C (3:53)

Yeah, Scott, it's a tough time in the market. You know, I've been here since 2016 and like you, I am buying the dips. But I'm also a bit disappointed, you know, if I'm being frank. I think a lot of us were expecting a major parabolic move. But, but you know, on one hand it feels like to your point, all the news and the fundamentals, it's, it's almost setting us up for that parabolic move. But the timing is always the big question, when is that going to happen? I don't think BlackRock and the amount of Bitcoin they have in their ETFs and the other Wall street firms launching crypto trading and much more are doing this so that they can watch bitcoin drop by 50%. It just seems the timing is off and it could go back to that thesis of the four year cycle. It's done with. Or maybe they're preparing for a relief rally. I don't know. It's just weird time. But, but I'm bullish and optimistic, you know, long term because I think this industry is going to grow significantly once the Clarity act passes. But price action is pretty depressing.

A (4:56)

Yeah, I mean they've said 2025 is a done deal for the Clarity act not going to happen. Right. I mean, that was, that came out of the Senate Banking Committee yesterday. I think that's pretty obvious considering the government works like one hour a day and one day a week, especially in December. So I think they would have had to do it the next three or four days anyways. But that's now a 2026 thing. I did see a hand go up. Matt, was that you? Somebody's hand went up and then went immediately.

D (5:22)

Yeah, no, that was, that was, that was the thing I was just going to bring up. I was really kind of surprised to see that the Senate punting on the market structure built to next year. That was the last kind of piece of Hopium that I was hanging on to. Maybe that we might see a bit of a Santa rally. But now I think at all points that, like you said, that's next year. So if we get back to 100 this year, I would be, I'd be very happy. I'd be very pleased.

A (5:41)

I feel like we're in this strange place where there are people very polarized who have high conviction. But I think most people, most reasonable people who are not deeply entrenched in their opinion, could see it going in literally any direction. I could see bitcoin making new highs in the beginning of 2026, obviously, no problem. I could also see us sitting at 75 in a few months, but I could also see us literally just being in the 80s for the next six months. Like, none of those things would surprise me in equal measure. So it's just, I mean.

E (6:13)

But, But Scott, do you feel like there's any chance, you know, ETH hits new highs or Solana hits new highs?

A (6:18)

Right.

E (6:18)

I mean, I, I don't know anybody in the market who feels like that's gonna happen.

F (6:23)

You know, I think.

A (6:24)

What was it that makes me feel like it could happen? Yeah, right. Yeah.

E (6:28)

Yeah, you might be right, man. You might be right. I. I don't know. I just. When I see, you know, the ETH maxis battling the Solana Maxis for who.

B (6:35)

Who.

E (6:35)

Who has more onchain transactions and we all know all, all the transactions are fake anyway. You know, it's just, I don't know, it's. It's a. It feels like, you know, the, the crypto side of crypto, Twitter, you know, the, the ETH and the Salana side are just kind of battling with each other and kind of all of retail or all of, kind of normie investors are just out. They just don't see the value right now. And you know, maybe it does take, you know, political, you know, moving forward with, with legislation that, that bring these back into the fold. I mean, you're, you're saying it. All the bullish good news should drive price up. Right? But it's just not right now. I think retail is just, as you said, exhausted.

A (7:18)

Yeah, I joked to this morning on my show that I think we, we literally have the SEC chairman saying that markets will be tokenized within two years. And you have the DTCC saying the same. Right. Literally the people who settle securities transactions and we get no move in market. But if Gary Gensler in his era said something bad about crypto, the market went up. It's absurd.

E (7:41)

I mean, how much would the market have gone up? If this has happened in 20 or 21 or 22, I mean, we'd have 10x. It's like crazy.

A (7:48)

We'd be at $4 trillion bitcoin if you just got a 5% bump on every piece of good news. It really is absurd when you think about it. And meanwhile, you were just talking about sort of jokingly, you know, that nobody's really using the stuff. I did see a story today that bitcoin active wallets, I think I don't want to misquote it, but yeah, bitcoin sees one year low in active addresses. So it's not going great on the bitcoin side. I mean, Ryan, I'm glad you raised your hand because when I see a story like that, you have to give me clarity.

