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BTC Crashes to $78K! Are We Heading Even Lower? | Crypto Town Hall
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BTC Crashes to $78K! Are We Heading Even Lower? | Crypto Town Hall
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- [00:00]
Scott Melker
Good morning everybody and welcome to Crypto Town hall every weekday on X at 10:15am Eastern Standard Time. Bitcoin obviously in a major correction here, going as low as roughly $78,000. Altcoins suffering even worse. Of course. Solana bottomed for now around 125.74. Ethereum traded as low as $2,070 or so depending on the exchange that you're watching, leading many to ask where is the market going next? Is this just another bull market correction or is it all over and are we back into the bare market doldrums of crypto? Before we go to the panel, I'm going to go ahead and offer my opinions on this. If you follow me on X, you probably know what they are because I have been exceptionally aggressive in my bull posting over the past 12 to 16 hours with high conviction that whether this is a bottom or not, it's a good time to think about buying these assets. I bought Bitcoin for transparency at 82,000, 79,000, Ethereum at 2100, Solana at 1 2650. These are by far the largest purchases of crypto that I've made honestly in quite a long time. Does that mean that I need it to be the bottom? No. My theory is that prices will trade at many multiples higher at this at some point and not at many multiples low. If we do continue down, there's quite a few reasons that I have high conviction. A sentiment is in the absolute dumps. This is as bad as I've seen it out there. And just rationally I can't look at a chart and see $80,000 bitcoin and be depressed. Just six months ago we were the 60,000, it's 80,000 now and you would think that the world had literally ended. I think Solana is irrationally oversold here. I think Ethereum will get their run as well. But we have the Fear and greed index at a 10. It's the lowest it's been in multiple years. We the worst sell off since ftx. Actually the worst three days almost I think ever outside of ftx. And that didn't even include the selling yesterday. Just every signal in my spidey senses says capitulation and we have generally the crowd screaming for $74,000. $70,000 Bitcoin certainly possible. Not saying it isn't. But anyone who's been here a long time knows that when everybody's screaming for an exact level, rarely does it come and if it does usually go below it and if it doesn't usually you get front run above and all those people waiting to buy 74 end up buying back on the way up. So that's my theory on the market, how I'm approaching it. Not financial advice in any way, shape or form, but everything about this reeks of the 25, 28, 30, 40% corrections that we've had in past bull markets on the way up. Mike, you can go. Feel free to disagree with me now.
- [02:59]
Mike McGlone
Oh no, I think you nailed it. First of all it's just been one of the best technical indicators is Ethereum around 2000 has been really good support. Ethereum around 4000 has been really good resistance. But I think what you nailed is, is my takeaway is don't take this as a buy and hold investment space anymore. 12,000 cryptocurrencies list on coinmarketcap.com just push back 12. Yeah, sorry, I keep messing up my zeros on that one. Yeah, I just checked. When I used to write about this when Trump was first elected, it was only 600. I think it's just that the hubris and the thing we heard, the stuff we heard from the mainstream ETF type people is you just have to be ignored. I mean having done it for almost for decades, people on the sell side of the trade, I think I'm missing the fact that they're part of the mainstream now. It's the insiders. A lot of people on this call who were involved in this when people told them they were idiots a decade ago or five years ago is now it's in the mainstream. Just take it as a good trading environment. I think it's an awesome trading environment because you can just set your bots up. We're at good support. The key thing I remember from doing this many times in all for history is all with all markets is you got to take the macro view in the big picture. So I think we're stuck between 2000 and 4000 Ethereum forever. I don't think it gets back to 4000. If it does, I think it's a sell, but I think at some point it drops to 1000. And the macro big picture is bottom line is I think you have to depend on US stock market to keep going up for a broad cryptos to rally. And I feel a little bit relieved that things like Dogecoin now are worth 28 billion versus 51 billion just a months ago. But I think you're supposed to lop zeros. I could do some zero lopping on virtually 90% of all the altcoins out there just lop the zeros off the valuations. At some point I don't see what stops Bitcoin from gaining towards going towards 90% dominance. I mean this space is just exactly like I remember the market being overall risk assets almost exactly 25 years ago to today. So I look at it that way and I keep even. See. So in the macro I see that, yeah, okay, stock market has to go up. Looks like it's just starting to show kinks and armor and there's really good reason from that. What we're getting from from doge and tariffs. Nothing in that space is good about equity market. We have the world's largest. I'm tilting over the macro actually. Obviously nothing in this space about the world's largest liquidity provider and employer. Cutting back significantly, something I've never seen before, which is quite good I think long term but short term discombobulating. And nothing about earnings is good from higher tariffs. And I just point out to anybody who disagrees with the fact that we're going to have massive tariffs in the rest of the world. Take a look at the book no trade is free from Robert Lighthizer. It's Trump is going right to that plan. And remember this is a human being that had a second chance ahead four years to think about it. So to me the macros we're going to get the normal Correction S&P500 which is get to the 200 day moving average. Haven't done that in over a year and a half and then we can reassess and cryptars are the best leading indicator on the planet. So right now way oversold. Sure got it. Great for traders. Ethereum around 2000 maybe bounces to 3000. But in the macro I think you're going to see more downside and I'll end with this. I see gold get really expensive. I see peaks in crude oil, peaks in copper, peaks in corn, peaks in natural gas. And to me the next big trade, I've been saying it for two years, I've been dead wrong, but have happened before is going to be U.S. treasury long bonds. Just that yield at 420, at 450 or 425 in a 10 year note. Just catching up to where they are in the rest of the world. In China, China's at 1.8. I remember trading Japanese government bonds, gosh, over 30 years ago and we've seen this before.
- [06:37]
Scott Melker
A lot to unpack there. I do want to and I said this on X actually this morning, Mike, you know you're on macro Monday every single Monday. Maybe you were early in your, in your bearishness but you very clearly for a very long time have been saying why Not Ethereum at 2000 and you and Dave Weisberger interestingly made that bet. And I'm trying to find the timestamp. It was either last March or April whether bitcoin or gold would outperform for a year. And it looked like you were behind there for a while but actually if it ended right now I believe you would win that bet. That gold outperformed bitcoin on the bitcoin gold ratio.
