← The Wolf Of All Streets
The Wolf Of All Streets
"Crypto Is DEAD" - Bitcoin's Silent Exodus Continues As Markets Bleed!
00:41:16
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- [00:01]
A
Crypto is dead. There was a great think piece about this that we're going to dive into today. And bitcoin silent exodus has continued as whales exit the market. The numbers are pretty astounding. About $300 billion worth of dormant whale wallets have opened, sent coins to exchange. Those coins have moved and have likely been sold. That's what has been driving this exodus from the market. The bitcoin sell off, the absolutely excruciating price action that we've seen. We're going to dive into all of that today and everything bullish that is happening behind the scenes in the market with one of my favorite guests, City Pal from Maple Finance. Let's go, let's go.
- [00:56]
B
Let's go.
- [00:57]
A
Good morning, everybody, and welcome to scenic Times Square in New York City, where I'm obviously sitting right now. I'm definitely not in Florida. Before we get started, please like and subscribe to the channel. Oh, look, we were no longer there. Now I'm in front of a gray screen. Sid, how are you? See, I just. I showed my. I showed my cards.
- [01:24]
B
I'm good, Scott.
- [01:25]
A
I'm good.
- [01:25]
B
It's good to be back.
- [01:27]
A
I thought I had you fooled. And then we went dark for a second. All right, man, so listen, let's dig into the topics at hand. This first article, I know that you read it, it's going viral. I think it's pretty good. Crypto is dead. Not exactly what you think when you read this, though. He's not saying that we're all going to zero, that the chains are going to die. There's going to be no transactions. He's basically saying that crypto as its own, own standalone industry is dead. I think that's something you would agree with because you've been at the forefront of this transition for a very, very long time. Basically saying you can't look at this through a singular lens anymore. It's being interwoven. It's just payments, it's just banking, it's just finance. It's not a standalone as we used to see it.
- [02:11]
B
Yeah, I tend to agree. I mean, he's got a provocative title there with Crypto as Debt. But essentially what he's saying is that the industry or the startup sector has kind of matured to the extent that you no longer need to refer to it as this tiny subsector. It's now kind of embedded in broader financial services or gaming or prediction markets or betting payments, et cetera, And that you essentially need to build great products that just kind of rely on crypto Rails rather than a product that's sort of geared more towards crypto. Twitter, essentially. So I agree with the broad sentiment of the article. And, you know, and it's what a lot of us have been saying for a long time, which is you can't, you can't build Ponzi schemes. You have to build real products that people want to use that either lower their costs or allow them to make more revenue somehow.
- [03:05]
A
So to be clear, crypto is not in fact dead, correct? Correct. Okay, good, good. Just checking we're not all out of the job. No, hopefully not. And it is interesting, though. I was even talking to Dante Desparte from Circle yesterday that hasn't been released yet. And I sort of the point. And he begrudgingly, I guess, agreed. I said, you know, listen, nobody wants to know if they're sending USDC or USDT and if they're doing it on Avalanche or Salana or Ethereum. He's like, this actually doesn't become truly mainstream or adopted until somebody just goes into their bank or whatever app it is and sends USD to someone. And whatever happens in the back, in the plumbing, it doesn't matter. It could be any stablecoin. They're interoperable. It goes on whatever chain it chooses, the fastest, cheapest one, and it just looks like any other transaction. And he, he agreed. But I think that's kind of the same sentiment here, is that we're slowly getting to the point where it's just the rails and the plumbing.
- [04:00]
B
Yeah, exactly. It's like if. If I send money to you and, you know, or you're a merchant, you don't care whether the money comes through via credit card, debit card, ACH or swift. And you know, stable coins and crypto payments should be the same kind of way. You just care that the money reaches you at the end of the day.
- [04:18]
A
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, before we dive more into these topics, I just want to show the fact that US inflation data. Surprise. You pointed this out to me. It was actually lower than people expected. So a better inflation print, which apparently means that the Fed could have a chance of cutting, which apparently means that markets go up. Right. It's hard to parse what is good and what's bad anymore. I joked earlier that for crypto news, it was better when Gary Gensler would do something negative than it is when our current administration does something positive for price, apparently so. But yeah, here we're almost at 89,000 here on Bitcoin. But, like, speaking less about what's happening in the moment, I mean, yesterday we saw what bitcoin went from 87 to 90 to 86 in an hour. So it's kind of hard to get really excited about these moves. Is this idea that there's been a silent exodus? Exodus, like I said before in the intro, 300 billion in coins in 2025 alone that were long dormant have moved. We know there's been whale selling. This has been probably the bulk of the sale pressure. I think you might have unique insight on this. I don't want to put you on the spot, but because you're actually a lot of people who have a lot of bitcoin come to you to not sell that bitcoin.
