B (2:57)

Yeah, yeah. I mean, look, it's, you know, the, the other thing though is that we're living through, you know, the, the trying to understand what it looks like, what cycles, to what extent the four year cycle remains intact in an era where we are now totally woven in with the broader financial system. And you know, inevitably it's going to be some parts of bitcoin and crypto cyclicality are likely persistent and other parts aren't. For example, you know, I wouldn't be surprised if the rotation between bitcoin and altcoins on a, in a sort of broad way has some amount of persistence. Right. New waves of people come in. They come in through sort of the big ones. They find their way to other parts of the field. That would not surprise me even in sort of financialized bitcoin world, for, for it to be persistent. But whether there's actual seasonality in the same way, or are we just subject to the seasonal forces that are broader now, you know, like all of these things, we're, we're kind of just living through it and it's, you know, we're not going to know until we know.

A (3:57)

There are definitely broader forces at play for the market and the cycle. Right now the first thing I had queued up was the Fed, but I'm going to move that back because this really plays into what you're saying. SEC approved generic listing standards for faster crypto ETF approvals. We can certainly unpack exactly what that means. We've done it here before. The TLDR is, if you've been on Coinbase futures for six months, you can probably get an etf. Here's the assets that, that qualifies for. And then of course, SEC breakthrough lets grayscale launch first multi token etf, which Arguably is just as big of news, but getting a little less hype. But we basically have our first crypto index fund that's trading publicly here. So if you want to talk about what could impact the cycle, what could change which coins go where, at what point, these kind of things should be massive tailwinds that are not priced in from previous cycles.

B (4:48)

Yeah. And you know, my sense of these types of things is they are massive tailwinds, but on a much longer time horizon than we think.

A (4:56)

Right.

B (4:57)

This is sort of what we've seen with Ethereum too. The Ethereum ETFs launched and it turns out that the supply of an Ethereum ETF did not create demand for an Ethereum etf, at least not initially. However, as we've seen subsequent to that, the fact that that instrument existed and you could start to see the treasury theme come into that and then other people could watch the treasury theme into Ethereum more easily. Like it did have tailwinds for it, it just wasn't an insta pop.

A (5:20)

Right.

B (5:20)

And I think that you're going to see something similar here where we're almost inevitably doomed to be disappointed as a new set of these things flood in, you know, kind of, you know, compete for, for liquidity. Don't really have anything new or exciting to people, but ultimately they just get normalized. They flow into all the different nooks and crannies of apps where people buy stocks. Like all of these things, they are tailwinds, they're just not sort of head popping in the way that, you know, five years ago a news story would come out and a coin would, you know, go up 100%.

A (5:51)

Are you daring to imply that there's not going to be tremendous immediate demand for a polka dot shib or stellar etf?

B (6:00)

Well, Polkadot has, has some seriously big backers who have been persistent for that thing for way longer than seems even a little reasonable. So I would not, I would not be willing to bet on that one. But you know, outside of that, Yes, I, I think that it is unlikely that we see some massive run on, on, you know, asset number 27 for, in, in the immediate term.

A (6:24)

Yeah, I think this is plumbing to your point. I think that the ones that have the entire flywheel of the narrative, like probably Solana right now, that has the massive treasury companies that is going to get the ETF that has an institutional narrative should absolutely pop on these. The rest of them, it'll be nice that they're there. We did get an XRP sort of ETF yesterday And a DOGE sort of etf because they basically skipped the line and found a novel way to launch. But actually both of them had tremendous volume. I believe I saw that the XRP ETP or whatever call it launch yesterday was the largest volume on an ETF launch in 2025. Of course, the other crypto ones were in 2024.

B (7:03)

Yeah, I mean, look, the, the other reality is that we could be wrong and there could be a lot of people who like that degen. Degeneracy could just come to the stock market in a, in a big way. You know, it might be our final triumph. So who knows?

A (7:16)

To be. To be clear, people are saying don't sleep on DOT and all these things. I'm not saying they're crappy assets, I'm not saying anything about them. I'm just saying that it's pretty far down the line of things that people are looking at with huge volumes right now, coins in mind.

B (7:32)

The big difference, for example, is that when Cathie Wood does something exciting with ARC or sorry with with.in the future, you know, she's one of those big backers that I was mentioning. There is now a place that the people who think that that's a signal can go that isn't, you know, that isn't a crypto. That's important.

