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Crypto sentiment is in the dumpster. It is cracking. It is dumping as Coinbase posts epically bad earnings. Or were they? You actually dig into Coinbase earnings. They were down in some areas, but the business itself is building massively, potentially very bullish for the crypto industry and for bitcoin as a whole. I'm going to talk about that and everything else on my Friday freestyle solo show. Let's go. Let's do. What is up everybody? I forgot to put on my headphones. Couldn't hear the intro music. I got in at one o' clock in the morning from New York last night. And this is exactly what you get. You can see though, then instead of flying home to Tampa, I flew into the scenic elven city of Rivendell from Lord of the Rings here for a live show. I'm expecting Gollum to show up anytime reruns it Reno guys, remember my Smeagol voice? I used to do that all the time on the show. You can tell that I'm slightly tired, slightly wired, but did have a great time with the Arch Public guys in New York City. You probably caught the live show that I did there with them and Bill Barheit Abra. It was a good one. If you missed it, you should go back because we got into a deep conversation about how AI agents are going to take over and destroy our lives and how it's probably all over for the rest of us. Which means you need to watch my shows now before the singularity and before I turn into an AI. But speaking of the conference, one of the highlights of my week was seeing an incredible summary of of this conference written on Bloomberg, right? I mean, wow, Bloomberg Tuning in, paying attention to this very small Bitcoin Investor Week conference that was thrown by POMP with some of the biggest industry individuals. Let's see what they had to say about it. Very complimentary. Oh, Pomp's Crypto Pep Rally Turns into Coping Strategies Session. I mean, if ever there was a more ridiculous headline that belonged in the Onion or the Babylon Bee, this is pretty much it. I mean, first of all, how minimizing, right? And degrading pumps Crypto Pip rally. It's called a conference coping strategies session. Now I will say that there was a lot of discussion about the market. I went on Yahoo Finance, Matt Hogan did, Lynn Alden did. Everybody did the same show and they asked same question. Is the bottom in what's been the reason for this drawdown? Do you think that this is a crypto winter? Is it a bear market? I mean Everybody wants to know the exact same thing. So maybe there's a little bit of cope and looking for answers. But to be quite honest, all I heard was largely, wow, bitcoin is so much cheaper than it was. I'm so excited to buy it here. Now, that's obviously how I've been approaching this market. You know, that I'm an actual adult who wants to buy bitcoin and not sell it. So I'd much rather buy it at, you know, 60,000 and at 150,000 seems like a good opportunity to me, but that seemed to be consensus across the board. I don't have the tweet in front of me, but we did have a discussion yesterday about Hunter Horsley from Bitwise's tweet that said, listen, we've been meeting with these people for two years, one of their specific clients, and they finally deployed $11 million into Bitcoin. People are viewing this as an opportunity. I had the opportunity to sit down with Matt Hogan. We did not have a Lacroix at the time, although they did have Lacroix on site. Hey, guys, call me lacroix. Call me. So, yeah, I'm still trying to get in touch with the marketing person at lacroix, but I talked to Matt Hogan about that and he said, listen, it's true. He's like, this isn't a bit wise selling point. He's like, these things take a hell of a lot of time. I mean, when you think about it. And I asked him, I said, how do these meetings usually go? I said, do they call you or do you call them? He said, oh, we call them. And then he said. I said, well, what's the process, you know, when they unlock, like, what's that 11 million look like? He's like, generally it looks like the advisor themselves buy it, then they hold it basically for like a year before they allow a first wave of clients. And I was like, okay, so they pitch it to their clients. It's like, no, let's say there's a hundred clients and ten of them have been asking relentlessly about bitcoin. They allow those 10 clients to allocate, then they wait a year and see how it goes for them, and then they'll start recommending to the others. Well, this process is just starting. So, I mean, do the math. We have this sustained demand that's going to be coming for many years, but most of that has not unlocked yet. I mean, we just got these products. We are just getting these wirehouses unlocking. These things are going to take a lot of time. But really the story to me about being at this conference and looking at the market right now is this wild bifurcation between retail sentiment and institutional sentiment. Like I said, everybody at this conference were guys my age and older in suits working at family offices. It wasn't like the Coachella Vegas retail where everybody would have been depressed and like, you know, like really trying to cope and figure it all out. These were a lot of adults who are very interested in buying bitcoin at this price and who are bullish on the industry. They don't think that price being down is an indictment of the asset class itself. And we've had more bullish news than ever over the past few months. So there's literally no reason when you look at the news to be bearish at all. The only reason to be bearish is to look at the price and see how far that it's gone down. And nothing shows that better than this. Crypto Fear and Index Greed index now extreme fear 9. The good news is that's up massively from the all time low of 5 yesterday. 