F (8:23)

Yeah, I think, well, first of all, to touch on Solana. I think I've heard of that project before and I think it's going to go the same way as Polygon and Cardano and all the others. I think Solana has maybe overstayed its welcome in the top. And mainly that's just because the meme coin frenzies. I really don't think it has like, its technology isn't that revolutionary to really have staying power. It really just. It matches Ethereum in a lot of ways, but Ethereum just keeps iterating and optimizing anyways, just shots fired on Solana. For Ethereum, I feel like it's decoupling from Bitcoin just a little bit right now. Bitcoin's trading down. I think as far as the general, you know, public and people that are, you know, going into Christmas, I think money just feels tight and they're not diversifying into risky assets as much right now. I think once we clear the holidays and go to January, maybe they're going to be feeling a little more optimistic. Maybe we might push back up to 105. But I, I don't, I mean I don't think we've broken the four year cycle. I think if anything else we're, we're going to create the four year cycle out of worry that there might still be a four year cycle. So it might just be a self filling prophecy.

A (9:44)

Self fulfilling prophecy.

F (9:45)

Bingo.

A (9:46)

Always.

F (9:46)

Yeah. I think what we're actually doing is people are trying to preempt the four year cycle and that's why we had the sell off in October, is because everyone was expecting the sell off to happen November, December. So people were thinking, oh I'm smart, I'm going to take my profits now. And then some of the treasury companies followed in November and that's why we didn't see much of a rally in December. People are just trying to preempt the cycle and I think that's just going to keep getting the cycle tighter and tighter as we go on through the years as people are going to keep trying to preempt the same cycle and we're just going to create it.

A (10:22)

I mean my issue with that, I would love the panel's opinions on the four year cycle. It's the endless conversation that keeps on giving. But my problem with that is that we topped at the right time. So I can see that that would be an argument for the four year cycle existing. Everybody knows like the day that Bitcoin hit 126 or whatever the exact number was, someone had predicted on Reddit years ago that that would be the dead top of the cycle. So here we are with the self fulfilling prophecy problem is that nothing else in the cycle really indicated that it was actually a cycle like bitcoin made an all time high way too early. You can say it was because of the ETFs or otherwise. There was no altcoin rallies. Part of the four year cycle should be considered in my opinion. Those early year rallies that we should have seen early 2025, that we saw early 21, that we saw early 2017 where altcoins wildly outperformed as bitcoin consolidated. Even bitcoin making a new all time high and then consolidating in the 115 to 125 did nothing for altcoins. Right. And so like all of the cyclical things that I would have looked for to indicate that cycle, except for when we've got a high for now, don't align. So that, that's the issue that I take with it. Like I have no idea what 2026 will be. Could be a self fulfilling prophecy, but just felt like the cycle was broken for the entire last year.

F (11:46)

I think a lot of the money got soaked up into. I maybe just got spread out among more altcoin projects and more AI projects. Yeah, I think that is the case because we had the AI boom, right. Like where a lot of people were diversifying into AI and a lot of the venture that I was seeing that would have normally gone into crypto was like hunting down every type of project that had AI slapped on it.

A (12:13)

Yeah, we have a tendency to do that. If we had the Metaverse bubble the one time when Facebook rebranded to meta and we had clearly the AI bubble where you saw all of the tokens as you said, popping. So yeah, that makes sense. I mean anyone else guys jump in pretty.

E (12:32)

I would just push back against, against Ryan, what he said about, you know, a little bit ago about Salana, you know, just from a, a user perspective and I think people who are kind of in, you know, using crypto every day, like myself. Salana has a lot of users. I, I would say like daily active users, actual just regular people in a way that, that ETH just simply doesn't. I would just put push back there. I mean, you know, whether or not it has significant enough network effects to be like this, you know, third winner. I think it does. But you know, I could be wrong but it feels like to me the users are there in a way that they're not on Ethereum right now, even base. I mean you see what's happening on base. I just, when I'm over there and I'm trading and stuff on base, it's just in a lot of ways it's a ghost town. And so I don't know, maybe Ryan, you could feel free to counter me. But I mean my feeling is just people I know and users, they're kind of real users on Solana and that's why we have a lot of projects building on Solana. You know, that's my feeling right now.

