Fed & Banks Back Crypto! What’s Next? | CryptoTownHall

Summary

The Wolf Of All Streets — CryptoTownHall

Episode: Fed & Banks Back Crypto! What’s Next?

Host: Scott Melker
Date: October 22, 2025

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Overview

This episode of CryptoTownHall, hosted by Scott Melker and featuring regulars like Dave, Carlo, Gary, Joe, and several others, centers around pivotal changes in U.S. monetary policy and the banking sector’s stance toward crypto. The panel discusses the unprecedented openness of the Federal Reserve toward digital assets, the technical and regulatory evolution surrounding stablecoins, the role of banks and fintechs, the ongoing debate around CBDCs (Central Bank Digital Currencies), market reactions to current events, and the fate of various crypto tokens and altcoins.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. A Major Shift: The Fed’s Open Embrace of Crypto

• Fed Governor Waller’s Shift:
  The group opens by dissecting what Dave calls a “pivotal day” in which Federal Reserve Governor Waller signaled support for integrating crypto into the mainstream, moving away from previous dismissive or hostile stances.
  • Quote [04:06 | Carlo]:
    "Incredible what we witnessed yesterday, Fed Chair Waller... was very receptive to innovation, very open minded. The fact that he wants to open up the Fed Master account to... qualifying payment processors is incredible news for stablecoins and for innovation."
• Implications for Stablecoins:
  There’s excitement about the Fed considering “skinny” master accounts (narrow access to Fed systems) for regulated fintechs/crypto processors, which would be monumental for stablecoin development and integration.
• Vindication for Custodia & Caitlin Long:
  Scott highlights that this move vindicates early actors like Caitlin Long and Custodia Bank, who have been fighting for Federal Reserve access for years.
  • Quote [06:48 | Scott]:
    "This is pretty crazy vindication for her... that there will likely be some sort of connection to the Fed system for fintechs, crypto and others without them having to go through the rigmarole of getting that full master account."

2. Stablecoin Technology, Privacy & Market Impact

• Stablecoins as Payment Infrastructure:
  Both Dave and Carlo predict stablecoins will become the backbone of future payment rails, being treated more like utilities (boring but necessary, with stable revenue and lower multiples).
  • Quote [08:27 | Dave]:
    "Stable coins… will be utility... the tech underneath… will be utility style valuations because that is literally where the market is kind of pushing it to."
• Privacy & Zero-Knowledge Proofs:
  Carlo emphasizes the need for privacy solutions, like zero-knowledge proofs, to make stablecoins viable for enterprise payment operations so businesses’ financials remain confidential.
  • Quote [10:32 | Carlo]:
    "I think businesses would like to have that same layer of anonymity when it comes to what’s in their stablecoin wallets when they’re paying vendors and moving money around. Because that’s just proprietary stuff that they don’t necessarily want the whole world to be able to see on chain."
• Effects on Banks & Payment Processors:
  If banks and fintechs fail to integrate these innovations, they'll lose customer deposits to those who offer faster, cheaper services.

3. CBDCs vs. Private Stablecoins: Will Crypto Become Dystopian?

• CBDC Fears & Devil’s Advocacy:
  Scott and Carlo voice unease about rooting for the Fed, and worry the same infrastructure enabling private stablecoins could easily facilitate a retail, highly surveilled, programmable central bank digital currency.
  • Quote [13:45 | Scott]:
    "I just find it a little uncomfortable cheering for the Fed... Fed adoption of blockchain technology does not necessarily mean a ringing endorsement of crypto assets for retail."
• Debate: USDC is Already Like CBDC?
  Lou pushes back, arguing that government control over stablecoins like USDC is already functionally similar to a CBDC’s potential controls.
  • Quote [16:10 | Lou]:
    "What about a CBDC is more dystopian than USDC today?"
• Response:
  Dave, Scott, and Gary suggest there are degrees, and while Circle/Tether have complied with law enforcement, a true CBDC would make programmatic restrictions and surveillance instantaneous and unavoidable at a systemic level.
  • Quote [17:05 | Dave]:
    "Once you have a centrally controlled currency that’s programmable, they can absolutely track what you’re spending it on, 100%."
• CBDCs as a Crypto On-ramp:
  Despite concerns, several guests predict CBDCs will actually accelerate global digital wallet adoption, educating people who may migrate to “harder” assets like Bitcoin.

4. Market Dynamics: Beyond Meat, Coinbase, and Altcoin Collapse

• Meme Stock Cycle Returns:
  Scott brings up the parabolic move in Beyond Meat stock, linking it to the return of retail-driven meme stock cycles.
  • Quote [02:16 | Scott]:
    "We might be back into the meme stock cycle of the meme stock part of the cycle."
• Coinbase Decline & Market Boredom:
  The table discusses Coinbase’s 6% drop and the broader lack of excitement in crypto, suggesting this is a cyclical pause rather than any change in fundamentals.
• Altcoin Apocalypse:
  Joe notes the collapse of Kadena, once a top-10 layer 1, and predicts the death of many projects unable to generate real revenue beyond token sales.
  • Quote [43:23 | Joe]:
    "The majority of tokens you see today will not exist in the future, but there will be many more tokens in the future than exist today... probably have a 6% retention rate."
• Valuations & Regulatory Change:
  Dave and Joe propose that reforming securities laws (especially the Accredited Investor Rule) would allow for a true market sorting of crypto projects, with only a small subset gaining real value.

