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- [00:00]
Scott Melker
Bitcoin is going to $160,000 this cycle. Not my words, but those of today's amazing guest, Hadley Stern from Marinade and honestly, Standard Charter just up their bets on 2025 to 200,000. So I guess I have to ask Hadley why he's so bearish. We're going to talk about that and of course, everything else happening in the market with Chris Inks, Texas West Capital on the backside of the show. Let's go. Let's. Everybody has a big price target for Bitcoin for 2025-2026-2030-2037 and a half. We know how it goes. Michael Saylor, I think now saying bitcoin's going to $17 million a coin. I don't know. The predictions are getting bigger and bigger and bigger. But Today's guest says 160,000. Hadley, how are you? 160,000. I think that's reasonable. Dare I say you're reasonable?
- [01:04]
Hadley Stern
I think so. I mean, I'm not saying 160,000 in 2030 to be clear. So I think it's fairly reasonable. That's my notional price target for the end of the year. But yeah, I guess Standard Charter is a little more bullish than me. So it's kind of funny to have someone in crypto be bearish compared to a bank. But there you go.
- [01:24]
Scott Melker
I guess you're a bear. But listen, I mean, maybe let's just start by talking about fundamentally why know you think we're going up in general. Right. So obviously 160, we, we know that targets are kind of, you know, an area. Maybe we go 140, maybe we go 175. I consider that. Right. But I want to talk about the reasons that fundamentally you still think we're in a bull market that we haven't topped and that we're still heading up.
- [01:48]
Hadley Stern
Yeah, I, I think there's still if, just if, you know, if you observe previous bitcoin cycles and where we are in the cycle, we still have some room to go. I don't think we have as much room to go to 200. But you know, I think for, for some reason 160 seems like a right next level for us to hit before then we'll settle down in, you know, probably the 120 range. So there's still more inflows I think to come for ETFs. There's still a lot more bullishness around bitcoin and people entering it. And 160 feels right for the end of this year.
- [02:28]
Scott Melker
You know, we were just touting this epic 15 day win streak for ETFs and inflows yesterday. So of course if I do a show talking about that, we have to have a day of outflows to break it. So. Yeah, there you go. 342 million. I guess it's over. Pack it in. Right?
- [02:46]
Hadley Stern
Yeah. I also think. And we're going to talk about Solana ETFs. I also think there's going to be some uplift from this wave of ETFs that are going to come. You know, on the one hand it may create some saturation in the market and, and you know, spread things out too much. But I think ultimately it's going to be good for Bitcoin because you've got some of these multi asset funds coming like from Grayscale that are kind of the top five. And then you're just going to hear a lot more about crypto and digital assets with Ethereum staking ETFs, Solana staking ETFs which we're helping build, etc.
- [03:20]
Scott Melker
Yeah, let's actually talk about that. You brought up a great topic before we dive into exactly what you're doing kind of as we get the news here, SEC approves grayscale's mixed crypto fund, signaling momentum for other ETF proposals. So we saw we're getting a Solana staking etf. Well, it's not entirely a Solana staking ETF that includes some Solana staking I think would be the best way for us to. But now grayscale, effectively taking their previous mix crypto fund and getting it converted over to an etf. But when I talk to Matt Hogan from Bitwise or Matt Siegel from Vaneck, they always say the obvious, which is that blended funds, index funds, that's the way people invest in traditional markets. That's eventually how they're going to invest in crypto. They're going to want exposure in one vehicle to the top 10 coins or top 10 metaverse coins or top 10 RWA for coin. And this is the start of that. This is the first sort of example we're getting that the SEC is going to be open to this. Yeah.
- [04:16]
Hadley Stern
And when I was on my panel, I think that was last week or the week before Permissionless with James from Bloomberg, he made the point that ETFs are born for multiple products. So I think this time a year from now we're going to look back romantically on this time when there are only three or four SKUs to talk about. And there's going to be a huge diversity what that does to the market. We'll see. But I agree that for a new investor, one of these top five funds from grayscale makes perfect sense. Just in one click allocate.
- [04:50]
Scott Melker
Yeah. I don't have the story pulled up, but I read yesterday that the SEC is considering creating a very simple and transparent path to approval for effectively all of these. And for altcoin ETFs, basically knock out rule 1, 2, 3 and 4 and you're approved. Right. So if that happens, which I think it will, because this SEC is obviously pro crypto and deregulating, you're just going to get approvals of hundreds of these things.
- [05:19]
Hadley Stern
Yeah, we'll have the ScottCoin ETF next year. You'll be able to get that in your rollover IRA and the rest is history.
- [05:29]
Scott Melker
Only if ScottCoin is somehow a bitcoin treasury company, buddy. Oh, yeah.
- [05:33]
Hadley Stern
Well, that's another funny thing, the treasury company phenomenon that's also happening in Solana with Sol Strategies and dftv. Really interesting. And then the kind of wrapping of some of these equity companies into tokenized stocks. So you start with Solana, you wrap it in an equity company, and then you wrap that in a tokenized equity on Kraken. And I'm not quite sure what you're buying, but it's interesting.
- [06:01]
Scott Melker
Yeah. What's going to be interesting is when you're offered tokenized stocks by every exchange and then the ones that are public are going to have their tokenized stocks trading on competitive exchanges. You get Robinhood, somebody wraps it up, securitize whoever they work with, and then you buy Coinbase. Right.