F (13:39)

You have to remember with Ethereum too is it's not a closed off ecosystem like Solana is, where the EVM is very, very port. So you've kind of diluted your user base out from mainnet where you have everything from Binance Chain to Cello Chain are all running EVM and you can easily port between them now. So your user base has been way more spread out. So Solana probably does feel very condensed with a lot more users, but it's because its footprint is a lot smaller than the Ethereum ecosystem now.

E (14:11)

Sure, but that, I mean we've talked about this a bit. How does that actually benefited. This space was downloaded via spaces down.com.

B (14:18)

Visit to download your spaces today.

F (14:20)

Ethereum.

E (14:20)

Right. And I, I will, I don't think it does at all goes up here. It's like, and, and we could jump into this because I know William has has some significant thoughts on this but like people would say whatever, hyper liquid, oh, it's evm. But zero value basically goes back to Ethereum because it's evm. Right. So go ahead William, I'll let you jump in.

B (14:42)

Yeah, I mean I raised my hand before you started to talk about Ethereum. I don't want to talk too much about it because we can go on a tangent, but the EVM chains, what they add to Ethereum is network effects. So they don't add necessarily fees. That's fine, I understand that. But there's a lot of growth in the L2s and the L2s do bring back fees into the L1 Ethereum, which handles the security for all of these transactions. So if the PI gets bigger, like if Your PI is 100 times bigger than it was, but you're getting, let's say half the fees, you're still getting a lot more than before. And that's how we think about it because it's the whole ecosystem that grows together. But I wanted to answer back what, what Scott was saying about what do we do about the market right now? I wish we could get away from thinking and being at the mercy of these cycles and whether it's a two year cycle or a three or a four year cycle, I mean, why can't we start to look at fundamentals right now? Most of crypto is just based on cycles or whatever happens in the macro sense and whatever. Like anything that happens outside of crypto affects crypto. Two things here. One is that there is still a lot of, I mean, excuse my language, shit coins. Like why do these zombie chains still trade from the Cardano to the polkadot? And those ones, like there are many chains that shouldn't be like they should be gone. If these were startups and they didn't have the ability to print money like there's no tomorrow, they'd be gone. So all of these are sucking the air out of the real project. As long as you see all of them going up and down together, plus or minus 2, 3, 4, 5%, which is nothing, then you were still in that period where the investors are dumb and there are more traders than real investors and they enjoy the volatility and, and they play on it and that's not good for us. So I don't know what's going to happen, what needs to happen for those zombie chains to go away so that we have real products, real projects with products that we can look at, touch and feel and see the actual metrics. Now the defi protocols are a little bit ahead because there we can see real metrics and we can see tvl, we can see fees, we can see revenue, we can see active users, we can see transaction volume, we can see Dex volumes, we can see treasury holdings. So I think the Defi segment is the first one that is showing some maturity in, in fundamentals tracking and I think it's a good sign. And when you look at a blockchain like Ethereum, it's more complicated because Ethereum is not just a one trick pony. It's not just about revenue like some other chains would like you to believe that revenue is it. No, it's not. There's now it's complicated so that there are many, many metrics. If you're a big infrastructure like Ethereum that has many things, that does a lot of things. I'm not going to go further into the other variations, but I'll just stop there. But that's kind of where how I see things right now.

E (18:25)

Yeah, but William, I mean you gotta, I mean for, you know, you're saying the zombie chains need to go away, but the incentive is just too great for them to go away. They're not going anywhere and in fact people are going to launch a lot more, right? And I mean, I think you see, you know, Solana was near dead. People were calling it dead, but they came back, they had one winning app, right? Pump Fun happened and you know, the rest is history.

F (18:48)

Right?