5. Banking Rails, Fedwire, and Payment Technology

• Future of Fedwire & ACH Networks:
  Constantine asks about the fate of traditional payment rails. Dave believes Fedwire will evolve, probably adopting blockchain tech under the hood, while bank business models (especially for smaller banks) must adapt to new fee-based structures.
  • Quote [40:17 | Dave]:
    "Fed Wire will just morph... They don’t make money off it... Ach, will... leave the wrapper, but it’ll just be replaced by stablecoins. The bigger difference here is that banks, business models are going to need to change."

6. Tokenization & Asset Management

• Wall Street’s Incentive for Tokenization:
  Dave explains why major asset managers (e.g., Larry Fink/BlackRock) are pushing both Bitcoin ETFs and tokenization: cost savings, more asset flows, and control.
  • Quote [29:12 | Dave]:
    "In a truly fully tokenized world that the ETF structure is not going to be nearly as desirable... it’ll cut your back office costs in half, if not 75%. By the way, those are huge numbers for people on Wall Street."
• Stablecoins as Trojan Horse:
  Carlo and Dave agree stablecoins are the “Trojan horse” for mass crypto adoption, as people become comfortable with digital dollars first.
• Importance of Regulatory Clarity:
  The regulatory environment remains unclear, but speakers believe a convergence of securities/tokens could clarify what projects have real staying power.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Market Priorities vs. Real News:
  [01:11 | Dave]: "I just think it's peak silliness when one TV character's bloviations... get more press than the most iconic... powerful body in monetary regulation effectively blesses crypto."
• On CBDC risk: [15:17 | Dave]: "CBDC is the most dystopian thing that could possibly happen."
• CBDCs and Stablecoin Overlap Debate: [19:33 | Gary]: "Personally, I think stablecoin is no different than CBDC... Any linkage to anything else should be described, like, in great clarity."
• Token Valuation Reality: [45:07 | Dave]: "FTT token, FTX token is still worth double Del Taco... It has less value than trading baseball cards."

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 00:00–04:00 — Scott’s role, Kramer’s comments, market overreactions
• 04:06–08:27 — Fed and banking system shift, stablecoins as infrastructure, privacy technology
• 10:32–13:45 — Impact on business payments, stablecoin adoption, regulatory transitions
• 13:45–15:17 — CBDC concerns, Fed endorsement, privacy issues
• 16:10–19:33 — Debate: USDC vs CBDC, government control
• 22:57–26:17 — Payment tech evolution, ETF vs tokenization, stablecoins as bridge
• 29:12–32:12 — Wall Street tokenization incentives, mass adoption paths
• 34:15–39:07 — Market stories: Beyond Meat, Coinbase, boredom, capital flows
• 43:23–45:07 — Altcoin problems, token/project death cycles, value discernment
• 50:06–56:15 — Profits, rates, risk, company turnarounds and management
• 56:15–60:12 — Final rants on management, ego, and proper company strategy

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Conclusions & Takeaways

• The Federal Reserve’s stance on crypto marks a historic turning point; the opening of Fed master account access to payment processors and fintechs could supercharge stablecoin innovation and adoption.
• The infrastructure being built for stablecoins could, for better or worse, also pave the way for a U.S. CBDC, raising important privacy and freedom questions.
• Banks and legacy payment platforms may face existential challenges if they fail to adapt quickly to blockchain rails.
• Transition periods will be messy: many altcoins and projects will fail, while stablecoins and Bitcoin continue to represent the mass-market bridge to the “Internet of Value.”
• There's a consensus that technology, regulation, and market demands are forcing financial institutions to evolve, even if the path is unclear or outcomes uneven.

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Panel’s Final Message:
Crypto’s foundations are rapidly being built into the traditional financial system. The jury is out regarding what the eventual mix will look like, but privacy, utility-over-hype, and thoughtful regulation are becoming more central than ever.

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Transcript

[Dave]

Good morning, everyone. Welcome to Crypto town hall. We are glitching again. Scott can't seem to become a co host. Scott, I see you as a listener. Are you a speaker?

[Scott]

I think I'm a speaker. Can you hear me?

[Dave]

Yeah, yeah, I hear you fine. Can't see you, but whatever, you know, take the bad with the good. So this morning is, is, is fascinating to me. You know, we dumped a little bit yesterday. We're still cleaning up from what happened with Gold yesterday. We had what is going to be, I think at some point in the next few years considered to be a pivotal day occur where we actually went from a Federal Reserve that effectively was either dismissive or outright hostile to bitcoin and crypto to hosting and basically saying that crypto is going to be part of the mainstream and the market not caring at all, which at the same time, Sorry, Scott, you were one of them. I counted five crypto influencers all jumping on Jim Cramer, making a statement and actually getting it wrong.