- [07:15]
Mike McGlone
I appreciate you remembering one of the, that one Scott. The way I look at it as an ex trader is I would have been stopped out. I mean certainly having trade leverage my whole life Now I just say it completely respecting you and anybody on everybody on this, on this X spaces who does it. I just say it. I don't, I'm not really allowed to trade as better if I don't but gives me that outside, outside view. And the one thing I've learned is, is when you, it's just sometimes you just put up your finger and you hear what Michael Saylor was saying in Q4 last year, it's like okay, he's tempting the market gods. Don't go with that, sell it. And now, yeah, we're getting oversold. But it's the macro. Big picture is I look at things so that was kind of fun. I'm willing to lose that bet and write the day because I can mention it's just a couple hundred bucks from friends. It's fun. I can't wait to have pay for that meal with you guys. The key thing I'm looking at in the macro is I see something that's, that's, you know, I'm making a lifetime call here. I see like the Bloomberg commodity index is just recovering from a 25 year low versus S&P 500. I see things like the, the treasury bond index. We have a Treasury bond index in Bloomberg that goes back above 35 years. It's the lowest ever versus S&P 500. See the problem there? The two times GDP, you know, there's, that's all that matters. You just have to keep going up or. And we've had this historic period and now we're just starting to revert. We have a good catalyst for it. The question is duration and cryptos are just the leading indicator for everything.
- [08:39]
Scott Melker
So I want to zoom in kind of on the macro. A lot of people pointing at markets Hating uncertainty. And obviously, we're in this transitional period to Trump potentially to tariffs. And we have Doge, which many have argued is, you know, a form of austerity. Grant. Grant just jumped down. I was going to ask him, but he just jumped off stage. I was going to speak a bit more about that, but there's an argument to be made. We have this sort of conflict, I guess I'll say one is that people expected, I think, Trump to do everything he could to pump markets as sort of an indicator for the success of his presidency. He's made those comments. He said $150,000 bitcoin in the first 500 days would be gauges for the success of the presidency. But rationally, if you're going to utilize tariffs as a strategy, if you actually intend to make these massive budget cuts, you have to know that that's going to be short term pain before there's long term gain. Right. So there's an argument to be made that if we're going to go into a bear market recession, correction, whatever you want to call it, this is the time to do it when he has the political backing and mandate and before there's an election to be considered. I'm wondering how people sort of frame that situation. Because, listen, it doesn't align necessarily with what he said in the campaign about what he expected for markets. But there's no way you just throw, you know, tariffs around at everyone in the world for 25% and start, you know, firing people, thousands at a time and expect that markets are going to go straight up. Any thoughts from anyone on the panel? Throw your hand up or just jump in. Go ahead, Preston.
- [10:20]
Preston Pysh
Yeah, so, I mean, I think crypto is kind of divorced from the rest of the markets in this respect. Because, yes, of course, Trump could be doing things to boost the regular stock market and all the rest of that, but we have to remember that the other thing that they've done is they've stopped persecuting the industry. I mean, the SEC took the unprecedented step yesterday of stating that meme coins aren't securities. That's the first time that the SEC has issued some type of informal opinion on that topic since the hinman speech in 2017, which of course was a total disaster. Charlie Fox trial.
- [10:54]
Carlo
Right.
- [10:54]
Scott Melker
And Preston, clearly, just to be clear, not just on meme coins, it's the first time really, the SEC has taken a position on anything in crypto and what it actually is. Correct? Correct.
- [11:03]
Preston Pysh
And like, so that, so that's like, that gives you some idea of you know, personnel as policy, the personnel at the top are now saying, listen, we want crypto to thrive and do well. The other thing to keep in mind is that we're probably also going to have significant normalization or regularization of the crypto industry in terms of both the treatment of stablecoins, right, which currently is not treated as fiat or money. It's treated as property or instruments for across a range of things. And potentially we could have a change in how that's treated. It could be more like fiat for various different purposes. And also we're expecting to get crypto market structure legislation which is going, and you can see this now, the Tron lawsuit I think was dropped, the Coinbase lawsuit was dropped. A whole bunch of other ones are likely going to be dropped as well. So what's happened is the industry is now no longer in a position where we're on the back foot. We don't have any regulatory clarity. We don't know whether anything that we do is going to lead to U.S. liability. People are going to feel there are all kinds of projects. I have clients who've done this. They've moved out of the United States, they move their developers out of the United States. They operated in places like Canada or, you know, or other countries that aren't the U.S. all that's going to come back to the U.S. a&B, the U.S. market, which is by far the largest crypto market in the world, is now going to be legalized. Right. So that in terms of like what's going to happen to our industry over the next four years, we've only just started, right, that process of getting crypto normalized and having regular avenues for people to buy it, sell it, trade it without the trading venue, worrying that they're going to be shut down. So I think I'm massively bullish because it's going to lead to a lot more development, a lot more innovation. People are going to feel free to say, listen, we had a team before that might not have developed a new layer one protocol, right? Because they said, well, maybe it doesn't work for us, maybe we're going to get sued, maybe this, maybe that they're going to look at it and say, fuck it, let's do this now. This is something which is worth doing, innovating on this technology, building something new.
- [13:01]
Scott Melker
Yeah, Preston is something we've been discussing here and elsewhere a lot. It aligns with my short term pain, long term gain sort of theory. We have a lot of these short term catalysts that maybe are Bad for the market. But the tailwinds from exactly as you described from a legislative regulatory perspective are just insane. Literally a dream. Every, every committee chair is pro bullish. The things that are happening at the sec. I mean, you mentioned Coinbase, consensus, Robinhood, Uniswap. I mean, I'm forgetting some, literally. Gemini. Yeah. I mean, in 10 days, right? So now we have a situation, I think, where we've ripped off the band aid. I think I said on my show this morning, it's like we flipped over the eraser and erased Gensler.
- [13:46]
Carlo
Right?
- [13:47]
Scott Melker
Now they need to flip the pencil back over and start giving the clear regulation, which is going to come so that people know what they can do. But you couldn't ask for in a vacuum for getting macro a better environment for crypto in the United States moving forward.