1, 2, 3, 4. Who are the five greatest rappers of all time? Dylon, Dylon, Dylon, Dylon and Dylon. You guys have watched the Chappelle show, right? Five, five. This is the most fearful and depressed and sad and concerned that retail has ever been in the history of this market. That's lower than FTX, Celsius, Voyager, BlockFi. Literally the lowest and worst sentiment that we have ever had towards the crypto market. So yeah, I guess I can see why Bloomberg would write an article about how we're all coping. But they must have been just walking the streets and asking random people what they think of crypto because that is not what I saw on the ground. I had incredible conversations there. Matt Hogan, Lynn Alden, Anthony Scaramucci, who else? Grant Cardone. What a legend. The way he's approaching it with, with real estate. Dan Tapiero, Jordy Visser, we knocked them all out. 30 minutes, 40, 45 minutes and one of the most compelling conversations with Chris John Carlo. So that that leads me to another story. I'm going to jump ahead, but we saw yesterday that the CFTC has created an innovation advisory committee. Note that doesn't say a crypto committee because people are freaking out about this Innovation advisory committee. Now Mike Selig is my friend Chris John Carlo's protege. Chris Giancarlo, you'll remember, was the head of the CFTC in the first Trump administration. People called him Crypto Dad. He was one of the most crypto forward and open minded people we've ever had in our government. And now he's advising mostly all the exchanges dealing with the politicians. The guy's absolutely crushing it. And he says Selig is basically the most pro crypto we could have alongside Paul Atkins, who Selig also worked with. And those guys are sitting down and meeting once every two weeks. Well, now they've created a CFT Innovation Advisory Committee member. It's got a lot of the usual subsets, usual suspects not Kaiser Soze, Hidden Adams, Brian Armstrong, Shane Coplin, I mean, Tom Farley from Bullish Garlinghouse. It's a who's who of AI crypto, etc. The fact that this even exists is such a far departure from what we've seen in the past and shows that the regulators are very, very serious about this industry. Like I said, he said that Atkins and Selig are meeting every two weeks. He said it was a big deal when him and Jay Clayton used to meet every six weeks, but these guys are meeting every two weeks. But of course he said, listen, we're going to get deregulation, we're going to open innovation. This is the only way we grow out of a bad economy. But we have a problem and the problem is the legislative side. We all know that we got the Genius act and we're going to need the Clarity Act. I sat there and I was like, dude, there's no chance we get the Clarity Act. He's like, man, uh, you know, nothing. Jon Snow, he said he put it at 6040 that it would get passed with the caveat that everybody in crypto is going to absolutely hate it when it does. Remember this guy was the CFTC commissioner. He's an advisor to all these companies, he's talking to these politicians. He's a classmate of Bill Hagerty, the Senate. I mean, this guy knows more than anyone what is coming. 6040 is not exactly high confidence. You'd be sweating at the poker table if you were about to get your aces cracked at 60 40. But he does believe that it's likely to get passed, but that we're not going to like it very much at all. But what I found more interesting that he doesn't really like the Genius Act. Right? We've all kind of viewed the Genius act as this great event. We finally got the bill that we want passed. We finally got the legislation that we were dying for. He said, yeah, the Genius act just basically locked in all of the Dystopian fears that we've had about a central bank digital currency forever. We just allowed a private company, we get now private company surveillance and government surveillance with no privacy built in. And he's been working on the digital dollar project to advise those who may create a stablecoin or central bank digital currency to include privacy. So we basically went partially China with our stablecoin legislation and we were too busy cheering and being excited about that. We, the fact that we had something to actually look under the hood at what it said. So the idea of having private digital cash right now is gone. And they would have to basically amend the Genius act to do that. And when it comes to clarity, not only do we have left verse right and the Elizabeth Warren cabal showing their head again. I called it a cabal. He agreed it was a cabal. Bill Barheid called a cabal. Anyone who's been close this or has dealt with them calls it a cabal. But they've reared their heads now we have right versus left. We have Trump versus everyone because of the ethics clause, and we have crypto versus the banks, and then we have the banks versus the politicians. So it's very, very muddied. And it's very likely that whatever passed will not be very protective of the industry, much like the Inflation Reduction act did not, I know, shockingly reduce inflation. So we have another story here talking about what the VC landscape looks like. I thought it was dead. It is not crypto's 2 trillion wipeout not stopping deals. But interestingly, crypto VCs used to deploy their money into new and innovative layer 12 blockchains that promised that we would be gaming in the metaverse with our NFTs. No, now