- [05:29]
B
Right. Or to put it to work.
- [05:31]
A
So why, when there's products like Maple Finance, when we know that the biggest banks are going to start loaning against it, why do we continue to see this sort of massive selling pressure from these large wallets?
- [05:44]
B
Well, I think, I mean, for a lot of these wallets, you know, they've held the bitcoin so long, they might be thinking of things like, you know, estate planning or, you know, passing wealth intergenerationally. We see, you know, a lot, a lot of our clients hold bitcoin. They don't want to sell it, they don't want to give up the upside. But we do tend to be more of an institutional base of borrowers. We do have a number of family officers who might borrow against bitcoin or ETH in order to make real estate purchases or substantial investments. But I do think for some of those long dormant wallets, I guess the positive side is that it's effectively releasing a lot of pent up inventory of bitcoin and you're not likely to see something like that repeat each year. So it's probably more like a shakeout in terms of supply hitting the market rather than something that you'll see regularly. And bitcoin is becoming more institutionalized. So in a lot of cases, the buyers of that bitcoin that's been long dormant are going to be institutions who will then pledge it to borrow from folks like us. And so it's going to be held, probably held for a long time from here, or at least that's what we hope in the market.
- [07:00]
A
Yeah, I mean, you have to assume that it's just moving from the hands of one kind of holder to another and it's sort of a transfer of a new floor, I would say, like somebody's buying it. I mean, sailors buying it. Yeah.
- [07:13]
B
The other thing that I've actually seen or observed that might be interesting and may not be known to a lot of people. Is that actually often what we find is that some of these really large holders, they're not necessarily exiting into cash. They might actually just be converting into, you know, into the ETFs. Yeah, exactly. Because they just find it easier from an OPSEC perspective to hold and then they can pledge it to JP Morgan or other large banks who accept ETFs as collateral.
- [07:38]
A
Yeah, that makes perfect sense. So I want to pivot to clearly the main topic of the moment, which is tokenization. Right. Not that that's anything new, but the tokenization of real world assets has gained another round of big press of late because Paul Atkins at the SEC has been talking about it quite a lot. I've said it every day. But the outrageous claim that in two years the entire United States financial system will be operating on blockchain. Quite an eye opener. And I'm assuming that you heard that one and said oh really? Right. But then I think even the bigger news was that the DTCC came in. This is the giant obviously in settlement gave us a hit like T plus two settlement and T plus one. Right. Saying that they're also going to basically tokenizing now that they've gotten a no action letter from the SEC and that this is the future of settlement for all markets. And then the DTCC announces. Here you go. 100 trillion trad just gave crypto a huge boost. Never see anything move as quickly that they're doing it with Canton.
- [08:40]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I heard that Canton is really, you know, make it play to kind of cement itself as the institutional chain. I know that they do a lot of repo business there with players like Citadel. I think Citadel also invested in them this year. So yeah, they're definitely making, definitely making a play there apparent. You know, apparently the, the key differentiator is the privacy aspect that they think is going to be favored by institutional players. You know we've, we've definitely heard that before with other chains that the, the key angle for getting TradFi on board in size is that you have to be able to offer them privacy. So yeah, it's gonna, it's gonna be interesting to see. I'm, you know, I, I see, I see takes like, you know, everything's gonna be on chain in two years and I think of it like an S curve where at, you know, it's actually slower than you expect at the start and then. But then probably after five or six years we'll have way More on chain than we expect and then it kind of peters out again.
- [09:45]
A
I think two years seems early.
- [09:47]
B
Two years seems early if you're talking like five or seven or 10 years. But I think you have to remember the technology trends play out over decades. We were still watching the Internet was still growing at a ripping pace in 2020 when it started in the mid-1990s. And so I think crypto is still going to be growing at a phenomenal pace 15, 20 years from now. It's not all going to be done in two years.