E (18:49)

And if, if you look at it that way, that if a chain is able to get a winning app on the chain, I mean, I mean, you know, look at Polygon, right? With Polymarket and with Courtyard on there, they have two winning apps. I mean the chain's still dead, but the, but the apps are on that chain, right?

B (19:06)

So yeah, but no, no, I mean, and in defense of Solana, you, you can't compare Solana to Polkadot. I mean before Solana went down to nine or $10 or $11, if you had gone to one of their breakpoints, if you were in close touch with their community, there was a lot there going on. So I never thought Solana would disappear. No. No way. But Polkadot and Cardano, I mean, do they have conferences where thousands of developers show up? These are the real zombie chains. Um, very different.

E (19:42)

I, I, I hear you, William, but reality is, it doesn't take thousands of developers to develop a winning app. It, it literally takes a dude. Um, so I would push back, and I'd say, that's actually not true. If I could have, you know, if I could magically create a winning app in crypto, and I did it on Cardano. Well, guess what? People would go to Cardano to use.

B (20:00)

Yeah, but it's not enough. It's not enough to lift. Oh, come on.

E (20:03)

It's, it isn't. We saw it. Pump Fun just happened. We saw it. It was enough.

B (20:07)

One, no, but Solana had a lot more going on than just Pump Fun. Pump Fun was a good example of activity.

E (20:17)

If Pump Fun didn't happen, we would not be talking about Solana right now.

B (20:21)

I'm not sure about that. I mean, again, here I'm defending Solana because I like to be fair.

E (20:27)

I want you to defend Solana. Yeah, that was the plan the whole time.

B (20:30)

I'm not going to just put the mud on Solana because for that reason, no, they had a lot going on. They had, they were trying at many levels, and Pump Fun was not the only savior for them.

E (20:46)

I would just finish. And I don't disagree with you, but at the end of the day, even with a winning app, which Polygon has winning apps, doesn't mean that the value is going to trickle down to the chain itself. Go ahead, Ryan. I saw your hand.

F (21:02)

I was just going to throw in there. Remember why Solana almost died originally was because they paused their chain and everyone kind of sat up a little straighter, saying, like, wait a minute. I thought this was decentralized. So they kind of showed behind the curtain a little bit and made people a lot of, like, made a lot of people very squeamish, and that's why their token price was dumping. Ripple did the same thing. Like when people started looking behind the curtain of Ripple and they got very concerned as well. I think people just kind of forget over time, and they. I think Pump Fund did bring a lot of life back into Solana, just like Polymarket is keeping Polygon alive. So I think it doesn't take more than one app, really, to keep a chain alive in perpetuity. But, you know, once another prediction market takes the the crown, you know, Polygon might just die like the rest of them.

E (21:50)

Yeah, I don't think so.

B (21:51)

Polygon has more than Polymark as well, and other apps.

E (22:00)

Sorry, I cut you out awfully.

F (22:02)

But, you know, it's a. It's a. It's a big world, too. So it's. I mean, you can keep a chain alive with a couple thousand users out of, you know, potential billions of users.

A (22:12)

I actually, there was a news. I don't know if you guys saw, but Mert tweeted that Solana has been under a colossal DDoS attack for at least over a week now. By the way, the fact that you haven't experienced it is a big testament to the levels of engineering present here. I had no idea that that was the case. I mean, is that a actual testament? I. I'm not a tech guy, Ryan. I mean, if they've been under a massive. No, it's. You can't. You can't. You can't.

F (22:37)

DDoS, a decentralized system, and if you do, it's very, very hard. The fact that they're under ddos, it's like, wait a minute, how did they identify all their core nodes? Like, that's. That's the red flag in my book.