- [06:22]
Hadley Stern
You have to think the regulators are going to get involved. I mean, I don't know. How do things like voting rights transfer to tokenized shares? Do they?
- [06:29]
Scott Melker
I have no idea. So you have to imagine that there could be a scenario there where voting rights go to the exchange, that or the platform that tokenized the stock and sold it to you. And that can get really ugly.
- [06:41]
Hadley Stern
Yeah. So I guess I can't show up to the Home Depot meeting with my Trezor wallet and say, I've got five votes.
- [06:49]
Scott Melker
You might get invited to the Trump Meme Coin dinner, though, if you. So you and I actually, you mentioned your panel at Permissionless with James Seyffert, which was great. So I was sitting there, I interviewed Eric Adams, I got off stage and that's when I literally met you. So here we are a week or two later. Which is awesome. I've had James on the show countless times. You're doing a lot of interesting things. So I. It's marinade, obviously, is building on Solana and it's defi on Solana. Maybe not the exact place you would have thought you'd be in 10 years. If you looked back, you know, in 2015, you were a tradfi guy through and through, right?
- [07:26]
Hadley Stern
Yeah, I was part of the very early team of Fidelity, so started my journey in 2014. It was such a weird and fun time at Fidelity, you know, privately held company with a CEO and a president. Abby Johnson, who had a lot of vision about bitcoin and to her credit brought a lot of people into the space, was part of an early team there, along with Matt Walsh, who's now at Castle island, and Nick Carter and others. And our mandate was really to explore the impact of bitcoin on financial services. That this was before Eth, this was before Salana, this was before anything else. And so we did a number of fun experiments. Enabled bitcoin payments in the Fidelity cafeteria because bitcoin became the darling of digital gold. You know, it was thought to be a payment mechanism.
- [08:13]
Scott Melker
Remember that? Remember like you read the white paper and it doesn't seem like it was meant for a bitcoin treasury companies in blackrock.
- [08:21]
Hadley Stern
But no, I. Yeah, I don't think Satoshi was wearing his Tradfi Patagonia vest with a little bitcoin logo on it.
- [08:28]
Scott Melker
By the way, that's James Seyfert. We had the joke. It's ironic that you did the interview with him because he would always show up on my show in his vest. And we put the meme. Me and Baltunas would put the meme of the traffic guy in the vest up and it was him.
- [08:41]
Hadley Stern
I should have shown up with a vest.
- [08:43]
Scott Melker
Damn it. Should have bullied him into it. Yeah, but.
- [08:46]
Hadley Stern
But yeah, so we did. And then one of the interesting early experiments we did that's public is Fidelity has a huge donor advised fund business. And we had some large bitcoin holders ask if they could donate bitcoin to their donor advised fund. So we actually enabled that, I think back in 2016 in a partnership with Coinbase. And that's led to now hundreds of millions of dollars of donations of bitcoin which led to Fidelity Digital Asset Services. But yeah, I started my career there. Popped out after Fidelity to the defi world where I was a block. Popped back into tradfi at bank of New York Mellon where I helped build the Digital asset custody business that kind of Got killed by Sad121.
- [09:24]
Scott Melker
Sad121.
- [09:25]
Hadley Stern
Didn't want to stick around for that and decided for my next. I really wanted to dive back into Defi and kind of met the Marinade team. Kind of like we met. Serendipitously fell in love with the challenge. And really the challenge is to bring the best Solana staking solution to institutions. So Marinade Finance has been around for four plus years, was the first liquid staking token with MSOL, has grown to about 2 billion US TBL, so around 11 million. Solana and about 18 months ago made the pivot to institutions, got our SoC2 have a regulatory framework, are now integrated with Zodiac Copper and Bitco. What's unique about us, and you know, you talk about centralization in the ETFs is we actually don't run any validators ourselves. So Marinade is not a validator provider. Rather we connect validators to stakers through a variety of different mechanisms.
- [10:23]
Scott Melker
That's really interesting. So was this born of a deep belief in Solana specifically as an asset, or a deep belief that institutions would want the ability to stake Solana and therefore you would provide that or work with them to provide that?
- [10:36]
Hadley Stern
I guess the beginning, you know, when the company started four years ago, Solana is only what, five years old. So it was very early in the evolution of Solana. So the notion of institutional investors were not there. It was really born out of helping ensure that Solana stayed decentralized. So when you spin up a network, an L1, your first challenge is how to get validators. And if you're a validator, you need to get staked. Well, how do you get stake in order to scale up your validator? The Solana foundation does do a program where it provides matching stake to help validators spin up. But in our case, we are a place where any validator can come through a command line interface and bid to receive stake. That helps with decentralization. The first mission of the company was to help with decentralization while giving the end investor the highest possible reward they could get. That has now evolved into supporting institutional investors to get the same thing. But we're also very concerned with centralization. If you look at the Bitcoin ETFs, 6% of Bitcoin is tied up in ETFs and ostensibly maybe 5.3% is tied up with one custodian. If that happens with a proof of stake network where there's only institutional grade validators who can provide Services that can become an existential issue for the blockchain. So that's what we're laser focused on.
- [12:01]
Scott Melker
That's really interesting that you were at bank of New York Mellon working on crypto custody and were killed by SAB121. But ironically, the existence of SAB21 is what allowed Coinbase effectively to end up as the custodian for every ETF. Because SAB21 said banks couldn't do it. And now the banks are chopping at the bit to get back in it. And Coinbase got this massive lead and.
