A (4:37)

Well you and I can unpack a lot of that this on Monday. First of all silver it's going lower 100. No 100 was, was, was the, the pop. The, the range for silver to watch and I think even, you know, I can't even imagine that anyone would disagree with this is the 70 to 80 range and we're still over 80. Actually there's a bear story on silver out pretty big one people haven't figured. People don't, don't you know know connect the dots which is that BYD's new battery, the new blade battery which may not be quite as, as impressive as the Samsung battery but is pretty damn close, doesn't use a lot of silver and so that definitely decreases the likelihood of solid state batteries being a massive driver. But you know, whatever, you know you could get into the minutiae on a lot of this stuff. The, the, the if you believe however that this is going to, that this war will tip us over into a recession caused by like lack of oil. Remember the US doesn't. The most interesting thing in the oil patch today by the way, I think Mike, which I was hoping you would get to is not just that the price is up but that the spread between West Texas and Brent has collapsed. I mean it was like between seven and eight dollars a couple days ago and it's like less than $3 now. So it's across the board. Meaning that US inputs are going up too. So they. There is that. But if you believe there is a recession then and the government can't afford a recession, you know, you're right. That's very important to understand.

C (6:11)

I'm glad you brought that out Dave because yeah, 88 and WTI and 91 in Brent is a bit of a shocker. That just shows there's pretty significant cleansing of shorts and wti. But my key point is to make it clear is the next recession is going to come from one key factor. Reversed wealth effect. Now we're seeing that in cryptos. The stock market's the key guidance for that. To me this is A matter of time that kicks in. That's why I keep pointing out is I just, you know, stock market value is too low to consider buying risk assets. But that's the key thing. We're covering those shorts. But again, straight of hormones is closed. This has never happened. Crude oil should be up, but again, one thing. Natural gas was up twice as much at the beginning. And where is it now? Because that's the key thing. The bottom line is the whole world has shifted from 1979 when you and I remember when we had the Iranian revolution when US was the largest net importer. The US is running net exports running 4 million barrels a day. That in context in 2008 when crude oil peaked at 145, we were importing 12 million barrels a day. So this is win, win, win for US producers. And what are they doing? They're selling forward. We saw what happened in natural gas. They're going to bring on more supply. This is really bad for the rest of the world. And remember, most of that oil from the Strait of Moose goes to China. Remember how this all got started? This all got started between Russia's invasion of Ukraine that pumped up prices, they're still heading lower. And what's happened since then, we've had the unlimited friendship. You can see things just ticking down. Russia and and China have lost as allies. They've lost Syria, they've lost Venezuela. Iran's down. Trump just said Cuba is next. You see the trend there. This is all bad. This is all that geopolitical bid for gold I think is over. And I just simplistically look at it. Yes, I was early last year calling for a peak in cryptos, but that peak in cryptos last year I think is going to trickle down to a peak in metals this year. And so far, what's been the worst performer so far this has happened. The Bloomberg all metals index is down 4% on the month. That wasn't supposed to happen. But to me that's what's going to continue to happen. The bottom line is when things like this happen, stuff that's really expensive, reverts and stuff that's really cheap reverse. And that's why one of the best performing assets was MicroStrategy. It's just, you know, it was way oversold.

B (8:22)

Dave, you're Mike Working. I'm not sure if mine is. I think we can go to the panel. Anybody's opinions here on obviously the price action. We were very excited when bitcoin was at 74 on Wednesday or Thursday. But now you know, 24 hours later, back down at 7. 68. Mike, we talked about this yesterday. Literally you said 74 obviously was a level to fade, and we showed it on a chart.

A (8:42)

Right, Yeah. I mean, is it the chart, Scott, or is it the fact that, look what's happened since then. I mean, since the war started. Bitcoin's up 10%. Right. You know, let's just. Let's just go right there now. What has been the performance since the war started of the S and P down? What?

B (9:03)

I don't have the number, Mike.

C (9:05)

It's about 2%.

A (9:06)

Right, right. So stocks are. So when you make the statement X is starting to roll over from the war, I think that that describes risk assets on the stock side. When you say that about bitcoin, maybe not. The data doesn't show that. So we got to be careful about our time frames. But yes, I mean, I agreed with Mike, by the way, on 74. You heard me say it. I thought it would be the time. I actually thought it was a short, you know, in terms of trading. I still think, yeah, Fair trader.

B (9:34)

That that's the most gratuitous short on the chart because obviously your risk is well managed. You go to 75, you cut it, you lose a little, and you move on.

A (9:41)

Right, exactly. So, you know, look, my. My base case has been. And isn't changing that I thought we would chop around and grind higher, grinding higher kind of doesn't happen when the entire world is. Is worried about going up in flames and everyone's panicking. So, you know, whatever. But panic looks like. This is what panic looks like. And bitcoin's performing extremely well considering panic. That. That's really the. The point that, That I would make here, and I'm talking a lot.

B (10:08)

Nine is pretty crazy when you consider what's happening with.

A (10:13)

Yeah, I mean, well, but it makes. But it's not crazy. It makes sense. I mean, the people in the crypto sphere have sold, and the idiosyncratic value proposition of bitcoin is still ridiculously good relative to what people believe is the product is going on. But look, there's carnage going out there in financial markets that hasn't actually happened yet. I see Robert has joined the stage. Robert, from your perspective, forget the moralisms and let's not talk about whether we should be or any of that stuff. But from a pure pragmatic point of view, from a capital flow point of view, there are some pretty major things happening right now, right?

D (10:53)

Yeah. So higher energy inputs are going to pressure rates it's also going to pressure the current account of creditor nations that have been a big buyer of U.S. treasuries, you know, Japan, South Korea, Europe. Yeah, they're, I mean, I could talk for 20 minutes on this, but.