A (7:50)

You know, speaking. Speaking of Coinbase, this is one I need you to unpack for me as my AIs are Google Agentic payments protocol plus X402 agents can now actually pay each other. This is actually really cool. It's between Google, Google and Coinbase. And my AI can pay your AI without us having to even communicate, right?

B (8:12)

Yep. So, so basically. So a couple things there are right now, the place that we're in when it comes to AI agents is there's a huge amount of the plumbing to use the term. You just use being built infrastructure for agents. So over the. The last year we've seen a number of new standards come up. There's one called MCP Model Context Protocol, which is basically a sort of an agent API where you can wrap any set of data in an MCP server and then any agent can access it. Right. So it makes the creation of agents much more quick and fast and easy. There is also a new protocol called A2A which is from Google. It's an agent to agent communication protocol to make it easy for agents to interact with one another, to speak with one another, and these have been widely adopted. This is self consciously modeled to work with MCP and A2A and is meant to solve some of the very core problems of agent commerce. So this is not a highly like super generalist agents platform for everything. This is not imagining, you know, agents working together to sort of make trades on financial markets or anything like that. This is specifically meant to solve some of the core problems of Internet commerce for agents. So it wants to solve things like authenticity, intent and basically and, and have a way to kind of backstop things so merchants aren't just you know, stuck holding the bag. So it allows person who's programming an agent to say in a, again a common standardized way, yes, it has permission to do X, yes it has permission to spend X. That's sort of the, the, the level that it's functioning on, but it's extremely notable. I think there were some folks in the crypto space who were sad that this wasn't instantly sort of like fully cryptoized right from the beginning. But it is hugely telling that this is again the mainstream first agents protocol, agent payment protocol that Google is releasing and they chose to do it with Coinbase. They have like 60 other launch but this one was actually collaboration with Coinbase. So they are very clearly thinking about the integration of the crypto system into this stablecoins obviously being the first part of that. So you know, again not necessarily great news for the, the, the random AI coin that wanted to be the payment standard for agents but surprise, that was never going to work. And this is a much sort of like more considered approach to, to how agents in crypto can actually intersect.

A (10:40)

I'm going to go out on a limb and say I don't know what that coin is that you're talking about, but I definitely own it.

B (10:45)

Yeah, there you go. Somewhere in, I'm sure it's been airdropped to you.

A (10:50)

Yeah, sounds really good for USDC though to be quite honest because Coinbase obviously has a vested interest in the success of USDC and the most rational approach for agent to agent payments is going to be a dollar denominated stablecoin.

B (11:03)

Yeah, I mean look, this protocol will be able to use everything. I mean so like MasterCard, American Express, they're all in this alliance as well. So a lot of this is going to be, this is honestly, this is the most boring version of agents payments that you're ever going to see. This is. Does my agent that's sitting inside Chrome? Chrome just announced that Gemini is now native inside Chrome this week. It's. This is solving for. Does my agent have the, you know, the right to buy, you know, the the, the, the random Halloween PJs for my kids that were just advertised to me. It's like, it's stuff like that. It is not super kind of advanced comm, it's just run of the mill e commerce stuff.

A (11:41)

What could possibly go wrong when this does become more advanced? I can't see any potential traps or pitfalls for this. I mean just having AI agents out there spending your money, it's going to be perfect. It's going to go great.

B (11:54)

We've done crazier things.

A (11:55)

We have. Well, speaking of tokens, we have some big news in a couple of corners of the Internet. Base is beginning to explore a new network token. Of course, this is Coinbase's L2. I'm old enough to remember when Base was started under the Biden Gary Gensler era, when they said we would never do a token. A layer two doesn't need a token. Apparently now when there's money to be made and we're under a different regulatory environment, definitely need a token. And of course we have Metamask saying that they have a token coming as well. In all seriousness, couldn't pick two probably larger platforms or protocols, however we want to call it, to choose to launch tokens.