[Scott]

If I jumped on Kramer, it was my news team. I don't even know what you're talking about.

[Dave]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, your news team. Kramer did a post and he said that crypto is likely to surge today, but people are going to get hurt, so you should trim I. In other words, telling people to fade the rally. Okay, it's reasonable. I mean, even by Kramer standards, that's somewhat reasonable. But. But your news team and five other crypto influencers didn't bother reading to the end of this post and just saw crypto is going to surge today and posted it. Which of course created all sorts of oh no, here we go again. Sort of, you know, death and disaster moments. And you know, I just think it's peak silliness when one TV characters bloviations, even when he actually says the opposite of what people think get more press than the most iconic. And we could argue lots of people would say evil, others would say other things. But certainly iconic and powerful body in monetary regulation effectively blesses crypto as having a part of the financial system and that one doesn't even get talked about. I just find that amazing. I mean, am I alone? Anyway, what does anybody else think here?

[Scott]

What I find more amazing is that beyond meat is going parabolic to the upside and we might be back into the meme stock cycle of the meme stock part of the cycle.

[Dave]

Why is Beyond Meat going up? I haven't been following Bill Gates like, you know, get to be able to make us all eat bugs again.

[Scott]

To what I understand, it's literally just one of these pumpable, heavily shortened dead stocks that's getting pumped on the actual stock market.

[Dave]

Yeah, well, that happens. But usually a signal. Usually. Well, I mean, look, you know, it's like the seasonality stuff is gonna die here. You know, we're in October and you know, whether you call it October or whether you call it Crashtober, whatever, you know, it's unlikely that anything major is going to happen. Of course, now that I've said that watch markets are perverse. Just to be clear, I haven't put any money on nothing happening. I haven't done anything. So it's, it is interesting, right? You know, we, we get these periods of time when people are so desperate to create a catalyst that, you know, the stuff that does get airtime gets, you know, it gets way over exaggerated. That's basically what, you know, what I'm seeing. I mean, curious. I mean, I mean I see, I can't tell who's in, in the audience versus who is speaking, of course, but whatever.

[Scott]

I don't see any hands and you have me as a listener, so I don't know.

[Dave]

Yeah. So Carlo, you've given a couple of emojis so you could say your good mornings and get started. But what do you think about the. Because the other story that, that is worth talking about and I'm sure you're going to care about it, is what Coinbase said in terms of base and stable coins being your main topic. But I think that's actually pretty important also. And I also think people in crypto don't really understand what it means.

[Carlo]

Well, first off, good morning, Scott.

[Scott]

Good morning, Carlos.

[Carlo]

Glad to be here. I have to share your sentiment, Dave. Incredible what we witnessed yesterday, Fed Chair Waller, Fed Governor Waller was very receptive to innovation, very open minded. He acknowledged in his closing remarks that every time he does these things he learns more and realizes how much more there is to learn about digital assets. So I love that he's curious. The fact that he wants to open up the Fed Master account to what he called a skinny Fed Master account for qualifying payment processors is incredible news for stablecoins and for innovation. Also, I would encourage everyone to check out Eleanor Terrence interview with Chair Waller that she did on her Crypto America podcast yesterday because he kind of went into greater detail about how he views yield on stablecoins and he pretty much regards stablecoins as being a payment processing vehicle and that they should not be used for yield. So he defers to Congress on all of this, of course, but he's kind of tilted or at least tipped his hand as how he feels about the subject. I'm also excited to see what Coinbase is doing because I think one of the things we have to solve when it comes to really integrating stablecoins as a payment processing rail for businesses is a zero knowledge proof layer because I don't think businesses will be comfortable with their addresses being disclosed, their identities being disclosed, and how much they've got in their stablecoin wallets being disclosed. And zero knowledge proofs may be a viable solution to all of that. And then we had the news yesterday from Caitlin Long that I know you shared as well, that she hinted that there is a possibility of having a dual purpose rail under the stablecoin payment solutions where they can weave in and out of being depository tokens and pure stable coins. If she's got the proprietary rights to something like that, I think banks are going to pay dearly to get access to that kind of tech. So that is also very interesting. And then lastly I launched the podcast stablecoin Solutions and episode one is that big round table I had with Caitlin where she actually kind of shared a little bit of alpha about all of this. So with your permission guys, I would love to share a link to that first episode.

[Scott]

Now go ahead, put it up above.

[Carlo]

And then I will mute because I think that's enough and that's all good stuff.