A (11:13)

No, I know you could. I, I know you could, which is why I tried to restrict some of what you would say, but, but, but pull on that thread for a bit because that, that doesn't that matter quite a bit? I mean, you know, if you start talking about like, you know, people have talked about the TLT trade. I mean you, you know, and I'm not making fun of you because the war is obviously different, but you and Mike McGlone both have, have talked about, you know, how rates, you know, rates were at 4.2, give or take between you know, 4.15 to 4.2 and you know, it collapsed below 4. And guess what, we're right back to where we were before all of that. And I think what you just, and that matters because that's the people don't understand. Robert talks about this all the time, but people don't understand that when the long bond rate goes up, that's the risk free rate that people believe, or they call it risk free anyway that people compare other investments to. And so that definitely depresses what's going on. So when you see an economic incident where bonds which are considered the safe haven goes down at the same time as stocks, that is indicative of significantly more financial distress. And that is actually what we're seeing, right?

D (12:24)

Yeah, to some degree. I, I mean, you know, I would also say that it's kind of like the first order effect, you know, the short, short term read. Yeah, you get, you know, $90 crude, you're gonna have higher rates. But like I personally see, you know, all what, what is going on in the energy market as extremely bullish for tlt. I know that sounds crazy, but if you can look through the kind of short term sell off it's going to cause due to higher inflation concerns, then I think, you know, look at, look at what oil did going into 08. You know, look at what oil did really going into the vast majority of the past 10 different recessions we've had, including 2022, which by the way was we had two consecutive quarters negative GDP and bear market in the equity market, you know, oil, I think that the American consumer is already so stretched that 80, 90, $100 crude is just going to result in demand destruction. So you know, we got an already very weak NFP second Worst going back to the pandemic. And so, yeah, I think I still, you know, I'm adding to my TLT calls here. I still think that, you know, this is kind of the short term reaction. Yeah. You know, like, is there a concern that the safe haven, the sovereign debt is not getting bid during a geopolitical conflict like this? Yeah, but you know, it's due to what's going on with oil, natural gas, heating oil, you know, the whole bit. I think if you can look through that though, I think it's actually very bullish for bonds.

B (14:09)

Have you guys ever seen the movie Stepbrothers Brennan and Dale? And they have that moment where they go, did we just become best friends? I think you and Mike just became best friends.

C (14:19)

But Robert, just point out of the fact of one of my, you know, just when you look back at a trade that worked, you try to, you know, remember the ones that didn't and not to do that. But 2008, I just remember July, I was so, so bearish and everything and it wasn't working well. But when I saw that national average price go to 4 bucks in gal in gasoline, I'm like, that was it. And it's like, Robert, I just download up, you know, loaded up on gold and T bonds and it worked great. Well, the gold was trade last year. That's the difference. Gold's already too expensive. To me, the only big trade left is T bonds and if I'm wrong on that, that would be okay because you're still clipping coupons, you're getting almost 5%. Well, 480 in that long bond. So to me, this is a duration trademark and this is the moment. Just look at this. Back from the future. What's this going to look like by the time we get the midterms? You just think about Trump's legacy. If we're anywhere near where we are in the screens right now, with Carell 50% in the year and the war going bad, he is toast for history. I don't think that's going to happen.

B (15:18)

I'm having a lot of technical issues here. I'm sorry. Yeah. Dave, any specific stories beyond obviously the macro that are on your radar? There's quite a few, but I think mostly people want to just talk about what's going on with the market.

A (15:36)

Well, I mean, look, I wrote an article actually. Arguably it may be the highest reach article I've ever written. By the time it's all done on how absolutely absurd the banking lobby's arguments are in terms of this Whole debate. I mean, I mentioned this morning on the finance show, Scott, that if you put on my, my 2026 bingo card that I would be violently in agreement, almost word for word with Eric Trump. I would have been very surprised. But yet here we are. It is exactly the case. I mean, the core of the article, obviously there's a lot in here in terms of data, but the data effectively says that the banking lobby is lying. I mean, you can manipulate statistics however you want, but when you have the big banks telling people that, oh, well, we're going to lose deposits and it's going to hurt community banks and they drum up the interest, the image of George Bailey from It's a Wonderful Life saving the community. That sounds great, except for here are the numbers. The community banks pay dramatically lower interest rates than the money center banks, yet they make substantially higher margins on the loans that they do originate. Now, both of those numbers take the banking argument and flushes it down the toilet, but it doesn't stop them from anything. And all of that is, of course, irrelevant to the fact that they also say, as Austin Campbell would put out, and he joins us every once in a while, that they are completely mischaracterizing how the banking system works. And a lot of the politicians are too damn stupid to understand it. So they make statements like the stablecoins could have runs on the bank. You know, they could, they could fail, but they're fully reserved, right? So the reason a bank run happens is because you have a million dollars of depositors, you know, money in the bank, but the bank is only holding on to 50,000. And so when $52,000 are withdrawn, the bank goes.

B (17:31)

Magic, Dave.

A (17:32)

It's magic.

B (17:33)

I was just writing through stablecoin.

A (17:34)

If it's a million, they hold a million. So it's like, it's, it's, it's beyond belief. But, but it matters. I mean, the thing that really is this is where the tip of the spear on this, on, on this act is. And it matters. And, and like, you know, Simon, you know, asked me this morning, Simon Dixon, you know, why does it matter? Well, it matters because if you want to unleash the entire financial system to embed Bitcoin and be able to use and, and crypto inside the system, they need compliance departments. Just, they don't operate the way you think they do, they don't take risks. And when there's a chance that the rules could change, they won't make investments. And so the fact that Morgan Stanley has done what they've done recently is actually staggeringly bullish. People don't understand how bullish it is. But getting a law matters and we'll see whether it happens. I know you and I keep talking about it. I think that it is the size of the catalyst, given the fact that people don't think it happens, a big deal.

B (18:36)

Yeah. Dan probably has a whole lot of insight on the likelihood of law.

A (18:39)

Go for it, Dan.