- [10:16]
A
So is that Canton? Honestly, I'm such a crypto boomer that I was like, what's Canton Network.
- [10:24]
B
Incubated by? Yeah, I mean, Canton was incubated by DRW and Cumberland. So it is set up to be kind of purpose built for, you know, high frequency traders, market makers and kind of regulated participants.
- [10:38]
A
So.
- [10:42]
B
I think the key in adoption is where is the liquidity going. And the larger established chains like Ethereum and Solana, they still kind of act like gravity sinks for new business. So it's not going to be easy to disrupt just because you have a large number of institutions kind of coming to a single chain.
- [11:01]
A
Right. But I think that Ethan Solana, Maxis are giving a humongous WTF to this because it seemed like you had this sort of directionally that, you know, BlackRock would choose, you know, one of them or Galaxy would choose one of them, or, you know, all the big institutions clearly were making their moves in something adjacent to Ethereum and Solana seemingly before this. I mean, I guess Franklin Templeton's done some stuff with Stellar. There's been some random ones, but I think most of the value accrual of tokenization and real world assets was to Ethereum and Solana ecosystems. And this comes out of nowhere. I mean, I assume Canton, listen, I haven't even done my research on it. It's a standalone chain.
- [11:40]
B
Yeah.
- [11:40]
A
As you said, it has, you know, privacy aspect to it. And you got to imagine if they're about to, you know, clear 4, quadrillion. Does it say an annual transaction that they might become a major player?
- [11:54]
B
Yeah, well, I think, and you know, it's interesting, you remember way back in the day, right, you had the FAT protocol thesis and you know, not just because I'm building more of an application, but I do think that value actually accrues to the applications themselves rather than the protocols. And you're not seeing L1s kind of command the same valuations that they once did. And there's a lot of questions around the ability of L1s to actually generate revenues that drive meaningful valuation growth. So it'll be interesting to see where, even if a lot of institutional business goes to some of these new chains that are pitched at. Pitched at Tradfi, whether value accrual actually happens for the token there.
- [12:40]
A
Yeah, this is kind of an issue that I have, like grayscale just did there. 10 big predictions for what the market will be and everybody's talking about utility is going to matter. Right. And we're going to have to start valuing these things based on actual transactions and revenue and such. I think that's accurate. But you kind of hinted at the point that if we start doing that, I would make the argument that everything right now at current value is wildly overvalued.
- [13:06]
B
Wildly overvalued, yeah. Definitely want to take all of our.
- [13:10]
A
Favorite assets down 95% and then see what wins from a transaction and utility perspective, because that seems like a terrible scenario.
- [13:19]
B
Yeah, well, it's terrible for certain assets, like in particular the L1 sector. You know, maybe the larger, more established L1s are kind of immune to that. But I think most L1s probably should be revalued down 95% if you look at their actual earning capacity. If you see nowadays, what I see behind the scenes is that the actual real power is with the applications. You know, if AAVE goes and pitches, you know, five chains, like partnerships with five chains, it's commanding incentives from those chains, payments to launch on the chains. Like, that's because the users come for the applications. They don't come for the chain specifically.
- [14:00]
A
Right. But by that argument, shouldn't we be more excited about the price action on AAVE than we should be about the five chains? That I agree.
- [14:07]
B
I think we should. We don't get excited about the valuation of the Swift system or the ach. I think we get excited about the value of Apple and Google and Nvidia. And so I think in the same way, we should actually be more excited about the valuations of the bigger defi protocols, whether it's AAVE or Athena rather than the chains themselves. Hyper liquid. Interesting case in point, because the app is the chain.
- [14:36]
A
Yeah, it's not looking good for a lot of the dinosaurs if. I mean, if you look accurately, value them based.
- [14:44]
B
Well, if you look at Maple, for example, we make roughly 20, 25 mil sort of annualized. We make more revenue than most. Most L1 chains. But. And indeed, I think over the next 12 months, most DeFi protocols will make more revenue than the most L1 chains. And so I think at a certain point the market is going to, is going to flip in in which sector it assigns higher values to.
- [15:10]
A
Okay, there's an interesting conversation then. You're obviously making real money, which gives you a real valuation. A, I would say generally not nonspecific to you. When a company makes money in crypto, how does that value accrue to the token holder when there is one? Because that's a huge problem. And then also, which verticals are you most excited about? Since you make money in a number of ways, which ones do you see growing the most? For 2026.