- [12:22]
Hadley Stern
You can't under count how massive a lead it is when you stand up a custodian operation, even if you're banking New York Mellon, no one is going to stake a significant amount of assets with you for day one of your operation. They're going to need to see 12 to 18 to 24 months of evidence and, you know, it just takes time. So, yeah, kudos to Coinbase. I mean, you know, depends on your point of view. Kudos or, or it's a shame, but they definitely have a lot of legs up in this cycle.
- [12:55]
Scott Melker
Yeah. I think you and I briefly talked about, but I know it was sort of in the notes. The genius act. Right. I think everybody touting this as this great American accomplishment. We're finally going to get stable coins regulated. You have some fears. Is that accurate to say?
- [13:10]
Hadley Stern
Yeah, no, that's very accurate and I'm trying to find some time to write them down because it, it used to be, it felt like, you know, it was Tradfi versus DeFi. Now I kind of feel like there's this other slot and I don't know what to call it, but it's Circle, it's Coinbase, in some ways, it's Robinhood, it's these, these ostensibly defi companies that are behaving like tradfi companies. And I think that's reflected in the genius act. It's reflected in Coinbase's announcement that, oh, you can, you know, Shopify accepts usdc. Oh, by the way, only on base, you know, so that you're seeing these, these what you would think are crypto companies behaving like tradfi companies and building up monopolies and moats. Maybe I'm a naive guy probably to think that this wouldn't happen. It's what happens with pretty much every technology. It just may be a little surprising, especially in the example of Coin Bears, where they try to speak this very crypto native language. But there's example after example of These moats coming up.
- [14:15]
Scott Melker
So having been at Fidelity in the early days, bank of New York, Mellon, all of these massive institutions that were admittedly early to crypto, but now we're getting the ones who are skeptical and maybe aren't our friends coming in. Do you think that there could be other unintended consequences of the Genius act specifically, but market structure more specifically? I think, because I think that's going to be a much. There's going to be a lot more landmines in that, I would imagine. But where actually sort of crypto incumbents and decentralized platforms get pushed out. Maybe this all just ended up turning us into Wall Street.
- [14:52]
Hadley Stern
Yeah, I think there's a potential for huge unintended consequences. So we go back to what we talked about with the Satoshi White Paper. That is the true spirit of decentralization. Like a completely anonymous whoever it is creating this new technology with incredible energy. So as the attention, the money. And this is part of Circle's IPO as well. That ipo, they could have launched a token. Right. But they went the ipo so that capital energy is sucked up into the traditional markets. You have to wonder at some point how decentralized technologies continue to grow, how it's going to flow down to the protocol level and how protocols are going to be supported and what innovations we're going to miss. So that's what I worry about a little. It's why I'm happy to be working in Solana in a DEFI protocol that's trying to bridge those things. But the signals are definitely complicated right now. I think blocking Tether from the US market, I understand it from a compliance standpoint. I understand it from a. I understand it, you know, is going to have some interesting consequences.
- [16:05]
Scott Melker
I'm wondering if tether will be blocked or how they'll be blocked with their interest, obviously from Lutnick and Cantrip. Gerald, it seems like, you know, I spoke to Paolo and he kind of dismissed it as if we have to just launch a US stablecoin, we'll launch a US stablecoin, but it doesn't seem that easy.
- [16:19]
Hadley Stern
Yeah. And again, even the idea of doing that is already a distraction to, you know, you're already adding a layer of complexity onto something that, that you maybe don't need to. So, you know, none of these. I don't pretend that these issues are simple. You know, crypto clearly needs some kind of regulatory framework, but it feels like right now we're both from a regulatory and a business standpoint. People are starting to view these technologies, like, as another Swift that they can just build businesses around.
- [16:47]
Scott Melker
Yeah. I think the other unintended consequence has been that the money has just left the crypto ecosystems. I'm not saying necessarily from the development side, but certainly from the speculative side and from the investment side. In my humble opinion, Bitcoin treasury companies, Circle stock, Coinbase stock, Hood stock, have stolen all the money that we would have seen this cycle in Altcoins.
- [17:14]
Hadley Stern
Yeah, absolutely agree. I was amazed to see. I mean, kudos to Circle for having such great performance out of the gate. Circle didn't experience. I mean, Coinbase didn't experience that originally.
- [17:24]
Scott Melker
But they got the boost from Circle.
- [17:26]
Hadley Stern
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And they're intertwined as well, which is really interesting. So, yeah, all that money that went to Circle in traditional markets, that's a lot of capital.
- [17:39]
Scott Melker
Yeah. So talk to me then about your take on Bitcoin treasury companies, which is by far my favorite topic these days, because every day I have a conversation where someone says, scott, launch a Bitcoin treasury company. You'll make so much money. And I say, but shouldn't people just buy bitcoin? Why would they want to buy stock in my Bitcoin Treasury Company at 4x or 5x NAV if I'm just buying bitcoin, which they could do themselves. I think that this is the ICO season of 2025 and it's in Bitcoin treasury companies. But maybe I'm just too skeptical. I have friends who are so bullish on it. Hard not to want to.
- [18:18]
Hadley Stern
I would expand the ICO thing to not just Bitcoin treasury companies, but some Solana treasury companies.