E (18:40)

Yeah. No, great to see everybody again. I'm just getting back from paternity leave. I've been off basically the last two months. So I'm getting back here, getting caught up. Great to see everybody. Thanks for having me. Scott. Dave. Mike, good to see you again. Yeah, it's been a wild week here in Washington. I think the President's truth social post really was pretty damning, I think for the banking industry. Essentially backing us, our industry over the banks and his son, of course. Dave, as he pointed out, tweet was pretty telling and I actually completely agree with you on that. We've had no less, actually three so summer mercenary, former CTC commissioner, CEO, has been in those three meetings at the White House over the last two months. Crypto on one side and the banking lobby on the other. And it's. I think there's been more than enough concessions on our industry. I mean, candidly, honestly, genius itself was a concession last summer before it was signed. I mean, it's rewards. That was the concession. Banks were asleep at the wheel. They were in the room. But I don't think they expected it to happen. And so that's why they're stalling clarity to reopen what they call this loophole. But it is a problem because. Well, good news for Kraken this week. I mean, that was a massive milestone for our industry, their banking, the banking news out of Kraken. But as soon as that dropped, of course, the banking industry, the American Bankers association settled this rules in progress. This is a classic line, protectionism from the banking lobby cartel. Essentially, they're implying impropriety where none exists. As many of you may already know, the Kansas City Fed, any reserve bank really can approve master accounts today. This pending skinny framework referring to future guidance. And Kraken has an SBDI. I mean, this requires 100% reserves, zero lending, strong strict oversight already. So in a way, this is materially lower risk anyway than a fractional reserve bank. And then the other one, the icba, that's a trade association for the community bankers, they came out with their deeply concerning press release about the situation and they're pulling the same argument, unlike traditional banks. I'm not too concerned. I actually think this is a big domino effect. I'm really excited to see Kraken get this. I think there's going to be definitely more in the hopper. There almost certainly will be. But it goes back to the whole conversation around clarity. It really is a major, major milestone for our space. And I do think it will pass. I think it's going to pass. My hope is now, before Memorial Day, we're hearing a few different sources back and forth from Patrick Witt's office that this has now become a top priority for the president domestically. Now, in terms of the other topics, I just want. And we can stay on this topic, too, but there's a few other, like, ancillary topics that I think are on our mind that are affecting the industry. This private credit conversation that's really dominated the news this week, you know, these big lenders, it's rattling Wall Street. Private credit loan spreads are tight. This jobs report that came out today, I mean, it was terrible. 92,000 jobs plus were lost in February. That's. And it's way under what the estimates were. It's in the negative. And that was before the whole Iranian attack. So we'll see if this, you know, leads maybe puts back into play the Federal Reserve rate cuts in the first half, 2026, I don't know. And then this AI layoff, boom. You know what's happened with Jack Dorsey and Block? I was in a meeting roundtable two days ago at the Milken Institute, and somebody from Block was there. I'm not going to name who it was, but they were spared. They were not included in that layoff. 50% of whatever it was of their workforce. But they said that this is a canary in the coal mine. And from what I was told, Dorsey is the remaining employees there are now, every week they're going to be taking AI, like an hour a week dedicated to focusing specifically on artificial intelligence for the workplace. So I think this is another big outlier. Not an outlier, but a big problem, I think, for our greater industry and the economy as a whole. So the Iranian situation, the private credit troubles, and then these layoffs that are incentivizing companies, that's where I'm at.

B (23:10)

Sorry, I'm. My mic just will not work.

A (23:12)

Sorry.

B (23:13)

Scott, I want to ask for you

A (23:14)

to take the lead and.

B (23:15)

Yeah, no, it's not your. I'm trying. And I have specific questions for Dan based on that. So, Dan, I mean, I'm more pessimistic on clarity but you're closer to it. So I like the optimism. If we're still stuck on stablecoin yield and can't even get past that, it's like the other bigger issues that actually will be points of larger contention politically have not even been addressed. Right. So it's kind of like we have the banks versus crypto, but then we also have the Democrats versus the Republicans and we haven't even gotten to defi or ethics or any of those things.

E (23:47)

That's what's holding it up. Yeah, well, the defi. Ethics. So out of. All right now, one of the big problems is Senator Tillis out of North Carolina. You know, he's on the way out. So he's able to do a lot more. He's able to go a lot more rogue, I think, than obviously, if he was facing the voters again. We saw a similar thing with Mitt Romney in the past. I do think he's going to come around and sign on to it, but we can't afford to lose him because even if we lose all the Democrats in terms of the Senate banking and this overall Senate vote, and once that, let's just say hypothetically, does pass the Senate, it's going to go back to the House again. People forget that. And the House is a lot more radioactive now than it was six, seven months ago. And so I'm a little concerned about the fact that it has to go back to the House again because of everything that we've seen. Just generally with World Liberty and with some of these other projects that are tied closely to the president's family, they're going to use that as leverage. But I think the president's tweets, the truth social post was again, that was a big deal for us. Big milestone means that he's drawn a line in the sands. And I'll give credit to Armstrong and the others that actually went and met with him.

B (24:52)

You know that guy, man, I'm just kidding. It's not like Trump was always pro crypto. So I don't think this is a surprise. And his family has literally been like railing against the banks here for months. Right. The debanking stories. And so I don't think it's a surprise, but Brian Armstrong went into the White House and Trump and when he left, Trump seemingly had a renewed vigor.

A (25:12)

Yeah, yeah.