- [15:36]
B
It is, it is actually a good question. So when, when a protocol or an application makes money, how does that value accrue to the token holders? Up till now the main mechanism for that has been buybacks. Because you can't pay dividends to token holders legally, you can't assign economic rights to token holders notwithstanding. You know, I've seen metadao in this concept of ownership tokens. However, if you have a token that has legal rights attached to it, you would instantly fail the regulatory checklist on every exchange. So you wouldn't actually be able to be listed on any exchanges. So you would have a token that would have economic rights for holders, but there's no venue to trade it. So it's like having a fantastic company, but you can't get it listed on NASDAQ or New York Stock Exchange. So what liquidity can you get on it? But I think buybacks will probably continue to be the main way that profitable defi and crypto companies try and return value to token holders. I haven't seen a better way kind of come along yet. And maybe we'll see better opportunities once Clarity act passes where maybe we can pass dividends to customers. In terms of what sectors I think will benefit over the next 12 months. Like, I think, you know, I'm kind of most interested in the core defi sectors. I think prediction markets will do well. I think perps Dexs will continue to do well. I mean, even the small perps Dexs still print money. Like whenever I talk to the, to the teams there, some of the revenue numbers those guys are doing are astronomical.
- [17:12]
A
Exchanges you've never heard of with like a few thousand customers somewhere on planet Earth. And no KYC are making a lot.
- [17:21]
B
Of money and, and then lending, lending and borrowing and then, and then stable coins, I think. So I think, you know, 2026 is going to be very good for, for defi and those, those are the sectors I kind of pay the most attention to. And, and you know, naturally we, you know, focus our attention on kind of the lending and borrowing sector.
- [17:42]
A
Yeah, I mean I had Bill Barheid on yesterday from Abra. They're launching a very similar product to this. I think that these are becoming very popular. Right. But you obviously have a lot a liquid yielding dollar. You're not allowed to call them stablecoins, right?
- [17:56]
B
Yeah, go ahead.
- [17:57]
A
I would say but you know, whether in name or otherwise, it's a yield bearing stablecoin that like you earn this 5.2% yield but you can still use this in the same way as you would use a normal stablecoin. Pay someone in it. You can post it as cloud.
- [18:13]
B
Yeah, well, I mean you can use it in a lot of similar ways. We don't pitch it as a stable coin. We actually view. The way I would view it is like you have the underlying layer of infrastructure which is a stable coin. So in the case of that product, it's USDC and usdt. We don't want people to use our product for, for payments. And we wouldn't pitch it as a stablecoin itself. We pitch it as a savings product for holders of stablecoins. But then you can post it as collateral, you can loop it, you can sell it on a secondary market, you can fix the interest rate. And so we want to be that layer above. We like working with all the stablecoin providers but we don't want ourselves to be a stablecoin. It's a very difficult business and very competitive. But the advantages of having this in defi and that's actually been our fastest growing source of capital. Right. And our cost of capital is now actually very competitive with Wall Street. So we are coming under when I go and talk to some of the community banks and asset managers who are trying to come into the space. And because we can source capital from Defi, our cost of capital is actually lower than theirs. So we can undercut them on pricing and that helps us from a competitive perspective. But that's because of the composability of DeFi. Because you can take syrup USDC and you can use it in AAVE or Morpho or Euler or Uniswap or Pendle.
- [19:39]
A
Man, I'm old enough to remember when crypto was simple.
- [19:44]
B
I remember when Defi was like five teams.
- [19:46]
A
Yeah. I mean wasn't Defi just like farming taco to get yam yam to get.
- [19:52]
B
Yam to put it in pickle?
- [19:54]
A
You guys are like real companies doing serious things with a whole lot of money. It was a whole other level. I think I want to zoom in a bit more on the stablecoin side, not specifically what you're doing. I don't know if you saw this announcement from Coinbase. I just ripped the video as it was coming here, but we got Coinbase launches custom stablecoins. Users can now issue branded stablecoins backed one by one by Coinbase Custody collateral. I ripped the video so we can watch it really quickly.