- [18:24]
Scott Melker
Eth.
- [18:25]
Hadley Stern
I mean, who knows? Maybe there'll be a Far Coin treasury company in our. In our horizon.
- [18:30]
Scott Melker
Reverse merger with pets.com. yeah, exactly.
- [18:34]
Hadley Stern
Combine it.
- [18:35]
Scott Melker
That would be good.
- [18:36]
Hadley Stern
I think I would buy that, actually.
- [18:38]
Scott Melker
I'd be too. That's the sad thing. Yeah. Still. Still here for the jokes, the memes. Yeah.
- [18:43]
Hadley Stern
A Beyond Sailors experiment, you know, is. I don't understand the. The need for certainly dozens of Bitcoin treasury companies. Like, you know, isn't one enough or two? I also don't quite understand the argument of why it's, you know, why it's more beneficial or needed in an ETF environment. And it does seem like at some point that everything will just kind of collapse on itself.
- [19:11]
Scott Melker
That. What.
- [19:11]
Hadley Stern
What is the. What is the reason or logic? And what is the market size for these type of treasury entities?
- [19:19]
Scott Melker
Yeah, I don't really get it either. I guess I fundamentally get it. Every one of them in their pitch says bitcoin is the hurdle rate or is the benchmark and we have to beat bitcoin per share. We're going to offer a suite of financial services, but right now those are promises and right now they're just buying bitcoin. I mean, even Saylor is still just buying bitcoin until he feels like he has enough critical mass to offer the financial services that have been promised. So at the end of the day, you have to just imagine that they're counting on there still being demand for these notes and the debt. But how much demand can there possibly be for this debt? Especially when you have Saylor doing it billions at a time on a seemingly weekly basis.
- [20:02]
Hadley Stern
So that gets back to the price. I mean, are you surprised that the price is not been, you would think it would have been squeezed up by these Treasuries.
- [20:12]
Scott Melker
Who do you think is selling? This is my second, this is my second new favorite topic of the past few days privately. Who do you think is selling? I mean there's been some evidence that long term holders, original bitcoin whales, I think people underestimate. I actually sent a tweet yesterday, I said, believe it or not, for some people there really is too much bitcoin. You know, we're supposed to say you can never have enough bitcoin. But like if you've bought Bitcoin at $5 and you've got tens of thousands of them, there's too much bitcoin. You're literally going to just sell it and go do other things with your life. Yeah. Move on. And I think that, I mean that has to be what's happening or there's some mechanism behind the hood with options trading or something that we haven't yet seen where you know that maybe all this demand, not the treasury company demand, but ETF demand can be tied to shorts of the futures or something and it's just a carry trade. But that doesn't explain bitcoin. Treasury companies buying billions of dollars a week.
- [21:08]
Hadley Stern
Yeah, my thought would have been it would have been squeezed a lot earlier than it has. And I don't know how much of it is the psychological part of the price, like the 100,000 thing maybe that causes people who were those $5 to finally exit.
- [21:26]
Scott Melker
Dude, I never thought this thing would get to 100 grand. I'm going to buy a yacht.
- [21:31]
Hadley Stern
I remember when I first got into this space, I think it was a two to. We were like a thousand. Will it get to a Thousand. Whoa.
- [21:39]
Scott Melker
The unregulated 10,000. 10 guys.
- [21:43]
Chris Inks
10,000 seemed insane.
- [21:45]
Scott Melker
2010 guys. All the ones I talked to, like, kind of COVID their head and admit that they sold at a thousand.
- [21:52]
Hadley Stern
Yeah, yeah. Because it. And this is where the absurdity of being human comes into. It's just a random number that we anchor ourselves to, like a hundred thousand, you know, so what? But that's why I think the 160 mark, I think that's. I don't think we're psychologically ready for the 200 yet. To me, the next big number is the million number. To me, the million number is what a thousand was when it was 200.
- [22:19]
Scott Melker
It is. It seems so far off. Yeah. I wonder what the world has to look like for bitcoin to squeeze up to a million in any shorter timeframe. I'm not talking about next year, but even by like 2030, you know, if you're at a million bucks, where's the dollar, where's the euro?
- [22:36]
Hadley Stern
I don't even want to think about that kind of world. Although what bitcoiners would say is, well, there's only 21 million and there's only, you know, with lost bitcoin, there's only really 17 or 18 million. And so how many, how many people want to have one bitcoin? 17 million people.
- [22:53]
Scott Melker
So let's talk about Solana staking institutionally. So you're the perfect person to ask about the rec. Was it Re Osprey? The Solana staking etf I kind of flippantly mentioned before. A lot of people think that that's literally just a Solana ETF getting approved and that you can stake the Solana. It's just a part of a broader etf. But still, did Marinade participate in that? How does that change business for you? How many people are looking at these like, are you sure? Lobbying regulators? What do you have to do to make the products you're trying to offer exist?
- [23:26]
Hadley Stern
So the other nuance with REC shares and kudos to them is they didn't go through the 19B process. So it's. And I don't know, I'm curious what James would say about this. I wish I. I could.
- [23:36]
Scott Melker
Maybe I'll get them on the line.