E (25:12)

I don't think the president knew like the. And Patrick Witts have used to been barking up the chain as long as he can. But it takes. It took somebody of Armstrong's magnitude to, you know, show him to show up. And I think that really absolutely made the difference. And I think that'll be a good swift kick to the behind for some of these other senators in the Republican caucus. And I think we can bake in the ethics discussions. Right. That's certainly what Booker and the Democrats want and I don't blame them, especially with all the news that we've been seeing. But if we can figure a way to keep, to bake that in, get it back to the House and get it signed, then we don't have to worry about a post Atkins sec. I mean, right now we're in good shape, but this is a very, very long term play that we need to make happen. And that window of opportunity is very, very much tightening. I mean, that's why McHenry, he's the one that predicted Memorial Day. That's the Custer's last stand. That's it. Because after that, then it's summertime, then it's campaign season. I think the other saving grace that we have is our industry's got a lot more political muscle than even we did even two years ago. I mean, the political action committees are stronger than ever. Bipartisan too, by the way. So I think that will have a big benefit. And that's in the back of the heads of a lot of these other elected officials that are running for reelection this year. They do not want to be on the wrong side of history.

B (26:30)

I mean, Dave, you had that wildly viral tweet yesterday, kind of the other side of this. I've been joking. It's kind of interesting that Brian Armstrong has so much power being that he's not a senator, he's not voting on this. Right. And you made the point yesterday that there's articles saying that the banks have rejected the White House stablecoin rewards deal and how does the banking industry effectively have the ability to veto the legislation? I find it so interesting that both sides have so much power that we literally just write about it as if they're the ones who are deciding what happens.

A (27:00)

Well, it is, it is insane. Well, but the dynamic is different, right? You know, the crypto industry is asking to be regulated and people have to. And of course, if this gets conveniently ignored, the, the casualty of the stablecoin debate, which is, it's not really a debate. The casualty of the stablecoin propaganda campaign is allowing more FTXs and pushing innovation offshore. It is almost the reason that Clarity passed the House with such a striking majority is because at that point there was none of these other exogenous political things to talk about. And it's because it is so absolutely illogical to allow an industry to allow FTXs and Celsiuses to get away with the kind of that they do because we don't have a regulatory umbrella. It is, it is ridiculous to me that people can't make the argument to senators that aren't like Mitch McConnell who are drooling into their, you know, whatever and can't speak, but you know, to anyone with it, with even a fun with functioning brain cells that October 10th, there's a very real chance it was from manipulation as the start and that having a strong regulatory framework in the United States would allow the CFTC and SEC to at least have market oversight to be able to make those sorts of things more dangerous and less likely. You know, I've written about that extensively. I mean, these arguments really wouldn't go very far. I mean, it would get passed. So it really is only about the crypto industry is saying that the banking industry is saying, you guys have paid me, you've paid us $580 billion since the global financial crisis in special stuff because that we can get interest at the Fed. The banking industry understands that they're making over $100 million a year in net interest margin. That would be under threat from competition and it would put money in the hands of savers and money in the hands of the economy. They don't want to position it that way. So, you know, they, they say that it's going to be, you know, it's going to hurt community banks. Of course, the data says that it won't hurt community banks nearly as much as the money center banks. But that's, and that's the article I wrote today. But the fact is the banks are huge donors. They have made all this money. I mean, just think of the scale of the money I just said, literally just the decision from 2008 to pay extra interest when they deposit at the Fed, which is risk capital, right, is $580 billion. That makes for a lot of money available to donate to politicians campaigns and hire politicians, kids, et cetera, et cetera. And so that's where the power is coming from. And it arguably is one of the most disgusting and most obvious use of financial power in politics that I've ever seen. That I think, is why it's hitting a nerve.

F (29:58)

Dave, did you get a new handle, by the way?

A (30:00)

Yes.

F (30:01)

Did you get banned? Did you get banned by Twitter? I've been gone.

A (30:03)

Oh, no, no, Joe. What happened was Dave at Dave Weisberger

G (30:07)

was was this space was downloaded via

A (30:09)

spacesdown.com visit to download your spaces today. Packed and stolen.

F (30:14)

Oh no.

A (30:15)

It immediately. It was on February 1. It was reported immediately.

B (30:19)

I.

A (30:19)

It won't go. It was a. It was a spoofed email that looked exactly like. It was X claiming something about a. A copyright violation. They hacked it, told them about it right away. They closed it down almost immediately because several people reported them using the. The chat feature to, you know, do the same sort of spoofing. And for the last month, plus they've told me they can't verify that I am the same person, which is funny because, you know, everyone who's a creator here knows you submit your ID and so they have my ID in both accounts and they can't compare the two and say, oh, it must be you. It's. It's pathetic. And, and actually it matters Just, just for those who are listening at home, if you believe that X will ultimately be a great platform because it's going to have financial, you know, you know, the X Pay and other stuff in it be an everything app. No, it has zero chance until they fix this problem because you can't let me access and, and take a month to get it. And I'm not the only.

E (31:16)

We get. We should talk offline xd. I can help with that too. We got. We actually are in the same building. There's a lot of the folks from X and SpaceX, their team. And I'm really sorry to hear that happen because I was, I was following you and I hadn't seen you in a while, so I just, I just followed your new handle. That's good. Good to know.

A (31:31)

Thanks, Dan. Yeah.

B (31:31)

Everyone follow Dave's new handle. Everyone. Right, Pause. Deep breath. Follow Dave.

F (31:37)

So, but yeah, I'll text Elon for you too. Dan can do that.

A (31:40)

Thanks. Yeah, Dan, the big thing is, is I'm a huge supporter of X and, and this is a huge thing that they need to close. They need to be able to verify. And, and by the way, just, just for those who care, you know, we always bitch. Everyone on this panel bitches about proof of human and being spammed by AI bots. You know, the other thing that this is all bound into if you want to be a financial app, is you do need to know you should have a version of proof of human, not a human who is using an API. That's different. But, you know, one person shouldn't be able to have 20 accounts that are associated with their ID. You know, that kind of thing. So, you know, it really is a bigger issue.

C (32:18)

Sorry.