[Scott]

I would say also to the Caitlyn Long side of this. Those who have been following the Custodia bank saga. She tried to get a master account for a fully backed non fractionally reserved bank and was rejected and has actually been suing the Fed for years. So this is pretty crazy vindication for her for Kraken a lot that are trying to get master accounts that there will likely be some sort of connection to the Fed system for fintechs, crypto and others without them having to go through the rigmarole of getting that full master account. I mean she felt very vindicated, I could tell. Clearly getting a lot more patents I think I saw as well. So this hopefully will be a huge win for her and for Custodia and she can stop suing the Fed now if this actually happens, right Carlo?

[Carlo]

Yeah, look, I think she, she acknowledged that she was very happy to see Fed Governor Waller express this interest and she actually kind of, you know, discussed this possibility of access to non bank entities to to the Fed Master and Waller has seemed to be receptive to this. So this is encouraging because this is going to mean that you just don't have qualified banks and bank charters that can get access to this now they can't get access to the full suite of services. He made that very clear. But he's open to a fast track option and a simplified streamline option for payment processors, which does create an interesting paradigm shift here.

[Dave]

So how do you look at the base announcement in parallel with that or along with that? I know what I think, but I'm just curious from your perspective and it feels to me like Stable Coins, the underlying tech for stablecoins is going to ultimately be something you want to value the same way you value utilities, which are not terribly exciting, don't get really great multiples but you know, they're, they're assets. They are, they are what they are. But it feels very much like stablecoins will that the tech underneath Staples at least and a lot of this, this payment rail stuff will be utility should have utility style valuations because that is literally where the market is kind of pushing it to. I mean, am I crazy with this? Because certainly the crypto market doesn't look at it that way. By the way, this is not a bad thing for lots of assets, certainly the companies that operate it, and certainly the ability to invest. One of the things that people don't understand is once this utility is built and once this all actually works, it means that platforms will easily be able to offer payment services, meaning you can have your, your whatever, your Zell, your Venmo, whatever tied to an account you could pay your bills on, auto pay, do whatever the heck you want, much lower fees, much lower costs and at the same time with your excess cash, save and whatever the hell you want to save in including anything that's tokenized anyway, including obviously Bitcoin or, or funds or you know, whatever. And, and it feels to me like that is a major force multiplier both economically and for part of the crypto space. But other tokens in the crypto space one has to question what are their valuations because the technology itself would be commoditized. And so it's really a question of differentiated versus commoditized tech that in crypto you need to figure out. I don't think a lot of people are looking at it. Certainly most of what you see on X about crypto doesn't even think about trying to figure the difference out.

[Carlo]

I can't disagree with anything that you're saying because I think what we're seeing here is we're seeing the plumbing being laid for consumer to consumer movement of stablecoins which is then going to translate to B2B. And it's going to be a viable alternative if you integrate this stuff into everyone's wallets. And look, we're already seeing that. I mean, you have, you have stablecoin options and things like Cash App and PayPal and so forth. So it's just further reinforcing that moving money is going to be digitized and it's going to move faster, cheaper, more efficiently. And the banks and fintechs that adapt to this are going to win. And the ones that fail to adapt are going to lose customer deposits because there's going to be much more attractive options. And that's why I'm out there preaching this very thing. Why are you still processing payments the same old fashioned way when you can expedite this entire thing? And like I said, adding that ZK layer to this is what I think will be very appealing because nobody knows what's in your bank account. And I think businesses would like to have that same layer of anonymity when it comes to what's in their stablecoin wallets when they're paying vendors and moving money around. Because that's just proprietary stuff that they don't necessarily want the whole world to be able to see on chain.

[Dave]

I mean, that is not a trivial point. It's not just about money. It's also when you talk about real world assets, right? On chain, particularly equities, there's an entire structure for obfuscation of ownership in equities for very, very good reasons. Right? When someone's acquiring a large position, they don't want the world to know about it until they're done. For obvious reasons. There's rules like 13F filings where at certain thresholds you have to declare, but that doesn't work if everything is 100% transparent. So all this technology is necessary for lots of reasons. It helps liquidity, it helps capital formation, et cetera. And what's interesting about it is these are solved problems from a tech point of view. I mean, maybe not the finishing touches, the UI, UX, etc. But they're solved problems. And yet people in the traditional financial markets go, oh well, this won't work because. And they don't even know. So it was incredibly interesting to me that of all people, a Fed governor understood the underlying technology that can make that kind of systematic obfuscation by design work. Right? I mean, it's funny to think that there are people at the Fed who actually understand this better than the average person who runs electronic trading or does research or quantitative trading on Wall street. But there, there we are.

[Carlo]

And I love the fact that he's curious and that he gets it and that he understands that there's been a complete change in the tone towards this, towards this sector. It's not about stifling and killing it and pushing it offshore. It's about integrating it and bringing blockchain technology into the banking system and revamping what is really antiquated tech that we've been using since the 70s is, is just amazing to me. I, I could not be more excited about the future of, of stablecoins and what they can do.

[Scott]

I agree. I think it's worth playing devil's advocate though on the other side. I think the adoption is incredible. I just find it a little uncomfortable cheering for the Fed.

[Dave]

Oh yeah.