they're just basically deploying into stablecoin infrastructure. I think it was $2 billion that went into stablecoin infrastructure in the last quarter. VCs are interested, but they're buying the things that we can't invest in and likely will not benefit from very much. I had a conversation yesterday with Dan Tapiero, one of my favorite people in the crypto industry. Guy has huge targets and a giga brin. And his model has always been being a later investor. Private equity, not venture capital, know not the seed round or pre seed or Series A. He's like the series CD guy who's looking for a 5 to 8X. And he was invested in literally every company not named Bullish that went public last year and every single one that's about to go public this year. And it proves that his slow and steady approach to viewing this market was kind of the turtle versus the hair. Right? The guy is making 5 to 8x on most of his investments, or at least that's their goal. Comes in when there's actual revenue and with the money and is not yoloing into a bunch of bullshit crypto projects promising the moon that people in the past expected 100 X's from. And so that's really the approach now, the, the, the hundred X idea. Novogratz said it, that's pretty much gone from the crypto market. If you were here for a lottery ticket, you might be very disappointed moving forward because those opportunities may not exist. But if you're an investor who can get into public equities that are building infrastructure and plumbing for an inevitable future of tokenization of securities and RWAs and stablecoins, then you stand to make a hell of a lot of money. Now I'll tell you that the other major topic that we were having there, as we discussed on the show yesterday, was AI and the intersection of crypto and AI. Everybody believes obviously that our AI agents that are going to take over the world in the skynet, Skynet, like dystopian disaster, at least they're going to be like transacting in meme coins or something, right? No, they're going to be transacting probably in stablecoins. But anthropic, massive valuation here. What? Anthropic's 300 billion valuation signals for crypto investors. What a story. First of all, I would think, like, what is Anthropic's 380 billion valuation signal for? I don't know, AI and markets. What does that literally have to do with crypto investors? We can make a headline out of anything. It's another Babylon B headline. It's like, what does the cyclone bomb weather coming to New York City mean for Shiba Inu? I mean, nothing, Nothing. Because these are not the same industry. Anyways, though the AI intersection was meaningful. You know what this story actually means? I brought this up, I looked it up because I wanted to see. First of all, they raised 30 billion in funding at a 380 billion post money valuation. Last I checked, that's a lot of money and there's some serious value in AI. But what I thought of was didn't FTX invest in Anthropic? They did. So I just looked for a tweet and I quickly got one. FTX invested 500 million in Anthropic in 2021, representing about 8% of the company amid bankruptcy proceedings, the platform sold most of that stake for 884 million to repay its creditors. By the way, that was actually like a 60% upside for creditors. It helped make people, quote, unquote, whole. Of course, whole in 2022, price is not in price at the time. Today Anthropic is now valued at 350 billion following its latest 30 billion funding round. Those 8% would now be worth nearly checks notes. 30 billion. One of the best investments of the decade liquidated at the worst possible moment. This gives me major PTSD back to the days of sell Fi, Voyager, BlockFi and FTX, of course, because I was a Voyager creditor and they liquidated all of our assets at the literal dead bottom of the market. If they had even just been a little slower and waited a few months, we would have probably gotten a hell of a lot of money left. But it's just crazy when you look at this that AI has exploded so much and that whoever was doing the investments at FTX had the foresight to put 500 million in anthropic. Of course they invested into literally everything. They wasted money on stadiums, political bribes. FTX was. Lacroix was sponsored by FTX for a while. I think it was one of their flavors. Essence of sbf. Disgusting. But yeah, one of those things they yoloed into when making, you know, dark web contributions to politics was 500 million into anthropic. And this could have literally saved everyone if we had been able to tell the future moving forward. So talking about AI a bit, Hunter had a lot, man. The bitwise guys are just like hot take after hot take after hot take. Crypto. You should be excited right now because it's not popular. Agree AI, you should be less excited right now because it's very popular. As annoying as it is, that's how the cycles work. And he's absolutely correct. This is kind of the crux of my conversation with Jordy Visser. Jordy basically said there's going to be a massive compression of, you know, AI valuations and everything's priced to perfection and those stocks are going to come down massively, all the hyperscalers, and you're going to want to start to be in the things that are looking very boring and unpopular right now, which of course includes bitcoin. It's just a reminder that you don't want to be on the side of the crowd. I don't know, I'd rather buy Bitcoin than Nvidia right now. Maybe I'm wrong, but that's definitely how I feel about it. And speaking of interesting things to dive into in public markets, we weren't. We have Coinbase earnings, which were