B (12:36)

Yeah, I mean there's going to be demand for them. They're real projects, they're going to be exciting. Like, you know, it's. By the way, the Coinbase is very much cowsing couching their language and we're totally still just exploit. No, they're not. They are 100. Unless. Unless. Unless the, the regulators show up with pitchforks outside of their headquarters in San Francisco. Actually, honestly, not even that outside of Brian Armstrong's house on a cliff in la, this thing is getting launched is, is my prediction, but this is a, it's a test balloon to see, you know, how their partners will, will interact. As we just saw with Google, Coinbase is now they got to consider what a lot of people think, not just all of us, you know, crazies over here in the crypto world. So I think that they are kind of floating it to see, you know, are other people, you know, going to be pissed? Are they going to deal with a bunch of, you know, anger from various coalitions that they're part of. But I would anticipate this is, this is fully 100% full steam ahead.

A (13:31)

I didn't really dig deeper. Do either of these, the Metamask token or the Base token offer a differentiated utility from other similar platforms before, like, well, basis token be different than other layer 2 tokens. Not saying it has to. Right. Gas can be a usable utility. Will the Metamask token replace your Ethereum gas fees? I have no idea. I didn't dig into it. But what's the utility, what's the value proposition on these?

B (13:56)

So I don't think that it's necessarily super clear yet. The thing that they are representing certainly in base's case is that they are, they don't, they're not trying to move away from Ethereum compatibility. So it's not even clear that they would replace Ethereum as the gas token. So I don't, I don't know. It's. It's not exactly clear what it is. Look, tokens are a money making thing and they create a lot of opportunity to make money and then you can spend money to make more cool stuff. And that's sort of the idea.

A (14:23)

So the value proposition is. Trust me, bro. And speculation. Love it. Yeah. My favorite. That's my favorite. This is crypto after all. Tether reveals USAT stablecoin appoints Bo Hines former White House advisor to lead US Business. And thank you to everyone who joined us for the launch event of USAT in New York City. Has there ever been a more astronomical ascent of a human being than Bo Hines this year?

B (14:51)

I, Paulo Arduino before him, I guess he, he put his time in the trenches, I guess. No, it's. I mean it makes sense now why he left the administration certainly. Yeah.

A (15:00)

12 minutes in Washington is, I mean.

B (15:03)

He was there for, he was there for at least a few Scaramucci's, right?

A (15:06)

Yeah. He probably knocked out like 10 scaramuchies or something. It's pretty good.

B (15:10)

Yeah, no, it's, it's. Look, I am, I think it is a huge sign that things are working and that things are improving that Tether can do this and actually launch it. I think it's hugely good for US customers for businesses to have both Tether and Circle competing around Stable Coins. I think it leads to nothing but good stuff if you are a consumer of these technologies. So I'm glad they're here.

A (15:36)

As am I. And you know, I think there was a great article and now I can't remember where it was that basically just projected that the future of stablecoins was going to be you just go to an exchange and you exchange dollars for whatever you have and the plumbing in the back decides which stablecoin you're using. But there's going to be a day when you as the consumer are not even thinking about hey, do I need USAT or USDT or usdc. It's just going to be in the background and you're going to effectively use it as a dollar.

B (16:04)

I already believe that for the vast majority of stablecoin usage around the world that is, that, that more accurately represents consumer, you know, consumer opinion. When, when a consumer, especially outside of the US when a consumer is using a coin, they're not using a tether, they're using a US dollar. That's what it means to them, you know.

A (16:21)

Yeah, totally, totally agree. So I do think that will be the future here. Speaking of the United States, we've got the UK to strengthen ties with U. S on crypto matters. I actually saw that a bitcoin staking ETP I believe launched today in the UK which obviously we have not gotten here. Staking or, or in kind something, I don't want to misquote it, but it does seem like the UK in all of their glory or whatever problems you might think they have are looking to become more crypto friendly. They see the trend that's happening around the world and they have not been that crypto friendly in the past. I don't know man.

B (16:56)

It's every other week the UK has a new Prime Minister and they're like switch from being crypto friendly to not crypto friendly. It's very, it's very unclear to me what, what's going on there now. The reason to be sort of like interested in this and not just super cynical out of the gate or even to care if you're in the US and who cares what the UK is going to do is there are a bunch of interesting experiments around cross border real world asset tokenization, like sandboxing stuff that the, that the UK and the US seem like they're gonna go do, which could be very valuable in terms of sort of bringing real world assets to a, to a larger context. So I was interested to see stuff about that. Mostly it seems like this White House is just trying to shore up the kind of like the innovation corridor between these two countries. They seem like they want to make that a key aspect of whatever sort of go forward trade relationship we have because there was a, they, they had a boatload of AI related commitments that they announced at the same times, like you know, tens of billions of dollars of US companies investing in the UK and things like that. So there's clearly a, it's sort of, the crypto is a very big part of it and in fact I think that it was a bigger part of it than, than it Even thought it was going to be. Basically, you know, a lot of the headline making stuff was supposed to be AI, but then a lot of the discourse, it sounded like in practice behind the scenes was about crypto. So, you know, I think it's a very sincere, conscientious effort. I do not think it's just sort of window dressing how much it actually impacts anything tbd.