[Scott]

And I also think that Fed adoption of blockchain technology does not necessarily mean a ringing endorsement of crypto assets for retail. So that's not necessarily investable and does not necessarily make your assets go up as retail. And C. And I'm not one of the doomers about this, but it's definitely a step towards a central bank digital currency if ever they decided to pursue one.

[Carlo]

Yeah, look, I don't think it'll be called a CBDC and we've talked about this, Dave and Scott, that this is not technically a CBDC platform because you have private issuers, but you also do have steep regulation, steep oversight. KYC aml so it's not too far to say that you're gonna have a heavy handed approach to monitoring this stuff and to tracking it. But the thing is, and it's, yeah.

[Scott]

It'S just laying the plumbing is what I'm saying. It's not that that's the intention. I'm just saying if they ever decide to turn it on, it ain't gonna take long.

[Carlo]

Exactly. Especially if, as we're seeing in other sectors, you have the White House sort of bringing private sector into the fold and sort of cooperating with private sector. You could easily see something like that happen in a worst case scenario. No question.

[Dave]

Yeah, I mean, look, I'm on record as saying the CBDC would be. Is financial is the most dystopian thing that could possibly happen. Thankfully there are some people in our government who agree and a lot of people in America who don't want cash to go away. And honestly, you know, we'll see how this all plays out. But what does need to happen? And there was a good post about this by someone I've seen it before. I've said the same thing. If you're, you want to understand what gets you to the steps that are required to get to Bitcoin as the base layer for the Internet of value. If you want to know what's going to be there, one of the things that absolutely has to happen is all monetary movements and frictions associated with buying, selling Bitcoin, holding Bitcoin, et cetera, go away. Has to happen. And you know. Yep.

[Lou]

Just real quick, just go back. What, what about a CBDC is more dystopian than USDC today.

[Dave]

The fact that the government, without any disclosure, can program it such that you can. What you can spend it on. In fact, they're talking about doing that in Europe right now. They're basically saying your carbon allotment, which you can track by a social credit score. And so you can't, oh, you've driven too many miles this week, you can't buy gas or you've driven too many miles this week, you can't, you know, you know, in my case, use the charging station on your car on, you know, for this currency. Or you've had too much beef this week, you know, why don't you try beyond beef, which is maybe why, you know, whatever. Anyway, I don't want to go.

[Lou]

And, and the CBDC is going to track how much beef you eat. I don't understand.

[Dave]

Well, it can, you know, once you, once you have a centrally controlled currency that's programmable, they can absolutely track what you're spending it on, 100%.

[Lou]

And so you don't think that they know what you're spending USDC on. My point is, we are already. Whatever you think is possible under a CBDC is possible today with USDC. And I think by shitting on CNBC BDCs, you are sitting on what is likely to be the biggest educator of crypto to most of the world. And I'm all for crypto education, even if it's cbc.

[Dave]

Well, we can agree to disagree. I think it's actually an interesting conversation, but there is a very, very large difference between private, competitive, stable coins.

[Lou]

The government can tell you. The government can tell Circle whatever it wants. And Circle will do whatever the government wants, full stop. Circle has never said to the government, no, we will not do that.

[Dave]

No, but it becomes it. It, it is a hell of a lot easier for that.

[Scott]

They could, if they wanted to see your purchases, Lou, it's a little different than they can see all purchases today.

[Lou]

They can see all your purchases on your MasterCard on your Visa. So this dystopian future that you guys are talking, they're already.

[Dave]

But they can't block it.

[Lou]

Yes, they can. They can take your USDC if they want to. Oh, well, they've taken USDC before.

[Gary]

They got.

[Lou]

When you say they can't block it.

[Scott]

They can block it so fast.

[Lou]

Exactly.

[Gary]

Like if they want to turn you off, they turn you off. They've turned entire countries off with a click of a switch.

[Lou]

Thank you.

[Gary]

Like Russia. So look, I think that this is an interesting conversation because, I mean, what, what this gentleman's saying is, hey, look, we're saying CBDCs are bad. Personally, I think stablecoin is no different than CBDC1. The name alone is grossly misleading. It is a linked coin. Immediately when they call it stable, I'm like, why are they doing that? They're trying to hoodwink people into believing this is stable. It's not. It's a link coin. Any linkage to anything else should be described, like, in great clarity, Hey, I am linked to this, you know, project and it could fall apart. So, you know, I, I agree, man. I think Circle, coinbase Finance will do whatever they're told to do by the US Government. We're kind of pretending that that's not going to happen.

[Scott]

I don't know. I'm not, I'm not like, just to play devil's advocate. I think that Circle obviously and Tether have complied with the United States government when there's been fraud or criminal activity. I'm not sure that Circle would open your wallet to the government for every single transaction if you're on a dex. And it just. I'm not sure. Peer to peer, I'm not sure if they would do that. I can't say that they necessarily won't. But I don't think we have evidence that they have, do we? Am I missing something?