apparently exceptionally bad. Coinbase just posted one of their most important earnings reports to date. And most people completely failed to see the bigger story at play. They're all focused on the headline miss. Revenue down 22%. That's bad. Consumer transactions revenue down 45%. That's bad. A 2.49 loss per share when analysts expected a dollar profit. Here you go. $667 million loss in net income. I like how, like when you do the graphic, it all looks really good. And you just put the parentheses around the number. Apparently that means negative. So we got the parentheses right there around 667. That is obviously a loss. But as they said here, they're focusing on the wrong data. We all know that retail has exited crypto, that nobody's interested. This is classic bear market stuff. It's just the volatility that comes with bitcoin. Prices being up and down, people being liquidated all over the world. But what I found more interesting is that Coinbase comes out swinging, saying they have 12 products that generate more than 100 million in revenue on an annualized basis. The here is Coinbase's transition to being an everything company and not just a crypto exchange, which is something that we've been talking about forever, I truly believe. I think Dan Tapiero agreed when we were talking that this will be one of the big biggest five or ten companies in the United States in the coming years. I've been saying that about Coinbase all the way down after their direct listing. All the way. And I still tend to see it now. This is hilarious. This came right after Robinhood highlighted their quote, 11 businesses with over 100 million in annualized revenue. It's like Vlad and the CEO of Robinhood and Brian Armstrong, or at least their teams, like took out the tape measure and whipped it out. It was like 5.4 inches. 5.5 inches. You said you got 12 products. We have 13 products. Yeah. Wait till you see our 14th product. It's going to be amazing. But yeah, so Coin very specifically, you know, making it clear because their biggest competitor is Robinhood, that they have 12 products that generate more than 100 million in revenue on an annualized basis. I think that both of these companies are where you're going to want to be. I would much rather own Robinhood or Coinbase stock than a boring ass JP Morgan or something like that that we all know are going to be marginalized and are going to fail to exist far into the future. Now we used to get really bullish about stories about bitcoin adoption and crypto adoption by the government. Obviously, you know, we, we expected a strategic bitcoin reserve. We've actually seen strategic bitcoin reserve type legislation passed in multiple states. Well, now we have Indiana, which apparently is a place, I don't know, does anybody ever been there? Indiana's crypto bill advances to the full Senate after a committee adopted amendments passing with a due pass recommendation. I've been to Indiana. It was a joke. Don't be offended if you're from Indiana. Your state sucks. The bill would allow state retirement funds to invest in crypto ETFs and offer self directed brokerage accounts with crypto options. So this would allow once again the state to actually invest in crypto. I mean, what a novel idea. What a novel idea. So it's important just to have a reminder that this stuff is still out there, this stuff still exists and we're still getting this bullish news. And it was another conversation we had over and over again. Like with all of this bullish news that we have every single day. Morgan Stanley does this, JP Morgan does that. BlackRock does this. Means you see, BlackRock is buying Uniswap tokens. It's crazy, right? All that news. Why hasn't this been absorbed by the market? Why doesn't the market move? And I truly believe, like many, that when prices inevitably start to rise, we will once again look back at all these stories and say, damn this, that was awesome. Like those things really mattered. We have states that are adopting our beloved asset class. We have the biggest institutions on the planet. They're here. We have the government talking about this. We have pro crypto, sec, pro crypto, cftc, pro crypto and health and human services, if that even matters. Right? There's a pro crypto or bitcoiner in every single level of the government and we're likely going to get deregulation so that the future of this country is actually growth and not stifling innovation, which is what we've been looking at for so very long Now. I have to tell you, that conversation, I don't really remember much in the last few days. I don't drink or anything. I'm not saying that I wasn't sober, I'm just saying I was really tired and had a thousand conversations, but I was, you know, out at a, at a, like a bar, whatever, with Bill Barheid and All the arch public guys and Bill, like, you know, we. We, like, go into the corner, we're having a conversation. And I said this yesterday, but I just want to reiterate it. He said, dude, I haven't slept in 10 days. You guys might not know, like, Bill was one of the original, you know, coders, hackers, whatever you want to call it, the Internet. I mean, we ran Netscape. I mean, Bill is an absolute legend in Silicon Valley. And he was like, I've been awake. I told you this yesterday. I've been awake for 10 days just programming AI agents. He's like, man, it's going to get really gross, dangerous, scary out there. Jordy Visser said, you know, the next five years are going to be very, very dystopian. This is all happening much faster than people anticipate. Yeah, we've seen the stories about people with Claude bot, and