- [14:00]
Preston Pysh
All the talent, I mean, not all the talent, but a huge chunk of the crypto talent has always been American, right? And this has been true for the last 10 or 15 years. And you know, and for most of that time, people in the United States have not been able to develop it. They've had to go offshore. They've had to do complicated offshore arrangements involving Panama foundations or Cayman foundations or Swiss stiff tongues. And there's a reason the Ethereum stiff tongue is based in Switzerland, right? It's because they didn't want to be based in the United States because the US Drove them out. So people have been twisting themselves into knots in order to avoid the United States and avoid doing business here, and that's over. Right? So all that you're, it's, there's a huge amount of pressure, bandwidth, time investment. I mean, we're talking probably billions of dollars in terms of time value, right? That is going to be recovered by developers, by startups, by investors, not having to worry about basically persecution by the U.S. legal system for political reasons. And I think it's, it's fantastic and it's massively, massively bullish.
- [14:58]
Scott Melker
Good morning, Carlo.
- [15:00]
Florian
Good morning, Scott. Man, every day just brings more and more good news. I, I wrote a thread this morning breaking down the meme COIN guidance that the SEC issued. Significant progress in the sector. Very good news. Also had to warn everyone it's not binding authority. It could change at the drop of a hat. And it's not binding legal authority. It's strictly guidance. But that said, Scott, it's really good guidance because finally, as Preston very well articulated, we're starting to get clarity as to what can and can't be done. Now people are going to capitalize on this, as they often do, and they're going to try to skirt the lines. They're going to try to launch meme coins that appear to be collectible tokens, but offer all kinds of things that may put them back in the line of sights for regulatory scrutiny. So, just a caveat, a warning. But on the broader conversation, this is all good, but I would be remiss to say that with all this good, there still is the lingering question, what the hell did all of this accomplish? All the wasted taxpayer money time investigating all of these centralized and decentralized platforms to determine whether they were launching investment contracts or not. In the end, they all seem to be getting dismissed. Hundreds of millions of dollars in legal fees and time wasted virtually destroyed the sector for years. And in the end, what the hell does the SEC have to show for it? I think that's a question that still demands an answer, and it's really frustrating that we had to get to this point.
- [16:44]
Scott Melker
Cameron's thread on that yesterday, I think it was yesterday or two days ago, was great. He said, yeah, it's amazing that we've dropped the Gemini suit. Thank you. We're glad that we're not in trouble. But what about the hundreds of millions of dollars spent to defend complete nonsense case? I think he proposed that they should get that money back three to one for anyone who had to defend themselves against something that ends up being completely dropped. But, Carlo, I think it kind of shines a light on how different this would be if the same SEC had continued through in November, right? Absolutely. To what end? The answer is that they lost. If they had won, they would be continuing this and we would see them four more years of attempting to destroy the industry.
- [17:28]
Florian
But the thing about this legacy is, and what they've done, the path of destruction, the chasing the sector overseas, as Preston indicated, it did nothing to protect consumers. And the saddest piece, and the saddest part of it is, is that a lot of companies and startups got absolutely destroyed in this and had to settle because they didn't have the war chest that the Winklevoss brothers have, that Coinbase has to stick in and see the fight through to the end. And none of those companies are ever going to be able to recover from what was done to them. And that's really unfortunate because at the end, their mandate was supposed to be to protect consumers. But what they did is they destroyed an entire sector and almost brought it to its knees.
- [18:11]
Scott Melker
Carlo Preston, Anyone else? What? I haven't looked and I can't off the Top of my head. Think what sort of pending Wells notices slash enforcement actions have not been dropped. Kraken glaringly is out there still, right? Any others? Or is this kind of like maybe you guys just don't know off the top of your head either? I'm trying to remember if there were others that were sort of big news. There's still Binance, right? To some degree. Or is that completely settled? Do you guys remember Binance is going.
- [18:41]
Jay
Through investigations in Europe but not in the US as far as I know.
- [18:46]
Scott Melker
But the SEC had the Binance investigation. They launched Binance and Coinbase back to back. I know I should know the answer to these questions, but I think finance settled, right? Binance paid the largest, I guess that was in American history. Yeah, I just couldn't remember if that was DOJ sec. Ah, good point. Yeah, good point. I, I think, I think it's all settled from my Binance friends now. I think it's all done. Yeah, says the guy who worked at Binance. So I'm going to trust you on this. Exactly. You're the go to guy for correct information on finance. I'm glad that you were, you were here. So, so I want to kind of just talk a bit more market. Florian, since we have you here, how are you viewing this sort of quote unquote crash down to 78k? Are you viewing this as part of a normal cycle? Are you concerned now that we could be entering a bear market and how does it fit sort of in the context of what's happening with macro?
- [19:43]
Fred
Yeah, thanks for having me. Well, I assume this is still just a correction within the cycle. I don't think the cycle has topped. I think I published a chart early January where I showed people that we had this open gap in the bitcoin future. So finally today it has been more or less closed. I wouldn't be surprised if there is maybe a little bit more downside in the short term. But overall I think that looking at the fear and greed index, panic is everywhere also in the stock market. So I think this is just a pullback and we're going to see higher prices rather soon. And don't forget, seasonality is turning very bullish in mid end of March and then usually we get a massive rally into April, May, June. So I'm actually viewing this very positively here.
- [20:31]
Scott Melker
Yeah, this is the worst month, I believe for Bitcoin since June 22nd. I mean, I guess it'll depend on how the day closes, but at this point I don't think people maybe. Are you Know, depending on how long you've been here. This has been a really, really epically bad run, as I said, basically the worst kind of few days since ftx. And that was already on the tail of, you know, having dropped 15, 20% off the highs. Right.
- [20:58]
Fred
I mean, if you're in for a few years already, you know that this pullback so far is actually mild in bitcoin and it's totally normal. So, yeah, I think it's bullish. I think it's good that this gap in the bitcoin future has been closed today, more or less. Again, maybe a little bit more downside.
- [21:14]
Scott Melker
Yeah, it's about two or three hundred bucks, I think, to fully close it.
- [21:18]
Fred
Exactly. And then we would have the, I think the 61.8percent retracement. This whole rally since the August low would be maybe coming in around 75ish. So a little bit more downside maybe, but I think it's a buying opportunity here. I'm bullish. I think we're going to see much higher prices in the fourth quarter this year, Alex.