A (22:50)

Yeah, it's a. It's an interesting debate. I think that everyone would agree, though, that even with all the news stories we have about all the things that will happen, or are, you know, the plumbing that's being put in place, I'm not sure right now that we have the actual usage for all the things that are being built. Which is funny because I remember in 2020, 2021, the endless debate was, there's going to be so much built. How the hell are we going to have enough block space now? It's like, who's going to use all this space? Right? So, I mean, we've launched enough layer ones and layer twos and blockchains to scale to literally anything, and now we need stuff to actually be adopted to scale for. So it's kind of a bit of a mess, I would say. But when you have these stories like Schwab and JP Morgan and all of these, wouldn't you anticipate some price action? It's like nothing. It's pretty wild. We can also switch topics if we're. If we're exhausted here. It's just that there's not that many huge ones worth discussing. I think it was really interesting and very important that Metamask has rolled out BTC support. Maybe I should ask you, Ryan, I mean, would you use Metamask for Bitcoin?

F (24:14)

No, I actually, I stopped using MetaMask for EVM as well. And it's funny because I actually, I was at a meetup with one of the creators of MetaMask the other day who was building another project on top of MetaMask and kind of saying, you know, to, to his point, like, MetaMask is a good platform. Everyone should just build on top of MetaMask. But I didn't have the heart to tell him that me and just about everyone I knew had moved on from using MetaMask because it's lacking in a lot of functionality and it just got really, really confusing with the recent updates. So there's no way I'm going to trust any type of temporary or long term storage to MetaMask when it comes to Bitcoin, bro.

E (24:51)

How could that dude be so out of touch, man? I mean, that's incredible. I guess you just get.

F (24:56)

It's because you build inside your own ecosystem. You dog food your own technology, so it's easy to get blinders on.

A (25:06)

So I'm actually, I've never really heard the everybody's moved on from metamask narrative. So is there a very specific reason for that or a worthy conversation?

F (25:16)

I mean, just use Rabi, like use something like Rabi Wallet, like Rabi and like your, your first couple transactions with Rabi Wallet. You'll quickly realize why MetaMask is inferior.

E (25:26)

Yeah, MetaMask. Scott just Most people have moved on from MetaMask, you know, literally years ago because the interface is just so clunky and terrible and they do updates that make it even worse. It's like hard to even be worse than it is, but it's like the, it's the worst app. I mean, I have a couple of old metamask wallets that I'm too lazy to like move away from. But yeah, it's a terrible, terrible user experience. They lost their lead, it's gone.

A (25:54)

Honestly, it called me crazy. I had no idea. Like I, you know, I just kind of felt like it was the Coke and Pepsi.

E (26:02)

No. Yeah, no, I mean people have, people have experienced new wallets now and so MetaMask kind of has this like, you know, network effect of kind of. They were the first like kind of great wallet or whatever or good wallet, but them, them layering in new chains and stuff. Their interface, if you've used it recently, is so bad you often can't even find like your, your address.

A (26:26)

That terrible that I get so dumbfounding. They're like, you used to have a list of wallets. You copy the address now you have to actually hit receive to find the address for a wallet. Which, like, how did you decide? Maybe they were like not dock your wallet when someone just clicked for the first time on the interface. But it's pretty wild.

F (26:51)

I was gonna say, you remember when Yahoo used to be like the it for search engines and then Google first came out. We're like, wait, what is this? I only have to search once. There's a I feel lucky button. Like what is this? It's actually good search. And then I feel like we're kind of moving on from the Yahoo search engine to the next generation. Eventually we'll get to the ChatGPT replacement of all of this where AI comes and just takes control. But for now I feel like MetaMask is very antiquated.

B (27:19)

Well, if you want to see a, go ahead.

A (27:22)

Sorry.

B (27:22)

If you want to see a game changing wallet interface, try one that has an AI prompt built into it like Banker bnkr and you just talk to it in natural language the same way that you talk to ChatGPT and it does things for you. That is the future, I think. And I think somebody mentioned AI early in the in the conversation. I wish there were more cases of AI and crypto because AI, as you know, has figured out the user interface and I think AI can inject some more excitement into some of those crypto products, namely the wallets that look and feel dull and difficult to use to many, many people.

A (28:14)

The rabby. Is that the one? I thought you said R A B I or something. It was R A B Y. I think there's also. Adam, Sorry, I'll let you jump in a second. There's also, I've noticed that I think a lot of the bad actors target metamask specifically just because it is the biggest. Is that accurate or is that fair to say?