[Gary]

Look, yeah, I think the question though, is the peer to peer market that big? Because I don't think the peer to peer market is as big as people say it is.

[Dave]

Well defined peer to peer market, Gary. I mean, like, we're not Italy, okay. In Italy, at varying. People will basically tell you that the black market, the peer to peer market, the cash market, whatever, is as much as 50% of GDP, but that's because of the insane regulatory structure and tax structure, etc. I have no idea what the overall cash market is in the United States, but it's definitely an integer and it's probably double digits.

[Gary]

Well, what they, what they did in Europe, though, Is they, they, they've removed, I think the largest note you can buy now is 50 pounds sterling. They're going to get rid of that. Okay. Once you get rid of those big dollars, big denominators, you really stop the, you know, peer to peer fraud that you're referring to. I mean I, I love cash. See I think cash is our friend, it's bitcoin's friend because cash is the real problem around fraud. It's not crypto. But, but Scott, I just think this, this is a very good conversation. CBDC stablecoins versus Bitcoin, like are they going to coexist? I don't see bitcoin doing this without stable coins and CBDCs you're going to just get blocked and dropped and it's going to be a world where we live in. I just think it's a transitory space we're going through right now. It shouldn't be frightening. And I think CBDCs will educate because one, they're coming but they will educate the user.

[Scott]

I agree with that over digital wallet.

[Gary]

And that will be good.

[Scott]

So I've had this debate in that side of the conversation as well. And there is a world where CBDCs are not like this dystopian tool. Chris Giancarlo, who was obviously the head of the cftc, many called it crystal crypto dad trying to remember the name of it, the Amer, the digital dollar product project, something like that. He has a non profit going around the world trying to educate potential issuers of CBDCs on how to include the same kind of privacies that you would have from normal fiat money or cash. So there is a world where we have a central bank digital currency but the proper people put the proper privacy protections in place. Just hard to imagine that that would be the environment where it happens. So I do think that there's a big jump from a private stable coin to the fully dystopian CBDC where they're airdropping you your stimulus checks or like Dave said, they're penalizing you social credits which we know they will do in China for things you spend on or they're literally just saying hey this is your tax bill that we've calculated for you and remove it from your wallet.

[Dave]

Yeah, I mean Gary, I think this might be an interesting Tuesday evening conversation. You know, your cardone debates. I think that would count me and.

[Scott]

Gary's coming to my house. Gary's coming to my house tomorrow to record.

[Dave]

Yeah, you certainly could. But the one thing that I think we all agree on, and this is what really matters here, is that as these technologies advance and the UI UX improves, the user experience improves and the ability to transfer from pay a payment account to an investment account. Isn't anyone who does this at banks, you know, if you have Citi or whatever, I mean, I have Citi. Just transferring money from, from one to the other can take days, I mean literal days. If it's because they wait for everything to settle, etc. And you know, whatever, it's, it's hard you change that to be instant and, or automated. And now all of a sudden people can invest in whatever they want to invest in and they can do it even with automated sweeps. So it will 100% open up investment opportunities for a variety of assets, obviously including Bitcoin, obviously including a lot of other crypto and in fact takes away the need for kind of me too, treasury companies and ETFs where you have to pay a management fee because all of a sudden instead of paying a management fee, you have a much smaller if any custodial fee for the same asset. So you know, you know, people forget and you know, it's like everyone says, well, ETFs, oh my God, look what it's done. Well, the reason people want ETFs is because they can own it in a brokerage account and they don't have to worry about, you know, they lose their treasure, they lose their, their ledger, you know, whatever. They have to use a counterparty that they don't trust and they're happy with that ETF. The reason for the ETFs disappear almost completely, you know, when it becomes ubiquitous that you can have it in the same sort of the same account and actually do payments, et cetera, off of it, you know, and not have to worry about, you know, settling and all this stuff. So the frictional costs and ETFs are lower, much lower than we used to have. But the new world that we're going to in the next five, 10 years will be much lower than that now.

[Carlo]

And look, I've said it too, Dave. I agree. Look, stablecoins are going to be the Trojan horse that are going to open up exposure to crypto. Because if you get consumers comfortable with moving fully regulated, fully audited, one to one backed digital dollars that are going to be stored in wallets, it's going to then transition to interest and curiosity and things like Bitcoin. Which is why I always say, Gary, stacking sats, spend in stables because we still have to Spend with Fiat. No one wants to sell their bitcoin to pay their bills, but they're going to be interested in borrowing against their bitcoin, taking that allocation.

[Gary]

I was pitched last night for an hour by code developers that we should be using Bitco for potato chips. And I'm like, wow, you guys, really?

[Dave]

No way. It was funny, Gary.

[Gary]

Developers that don't understand market adoption.

[Dave]

You've been on multiple how to get. You've been on multiple sites, Gary. Like, you know, some of the bitcoin today is where these guys are saying, well, you know, everything is going to be denominated in bitcoin. You should opt out of the system. And you're like, yeah, dude, but, you know, I want to buy houses, I want to buy cars, I want to buy food. I mean, you know, what are you talking about? It is kind of amusing, right?