- [23:37]
Hadley Stern
Yeah, it's. It's like an etf, but not an etf. You know, from a. It doesn't have the same regulatory scrutiny from the sec. It doesn't go through the same security and compliance. So, you know, for, for all intents and purposes, the eat Solana E Staking ETF has not been approved yet. As we think about it, in terms of how we're involved, we're involved with, in conversations with all of the big providers. We are, we do, we did publicly launch and we're the first application for the Canary Marinade Solana etf. So that's through Canary, they're going to use our Select Validator program. And what that is is we've taken 30 of the best Solana validators from a performance standpoint and wrapped them into one tool. So when a consumer Canary, a person buys a Canary ETF, that Solana will then get staked to 30 of the highest performing validators in the Solana ecosystem. One of the other unique things we do is we do something called protected stake rewards, which means if one of those validators ever goes down, they provide some Solana to top up. So we extensively have 100 uptime. So that's what we're launching with Canarium or conversations with many of the other providers as well. I'm heading down to D.C. after I come back from Prague a couple of weeks from now. Let's just say it's a very hot time in the ETF cycle, particularly when it comes to staking ETFs and we expect to see some movement soon, which is very exciting.
- [25:07]
Scott Melker
Have you ever thought of ways to mix the names Canary and Marinade so it could be Marinara? Well, you'd be Marinari. I guess I was gonna say you get to Marinara as a company Marinari.
- [25:19]
Hadley Stern
We have not. But it sounds like we should definitely invite you to our next meeting.
- [25:24]
Scott Melker
I'm full of ideas.
- [25:26]
Hadley Stern
You're full. Full of good ideas.
- [25:27]
Scott Melker
I'd say people want me to, you know, like I said, people want me to start a bitcoin treasury company. Maybe I should just name them.
- [25:32]
Hadley Stern
Yeah, well, what would you name? Would it be a Wolf of all streets Treasury?
- [25:37]
Scott Melker
I don't know, man. I can't do it. Like. So listen, I've actually, like, I'm more than happy and I will be and have taken on like small advisor roles I'm talking about, but like to participate in getting balance sheet companies to add bitcoin to their balance sheets. Like simply like, oh, you've got 10 million bucks in your balance sheet. Buy a million dollars worth of bitcoin.
- [25:56]
Hadley Stern
Cool.
- [25:58]
Scott Melker
I'm not telling them to like engineer. That's a. So that's the thing. I think we're having that problem again where we have one catch all term for something that's not all the same. I Think now we have to have balance sheet companies and treasury companies. Treasury companies is financial engineering your stock and debt to buy Bitcoin. A balance sheet is just like you and me who are like, yeah, I want to own some bitcoin and some cash. That's cool.
- [26:21]
Hadley Stern
That's a totally different premise. And scalable and love that premise and own some bitcoin, own some Solana, mix up your Treasury. But yeah, you're absolutely right. It's completely different from these vehicles. I mean, I also wonder, so if you have someone come to you and say I want to get access to bitcoin, you'll just say, buy bitcoin. But then they say, well, I only have money in my rollover Iraq. Then you say, what? Buy the etf, Right?
- [26:46]
Scott Melker
Yeah, that's been my answer to everyone. I literally was having this conversation at like 4:45 in the morning with some of my friends via text because we're early risers and he was one of the ones saying, hey, you should just do the treasury company. Why not? And I said, because I just tell people to buy bitcoin. My literal response, I mean you can see it in my text. I said that exact thing this morning.
- [27:06]
Hadley Stern
And then same with Solana. So the great thing about Solana, you know, proof of stake network inflation rate right now in terms of Rewards is around 8%. So this is why it's existential that staking be included in the ETFs with Ethereum you kind of get away with, okay, I'll leave 2 or 3% on the table, but at least I can hold ETF. But people cannot and should not leave something like 8% that they can get with marinade on the table. So that's why we're working really hard to bring these staking products to the market.
- [27:37]
Scott Melker
Yeah, really cool. When do we get blended treasury companies? If people love indexes, isn't that actually a really strong idea? Like why don't you, Hadley, start a bitcoin Solana treasury company. Hadley froze for me. I don't know if he's frozen for you guys. I think we lost Hadley. No. Can you guys see Hadley? I can't see Hadley. He's frozen. Bring him off and if he unfreezes, we will go ahead. Maybe it's me that's frozen. I don't know. Am I frozen? Am I frozen? I'm not frozen. How they're frozen. How they still frozen? Yeah, we lost him. Too bad, that sucks. I wanted to finish up that conversation with him. Interesting that obviously he's doing all of this building on Solana. And we have this amazing sponsor here, which is Aptos, which you guys know about. And my good friend Avery actually was also at Permissionless, the CEO of Aptos, he went on right after James and Hadley. At Permissionless, it was me and Eric Adams, then someone else, stablecoin something or other. Then Hadley and James, then Avery and the guy from Jump Crypto. Obviously they were announcing Shelby, which we've talked about, decentralized storage. But on the Aptos, congrats to Avery. Honored to join the CFTC Digital Asset Market Subcommittee alongside leaders from BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, Citadel and more. Not bad company to be in, but now Aptos officially represented by Avery Ching on the CFTC Digital Asset Market Subcommittee. Really huge to me that we're seeing not only him specifically, but representatives of our industry actually impacting how policy is made and what we will see in the future from all of these companies. I think it's huge for our industry and of course also that they have real world assets, real adoption, real world Aptos. 540 million in RWA already live on Aptos. BlackRock Pact consortium, Ondo Finance and beyond. They're absolutely killing it, as you guys know. Let's check that out. How they. Are you back?