- [21:43]
Jay
Yeah. After really being able to talk with a lot of very, very intelligent people way more than I am. And really going back to the macro side of things, this market is very disjointed because I think it involves institutional capital and you know, before it used to be retail. Unfortunately, that retail capital was compromised with all the hacks with the USTs, the FTX Celsius, we lost roughly $100 billion in the past year and a half from, you know, 2022 to 2024. So the past two years, a lot, a lot of money. Plus The DeFi hacks, plus what we just lost last week, $1.5 billion in addition to that. So a lot of the retail capital is limping. It's. These are like basically war survivors.
- [22:23]
Carlo
Right.
- [22:23]
Jay
People who are walking on one leg. And what happened essentially is I think we managed to capital some of the gambling capital from retail coming to meme coins rather than spending money on your casino or maybe on playing poker online. So it's a very disjointed market. You know, if you really think about where we came from, just Jan 2022 all the way to February 2025, it's very, very disjointed. And you know, if you guys want to have a look and I, I believe that there was something that was said earlier by Preston, which is that's not an indicator that is married to crypto. And those are the type of indicators that I've been looking at for the, you know, the past few months to really try to understand where we are in this market, how long will we go, when should we start taking profits? And I believe if you guys have a look at my X account, there are six vital indicators that really can tell us when we'll have a full fledged cycle. And not just institutional capital pumping a few of the coins or, you know, kind of playing around with some of the major large caps such as Sui, or what we saw with Solana or what we saw with Bitcoin, obviously the mother of all coins. And we all know that the number one concept of a bullish cycle, whether it be the stocks or whether it be the crypto cycle, is the concept of risk on markets, because these are considered risk, riskier markets. And all that is funneled through global liquidity. And that global liquidity once again can be break it down into two cohorts, which is retail and institutional. But when you look at that concept of liquidity, which is directly tied into the machine, which is Fedora's Fed, the Fed's interest rates, which is currently at 4.5%, there are truly six indicators that I believe as of today are extremely important. And Ray Dalio commented on this just last week, which is, and in all these indicators and these six indicators, you have to see some of them as green, as doing well, maybe in between a yellowy orange, which is mediocre, or neutral indicators, not good, not bad. And then the red, which are the, the bad indicators, the negative indicators. And you guys all know that there are two really negative indicators, which is we have a strong US dollar that's really bad for crypto. And on top of that, if you make it even worse, is having a strong bond market, huge demand for governmental bonds, which by the way, is Ray Dalio's biggest concern because, you know, if the US gets too much capital into government debt, they won't be able to pay it back. And that's why that's the whole concept behind DOGE is to cut on costs, bring down inflation and make sure that, you know, the US doesn't become insolvent. Right. Of course I'm being overly dramatic. I do think Ray Dalio is overly dramatic, but he's good at sharing, you know, at least, you know, alarming the bells to make sure that we know where we're going. And so those are big red indicators, the kind of mediocre indicators, I would say inflation, as you guys know, consumer price index, you know, right now we're around 3%, which is not great. The GDP is in the 2 to 3% range, which is, which is great, which is decent, but not great. And then on the pro side, it's exactly what you guys were talking about. The two indicators that we want to look at is the regulatory side, the regulatory clarity, having a pro crypto administration like Trump has. These are all the pros. Right. But I really think, Scott and I, I think this is going to be at least until September, right, Because we're going to see the results of the $1 trillion that Doge is trying to cut in terms of the deficit, and hopefully we'll be able to do that. I think he needs to cut $12 billion a day to reach that target.
- [26:08]
Scott Melker
But I'm gonna cut a trillion dollars.
- [26:11]
Jay
He's not going to be able. Right. I mean, he's, he's probably overly zealous on that. Right, yeah.
- [26:17]
Preston Pysh
Sorry. Just, just to briefly interject, what's interesting on that point is that they've just, they proposed that Doge dividend, which I'm assuming, right, is a, is like a demand side intervention where they say, we got to stimmy. It's a stimmy check. Right.
- [26:30]
Scott Melker
Anyway, sorry, pay down the debt with that money instead of sending it to people. But hey, that's my opinion.
- [26:37]
Preston Pysh
Yeah, Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt it.
- [26:40]
Jay
No, not at all, not at all. I mean, that was my last point because, you know, on the, on the green side, I mean, Doge has, I think based on their live Tracker, they've cut $56 million. But as you said, Scott, they're still behind schedule. Right, for cutting the 1 trillion. And obviously by the end of the presidency, they want to cut $2 trillion, which is very, very aggressive. But yeah, so what I'm seeing right now is you have a mix of, you know, positive, negative and neutral indicators out of these six indicators that really matter to the Fed for them to bring down interest rates, increase liquidity into risk on market. So I honestly, I don't want to be negative, Scott, and I've been saying this for the past like four months here on Crypto Town hall, but I don't see all time highs until 2026. I think this is going to be a boring sideways market. That being said, sideways, you know, if it's playing in a range, maybe it's great for trading. As some of the guests said earlier, this is a great support resistance. Quite easy whether you, you choose your trading bots or whether you just want to accumulate on your favorite, you know, token, whether, as you said, Solana Ethereum, Bitcoin. I think it's a great range to accumulate and, and position ourselves for a rally potentially next year, depending on how the US goes.
- [27:46]
Scott Melker
I'm not sure if people saw, but I just tagged above in the nest CME Group to launch Solana futures March 17. This is absolutely huge. These stories get caught in the news cycle now and totally dismissed because crypto is now just a mainstream asset and I think it's part of the headline and part of the system. But for those who don't remember, first of all, CME Group to my knowledge only has Bitcoin and Ethereum futures. And the basis for being able to Approve Bitcoin spot ETFs and Ethereum spot ETFs at the time was that they had these futures available on the cme which gave them, you know. Now I'm blanking on the term, you know, but a. Anyone remember the term A market? My God. Sorry. Anyways, it meant that there was a monitorable market that they could prove was not manipulated which allowed them to approve the Spot etf. So the fact that now we will have Solana futures on the CME probably means that spot Solana ETFs are coming very, very, very soon. I mean, anybody else have a view on this news?
- [28:53]
Jay
I would love to share one thing.
- [28:54]
Scott Melker
So one significant size market of significant size. Go ahead.
- [28:59]
Mike McGlone
Oh really?