- [20:21]
B
In this case, we're announcing that you can now create your own custom branded Stablecoin with Coinbase backed by usdc. I think it's interesting. Coinbase system Stablecoins offer the ability to embed your brand in every transaction. Rewards on balances with best in class economics and a seamless issuance process managed by Coinbase. We're working with innovative partners like Soul flare, flipcash and R2, all who are launching with custom stablecoins in the coming months.
- [20:55]
A
I mean, do I need a stablecoin like Scott. Scott Coin. Scott.
- [21:00]
B
Scott Coin.
- [21:06]
A
We're running a lot of letters and.
- [21:08]
B
Words to put on the end of USD. Yeah, we've gone through just about the entire Alphabet. Interesting product. I would say it's. It's interesting as well. It's probably actually second to market. Right. Like if you look, Anchorage has been doing this with Athena for, I think it was Jupiter or one of the other Solana products was going to have its own stablecoin that was effectively backed by ustb, which is the Athena Stablecoin built on, on Biddle and Anchorage Custody as well. So interesting competitive dynamic that stablecoins as a service is kind of becoming the next big service. I think it means effectively the economics as a Stable Coin issue are probably going to get a little bit worse.
- [21:50]
A
Because they're going to have to be sharing the revenue. If I launch my own Stable Coin for TIPS or whatever it is, then I wouldn't do that unless I'm obviously sharing in the revenue. Right. An affiliate deal for usdc.
- [22:06]
B
Yeah, it's. Yeah, exactly, that's. That's exactly right. So the question is, you know, if you're, you know, Coinbase or Circle on usdc, you know, you're. The calculation you're making is that you can get the market larger such that even if you're giving up some of the economics and taking a lower margin, it's a much bigger pie. So you're still going to make more money overall. You know, same kind of question as you Know, do you want to be like Walmart or do you want to be a boutique with higher margins? I think the instructive thing to look at would be to look at the history of Visa and MasterCard. Most payments networks where initially they were probably clipping larger margins and then you see branded cards come out and then they give interchange fees and other cashbacks and rewards to the users. So. So theoretically they're taking a smaller piece of each transaction but they've expanded it to a much larger audience.
- [23:05]
A
It's affiliate marketing.
- [23:06]
B
I think the only thing you know, it's like Warren Buffett said that you know when there were all those car companies in the 20s and 30s, he didn't know you wouldn't know which car company to buy stock in and pick, but you did know to short horses. And one of the things I think is like I don't know which stablecoin is ultimately going to win. However, I do know you probably want to be Short Visa and MasterCard.
- [23:27]
A
Yeah. And Western Union. Right. Except for they're going to be using Solana. Yeah. But just to what you said right here, total stablecoin supply is up 33% this year to over 304 billion with monthly adjusted volumes now exceeding Visa and PayPal.
- [23:42]
B
Yeah.
- [23:42]
A
Right.
- [23:43]
B
So that's they're going to leave.
- [23:46]
A
You don't even need to guess. Like stablecoins are crushing these things. I think last year, I don't know if it was a 12 month calendar year and pegged to what date, but there was a story a couple weeks ago that we were basically the half of ACH on stablecoin transaction volume. Like dwarfing Visa and MasterCard in total volume and like actual vit transaction volume but halfway to the entire basically like core of the banking.
- [24:11]
B
It's gonna, it's gonna leave it in the dust like it's gonna be multiples of what currently happens today and you know, all of Visa, MasterCard and the banking system transactions.
- [24:21]
A
Yeah. I think that the difference this time around with a new innovative technology is that the companies, the I would say the incumbents are well aware that they're about to be replaced and are actually trying to participate or to adopt the rails. I mean I showed this recently but YouTube now that's eligible US creators receive payouts in PayPal's PyUSD. Stablecoin. The worst. You can put any letters around USD by the way. Py are the worst. You could have chosen anything unless they.
- [24:54]
B
Get free marketing with us talking about it.
- [24:56]
A
Yes, I talk about it a lot. Maybe I got played. And how digital dollars move through creator monetization. So yes, there's a story that YouTube is adopting stablecoins. But the bigger story maybe is that PayPal, which launched PyUSD a long time ago, is really trying to find ways to get it used because they know that this is what's happening. And Visa and MasterCard also both have their own stablecoin plans. Right.