[Joe]

That's a developer that doesn't even understand the theoretical maximum of how many transactions can happen on bitcoin in a year. There can only be like 400 million in a year visas doing a billion a day. Like, you just. You can't. Like, that's just not like a physical possibility. It's against the laws of physics. So don't invest.

[Dave]

Well, I mean, yeah, except for if you look at. If you. You look at Fedwire, you'll see that Bitcoin actually is probably faster. And so, you know, it depends on how one does things. But, you know, whatever. I mean, that's. That's another debate. And that could be had.

[Gary]

And Justin, comparing settlement to transaction.

[Scott]

I saw. I saw Constantine had his hand up before.

[Dave]

Oh, I didn't see it. So. Thank you, Scott.

[Constantine]

No, it's actually fascinating to listen to you guys.

[Scott]

Yeah.

[Constantine]

I don't want to interrupt, but I honestly, like, I just, I know that there. There are different opinions about it. I just want to praise, like, US Government, what they're doing. If you think about it like, we're comparing ourselves to sometimes like China and Digital Yuan, where it's like, like literally fully centralized, like, you know, 100 controlled by People's bank of China. They do everything. Like, you know, there. There's zero kind of innovation from private firms. It's just literally impossible. Right. You know, so they, like, in our case, like, you know, here, the skinny master account, like, you know, yes. Federal Reserve, limited access via private firms. And of course there's going to be limited firms who will be able to even afford to go to the level of, you know, like trust banks or SPDIs. Like, you know, so, yes, of Course. So we're going to have like maybe circle and coinbase of the world who will be able to do but like to the point of Scott, like you know, Custodia bank and Kraken like who are pioneers in Wyoming, like and they have SPDI status, they will benefit a lot. And I think that would inspire more firms to get federally recognized licenses instead of relying just on state money transmitters approval. So just the fact that we have a constructive conversation about it, you know, like and there's a support and there is like I'm sure we all understand that after the July like genius aquasign like you know that will help even further to recognize payments like in stable coins is something like like the clear federal framework. I, I think it's like incredible that we're having like I could not imagine in the like previous administration to even have this conversation or to even like you know, think about it like even before that. So I know we're not always happy. I know that like there is maybe some going to be opposition from occ. But overall I think like it's incredible fact that the, the private sector and the government are trying to find this middle ground. So I just wanted to add some positivity to the constructive conversation.

[Dave]

Yeah, no, I think, I think that's right. I mean but I just want to go back to the one thing that people, if you want to understand method to madness and I'm not a conspiracy theorist, right. I just think that people act smart. So if you want to know why it was at the same time Larry Fink was pushing the Bitcoin ETF pretty much immediately in the same breath he started talking about tokenization despite the fact that his own people are smart enough and have told him that in a truly fully tokenized world that the ETF structure is not going to be nearly as desirable. Why? Because what he thinks is that his firm and asset managers will be well positioned to be able to take advantage of tokenization to get to collect more assets and money flows and understand that there's reasoning behind these things are not completely separate and nobody really seems to understand that. But just, just the fact that you can have tokenized funds, you know, and, and those are starting to develop, that's a very big deal. I mean I, I'll tell you, I talked to a lot of people, very senior people on Wall street last week and there was a panel on tokenization that unfortunately they had the wrong people on the panel. I don't want to insult them, but they were asked by the moderator which is Brett Redfern, who's my friend Brett. He knew the answer, but he was surprised when they gave it. He asked the question, what's the benefit of tokenization? And a woman who was brilliant in terms of understanding the technology from Securitize and Edward from zerohash started talking about how beneficial it will be to them to have tokenization, as opposed to telling Wall street the fact, which is it'll cut your back office costs in half, if not 75%. By the way, those are huge numbers for people on Wall Street. Right. You know, and it will dramatically decrease overhead and frictional costs. That's what's going to get them there. But we're so early that even the people given the stage to promote it weren't promoting it. And so, yeah, it's going to take time. Stable coins are the. I think you're right. You call it Trojan horse. I'll call it thin entering wedge. Call it whatever it is, it's the start. And this is something that's going to play out over years, not days, not weeks, which for crypto market shows is, oh my God, I've just broken the cardinal said we don't have the flashy headline. But, you know, but that, but that's what's going on here, right? That makes sense to you, Carla?

[Carlo]

Yeah, I 100% agree, and that's why I'm hyper focused on this, because I think this is, this is the thing we've been looking for. That's going to be the bridge. We've always tried to find that L1. That's going to be the bridge to the mass adoption. But I really think it's going to be stable coins that are going to be that bridge. Because once you have consumers comfortable with moving dollars on digital rails, it's inevitable they're going to have curiosity into moving other things on digital rails. And that's going to bring more adoption of Bitcoin.

[Dave]

Well, yeah, I think necessary, maybe not sufficient is the big deal, Dave.