- [29:00]
Jay
One counter argument, Scott, is that, you know, the FTX estate sold a lot of the. The soul. I believe it's roughly $1.3 billion in terms of the US dollar nominal value as of today to Pantera, to Galaxy and to one more company. And they bought those sol at a range between $70 to $100 per soul. So right now, as you said, it's roughly around $130. So they're all ROI positive. And one thing, and I love Seoul. Scott, I think out of all the assets you chose, it's the best one to DCA within the next three months. But one thing to understand is that there's going to be selling pressure for sure. There's $1.3 billion of selling pressure potential and, and that's going to be fully vested or the majority is going to be vested until the end of April. So I think Solana, as you said, is a great play to, you know, buy to fix a range where you're going to buy and, and accumulate that in the next three months as the VCs and these firms dump or yeah, literally sell their soul.
- [30:02]
Scott Melker
I have another question for the panel. I want to get the exact quote here. But Saylor had a pretty eye opening quote today. He said, sell a kidney if you must, but keep the bitcoin, which is more valuable? Guys, your kidney or your bitcoin, anyone? You got two kidneys, right? So you can afford to lose one. I guess it's relative. Yeah. If you have only one, it's a different question. Pretty aggressive.
- [30:32]
Preston Pysh
You can get dialysis too. I mean that's also possible.
- [30:35]
Scott Melker
Yeah. I mean I floated the idea of getting a kidney that you can either attach a hardware wallet to or a hardware wallet that functions as a kidney. Could be a solution for this. But I mean we've got some serious, serious conviction still coming from Saylor. Curious if anybody's dug deep now that they just bought this 2 billion sailor, obviously. I think on Monday was announced $2 billion basically more worth of bitcoin. I think the average was 97,000. Maybe that was last week. It's hard to keep up. Does Saylor with MicroStrategy stock down more than 50% off the highs run out of dry powder? Listen, I don't think that's like that matters per se for him. But do we think that he's going to lose the ability to buy as the stock continues to drop? Mike, have you taken a look at that or thought about it?
- [31:26]
Mike McGlone
Oh, yeah, unfortunately too closely. It was the first time in my lifetime, and I've only been in markets for about four decades that I had two fathers of two adult sons last year saying my son is way overweight. MicroStrategy, can you help convince him to sell some of it? Just a shocking thing. So I don't see what stops MicroStrategy from going back to 200 bucks or a hundred dollars. It's just so extremely expensive and there's so much hubris in there. But yeah, sure, you're going to get a great trading environment. But the bottom line for everything here is there's one prerequisite for cryptos or bitcoin to make a new high. Next year. Stock market has to make a new high. And let's remember when bitcoin was born is right at the end of the financial crisis. So I'll be publishing on it Monday. I just sent it to editors. Now we have an island top formation in bitcoin and gold in the bitcoin versus gold ratio. We have an island bottom formation in gold ETF flows. We're gonna have the first inflow year for the first time in five years. And there's been good reason to get out of Gold. I mean, there's been massive stock market rally. There's been, and there's been high US interest rates and digital gold's been taken off. But to me, that trade's over. I mean, I think to me, last year marked the end and I think people are still hanging in. I get it. But I think one thing people need to learn is, yes, the US regulatory environment's improved. What does that mean? Massive more supply. Does it mean. It means the companies involved in this space will probably make profits and earnings. But it's something I've seen in commodities my whole life is it means the underlying commodity will go lower, but the people creating those and mining those commodities make money. So I think it needs to be understood is just because the US government's tilted positive, we got the pump in prices. But that means I think these 12 million altcoins or so still have to lop off zeros off the valuations. They're too expensive. Particularly we get the first normal correction. The stock, when they come on CNBC and say it's a bear market, means they had a normal 20% correct correction. That might be your time to really lay back into these highly speculative digital assets. In the meantime, just trade. I'm sure we're getting a bounce from here, but remember the macro big picture here, you have to depend on the stock market to go up. I think in this space for any type of appreciation in broad crypto assets.
- [33:34]
Scott Melker
Fred?
- [33:35]
H
Oh, thanks. Good morning, everyone. I don't know if you guys already talked about this because I was having technical issues, but, you know, I think what Mike said, which is important to keep in mind, and what everybody else has discussed is I think we just have some negative issues that are overlaid on like this huge positive framework. And what I mean by that is Mike saying, you know, all these companies are going to be able to get in with regulatory clarity and really start doing things well, that's true, but there still is no regulatory clarity just yet. So we've had these dismissals of these cases and, you know, Coinbase is now official, or was official yesterday. They're dismissed, but there's still no actual laws and rules of the road. And Coinbase again, and, you know, talk about Kraken and Binance, these are all exchanges that are just selling the tokens. So we still have the huge elephant in the room, which is the Ripple case, which is still. Nobody knows why that hasn't been addressed yet. And the reason that's important is because this is a giant company that issued a token and Started selling it. And I know a lot of the people in the XRP world are going to be mad at me that I said that because they kind of don't.
- [34:45]
Scott Melker
Say it, they kind of did some.
- [34:47]
H
Fancy like ways the token was created, then it was gifted to Ripple and it's kind of basically legal fiction. But you know, the bottom line is there's a lot of companies that are creating tokens and trying to use them for ill and for good. And you know, there's, it's still a wild west there. And that is a reportable case, the Ripple case that they, you know, mainly won but lost on a couple things in the district court that's up on appeal. So that can't be dismissed like Coinbase crack and everything that, that case law can't be erased.
- [35:17]
Preston Pysh
So it's the problem with that. I actually wrote a blog post about that when Ripple was running around saying oh, we didn't, you know, we didn't create this. It was Ryan Zagone, he was their head of, of regulatory relations. So I wrote a blog post and went through like all of their public documents and their GitHub repo to demonstrate what they did in fact create the token and then had like XRP army people harassing me for straight non stop. So that was the last time I ever spoke about Ripple in public. But we on that it's a district court precedent, right. Which means it's not actually binding, it's only persuasive. So it's up to the Court of Appeal. But if the SEC wants to just say, you know what, we're, we're abandoning this and, and, and we're going to default it, you know, then Ripple wins. I think what they'll probably do is they'll reach a settlement which wasn't possible before under the Gensler regime. And I think then, you know, you've got some early indications from the district courts about where they would have gone under the old regime. But I think we're going to have market structure regulation that'll make that irrelevant.