- [25:22]
B
I think they're, they're victims of their own success in that, you know, PayPal wasn't the top leader in the space. Right. So it could take a bigger risk without it having to cannibalize a larger, more profitable business. Whereas if your Visa, you know, it's like the institutional imperative, every positive thing they do for a stablecoin internally comes at the expense of this profitable cash carrying business is one of the best businesses, business models of all time. And so institutionally there's just, there's just so much resistance to setting up a new product that cannibalizes that internally. And so I think they are really going to struggle and it's just they're a victim of their own success.
- [26:03]
A
Yeah, I think everything's going to move to stablecoins, I really do. And you can see that the banks agree because they're fighting so hard to like stop it. Yeah, yeah.
- [26:14]
B
Don't, don't, don't, don't let the stable coin issuers pay rewards out to people. But I did see, was it the, the OCC granted what, five charters last week to the, to this.
- [26:30]
A
Coinbase. I don't know who the fifth one, I'm just guessing. I actually can't remember who the fifth was. But yeah, that was the group. I asked Dante about that yesterday. Being able to really be a trust and custody these assets safely, it means.
- [26:42]
B
They can custody assets themselves. So it makes Circle allow Circle and others to be more vertically integrated. They now don't have to outsource custody. So it's a positive step for them. And then the next step from there would then be being able to take deposits. And I think, you know, it's open, open to debate whether the government or the regulators will allow them to eventually just become banks themselves who can take deposits and originate loans or whether they want to keep them kind of pure, you know, in a more pure form as just stable coin issuers who take, you know, only, only hold T bill assets and super safe assets.
- [27:21]
A
Yeah, I, I mean I asked Dante about this kind of yesterday obviously because it was such high hot news and I think some of them will really Want to be banks. I think maybe a circle and others will want to are perfectly happy to stop at the trust and then integrate into the banks and make money actually from the existing banks rather than compete. I agree. Part of their potential income is to be the company that a huge bank decides to work with to launch their own stablecoin or to handle yield or all of these things. That's probably a more profitable business than being the bank themselves.
- [27:57]
B
I agree being a bank isn't necessarily a great business. I mean JP Morgan is a terrific business but for the average bank it's not super profitable. And you have regulatory capital constraints, you have liquidity restraints. Most of them don't make more than a 10 to 15% return on equity. Whereas a stablecoin issuer, Tether is the most profitable company in the world per employee. Circle makes software like margins. It's a better business being that rather than a conventional bank.
- [28:25]
A
I think I'm really wondering what's going to happen to a lot of stable coins when rates inevitably come way down. They make, you know, I mean you're betting on a stablecoin company, especially I guess a public traded one is just kind of like a interest rate bet, isn't it?
- [28:41]
B
Potentially, unless, unless they start introducing like interchange so mint and burn fees, transaction fees, that type of thing. I think potentially that's a race to zero. However, that, that would be the other angle. They just kind of look to what came before in the, the payment processing.
- [28:55]
A
Companies or launch a blockchain. Right. Yeah, I mean stripes do, that's the other thing.
- [29:00]
B
But, but again it's unclear to me that the blockchains make, make the money.
- [29:05]
A
Yeah.
- [29:05]
B
Why wouldn't blockchain fees get competed to zero?
- [29:09]
A
I, I think blockchain fees get competed to zero. I at some point triggered the XRP army in a comment about that recently and Joel Katz, David Schwartz, I don't know which one he goes by, but the CTO I think of Ripple basically came in and made that argument that he was like. When we were talking about the value of xrp it was like, well you think that eventually this becomes commoditized and arbed away where the fees are zero and tokens accrue nothing on that side. And I'm like scratching my head thinking it's not exactly a great case for anyone's token in this situation. Right.
- [29:42]
B
Yeah. They're a little ahead of the curve of everyone else though because they've been investing in other businesses. So they have, you know, they have diversified revenue streams.
- [29:51]
A
Yeah. So you mentioned this earlier and I don't want to. I want to make sure that we talk about it. So you, you brought up the Clarity act before and said that that could be a potential catalyst. This story is just another in a series of similar ones. But crypto industry insiders met with key senators on market structure, bill negotiation. So we know this is not getting done this year. It was originally supposed to be done by July or August. That was punted. Then we had a government shutdown. Obviously nothing was getting done. Now we're getting to go time because if they don't get this done, we're going to hit midterm season and a lot of other bigger stories are going to be in the news and it's going to get forgotten. But in the past few weeks, we've had not only crypto industry insiders meeting with key senators a number of times, we've also had actually like Moynihan and the CEOs of major banks meeting about crypto legislation. How important, I guess is the Clarity act in your mind? I mean, you guys dance around this regulatory like situation constantly. So how important is the Clarity Act? And do, more importantly, do you think that could actually be like a alt season or a crypto bull run catalyst?