- [29:51]
Hadley Stern
Yeah, I'm sorry. I needed to wrap a bunch of Bitcoin and Salon and Ethereum treasury companies and tokenize them on Kraken to make them available to retail investors. So I, I.
- [30:02]
Scott Melker
Too much. Too much bandwidth. Too much. Yeah, you were frozen in a great pose. And the thing is, I don't know, like, if you freeze, I'm like, am I frozen? And I'm talking to like, I have no idea. So I know it's time to go, but I did when I saw you pop back on, I wanted to bring you back on so we could at least say. Yeah.
- [30:20]
Hadley Stern
I apologize for the last minute hiccup. Awesome to talk to you today and thanks for the energy and. And conversation.
- [30:27]
Scott Melker
All right, guys, check out Marinade and give Hadley a follow his. His information is right down below in the description. Thanks, man. Hope we can do this again soon.
- [30:35]
Hadley Stern
Have a good one. Thank you.
- [30:36]
Scott Melker
Bye. Chris, are you frozen?
- [30:39]
Chris Inks
No, I'm not frozen.
- [30:42]
Scott Melker
You don't look frozen.
- [30:44]
Chris Inks
How's it going on, man?
- [30:45]
Scott Melker
How are you, man? So what's going on? We got a couple. Couple charts here today. We got bitcoin. Let's take a look. I haven't. Honestly, man, I'm. You know, it's summer or something's going on. I don't even wake up and like check prices anymore. I'm not really like too actively trading because all coins have been such garbage, right. And like I just kind of buy bitcoin, right. So it's like I don't even check. Let's look.
- [31:08]
Chris Inks
Yeah.
- [31:09]
Scott Melker
175. That's good. That's good.
- [31:12]
Chris Inks
Yeah. Things are really, I think starting to, to look really, really interesting finally now. You know, alts have been going down seems like forever and then they're doing this sideways thing right now, which I think is just about to end. I think they're about to really kind of start moving here. As you can see here on bitcoin, everything we talked about again, you know, this was the third. This low here back on June 22nd was that third low where everybody's like, oh, the top is in, you know, over the last year. And then it just what it took back off again. Right. So I was originally talking about this idea that we run up into this descending resistance. We pull back, then we break out. As we got up here, I said, okay, we've got a range going here. Looks like we've got a flat going. And then we're going to pull back here and basically hit, you know, right in the area where I said it was going to hit here. We've come up. I think we're, you know, on our way out here. And if so the pretty cool thing about this is this would be a one with a flat as a two here. That gives us a. A minimum expected wave three target up here at about 122, 887. Five waves up around 127, 479. So you know, this, you know, it might bear paying some attention to here as we get that breakout above there. Now in order to confirm that we do need the breakout, you know, again, this would be a, B and C and it's always above wave B which happens to be here at 108.7950. But if we can get that breakout, the odds are, you know, we're headed up here. This looks like a really great range here. I like the, the volume profile with the price action within this range. So again, looks like we got a spring here. Nice bullish engulfing candle on the daily taken up after. So if you didn't buy the spring, you know, you should have been buying the. This bullish engulfing candle here. If you hadn't, you should have been buying this pullback to the new monthly pivot. If you hadn't buy the breakout here again above 108, 795.50.
- [33:15]
Scott Melker
I'm buying at 88. It's going. Come on, let's go.
- [33:17]
Chris Inks
Buying at 88. You're looking forward to pull back?
- [33:19]
Scott Melker
I'm not. I've just had bids there for like months now, you know, since. And. And I'm just kind of hoping they'll fill.
- [33:26]
Chris Inks
Well, I mean, you know, I. I've been saying this for a real long time. You know, dips are for buying. You know, there you should be looking to deploy capital when those pullbacks come, not necessarily at the breakouts. You know, how do you, you know, maximize your returns, try to get an understanding of what's going on with the markets, how they actually move. Not a lot of the nonsense that you see all over online. A lot of the, you know, tired things that people say, you know. Oh, well, everybody says this. Yeah, well, almost everybody loses money in the market. So if you're doing the same thing that you say that everybody's doing and everybody's generally losing money, maybe you should do something else, right? But man, oh man. So, you know, that's looking good there. We have, Let me see here. I've got, Let me find it. Gonna share this tab here. I've got three three alts here. Three really good looking alts. And so the first one here is H bar. And so HBAR's got this nice. What? You know, it's. It's five waves up, it's three waves pullback. It was deep, but that gives us a double bottom here.
- [34:34]
Scott Melker
Is that stoke or RSI on the bottom? Because it looks like you got bullish divergence too.
- [34:38]
Chris Inks
Yeah. So this is RSI here on top, and this is stochastic RSI on the bottom there. Yeah. Let me see. Why is it not pulling up? There we go.
- [34:44]
Scott Melker
Weekly bullish divergence. Not bad. Yeah.