- [36:17]
Scott Melker
I mean Preston, sorry to Fred and Preston at this point though, with Coinbase dropped, Finance settled, all of these cases being dropped, ripples on appeal, but had already sort of won beyond waiting for market structure clarity legislation. There's not much fear in the unregistered security world at the moment. Right. I mean everybody's feeling pretty empowered. In the United States.
- [36:44]
Preston Pysh
Ripple won and lost. Right. So it was a split decision. So they won on the secondary sales of XRP transactions via exchanges not being unregistered security sales, which was a very, very small proportion of the sales in question under the ruling, they lost on their initial sales, like direct to investor sales. They said that was in fact an unregistered public offering. But, you know, I think the attitude is when the President of the United States was launching and his wife are launching their own meme coins and the SEC is appointing pro crypto people to run the thing, I think the expectation is that we're going to have a disclosure regime which makes crypto possible. Right. Just like other countries do, like the UK does, or that Europe does. Although they're qualitatively different, I think, within what we'll wind up with here in the US So still the new rules aren't in place. So I wouldn't say to someone if they came in and asked me, you know, what, what should I do? Oh, hey, go ahead, go do whatever you want. But I think there's a lot more optimism certainly among coin issuers that, that, you know, the SEC is not going to get on their case except in cases of egregious fraud.
- [37:58]
Scott Melker
Sorry, Fred, I interrupted. Jeff.
- [38:00]
H
Oh, no. I mean, yeah, I think what press and, you know, people especially, and I'm an XRP proponent and people in the community got to remember that, you know, Ripple did get tagged on the way they sold xrp. Now, the reason that's important is because, you know, a lot of companies, you know, kind of made similar sales in a lot of similar ways with their tokens, and that's still something that's out there. And Preston's right, it's a district court case and, you know, there's various ways, but it's still an important thing. And so, you know, Ripple basically has gotten around or, you know, publicly says we don't have to worry about anything we got tagged for in the past because the past is the past and we've changed everything now that it's not going to fall into what we got in trouble for. So you still have the aspect, again, it's different from Coinbase and Kraken, where, you know, these aren't exchanges. You still have this aspect of what can companies do that want to have these tokens and do they strictly use them like securities to raise money and sell, or do they have utility and whatnot? And until this case kind of gets resolved a little bit and then the market structure bills come in, we're still going to be in that question mark area, which, if you go by the way things have gone in, pass bull runs, we get something on the books legislatively, towards the back half of this year, we're still in that same zone where everything falls in line and we still have our blow off top. So I think the important thing just to close out my thought is that we've got a underlying extraordinarily positive situation, but we still got these kind of little negative islands floating around that they can't be undone until some of this legislative stuff happens that just can't be done by Trump in a month or two months or three months, no matter how hard he tries.
- [39:46]
Scott Melker
Exactly what we've been talking about from the beginning, short term headwinds, but major long term tailwinds. So we actually. Awesome. I just saw that Jay joined. Man, I awesome to have you here. We're sitting here talking about regulation, legislation, what's being built in the space. And I invited Jay from the co founder of say Labs to join and amazing that you're here because you think you can give us a lot of context into all of this. You were previously at Robinhood, right. And Robinhood just had their case dismissed by the sec. But you've been through sort of these contentious regulatory environment and the ups and downs of operating in this industry in the United States, right?
- [40:34]
Carlo
Absolutely, yeah. First of all, thanks for having me on. And yeah, it's been absolutely just crazy to see all the things go down with all these SEC lawsuits being dropped. I think overall from someone in the industry, from my point of view, I think it's phenomenal for the space. I don't think the markets are necessarily reacting to it the way that a lot of people thought they would, but I think that's a very short term thing. If you zoom out enough, I think it's extremely, extremely positive for the industry to have, first of all, these unnecessary lawsuits being dropped and then in the future to have clear regulation around what counts as security. And how should these be? How should crypto assets really be regulated? So I think we're definitely moving in the right direction right now.
- [41:15]
Scott Melker
Yeah. So what was your role at Robinhood, by the way?
- [41:19]
Carlo
Oh, so I joined as a new grad over there and I joined pretty early. Like when I interviewed, it was actually two houses across the street from each other. They literally had like engineers working from bedrooms over there. Like they had their standing desk kind of set up over there. So I got in pretty early and I eventually became an engineering lead. I was there when the entire GameStop saga happened and that kind of led to the inspiration for starting SA Labs.
- [41:41]
Scott Melker
Okay, well then let's talk about that what's it like building? Well, now we have a different environment, but you're US based, right? So building a layer one blockchain and trying to build in this environment that we've been talking about so much.
- [41:55]
Carlo
Yeah, yeah. I mean, when we got started with it, we really just wanted to fix a lot of the things that we saw as being wrong with the current financial system. For example, the way that the entire GameStop saga happened. This concept of T Plus 2 settlement, it's so archaic where it takes two days for any of these traits to really settle. And as a result of that, brokers just like Robinhood, they need to be putting up collateral, which when the GameStop stock was happening, they literally needed to put up billions of dollars of collateral, which at the time they didn't have. And it's just such an archaic system overall. So I think that the entire financial industry is ripe for evolution. I don't think it's going to be completely disrupted and just changed in one day, but I think that there's a ton of room for improvement in how a lot of these things can work. So, yeah, I mean, when we got started, we want to start building a different, basically a decentralized Robinhood. And that led to the inspiration for say, which is a layer one blockchain. We're building a parallelized evm.
- [42:51]
Scott Melker
Okay, so dig more into that because it's so fascinating. Right. We have plenty of layer ones. Obviously we've seen this major evolution from Bitcoin to Ethereum to them attempting the layer two strategies to the Solanas and Suis and saes and Aptos and sort of this new generation. So what differentiates one of these blockchains from another, say, specifically? Is it built for specific purpose or is it just built to be as fast and cheap as possible so you can build anything on it? I mean, what's the thinking there when you started sort of from the decentralized Robinhood model?