- [30:59]
B
It's a good question. I mean, potentially it could be. It could be a catalyst, I think. I mean a lot of the catalysts we've seen tend to be kind of bottom up rather than top down. But the legislation itself is super important. The conversations I've had suggest that it could get done in Q1 next year based on what insiders are saying and some of the meetings happening. I understand it's already gone through the House, it's in the Senate, and then I think it goes back to the House. And then once the two forms of the bill are aligned, then it can get signed into law. But it's extremely important for allowing traditional institutions to come in and also for players like us to offer our more defi native products in the US or at least to have a pathway to offer those in the US Whether it's what kind of disclosures need to be provided, risk controls, sandbox treatment, what have you. But it's worth noting, much of the US has been kept out of the defi market. They're blocked from using the websites, they're blocked from accessing most defi products, and ultimately they're the, you know, it's the biggest capital market in the world and it's where everyone wants to be.
- [32:10]
A
Yeah, I think the Clarity act is really, really important, obviously, maybe for Price, I don't really know, but I just think that we are inevitably going to see.
- [32:20]
B
I think it's important for fundamentals as well. Like, I think it'll drive a lot more, you know, profits and revenues in the sector, which hopefully, if we're moving into a world of, you know, fundamental investments, helps Price.
- [32:32]
A
Yeah, that's exactly what I was thinking. And then I guess the kind of third level of that is we never know what the political environment in the United States is going to look like more than a year ahead or two years ahead. Right. And so, like, if the pendulum swings and we just have executive orders and some statements from regulators and we don't have a irreversible law on the books, things can become very, very problematic again. I mean, we've seen this movie before. We saw people that were willing to try building in the United States when it was a bit more Wild West. Then we got a very contentious sort of regulatory regime. Everybody left the United States. Now they're, like, dipping their toes back in and cautiously coming back. But imagine like, you bring all your operations back to New York City, you know, for crypto, and then Elizabeth Warren gets back in power and we get another Gary Gensler, and all of a sudden everything you did for the last four years is, like, illegal.
- [33:23]
B
Yeah. Yeah. Well, I see. I think, you know, that's where things like no action letters or guidance and statements by the SEC are still held helpful, even if they're not law. But definitely the best thing that can happen, you know, during this administration is to get some kind of law in place to govern all of this so that we can't have, you know, a reversal and a return to, you know, what did the court call it? Arbitrary and capricious behavior.
- [33:47]
A
Capricious, yeah. That was the grayscale or ripple, one of those.
- [33:51]
B
Yeah.
- [33:52]
A
Great, Great term. So Clarity act could be a catalyst. I mean, as we kind of wrap up the year, it's obviously been underwhelming as a. For a function of price action. I think a lot of people just very unhappy with the October and November that we were supposed to get. The cycle we were promised. I mean, how do you kind of frame 2026 in your mind? I'm not asking you to make, like, grand price predictions or anything, but just, you know.
- [34:21]
B
I'm quietly optimistic. Look, I think, you know, we're seeing things like the inflation print. The macro picture is getting a little bit bit better. I think we spent most of the year under the pole of, you know, Tariffs and, and geopolitical strife. So I think seeing a, seeing a return to, to more stable conditions in 2026 would be beneficial. I can see more rate cuts coming and then I think if we get the Clarity act and you know, and we get more movement from TRADFI into crypto, then I think you can see, you know, I could see Bitcoin pushing north of 150 into the 150 to 200k range. Now that's not necessarily what it's all about, but I do think, you know, everybody talks about is the four year cycle dead? I think as it, you know, as we kind of institutionalize this space, it's inevitable that that four year cycle is, is, you know, going to become less important and you know, and it'll just be about as, as the crypto is dead article said. It's just going to be about fundamental companies that make strong revenues and have products that people like and those companies don't need to be worried about where we are in a four year cycle for how they're going to be valued.