F (32:19)

Yeah. AI is getting completely out of control in a good way and a bad way. Every founder and every CEO that I know in the last two months has gone from typing on their computer 95% of the time to just talking to it almost 100% of the time. Almost no one's even typing anymore. The release of 4.5 in December was a complete, complete paradigm shift in the way that people are going to operate. And it's. It, we're seeing it, you know, obviously at Lunar Crush, we're, you know, pulling in 30 to 50 million posts an hour across five different social networks. It's incredible the amount of AI generated content that's out there. And like you're, you're saying, dave, it's not even just API oriented. It's. People have a very simple ability to, you know, look exactly like a human. And there's nothing that could be done outside of some sort of liveness check, you know, but even a liveness check can be kind of passed and someone else can operate. So it's getting, it's going to get weird out there, folks. And if you haven't, you know, utilized any of these tools in kind of a deep way, you know, piggybacking voice with like a cloud code, I said, you got to start sprinting now. You know, you talked about block a little bit. I'm surprised it's only an hour of training a day. You know, if you're not kind of utilizing the tools all day every day, it's kind of like you're going to be out. So kind of, kind of get on it. One, one little thing, you know, about the, the Clarity Act. You know, I think there was a post the other day, it was like, I think Patrick Witt, you know, he's one of the White House crypto advisors. He was, he said something along the lines of, like, you know, crypto's really kind of come to the table and the banks need to reciprocate and ultimately strike a deal. It's like, why, why is that even like a thing?

C (34:01)

Right?

F (34:01)

Like, like you said, like the amount of money that's being poured into this to just fight like lobbyists, like, if that doesn't tell you exactly how Washington works, it's like one side hires people to kind of like whisper into the ears of people that make, that actually can vote and make the decision. The other side hires other people. It's almost like, thank God Coinbase is public and has enough money to pay for Lobbyists. Thank God OKX has enough money, you know, and Kraken has enough money to do these things. At this point, it's almost like if we didn't have those things, we would just continue to be squashed. But that being said, you know, it's, it's like when Trump took office, Bitcoin's at 110. You know, we're down, you know, like 40%. We've been down almost 50%. I would say bitcoiners and you know, the bitcoin conference in Nashville, I'm sure you guys were all there. Like, I think, I feel like bitcoiners effectively put Trump in the White House and now are down 50% since he took office.

C (34:55)

This.

F (34:55)

And like, I don't think that's going to last. I think a lot of things are happening, but at some point that favor has to be reciprocated, you would think. And so I don't think it's really happened. No bitcoin strategic reserve in any sort of big way. I think there needs to be something that happens, but I think this clarity act needs to happen first for that to happen. But I just don't think you can turn your back on this entire subset of the economy that is bitcoiners and, and crypto bros that you know, basically put you in office. So that being said though, sentiment, what we're seeing is sentiment is near like 52 week highs in crypto. You know, it's like bad news isn't pushing price down as much and good news is a little bit highs, almost. Yeah, almost eight. It's 87%. Almost like that's just how bad it is out there, guys. But we are seeing it at almost near 52 week highs, which is pretty cool.

A (35:52)

What is 52 week highs? Because I'm looking at crypto, greed and fear and it doesn't look like that even slightly.

F (35:58)

Yeah, that's a small, small, small slice of the Internet that they're looking at. We're looking again, billion, over a billion posts like a day. And we're, what we see is, you know, across bitcoin, all of crypto, all the, all the meme coins. You know, Scott says we don't talk about meme coins on here anymore. Basically everything and just the way that people talk and the sentiment that they have. And in the last, out of the last 52 weeks we're like at 87% is the positive sentiment compared to the last 52 weeks. Obviously it's been much, much higher at different points, but in the last year this is. People are getting rallied again. I think there's interesting things out there. Obviously we're seeing a lot less people talking about crypto, but the people that are here are more positive. You know, I think the ICE investing in okx was huge. Obviously crack and getting the Fed payment rails is huge. But I think that the bottom is in and I think it's time.

B (36:58)

I mean it's crazy that sentiment could even be construed as positive, but I'll take it. I mean, I think I saw that altcoin sentiment is at the lowest in history. So it was the lowest in three years, but looked like it was even lower than post ftx.

F (37:14)

Yeah, I mean look at the altcoins and what they've done. It's bad, but I don't know, I'm sure, I'm sure you guys talked about it while I was gone a little bit. But like the, like the Jane street action that happened out there and you know that, that lawsuit that kind of came in it, I feel like, like altcoiners kind of feel like, you know, I can kind of lump myself in there a little bit. I feel like we, we've existed in a completely fraudulent system. Right. And like, like the fact that yes there was, there were some things that are happening there but ultimately like SBF did make, you know, if he still held anthropic and Robin Hood and everything else, everyone wouldn't have done a lot better if someone just gave them a loan and they continued and brought the, brought it onshore than just paying the lawyers a billion dollars. And then who knows what would. Where we'd be from here.

A (38:03)

Well, that is revisionist history. I mean, look, the truth is that there are two, there's two aspects. One, he committed fraud. He literally stole client funds, replaced it with SAM coins, you know, FTT Token, etc and he used those funds to buy off politicians and do all sorts of other stuff. And yes, it might very well be that they could have been made enough money because of luck to have kept going. But I mean that way of looking at things and boy, that pisses me off for lots of reasons, but we won't go there. That said, the other thing he was doing was the DCC POA might have had a chance of passing which as bad as Clarity people might think it is, that basically shut down Defi would have, would have annihilated it. So it's easy to look at it that way. But I don't want to get started, but the Jane street allegations about Luna are very, very serious. And the allegations of. And the other allegations of manipulation are serious. And that points to the need to be able to actually have teeth on oversight. And I think there are lots of regulators that want to do that. Anyway, we don't have a huge amount of time left. Homer, you had your hand up.