they go get their Mac Mini and they're running it. But Bill, who I trust implicitly, like, very close friend, you know, like SEC registered and regulated financial institution and RIA that's actively managing people's crypto funds. I mean, he said, I've been programming this thing for 10 days. I've got a firewall around it. It's safe. He's like, it's already the best chief of staff assistant I have. It does all of my legal work. I can fire basically everyone. So the future that is coming is definitely AI replacing all of us. I see no reason. I mean, crypto banter already has an AI host, so I see no reason why I'm going to need to show up. Like, there's no way that you can't create an AI that has better dad jokes than me. That's inevitable. And we'll have a full Lexicon of 90s hip hop lyrics and movie references. Right? And so we're all, I don't know what we're gonna do. We're all gonna be replaced. And everybody talks about this world of, you know, Jordy talked about it and all of it, but the. The AI agent, this is a real thing, and it's really happening right now. And it's about to go hockey stick, parabolic. They believe that we're going to eventually get to a world where basically everything's free. And you've seen Jeff Booth here many times, wrote the Price of Tomorrow, a visionary. And he said that there's two competing forces. The natural force of the world is actually abundance through deflation. Technology improves things, those things then get cheaper. You have to work less things cost Less, you don't need to make as much money. You have free time basically, endlessly. The little bit of money that you make, if you choose to work, that's enough for you to live. And you live in this world of beautiful abundance where everything's free. You look at your iPhone, it's got your calculator and your camera and all those. You used to have to buy all those things, the flashlight, now they're on one device. And all those things are basically free within the price of your device. So that's the natural order of things. And that's what AI is absolutely going to do. Especially when you start to have like sex robots running around doing whatever those optimist sex robots are going to do. I've seen those movies. Scarlett Johansson is coming for you and maybe on you, but I shouldn't have said that. Where was I? Okay, so anyways. Yeah, but that's what's coming. The problem is that we have a very strong competing force, and that is the government and monetary policy. A beautiful world of deflation does not work with a government that wants to survive and needs to print money to, quote, unquote, grow themselves out of situations. So you have, you're going to have endless money printing and systematic inflation. You know, safe inflation of 2% a year. While in theory, you're fighting against the natural force of deflation and abundance. And this time in history, right now, I got to get Jeff Booth back on the show. This is the moment when it's really coming to fruition. This is no longer theory, it's no longer conjecture. I mean, I've talked to enough people that are using this stuff, and we know that once it starts iterating on itself, we will all be using it within six months. Right? Everybody's going to have some, you know, agent that's its chief of staff and assistant and is booking its flights and checking its emails. I don't want anyone in my emails, bro. I don't know about you guys, but like, I. I see what you guys talk to chat GBT about. I've seen it. I know, I know what's in there. It's your psychiatrist. It's your sex therapist. It's. What is this strange red thing on my butt? I know what you guys are asking it. Wait till your AI agent gets a hold of that and all of that somehow gets hacked as public. Like, I'm guaranteed to hack myself if I start to use this stuff. Why am I talking about any of this? Because it was the big conversation of the conference. It's treasury companies. Yay. AI and crypto Intersection AI agents completely outside of crypto, except for the fact that they'll use stable coins. And why are we in such a bear market when there's so much good news? That said, once again, I'm going to reiterate before I go. Everyone there was excited. People are buying the hell out of the dip. I did do a raise of hands at the very end. I was talking to him and I said, hey, how many people think we've bottomed or, you know, are within like, 10% of the bottom? Let's say, you know, within 55,000 or higher. 85% of people raise their hand. How many people think we're going lower? Like, two people raised their hand, which means maybe we're going lower because the crowd is not usually right and there's usually more pain to come. But there are a lot of people out there still with dry powder that are very excited to buy this dip. And regardless whether it goes lower or not, I am definitely one of them. All right, guys, that is all I've got for you today. I have to go explore Narnia. That's what I have planned for the rest of the day. I hope that all of you are having a wonderful day and weekend. Maybe we'll all be buying Bitcoin at 40,000 by Monday and Mike McGlone can come on and tell us that he was right. Lot of people loving Mike McGlone right now on the ground. Tell you that right now. I actually had people coming up and apologizing, being like, you probably saw me in the comments saying that you should get rid of Mike McGlone. I'm wrong. And I'm like, dude, I don't see you in the comments. I'm a pretty good multitasker, but I'm literally busy talking right now. I'm not reading. That's all we got for you today. I will see you all on Monday. Let's dope.