- [34:47]
Chris Inks
Yeah, this, the setup looks absolutely amazing. Like I said, it's pretty clear. Five waves up, looks like a pretty clear three down. We need a breakout above 0.18401 and that should confirm this. This gives us three waves up at 34 cents and then five waves up here, minimum expected at 42 cents. But you know, again, based on the height of this pullback, we should be going, you know, quite a bit higher than this high up here, generally speaking. So we get kind of our five waves up here, we'll probably get a three wave pullback down here toward the pivot. So a classic thing, you know, if you aren't into Elliott waves and whatnot, something I teach just about everybody throw your traditional pivots on here. If you can get a rally up from like. Like right here. It's above the S1 pivot. So usually it's going to give you five waves up to the R1, and. And then it'll be a 50 pullback to the pivot. And so usually you look for a rally into the R1. Yep. See right there, rally into the R1, a pullback to the pivot, and then you look for it to take off again. So a lot of opportunity here with hbar locally. And what you're going to see. I've just got three charts here, but what people see, if they're looking at alts, you're going to see a lot of this. Well, not quite so much of this one. But basically you'll look for a down and up and down. So you're gonna have like. Like what we were looking at on. On Bitcoin there, a flat correction this one. Wave 2 may be complete here instead of a flat correction. So we're just looking for that breakout above 0.15413. If we can get that, we're good to go higher. We got a nice, you know, throw under here. This is what a throw under should look like. If you've got a wedge or a channel. It should be just this quick move down and then a strong move right back up. And that'll give you a throw under. That usually indicates the. The bottom of the. The pullback. And so again, looking for that breakout there. So H bar looks good. This is what I was talking about here. On the. On most of these alts, you're going to have a one, and it looks like three down, three up. And then, you know, five back down. And so that five back down should come near that wave A, that pullback low. And we did it here. So we may be complete with this breakout above wave b here at 4.239 will get us going. So locally, that gives us 4.932 and then 5.231 is our targets. But again, bigger picture here is this idea that this is a one and again, this larger flat here. Two done here. And so, you know, wave three minimum expected target here up around 6. 95. 5 waves up, minimum up at $8 and 14 cents, which gets us right to the yearly pivot. I love that. I love five waves up to the yearly pivot. Three wave pullback. And then you get your wave three big breakout. Bigger. Even bigger macro picture here. If we zoom out on Adam here is we do appear to have 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 up for a 1, 3, down for a 2. So ultimately, it looks like Adam overall, whether, you know, it's this cycle or the next or whatever, is going to just continue up overall and continue to break out higher there. Which means if you're buying down around this area with the intent to hold on for a while, it might actually be a pretty good. Pretty good idea because you're pretty close to this pullback low here.
- [38:16]
Scott Melker
And support. So many coins bouncing off that support. They all look like potential double bottoms. It's so funny how they all.
- [38:23]
Chris Inks
Yeah, I mean, exactly. Exactly. Right. So, you know, on the. The daily, most of them look like that. That flat correction. And then for the. When you jump out to the weekly, a lot of them look like this double bottom and going up. And again, same idea here with ldo that we just had with that I was just talking about on Adam, which is this 5 waves up into the yearly pivot area around 2.30 based off this low here. Right. And so even as a double bottom, you know, you'd look for a breakout there. Well, that swing high, and you're looking for 200% as the target area. Same thing, basically, as this five waves up, we're looking at around 223, 230, that area. So, again, I think, you know, you got a good chance. You probably go long here. Just ride it up to that pivot, exit around that pivot. You'll get a pullback down here, probably around $1.25 or something like that, maybe a $20. And then you'd want to be long again looking for the big breakout. Once again, we jump in here to ldo here, and so we've got our five up, our three down for that big double bottom. Now this one, let me kind of zoom in a little bit more here. This one, not quite a flat here. This One has a 1, 2, 3, 4, and a 5. But a B, and it looks like C may be done at 50%. We were looking for potential pullback to this weekly pivot. This S1 pivot. But in this case, you know, again, on all of these, your. Your B wave. This one's 0.76. If we're breaking out above that, that says that the low is in. Wave two is in there at 50% pullback. And wave three, minimum expected target, about a dollar. Wave five up there, about a dollar nine. So, I mean, you're gonna see this pretty similar look across quite a bit of your alts. Right now and it should make you happy. It should. You know, everybody's been complaining, but I think the thing is everybody's gonna be awesome.
- [40:15]
Scott Melker
Pretty bad. It's been pretty bad.
- [40:17]
Chris Inks
Yeah.
- [40:17]
Scott Melker
Be fair, it's been pretty bad.
- [40:19]
Chris Inks
So a lot of people are not going to buy. They're going to miss out, it's going to go up higher, then they're going to complain about how they missed out.
- [40:25]
Scott Melker
On it and, and they'll buy the top.
- [40:27]
Chris Inks
Yeah, yeah. You know, same thing every time, right?
- [40:31]
Scott Melker
Not, not a hard, not a hard process to follow.
- [40:35]
Chris Inks
But I do, I, it looks really constructive. You know, we had a couple of really great trades recently. We had, I've trained an AI on the way that I view markets and the way that I understand markets and then it uses that knowledge with catalysts. And most mornings we'll get a three plus three so three stock picks and three crypto picks that it does for us that I post in our, in our academy. And like, so we had HFT the other day two days ago and that thing popped for 100. We had juniper, which was a stock which also popped pretty well. You know, just I think it was that same day. And we're getting, you know, these in and out of here throughout there. And so there's a lot of opportunity I think showing up in the markets both in stocks and in crypto in spite of everybody saying, you know, the top was in on both of them and you know, price just continue to climb that wall of worry. Right. All the way up to new all time highs. So it feels good. You know, the markets are good.
- [41:37]
Scott Melker
It's nice to be bullish when you're in a bull market.