G (39:11)

Yeah, sorry to roll back the conversation a couple of minutes, you get your hand up. One of the things that I kind of find I lack the adjective to describe it, but it is with all the stuff that's happening with AI the comment was made by the previous speaker, you know, that at Block, for example, the surprise that they're only putting one hour of their time a day into learning AI. You need to be putting in a lot of time or you're going to be left behind. And it's the. The irony of this is the. The AI was supposed to free. Free us up, like two months ago. We were talking about, oh, we're all going to be unemployed. We're all going to have all this free time because. Because all the AI is going to do stuff. But what it's really looking like, it turns out to be, is it's a new skill that needs to be invested in heavily. And if you're not spending a tremendous amount of your time learning how to use this new skill, then you're going to be made obsolete. But it's really, really hard. Everything that I'm seeing from people trying to use AI is that they're really struggling to get finished product out of it. So it's like, you got to do all your traditional work. We're in this ironic state right now where you got to do all the traditional work. Maybe you're getting some productivity boost from AI, but you. You've got to reinvest all that productivity, boost time into learning how to use AI. And the AI is transforming so quickly that what you learn one day is irrelevant the next day. You know, I'm exaggerating a little bit, I guess, for stressing the irony of it all, but it's a really chaotic situation with what. What should you do? What can you do? No, this is the observation I have around the AI stuff right now. It's very hard to know how to apply your time and what to be worried about and what to not be worried about. And then you can worry about crypto, too.

B (40:59)

Apparently Claude has anxiety now, so you got to worry about his mental health.

G (41:04)

Was it Claude? I saw something that one of these systems was stuck in the thought loop and was feeling anxiety. But, yeah, I'M really interested in following this. I'm trying to keep as open a mind as I can about all this stuff. But the pendulum swings from data from one week to the next around. Are these things conscious and have self awareness? Or are these things just statistical models spitting out words, incapable of reasoning? Or are they capable of reasoning but incapable but lacking actual real world experience and so they get caught in rationalism, loops of deductive logic that's not connected to reality and so on and so on. So we're in this really chaotic era where there's a lot of expectation which may or may not come true. It feels a lot like crypto years ago and there's probably some people with a really keen eye around what will work and what makes sense it will work and what is hype that is unlikely to materialize. But I don't know who they are yet. It doesn't feel as clear to me as like bitcoin versus crypto did.

F (42:10)

Don't worry. Just really quick. Yeah, this is Joe. I made that comment. I made a post like a month ago. I said it's funny that humans have the ability to be 500 times more productive and get 50% of their time back, but instead we're going to be a thousand times more productive and get 0% of our time back. And I think that's just human nature really.

A (42:30)

Well put, Joe.

F (42:31)

It's as human. We're just fully addicted to progress. I think some people will find a way to, to get time back. But the, the big, the big difference between today.

G (42:42)

Right, but it's like it's the example. Maybe you say, but Jack didn't give 100% of his employees 40% of their time off.

F (42:49)

No, he.

G (42:49)

With a 40% pay discount. He fired 40% of them and he

F (42:52)

got rewarded for that by the market. So the market is looking for this for people to finally do it because of AI.

B (42:59)

He did it because he overhiered during COVID But hey, fair enough.

A (43:02)

But.

G (43:02)

But we're going to be getting a lot more of these things and it, and every time it's going to be positioned as it. Like when are we going to see somebody say you know what, we're going to a three day workweek because everybody's

B (43:13)

got 40% get to work less to your point, right. There's just going to be less people with jobs to that degree. But then hopefully the entrepreneurship explodes because of those people without jobs having access to the same tool, doing well.

G (43:24)

But this is Joe's point. Like we since the weekend was Invented. And I don't know what year some of the, some historians will say, you know, this notion of the weekend was invented. I think it had something to do with indus industrialization and the, the assembly line. But since then, we haven't gotten any of our time back. We just keep plowing it more and more. And as these new digital technologies have come in, like I actually remember a time when you left the office before cell phones and before smartphones, before the Internet. You left work. Like the work waited for you in the office. As soon as the BlackBerry came out, work came, work was attached to your body, and the space of the office started to become less and less relevant. Now, of course, we have live video chat, conference, all this kind of stuff, but we've lost time rather than made time.

F (44:13)

There is going to be a short period here where if you can utilize these tools in a, in a cool way, you actually can get your, your time back because people are still catching up while you have the ability to be super productive. You know, I mean, there's just a couple examples, like if you can find a way in your workflow to use voice Claude code in the terminal right now, and you have a lot of different systems that are out there that you're interacting with and you can give it access to those systems. You can now just ask simple questions and you can operate on a. We just keep talking about compressing these time cycles, right? And it's pretty incredible what you can do. And you can get a lot of finished products. So, like, for example, there's a company called Whisper Flow, right? They've raised $81 million. They do voice transcription in six minutes for 32 cents in tokens. I just said, hey, recreate Whisper Flow. I don't want my transcriptions going off my machine. And I had a perfectly fully fledged app. So I replaced that $81 million of fundraising with 32 cents in six minutes. That's the world that we're starting to live in. That's kind of scary. And I think in the short term, I think a lot of jobs actually will be lost. But I think in the long term, like Scott, like you were saying, I think the market recovers, but there is going to be major disruption for the next two years.

B (45:36)

Yeah, speaking of major disruption, I invited Mauricio up. Hey, buddy. I want to be conscious of his time because I invited him specifically because I saw the news, Mauricio, that you guys got an S P global global credit rating and wanted to discuss that with you. So obviously you've Been here a lot and, and always contributed the conversation and that seems like massive news.

H (45:59)

Thanks, guys. Yeah, I do think it's a massive milestone and something that I think has gone a little bit underreported in terms of the significance of the event, really. So just to recap for those that might not have read it, Leden issued the first ever bitcoin backed loan, ABS bond, securitized bond. It was the first ABS to hit the market. It was the first ever rated product by S&P 500. Sorry, by S and P. And more importantly, it received an investment grade rating for us as a first time issuer. So this is the first time that a bitcoin product has reached the ABS market in the US and also the first time it's reached an investment grade rating. The issuance was for $188 million. And the very interesting thing about it was that coincidentally the deal was being sold or marketed during the downturn.