- [43:27]
Carlo
Yeah, yeah. So one of the points that you made, I think is really worth drilling into, which is we're currently in the third generation of blockchains. The first generation, I would argue was Bitcoin, where it really just brought this kind of proof of concept to the space. I think the second step in that journey was this idea of programmable smart contracts, which Ethereum really brought to the wides, kind of to the mainstream. And I think the third generation of this is chains like Solana, Sui, Aptos and SEI as well, which is really high performance chains that are allowing actual Web two types of applications to get ideally built on chain. So the core thesis that we got started with is that the Ethereum virtual machine, which is what Ethereum initially built, is here to stay. So the Ethereum virtual machine is what's used to process transactions. And without getting too deep in the around, that basically all developers are still using it in crypto right now. So getting someone to switch over from the EVM to another vm, for example, Move VM that we and aptos use, that's exceptionally difficult to do. So that's why we believe that all developers are basically still using the evm. And then the question becomes, how do you improve the evm? And that was the inspiration for building the paralyzed evm, because we see low performance as being one of the biggest bottlenecks of really getting more widespread adoption. Because if you don't really support too many transactions, you can process per second, first of all, it leads to really high gas fees. And secondly, and kind of unintuitively to most users, it actually, it hurts developers a lot because developers need to start building really clunky applications that fit within these constraints of, for example, 50 transactions per second that you would see with a chain like Ethereum L1. So when we basically put that out, this was around November of 2023, we put out the blog post, we're saying, okay, we're doubling down on this paralyzed EVM kind of thesis. The community was extremely excited. And since then we went live with it last July, and we've just seen a ton of developers coming to the ecosystem and a ton of growth happening all around.
- [45:36]
Scott Melker
Sorry, I got kicked for a second. Can you hear me?
- [45:39]
Carlo
Yeah, I can hear you.
- [45:40]
Scott Melker
Okay, good. Because it kicked me off and then put me as a speaker instead of as a co host. So just making sure that we're not living in the glitch here. So that's really, really, really interesting. So that said, is the focus still then on effectively building a decentralized Robin Hood, or is it now to, you know, be the most utilized and, you know, highly adopted blockchain that there is? And then I guess after that, I want to kind of talk about this new environment and kind of where we have more regulatory clarity or at least less fear, and if that allows you to sort of build more, yeah, absolutely.
- [46:18]
Carlo
So with regards to the first question, our mission is to scale the EVM. Everyone uses the EVM. And the only way that you can really support Web2 being built on crypto Rails, is by getting the kind of performance that you see with web2 so for example, right now if you look at Nasdaq, Nasdaq needs 20,000 transactions per second that it supports. There are zero blockchains on Mainnet right now that allow a NASDAQ to get built. Similarly, if you look at visa, also needs 20,000 transactions per second, impossible to build on chain. If you look at Google, that needs a hundred thousand transactions per second. And once again, completely impossible to build on chain right now. So we think that one of the reasons that there's been less adoption in crypto than people would have liked is because the tech just isn't there yet. You really need to be able to support things like Google getting built on chain before you can actually have all these kind of novel applications that people want to be building on crypto Rails. So that's why we're really doubling down. That's our entire Sega roadmap. So essentially last year we went live with say the paralyzed evm and then we basically talked to developers, tried to understand what their pain points were. We realized that there's still these restrictions that are there right now. And that's why we decided to just completely rebuild everything from scratch to be able to change consensus execution storage, to be able to get to that 5 GHz number which will allow applications like Google to finally get built on chain.
- [47:49]
Jay
I'd love to add something to that, Scott, if that's please. Because Swissborg, we're a meta exchange, right? And our dream is to essentially create the Nasdaq, the on chain of Nasdaq, like literally connecting the banks directly to on chain Dexes. Right. And I just want to comment on one thing that Jay said. And transactions per second is very important. But what's even more important for a traditional institution that has high frequency trading is the concept of time to finality. And time to finality, for those who haven't heard, that is essentially clearance and settlement with what we would say in traditional finance, right? And the problem with Ethereum and Jay hit the nail on the head is that right now you cannot have a transaction that will finalize or that will clear in 15 minutes after the request has come in. And that's why us, for example, at Swissborg, we wanted to be able to say fuck you to all these centralized exchanges with our private order books, have all that liquidity aggregated on chain where it should be. And that's the way the NASDAQ have built theirs, with brokers, with a union of brokers essentially finding a way for the liquidity to be connected via everyone, right? And so the issue here is the finality, Right. You cannot have 15 minutes in terms of finality. And that's why we had to go with Solana and integrate other chains in order to start, you know, pushing this narrative of, you know, going against the centralized exchanges and bringing all the liquidity on chain.
- [49:11]
Scott Melker
Jay, what I find funny about that though is it was celebrated so widely this year when we went from T plus 2 to T plus 1 in legacy markets. And with blockchains, we're talking about how many seconds we can settle in.
- [49:21]
Carlo
Exactly. And if you kind of, I think trading is absolutely one use case where finality matters, I think it matters in everything else as well. So for example, if you look at AI agents, if you want to have agents that are communicating with each other, it's not going to really work well if you need to have these agents that are sending hundreds of transactions to each other and it takes 15 minutes for each of these transactions to settle. Instead, what you want is ideally for it to be hundreds of milliseconds for each of these transactions to go through and then they're able to send funds between each other to accomplish whatever you want. So I think there's a lot of use cases that are coming up where finality is one of the most important things. And that's why, that's why chains like say where it's hyper focused on decreasing finality and increasing throughput, they just completely change the developer experience and the user experience there.
- [50:06]
Scott Melker
Really interesting. So wait, you mentioned Giga, Correct? That's the roadmap. So I looked it up. So Giga roadmap that will bring 50x improvement to blockchain performance. I mean, we talk about obviously speed time to finality transaction costs, but how much of this is just about simplicity and the fact that you stay online and accommodate everything. Right? I mean, Solana obviously has had its criticism for, you know, going offline for long periods. They largely solved that. But there was even a period with sort of the Trump launch where at least you couldn't utilize the Solana network. I mean, how, to be fair, like cloudflare, Cloudflare goes down and we see issues in Web two like that all the time. But I mean, you know, what, what is the real main singular priority?
