they brought to that conversation basically had no idea. According to reports. I mean Democrats called it sort of the worst technical briefing bill that they'd ever heard. And, and in ways that like, you know, look, everything you have to, you have to, you have to have a pound of salt with any political discourse at this point. However, you know, watching anti crypto Dems pretty closely, I think you start to get a feel for like when they're scoring political points and when they're just like actually saying things that they think. And when it came to their descriptions of just how bad and how useless this technical briefing was as a matter of policy process, it had the air to me of just saying what it actually was. Right. That it's like the people just didn't understand this thing. It's a 200 page market structure bill. Feels like it's being rammed down people's throat and they have no idea. They just don't know what's actually in the bill. In fact, you know, there were a couple hearings then later in the week House AG and House Financial Services Committee and no one was prepared for, for, for actual substantive discourse. Now debate on whether they would have had any sort of substantive discourse even if they had been prepared. But you know, it's a mess right now and even more so than, than normal, no real progress seems to be being made on this, on this market structure bill. And frankly there is not the political capital for Republicans to just drive this through right now. In fact, yeah, everything, well, everything is up for grabs now. I mean the, you know, obviously the Big legislative focus is not on crypto bills at the moment. It's on the big beautiful bill which has now become, you know, the, the, the, the flashpoint for all of this. So I don't know, I think that it feels to me like we're in the middle of a very liminal period. There's going to be some amount of political resetting, how different it looks than, you know, two days ago REM seen. But I don't think we can know exactly what the sort of destiny for crypto policy is until we have a little bit of a settling of some of these bigger kind of core fights around the budget bill.
- [15:14]
A
Shockingly, we are not the most important thing on the docket all the time. Yeah, well, hard to accept, I know. So listen, the title here says bitcoin gets military backing. That is based on the lovely Senator Cynthia Lummis saying that the US military now supports your plan to buy 1 million Bitcoin. Of course, as she said that, we get JP Morgan saying that this is a terrible idea. We should stockpile missiles, not bitcoin. We actually have both videos. They're really quick. So just go ahead and show what both of them said. Drones, planes, etc. What do you say to critics like Jamie Dimon who say this is a waste of resources? Yeah, I would say that even the United States military disagrees with him. That there are generals, especially in Southeast Asia, who believe it's important to have strategic bitcoin stockpile because we're doing an economic war with China and we have to prepare for a guns and bullets war. But we need both. And so all we need to do is look to the leadership of the.
- [16:20]
B
Idea now section between industrial policy in this country and national security, which sort of gets at what you're talking about with some of these different industries. And it's spanning the last couple of administrations. Everybody devils in the details in terms of how the policies shake out across administrations. But I guess to that point, do we need to rethink what constitutes national security? I wouldn't rethink it. We know what constitutes national security. We need. You know, I was saying we shouldn't be stockpiling bitcoin. We should be stockpiling guns, bullets, tanks, planes, drones, you know, rare earths. We know we need to do this is not a mystery. Did you say stockpiling bitcoin? I said we shouldn't be stockpiling. Oh, it shouldn't be stockpiling bullets.
- [17:05]
A
Never miss a chance to take your shot at bitcoin in a completely Unrelated way for Jamie Dimon here. Right, but listen, we're going to, it leads into the next story about JP Morgan. But let's just kind of briefly touch on this.
- [17:18]
B
I mean, one just in my head, I see. I'm going to use AI to make Cynthia Lummis answer that question by saying what I would say is shut the hell up, Jamie. Instead of this very diplomatic response, very casual conversation about a kinetic war with China. As an aside by everyone, apparently also, how much bullets are going to be the tools of fighting in the future is another, another big question. Look, I think that the, the story has nice headlines from Lummis with this military backing, but it's literally just this errant comment that, you know, that, that, that I, I think that the subtext of this and the thing that's sort of true is that I think that there is a larger conversation and reevaluation of what national security looks like in the future. And it does include economic dimensions. And it's not just bitcoin. It's also about the status of the U.S. i mean, how we use the U.S. dollar as a weapon. I did a whole show this week, or I guess it's actually coming out on Monday about sort of changing perception worldwide of, of how in play foreign reserve assets are as a tool of, you know, diplomacy and foreign warfare. You got Europe talking about freezing Israel's, you know, 55 billion in Israel's foreign reserves. Right. And that's, this is now becoming increasingly normalized. That is a change. So the, the, the short of it is that Jamie Dimon is wrong. National security is not the same as it was 20 years ago. Anyone who thinks that it is is not paying attention. Whether bitcoin has a stake at that table is a total, you know, reasonable debate between reasonable people. But, you know, he's, he's on the, as usual, he's on the wrong side of things and, you know, continues to be more so. But I think where you're going is maybe watch what they say, not what they do. Boom.
- [19:09]
A
The best segue in the history of the show. JP Morgan plans to offer clients financing against crypto etf. So interesting. We know that they've offered bitcoin and crypto trading services to their high net worth clients before, but they were pretty behind the curve on opening that door to all of their clients, which they've announced they will do over the past couple weeks. We've covered that before, but they're a bit ahead of the curve actually here by allowing their clients to take loans, basically. Against their crypto ETFs. This to me is like the biggest story being undiscussed because we've long said Bitcoin will become just like any other financial asset in your portfolio. And this is the end game of that. The end game is when it's your spot, Bitcoin actually to be fair, but that you can just put this next to your SPY or your QQQ and in your mutual fund, whatever it is, that it'll be included and just take a loan against your whole portfolio. This is how rich people buy, borrow and die or never have to sell their Bitcoin or their assets. And this is just, it's now part of your portfolio for JP Morgan.
- [20:11]
B
Yep. This makes the ETFs a full financial asset, not just a cool thing. That's the new kid on the block in a, in a hu. Important way that the, the impact of which will, will be manifest over time. But you know, you, you said it exactly. And I, I think that this was, you know, look, to the extent that the argument is Bitcoin as pristine collateral, this is a part of making that pristine collateral actually, you know, useful. We've seen how good Bitcoin is for people who have structured their organizations to take advantage of Bitcoin both in terms of its liquidity, its store value properties. But this allows people who are, you know, have the proxy exposure to Bitcoin Visa vis a visa ETFs to have that so impact. So it's, you know, extremely important for the evolution of this as an asset class. And you know, as we said before, you know, Morgan, you know, it's always important to watch particularly JP Morgan, what, what they, what they say and not what they do. And you know, I think the question for Jamie Dimon always is, is, is Bitcoin in the room with you and, and, and what is it doing to you?
- [21:12]
A
Literally, like show me on the doll where Bitcoin touched you. It's. It's wild. And what a perfect way to end the show. That was a great quick Friday 5. I think we cooked through it all. It's going to be interesting to see how a lot of this shakes out, especially the Elon and Trump spat hopefully. Honestly, I think it's in everyone's best interest beyond entertainment value and proving that the simulation has a sense of humor that, that calms down and is resolved with time. Guys, give the breakdown a follow and a listen every single day. And give NLW a follow of course. Otherwise I guess we'll see him next Friday. Man. Thank you very much later, guys.
- [21:49]
B
That's dope.