C (47:07)

And

H (47:09)

as part of that process, many of the investors, this is the first time for them ever investing in a bitcoin product. A lot of people had questions around how our system would hold up during a down market. And it was actually a great opportunity because in the middle of the roadshow we were pulling up data of a system working perfectly. And not only did the deal continue and close, the deal was two times oversubscribed. More than two times oversubscribed, actually. So this is the first time a bitcoin company has tapped access to the roughly $3 trillion ABS market. And for us, I think it's a massive accomplishment. I do think that there are very few firms, if any, that could have pulled this off. I can get into sort of what it takes to get this rating and what the rating entails.

B (48:00)

Yeah, I was going to literally ask you that because I know you mentioned, I remember that Saylor obviously has STRF and that has a 10% coupon, but that's not even viewed as investment grade. Right. So you're basically this is saying that bitcoin is better collateral. And also this is now, I mean, to have S and P evaluate. Bitcoin is basically the same framework, correct me if I'm wrong, as like an auto loan or credit cards. So how do you prove them that bitcoin collateral is like as reliable as a car or a home?

H (48:30)

Correct. So to sort of frame this in context, right. This is the first ever investment grade rating that a bitcoin product has ever received. So none of the other instruments that are out there, whether it's sdrc or convertible bonds, or even coinbase bonds. These are all junk rated. And importantly, there's a distinction. Our facility is an spv. It's a securitized loan, abs. It is not corporate debt to let it. That's important. That's an important distinction. However, if you look at the ABS market in the US today, it's roughly 2.5 to $3 trillion. 80% of that market is investment grade rating. Has to be because so many of the participants in those markets, they're qualified institutions, have mandates that they can only purchase investment grade rating assets. And so really it just elevates Bitcoin backed loans to the highest category. And to your point, the assumptions and the stress testing that S and P does is you basically put our book in our loan facility through the same ringer that they've put every other bond that's in the ABS market today. So auto loans, credit cards, some types of mortgages. And we spent over, I think it was over a year with S and P. And there was a big education process as part of it. They had to understand our system or model and they stress tested the living lights out of it and they still come out with an investment grade rating. And I think what's also so unique about the deal and what puts Leden in such a really saying it again, but really a unique spot to issues a deal like this is that you need a few things to pull something like this off. Number one is you need size, right? Our offering was $200 million, but the issuer that is let in has to have multiples of that in order to vend in new loans to the facility as loans get repaid. So the size of our size was one of the big things that allowed us to do this. The second one is our history. S and P and any other ratings agency will look at very heavily at what is the track record of the operator, right? They stress test our operations, our assumptions, our management, everything. And so we have an eight year history to show to them a perfect track record of eight years, which also I believe we're the only company that can show a track record that long of perfect operations. And then the third one is that Leaden has a perfectly clean regulatory track record and posture. Lennon has never had any fines, any issues. And so again, if you, if you look at the universe of vendors and companies that can, you know, offer the same type of history, size and posture, you find that it's a very, very small universe of companies. So now that said, this model, I think this offering lays out a Blueprint for the next trillion dollars of liquidity to come into Bitcoin. And that to us is a very long term strategic advantage. Why? Because if you look at who is lending liquidity into crypto markets today, it is largely crypto native companies or crypto affiliated companies or investors. And if you round up all of those balance sheets, you know, you wind up in the billions and that which is not a small amount, but bitcoin at a $1 to $2 trillion asset, which we believe is going to get to, you know, $5 trillion in the, in the, in the coming years, we need to have line of sight into a equally deep pool of capital and we've proven that. And we've also proven that there's quite significant demand in that market. Again, as a, as a first time issuer, the deal was two times oversubscribed in a down market. So I think that this is a very exciting path and I think we've unlocked something that will, I think will be transformative deal for the industry and for Lenin.

B (52:45)

It's incredible. I can't believe how underreported it was, as you said, because I mean this is just a huge step in catalyst for others to kind of pursue the same thing. And obviously like since we have you, I mean, I'm just curious how things have been going in this quote unquote bear market as things have been going down. I mean like have there been a lot of liquidations? How do you handle those? Is there different psychology here? Kind of with bear market borrowing?

H (53:12)

Yeah. So when the market goes out. So we have seen liquidations and the system has worked perfectly. We've seen our clients tend to be very conservative. So when you come to Leaden, you're not looking to Leadn by and large is used by people that are optimizing for transparency, security. These are not the type of people that are looking to borrow against the most recent speculative coin or taking 20x leverage on a perpetual right. Like these are people that care about not losing their Bitcoin. And with that comes a sort of preemptive mentality as in they have a plan. I would say the very, very large majority of our clients have a plan top up their loans. There are instances where some loans get liquidated and that is just the name of this business. And it's a necessary sort of risk management tool. What I do see when the dip comes is it's funny, we get very busy because on the one hand we have people topping up loans at times getting loans, making partial repayments, sending extra bitcoin but on the other side, you have people buying the dip and using their loans and sometimes to buy bitcoin, sometimes a lot of people were waiting, ironically, for bitcoin price to be lower before taking a bitcoin back loan because they didn't want to take a loan at their highs, if that makes sense. And so we've seen pretty strong originations in the middle of if of all of the sort of downtrend in the price. And what I have noticed actually this week, and I think I mentioned this on Wednesday, is that this week I'm actually starting to notice some more aggressive positioning.

C (54:57)

Right.

H (54:57)

Like, it's almost. I feel like this week things are starting to switch from defense to offense, if that makes sense. This is more sort of anecdotal and from conversations that I'm having, but people seem to be switching their posture from sort of how low can this go to? I think we're bottoming out at the moment.

D (55:15)

Cool.

B (55:16)

And what, I guess if you have a loan with let in, how do you know when your liquidation is likely? When there's a, I guess, margin call, how do you make sure that people don't get liquidated?