- [41:39]
Chris Inks
Yeah.
- [41:40]
Scott Melker
Funny how that works. All right, man, well, awesome. So guys, you can go check out obviously everything Chris has built. Follow him on TX West Capital. Go check out the academy. Where can everybody do that?
- [41:50]
Chris Inks
They can do that. Members.texaswestcapital.com that's easy enough to remember. Yeah, yeah, we're pretty easy there. And yeah, we do live trading three times a week and just so much just, you know, hundreds of hours of educational content. Just everything in there for however you want to do it. Got people from all over the world, which is great because they're making money overnight and then telling me in the morning, I'm like, dude, seriously. But a lot of fun, A lot of fun.
- [42:17]
Scott Melker
Amazing man. Well, thank you very much. I'm going to stay on for a second. Let you go.
- [42:21]
Chris Inks
Appreciate it.
- [42:21]
Scott Melker
Appreciate you Chris. Have a good one.
- [42:23]
Chris Inks
You too.
- [42:24]
Scott Melker
All right, guys. It's funny, you know, I always have guests on and they talk about all things they're building. And I'm the worst at promoting anything, and I never promote anything that I'm doing. So I wanted to just, like, take a moment. So I got, like, a bunch of things here that you should all be participating in that I rarely tell you about. Of course, first, these are all in the description. I have a daily newsletter. Do you guys know that I have a daily newsletter, free? I have written 1,130 newsletters already that I wake up at the butt ass crack of dawn to write and present to you guys. There's the arch public guys, you know them right there. Today I Talked about abolishing 20, you know, trading hours and the bell that closes and going to 247, 365 trading every day, every hour. I give my market analysis, I share my charts. I tell you what's going on literally in all markets. Some educational content, a whole lot of news, whatever, whatever, whatever. If you guys are not subscribed, maybe join my newsletter. And something I've pretty much never told you guys about is that I have another newsletter that actually has in like five or six weeks already way more subscribers than this newsletter, which is weekly. It's the Crypto Advisor. I built this with a couple of institutional friends to educate RIAs and registered investment advisors and institutions on the basics of crypto to keep them updated, really, with the premise that they're going to lose all of the boomer money when the boomer's kid comes in, said, I don't want my dad's crappy financial advisor who's telling me to buy 60, 40 when I just want to buy bitcoin. So trying to help them be able to speak with a, you know, educated perspective on the crypto market. This is completely free. It's another newsletter you can literally sign up for. It's called Crypto Advisor. We have 80,000 Something subscribers already in just over a month. To show you how much this is needed, but you guys can join too. It doesn't have to be just for advisors. There's nothing here. It's free. You know, Des says new letter sets my day every day. There you go. See? Benjamin says they're in the inbox. So, yeah, I got another one and something really excited that I haven't talked to you guys about literally at all. I have a telegram group. I started a telegram group and everybody thinks it's a scam. So, like, I tweeted about this telegram group and everyone was like, there's no way. Scott Melker started a telegram group. So we tried like a whole new website, if you guys remember, for members. And then I was considering a discord and all these things. And in reality, like, I am like almost 50 years old and I don't have time for any of that shit. But I really want the opportunity to get you guys into one place to actually be able to talk to you and communicate. And I'm literally in there talking to people who are commenting. And we have channels for Bitcoin, Altcoins, Ethereum, traffi markets. And then myself and my team, who are like, these guys are amazing and they never share anything with you guys are in there just sharing news and sharing their charts and all these things. These people you've never seen. So people think it's a scam because obviously under every like tweet you get something that says like there is usually a scam telling someone to join some group or click something. And the other part that's confused people is that when we did the research on launching a telegram group, it was like, what you're going to end up with is like thousands of bots in there and scammers. So you either have to charge money or you have to gate it in some way. And we chose to gate it with a exchange link. Now I'm working with Blofin on that. Blofin you ju Just to be clear, they're globally available to everyone. That's why we, we chose them. But it's completely free. It takes one minute to sign up there and you don't have to do anything there, right? Yeah. I don't even know if you have to like use your real name. I no idea. But it was just to make sure that we don't get bots that people have to do something. It's basically like a capture code. So you don't need to fund, you don't need to trade if you choose to. They've got great incentives, but you don't need to fund, you don't need to trade. And that gets you in the group and it's literally awesome. Like you can sit there and hang out all day and talk to me about whatever you want. So it's in the description down there. It's t me WolfOfAllStreetscore bot. It'll walk you through the process and then you join, I think, two groups when you do it. And then the final one I've told you about, we ran out last time. Literally, like we sold out last time I shared it here ofbitcoinbounbond5spirits.com but now we've got a new distributor to make sure that there's always spirits available for you. The vodka is incredible too. But the bourbon already has won the biggest award in the United States. Not like we just like bottled it up. The bottle took years to create, as I told you, and now I'm a part of this business very, very proudly. And the shit is just awesome and the bottle is sick. So you should have some bitcoin bourbon on your shelf. That's the last that I got there, you see. Really easy. So I just did it. I went against my own comfort zone. I exited my comfort zone and actually decided to share with you guys the things that I'm doing. Pretty good. Pretty good. And that's all I got for you today. We will be back, obviously tomorrow with Iago and God knows who else. I don't even look at my schedule anymore. And of course the Friday five on Friday. And that is all we have today. Have a wonderful day. Sign up for all the things it.