A (18:24)

Just so you know, from Benjamin. In the uk, they have a general election every five years and they had one last year. And Keir Starmer has been PM for over a year. So you're being hyperbolic about your comments on the uk.

B (18:36)

I can't.

A (18:37)

We are American.

B (18:37)

We can care.

C (18:39)

We already had the Tea Party.

A (18:40)

It's over. We won. Sorry. Sorry. All right. And speaking of things that happen only in America, here are five key takeaways from the Fed's big interest rate decision. I pushed this to the back. I don't know how much we want to talk about it, but damn, if Jerome Powell didn't just look defeated, how.

B (18:58)

Could there possibly be five key takeaways? What are the five key takeaways? I didn't, I don't think. I don't think I had any key takeaways.

A (19:04)

The dot plot. So nobody knows what. Nobody knows what's coming soon. Markets weren't sure what to make of it. That really. Okay. At least some of the confusion may have come from Powell characterizing the rate move as a risk management cut. That was a real zinger in there. The meetings began. But I don't even know how that's a takeaway. Yeah, there's no, those aren't takeaways. That's word salad to try to make something out of nothing.

B (19:27)

Yeah, that's it. Look, we all got to write articles. We're here slinging content as well. We know the game. Look, it's, you know, we got the cut that people wanted. It is. I, I think that when it comes to what comes next, we have basically an equal split between people thinking it's zero cuts and people thinking it's two cuts for the rest of the year. Just a couple people think it's going to be one. And then there's an outlier who's definitely not the new Trump ally, Stephen Moran in there, who thinks that we're going to have five for the rest of the year. And, and so no one knows really what to make of that. It seems like the bond market isn't loving it, is kind of rejecting it, whatever. It's just.

A (20:06)

Yeah, I saw mortgage rates went up.

B (20:09)

Yeah, it feels like more of the same. You know, it did not solve whatever anxiety people were hoping it was going to solve. And we're just still very much in the same spot of not really being clear on what the state of the economy is. It's. To be fair to everyone whose job it is to focus on that. It is a super confusing time. We've got this booming AI economy, but people are worried that it's a bubble. We've got real weakness in other areas. We've got inflation that seems like it's inevitable but hasn't shown up. We've got some indica. You know, it's just. It's a very strange time. Plus, you layer on top of that the, like, intense politics around it, and no one knows what to kind of do with it.

A (20:51)

Right.

B (20:52)

So it's. You know, I don't know that there could have been really anything. The. The only fireworks would have been if Powell. All of you know, if for some reason they didn't vote to. To. To cut. But it was, you know, it was 11 to 1 with the only holdout being the person who wanted the double cut.

A (21:06)

So, as I said before, 150 bips are. Shut up. Don't hit me with this 25 bips crap. We're either doing this or we're not. And clearly we're not really doing it. I can't believe that. By the way, we left out, like, Nakamoto's price action as one of our stories.

B (21:23)

Oh, yeah.

A (21:24)

And forward raising 1.65 cash and then just yoloing into $1.5 billion worth of salon on a weekend and then hit US with a 4 billion ATM. But guess what? We can just talk about treasury companies next week because I know we'll have.

B (21:38)

Yeah, we just gave ourselves a little break. We're. We're saving the treasury story for next week.

A (21:43)

It's coming soon, I'm sure. Also, I mean, BNB at a thousand bucks. That's crazy to me. But, hey, those are the other ones. Those are what I would have given as honorable mentions otherwise. Guys, check out the breakdown. NLW breaks all of these topics down in much more depth every single day. Newsletter. All of the things where I get all of my information that I can steal to sound smart on my shows. Highly recommend you do the same thing so you can sound smart with your friends and co workers. Otherwise, man. Thank you very much. See you next week.

B (22:12)

Later, guys.

C (22:13)

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A (22:17)

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