- [50:58]
Carlo
I guess the single priority is to remove the restrictions on the developer design space that exists right now. The reason that you don't see something like Google, for example, getting built on Solana is because it's literally impossible. Solana supports around 2 to 5,000 transactions on Mainnet. If you exclude their voting transactions. And if you're only allowed to have 5000 transactions per second and Google needs 100k tps, you literally cannot build that on chain right now. So we think the biggest unlock in these, the blockchain that is going to really win out of these next gen blockchains, is going to be the one that is actually able to support this type of performance. And none of the existing players have really been able to get that kind of performance, which is why you don't really see these really complex applications getting built. It's just the stuff that continues to get built on chain is like different flavors of AMMs, different flavors of the same type of applications. And in order to really get novel stuff getting built, you need to remove those shackles on performance that artificially exist right now.
- [52:00]
Scott Melker
That's really interesting and how, I mean, I think for a long time it was exactly what you described has been the major barrier. So clearly blockchains are being built. Solve for that. How much on the other side then is still complex UX UI a problem? Right? Because I would still argue that if you have incredible performance and you can build these things, they still need to be as simple to use as web2 to get real mainstream adoption. And it's still pretty difficult for grandma to sign up for a wallet, keep her private keys, bridge her assets, et cetera.
- [52:33]
Carlo
Yeah, I 100% agree with that. I think both of them need to happen in parallel. And thankfully we have a really strong engineering team, so we're able to execute on both of them in terms of both improving the actual performance of the chain and then also improving the user experience. But I think the state that we'll eventually get to is the entire crypto. The crypto rails are going to be totally abstracted away from users. And if a normal person wants to be using blockchains, they might not even understand what's really happening underneath the hood. That's kind of the state that we're in with the Internet. People don't understand how HTTP requests work, they don't understand how TCP IP works, and frankly it doesn't matter because they've built like people have built really strong abstraction layers on top of the Internet so that normal people are able to interact with it. And I think we eventually will need to get to that end state with crypto as well.
- [53:21]
Scott Melker
What do you think a timeframe for something like that is where it's just as familiar as using any other Web2 application.
- [53:30]
Carlo
It's actually really interesting because two years ago, things like Privy weren't universally. I don't even know if Privy existed back then to be able to just completely abstract away the wallet experience and just have people sign in with Google or something. I think that might actually happen sooner than we expect in terms of technology that allows the crypto rails to be abstracted away. So maybe a bold guess, but I think in the next one to two years the user experience will be completely different. One thing that I will note is you really need it to be happening on a single chain. That's why chains like say, Solana make a lot more sense, in my opinion, than having this interoperable rollup centric vision that the Ethereum ecosystem has been pushing for. Because when you have like a hundred separate rollups that all need to interact with each other, the user experience just becomes exceptionally complex. And I think it's difficult to get that abstraction layer built on top if you have like 100 different chains that need to communicate with each other. So I think in terms of the single chain experience, in the next one to two years it's going to be very, very easy to enter, like to interact with these chains. And I think that's why all these ecosystems need to have that dual kind of pronged approach for actually building the tech. One prong of it is improving the performance for the chain and the second part is improving the user experience.
- [54:42]
Scott Melker
I'm sure I've already taken up too much of your time. I'm sorry, since I have you here, we talk about interoperability. Obviously you described the situation within the Ethereum ecosystem itself, but what happens when like for example, you know, we have a, arguably a AAA game that's finally been built in crypto in off the grid, which is running on Avax, Right. What if something is built on, say, and somebody wants to bridge the assets from one game to another or something like that? Aren't we still going Unless we believe that one blockchain is going to literally consume everything and be one chain to rule them all, don't we still need interoperability between those layer ones that are finding adoption in different sort of buckets?
- [55:27]
Carlo
So the long term that I envision is there's actually going to be a very small number of chains where basically all of the activity happens on. So in the case of save in the future, I imagine there will be hundreds of different games that are all getting built on the same layer and the chain will be performant enough where you're able to have all these games that are both able to submit transactions and then we'll also need to be supporting different flavors of localized fee markets to make sure that there's not going to be congestion where one game that's taking up a ton of block space is impacting other games. So I think these are all solvable engineering problems and it will be possible to build a ton of different games, dexes whatever you want on one single chain. And the nice thing about that is then the interactions between these, the composability is extremely simple. If you want to be having interoperability between different L1s, it adds in latency for every single transaction that happens. And that's not, that's not going to lead to a really, really seamless user experience. So that's why overall I think the user experience in an interoperable world can only be as good as the user experience you get in a single chain world. And more likely than not, it's going to be substantially worse. And that's why over the past several years you've had so many projects trying to improve the user experience around interoperability and it hasn't really, they haven't made that much progress overall. And that's why I'm overall pretty bearish on that in the next one to two years as well.
- [56:46]
Scott Melker
So we're kind of at the end of the show here. Any final thoughts from you on anything I might have missed there?
- [56:53]
Carlo
No, I'll just close things off by saying that right now is a really good time to be someone building in crypto. I think the United States is going to become the hub for crypto and honestly for a lot of technology moving forward. I think that there's been a lot of fairly positive regulation on that front and there seems to be discussions around even more stuff in the future. So overall I'm extremely excited for the next several years.
- [57:13]
Scott Melker
Well, I'm so glad that you were able to join today because we obviously get wrapped up in these market focused conversations and what's happening in the macro and prices and it's important, especially at the end to wrap like that to remember what's being built and how much better the environment is. Now, as you just stated, to be doing that building, especially in the United States, which I think we all believe could or should lead in entrepreneurship and tech and we now have this environment where that can actually happen. So really psyched for you that you have been able to sort of build through this and now you have this golden era. I think now I'm looking forward to seeing our industry basically prove its worth now that the governor is sort of off.
- [57:59]
Carlo
Absolutely, man. Yeah, I think it's going to be a great time and thank you so much for having me on.
- [58:04]
Scott Melker
Yeah, I'd love to continue having you on, keep up with what's being built and say and just use you as a resource for kind of generally what's being built across the ecosystem for everyone else. Yeah, it's 11:15. Where does the time go? Haven't even checked. Been too interested in this conversation to check the prices, but it looks like we have got a decent balance. 83,500 for. For Bitcoin. Hopefully we'll be talking about the bottoms being in next week and we won't be talking about Kanye west dropping meme coin. That's my biggest fear for next week is that we get swastikoin and go to zero. Anyways, guys, it's been a great, great show as usual, a great week on the show. We'll see you on Monday, 10:15am for Crypto Town Hall. Have a great, great weekend, everybody. Bye.