- [35:30]
A
Yeah, I guess that the question mark for the people who've been here for a long time are used to being able to YOLO into a token and make 100x gains. How does that trickle down to the investment side for your average crypto enthusiast? I mean it's really exciting to see the DTTC adopt blockchain technology and Canton and SEC's comments, but can I make money on any of this?
- [35:58]
B
Well, I think, I think the, the retail investor was a little bit screwed over the last 12 months you had meme coins. The if you set up an account on an exchange earlier in the year you were going to get flooded with 50 or 100 different meme coins and you're going to lose money on pretty much all them. It was just a casino. So I think, whereas I think now, you know, for the new investor in 2026, they should focus on just investing in leaders in each category who, you know, who are going to have strong revenue growth over the next 12 months. Already the VCs and the liquid funds are starting to focus more on revenue rather than overall TVL or AUM or just kind of what's a hot narrative. So I think for the average retail investors they should just focus on investing in the category leaders in any given sector, whether it's defi or perps or prediction markets.
- [36:49]
A
Yeah, maybe it's just going to be buying a bunch of index funds from Bitwise and such that are like defi blue chips and top 10 market cap and things like that. And people will just look for broad exposure and not try to pick individual winners.
- [37:05]
B
By token, Warren Buffett says just buy the S&P 500 for most people is kind of the best option and dollar cost average.
- [37:13]
A
Yeah, I think with it we, we've seen a lot of be careful what you wish for. Like all the years of cheering for this level of institutional adoption and a lot of people who've been here from the beginning sort of got left behind financially.
- [37:25]
B
Yeah, well, it's like, it's like. Well they say, I mean the, the, the. The pioneers or the explorers end up with the arrows in their backs.
- [37:34]
A
That's right. Good job for us. So that's so absolutely true. I also happen to believe that. And you even sort of kind of passively said, you know, predictive markets making a lot of money. Perp Dex is making a lot of money. So clearly like speculation is still where the money is made in crypto. I have a very bad feeling that predictive markets that are non crypto native are going to steal a hell of a lot of the liquidity from crypto that people used to use to speculate. Like if back then you couldn't really gamble if you were a 19 year old kid somewhere, but you could go find a decentralized exchange and flip mean coin or something. Now you can go gamble on like the game or the weather or the pod or what word I'm gonna say to end the show. Right. I mean these things are. It's completely nonsense and probably the sign of end times when people feel that compelled to speculate on everything.
- [38:29]
B
The financialization of everything. It's. Yeah, it's nihilistic.
- [38:34]
A
It is nihilistic.
- [38:35]
B
Any.
- [38:35]
A
Anything else I might have missed? Anything else coming from Maple that you want to mention before I let you go?
- [38:41]
B
No, for us, I mean look our, you know, we're talking about fundamentals before our targets for 2026 are, you know, we're shooting for 100 mil ARR. And expect to see from us we'll have more partnerships. You know, we've done a lot with AAVE lately, so more partnerships on the D5 side expanding to more chains and then we are always working to bring Tradfi more into the space. We're working on a securitization type deal at the moment. But I'm very interested in using things like that to bring traditional investors in which ultimately grows the pie for the rest of us.
- [39:17]
A
I think it's fair to say that Safyield is back and maybe we can finally not consider it a four letter word and think about yield only in the context of Celsius, Blockfi and Voyager. Right?
- [39:31]
B
Yeah.
- [39:32]
A
Well, thank you, Sid. I forgot to put the names up there. I totally blew it. Look, I'm going to do it really fast. Sometimes I forget if I can figure it out. So. See guys. Sid. Pal Syrup. Sid on. On X. I'll never like, you know, yesterday, like technology has basically abstracted away our memory and ability.
- [39:53]
B
Yeah. Yeah.
- [39:53]
A
When I was a kid, I had to remember everyone's phone number. Now I don't know anyone's phone number. I always remember your ex.
- [39:59]
B
I love it. I love it.
- [40:00]
A
Always, always. And I joke about it. I think every time it's probably becoming redundant. All right, Sid, man, thank you so much. I hope you have a thanks for having me, Scott. Can't wait to have you back in 2026 and see how many of our thoughts and predictions about what's likely to come are true.
- [40:14]
B
Yeah, beautiful. Love it. All right, take care.
- [40:18]
A
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