E (28:33)

You always see type metamask when you do your next post or whatever just to see the bots and the scams that come in. Sure, yeah. MetaMask is one of those ones for sure.

A (28:43)

Yeah. Adam, you're about to make another point.

E (28:45)

I was just going to say to William's point, I mean it's, it is super early with the AI wallet infrastructure, but full disclosure, we're building one at my company. I, I do think it's actually the next level because that, that complexity we're talking about with MetaMask or any of the wallets now, which are multi chain wallets, it's still rather clunky. And the AI interface, the chat interface, just being able to tell it what you want and it just to be able to interact across blockchains, to just do the action you want it to take without having to know, oh, I need to bridge my ETH onto base and then I need gas. And all this sort of complexity, which was never going to work for an average user I think is the future of, of crypto, Crypto wallets.

A (29:30)

Didn't know we'd go down a wallet rabbit hole. But this is interesting and you know, I never really think, hey, what's the next new wallet? Because I think people, you know, you get used to one and you just kind of sit on it. Right?

E (29:43)

Yeah.

F (29:44)

I mean it's just the whole idea.

A (29:45)

Lift and risk to, to move. Right. You got all these wallets and.

F (29:48)

Yeah, yeah.

E (29:49)

I mean not that I would ever.

A (29:51)

Keep meaningful amounts of money in a hot wallet anyways, but.

E (29:54)

Exactly. But for most users, the idea of having, you know, multiple wallets, you know, in your web browser, you know, you look up there, I'm looking at mine, I have like five different ones for different chains and stuff. Right? Yeah, that, that's all going away. To William's point, I have no question. I never knew how it's going to go away until we really got into AI. But now that we're in day, I see how that's going to go away. It might, might be a year or two till kind of average users are using it to get the kind of safety down. But I do feel like that's the way we're going.

B (30:24)

Anybody try bank or bot? B A N K R dot bot bot. I have no affiliation with them whatsoever, but that's an interesting interface.

A (30:38)

Brian.

F (30:41)

Yeah, I'm just, I'm wondering how long until the more traditional Rails start catching on that this is kind of the future of Internet commerce is building a browser extension. So like a JP Morgan browser extension, that is your, your wallet, you know, for, for signing and then they, you know, have their, their CR crypto stable coin that ties into your bank account and everything. I'm really wondering when they start branching into this user experience.

D (31:06)

I'll just jump in on that really quick. I remember Brian Moynihan saying clearly on CNBC that they have those patents already to go for wallets, for custody and all of that stuff. So those big banks, they're ready, they're just waiting.

E (31:21)

Let them build it, man. Let's see. I mean having a patent and producing a product that works is a, there's a wide gap.

A (31:28)

I mean that's the next level to your guys point Though if you pull down just like you would a Metamasker Chrome extension wallet and it has access to your entire portfolio, not just crypto. Right. Because everything on the rails, I mean that becomes incredibly interesting. Not that somebody else can't build a third party wallet to do that, but I guarantee that Schwab or JP Morgan aren't going to let you API into a third party wallet from their exchange. Right. They'll tell you to go pound sand.

F (31:59)

I wonder if this would be like a natural fit for a company like Plaid or something that already has the tie ins to all the different banks.

A (32:08)

Yeah, I guess that actually I kind of made a joke but I guess, I mean they do allow Plaid to act, you know, the access to API into their bank account. But I feel like because that's a use case that they have to participate in. Right. Connecting your account to all these third. Third parties. But crypto app. I'm not sure if it would be a wallet. I'm not sure if it would. Would be exactly the same. Yeah, honestly guys, I think we're going to probably wrap early today. I don't want to beat a dead horse and this is a great conversation and I think, you know, we, we kind of ran through everything that I intended to talk about today. So we will be back Obviously tomorrow at 10:15am Eastern Standard Time for another crypto town hall. Otherwise everybody give all of the guests on stage a follow. They deserve it and otherwise we'll see you tomorrow. Thanks everybody. Have a good one. Bye. This space was downloaded via spacesdown.com visit to download your spaces today.