H (55:29)

Yeah, great question. So when you come to Leaden, before you take a loan, in the application page, we will show you what the critical price triggers will be for your loan, both for needing more collateral and for liquidation once you take the loan and the price drops. At Lennon, when the LTV reaches over 70%, which is not a liquidation. Liquidation is 80%. But when your LTV drops enough, or sorry, increases enough, that reaches 70%, you start getting high LDV alerts so that you send more bitcoin to your loan. At ledn, we don't require you to send any specific amount of bitcoin to bring your LTV to any particular level. So in that sense, there's no quote, unquote margin call where you have a period of time to send more bitcoin. At Lenin, our rule is do not let it get to 80% LTV. When it gets to 80% LTV, the system sells as much bitcoin as needed to settle the loan and returns anything left to the client. However, as long as your LTV is over 70, you're going to be hearing from us and we're going to be telling you to send more bitcoin to your loan. We have another tool that is shining very brightly in this downturn called Auto Top up. And Auto top up allows you to put extra bitcoin in your lead in transaction account and when you turn on Auto Top up on your loan, the system knows that when your loan reaches 70% LTV, it'll automatically sweep enough bitcoin from your balance to drop that LTP down to 65%. And we built this because a lot of times our clients would take out these loans and would go on, say a month long hiking trip or they would go to their cabin or their farm and they wouldn't bring their hardware wallet. And they wanted us to build a tool that would help them respond to a need for additional collateral when they were unavailable. And so we built Auto Top up and this is the first real, I would say, drawdown since Auto Top up has been live and it's worked fantastically. In fact, if you look around on Twitter, I've seen quite a few posts of people saying thank you for Auto Top up, which is really exactly what we want to see.

B (57:35)

Sorry, Mike, issues once again. And so just. I know we're kind of running into time here, but I just want to ask you generally now that obviously bitcoin backed loans are becoming more credible. You have a credit rating, all of these things. How much do you still, I guess, have to answer for the Celsiuses and the blockfi and the past iteration of crypto loans that obviously went poorly?

H (58:02)

That is a great question. And I feel that in 2023, 2024, that is all I was asked about. How did you guys survive? How was lent different?

A (58:16)

Right.

H (58:16)

It was almost as if the thinking was this is a broken model, right? Like nobody should have survived. And we had to basically prove to people over time that this can be done responsibly, that what went wrong was not that these people were lending dollars against bitcoin, it was that they were rehyposticating the bitcoin, lending the bitcoin outright, committing fraud, lending bitcoin unsecured to generate yield. That's what broke down these platforms. If you're just lending dollars and keeping bitcoin in custody, you can do this quite responsibly. We've demonstrated that. Now fast forward to today. We had the etf, we had the administration sort of coming on board. Everybody seems to be sort of looking up now. And I'm starting to see some of those concerns fade away into the background.

A (59:02)

And

H (59:06)

people have very short memories. And not too long ago we had another lender go down blockfills. I don't know if people remember that, that was two weeks ago. And it seems like people just don't want to think about these things right now. Like that risk of loss. And I would, if I were, if, if I was anybody considering these products, I would still treat this market as if your biggest risk is the platform operator.

C (59:33)

Right.

H (59:33)

Like a lot of these platforms are trying to come in and buy market share by seducing people with ridiculous rates and sexy apps and a cool ad that never ends well. And I don't think it will end well this time either. So what I would say is these things come in waves. It's either everything everybody wants to talk about or nobody cares. And I feel like we're moving from the. Everybody thought it was paramount to have proof of reserves and to have a track record and to have certainty that you were not going to lose your Bitcoin. And now I'm seeing that sort of move a little bit to, oh, I can get a little better right here. And there is no free lunch here.

C (60:13)

Right.

H (60:14)

I would say that one of the things that I think about a lot is this idea that people need to understand the full picture of the lending business. To assess the stability and robustness of a lender. Like at Lenin, for example. Our funding is public. You can now go and see what dollars cost us. Right. You can also see what dollars cost us when you look at our deposit accounts and stablecoins. So we're paying anywhere between, call it eight to nine to. Well, the junior tranche on the, on the facility is 9.99. Okay. The senior tranche is 6.84 and we're paying between 6 and a half and 8% in our growth accounts. We lend at 11, 9 and we're working very hard to bring those rates lower. We do have better rates as, as loans get bigger. However, looking at those data points, you can paint the picture about Lennon's business model and you can see that it's organic and it is sustainable. You cannot see that in a lot of these defi pools. You cannot see the incentives they're paying the lenders. You cannot see why somebody is supposedly lending to a two year old pool getting less than fed funds. Why would they do that? They're not doing that. There's a bunch of incentives that people are unaware of. And that's where risk usually hides. Sorry, long rant.

B (61:32)

It was a good long rant. I love it. Anything else that I missed that you want to mention?

H (61:39)

No, I think that this is. We've had a pretty phenomenal back half of 2025 and start of 2026. We did the tether round. We announced our facility, we got named in the FinTech50 for FinTech50 and I think that this is setting us up for a continue for a year of a lot more exciting announcements. So I would just say stay tuned.

B (62:01)

I love what you guys are doing man. Thanks for taking the time to come join. I just thought that that particular news was so big and I didn't send. I remember when Saylor they got some sort of S and P even though it was a poor rating. It was big news that they even got one. And to have bitcoin backed loans have a S and P rating is just a huge signal.

H (62:22)

Yeah. Investment grade nonetheless. So I think this will be you know, stay tuned for future issuances from us. I think our rating is only going to get better and that'll only translate to better pricing for bitcoiners and just a more transparent, robust lending industry for all of us.

B (62:38)

Congrats man. Thanks again, Dave. Thanks as usual for being an astounding co host. Outstanding.

A (62:44)

Wonderful. Thank you for both. At least it's not astounding.

B (62:47)

I'm always astounded. And that's all we got for you guys. We'll be back on Monday. So everybody have a great weekend and we will see you on Monday. Bye.