[Joe]

I think if you're like, I think Lou's point is just kind of like if you're just replacing the current activity that's just digital dollars right now, which they currently are like in your bank account. If you're just replacing that with a cbdc, it doesn't really matter. Right? Like that part of the economy is already functioning in a way where there's a lot of oversight. They can garnish your wages. There's so many things that they can already do. And so it just actually brings people a tiny Step closer to utilizing the other parts of the economy that we know potentially work better. Like usdc, right? Or USDT or DAI or potentially Bitcoin just moves them a little bit closer. But there's a couple other topics I think are really interesting. I don't know that you guys saw over the last day that I think affect the overall market is one of them is Kadena failing. And obviously if people still create blocks and there's nodes, people can still utilize a chain. But Kadena was a L1 at one point worth tens of billions of dollars. Basically just the foundation said like, we're done. And I think we're going to see a lot more of that in different parts of the market. I think we have a. There's a very serious problem in the altcoin market around what actually drives price, right? Like I could say people say, oh, we just need a killer app, right? And then I could say, well, look at Polygon and look at Matic and look at Polymarket, right? Absolute monster success, tons of money. It's done nothing for Matic, right? It's done nothing for the token, underlying token appreciation of that chain, right? So what I can kind of point to and say is that a killer app doesn't matter for a chain, right? And so now we're back to what does matter for that. So that's a huge thing that's, that's happening and will continue to happen. And I think people should keep an eye out for that. The other one that I know Scott wants to talk about is the Beyond Meat short squeeze. He's. He was dying to understand what's happening. So someone, if, you know, if I got.

[Scott]

Well, I bought up. I bought seven pounds of fake meat this morning because I was hungry. Maybe it moved the stock price, I'm thinking.

[Gary]

So.

[Scott]

But a couple days ago, physical delivery of oil, when it goes negative, I bought all the me there was.

[Joe]

There was someone named Copybara Reborn that was posting onto Reddit about the like 62% short float. Those, those posts were for some reason getting deleted off of Reddit. So they started to kind of cross post those onto, onto X on like the 14th, 15th, the 16th, like people started to really amplify it on X. Then it was kind of going viral saying like, Ken Griffin was the villain again. And then on the 18th, it was basically, you know, they were thinking that Roaring Kitty was actually Capybara Reborn. And so that's when it just started to go crazy. And so that's why you're seeing the, the Gamestop nostalgia Retail versus Wall street narrative playing out in beyond meat. And then what kind of amplifies a little bit more is red if you're kind of paying attention, X leans a little bit more right. Reddit leans a little bit more left or a lot more left. And so when you're talking not eating meat, it's just amplifying it even more. So that's what you're. You're seeing in that market. So tread very lightly. It will probably go up and come down very quickly.

[Carlo]

Just out of curiosity, guys, why is Coinbase tanking this morning? It's down 20 bucks.

[Scott]

Absolutely no idea on this end. Didn't even notice.

[Joe]

Give me a second. I'm letting the AI agents tell me.

[Scott]

Are they telling you to buy or sell? And they telling you to eat the bugs or not?

[Gary]

Hey, may I ask a different question that's even more profound? Why is Amazon stock going up when they're down two days and no one's talking about cloud being completely.

[Joe]

I think it showed market saturation. The entire Internet is dependent on them. They have such a strangleholder monopoly that it proved that people. That people are fucked unless they're utilizing it.

[Scott]

That's a pretty wild conclusion. But accurate.

[Dave]

Really wild.

[Scott]

It's all down, but you need to buy us because we're the only ones who can provide it. Pretty wild. Dave, you're about to jump in.

[Dave]

Sorry.

[Gary]

It's great. It's crazy to me. Coinbase is down 6% and Amazon's down 1. I was thinking Coinbase might be getting hurt because it's been down.

[Carlo]

I mean, look, it makes no sense to me. Makes no sense.

[Dave]

Things markets are strange that way, Carla. I mean, look, you know, there's. All it takes is in these stocks is one significant rebalancer making a change, particularly this time of year. It happens all the time, so it doesn't take much, and then the market reacts to it. Right now, I mean, I don't know. I don't know that this is happening, but cryptos kind of feels, you know, what's. What's the word that I want to use? Boring. And when crypto gets boring, people money comes out of Coinbase and it goes down and then it gets exciting and it flies back in. And the liquidity is never that much on single stocks. I mean, Amazon's obviously a bigger market cap, so it takes more to move it. But, you know, there's. It's all the stories out there. It's like you could look at, you know, some of the high flyers recently. It's it's nothing more than possibly profit take. I mean look at the performance of some of the best performers. Things that I own for the long haul like iron. You know, we talk about that, you know, part of the AI, you know, revolution. It's had a pretty bad two days. You know how you want to slice it? I mean it's getting absolutely destroyed today. Right again. Yesterday it got destroyed down. What? I'm just looking there. That's the wrong, the wrong one. Sorry, but I don't really care because I'm not selling. But you know, it doesn't matter. You have to understand what it is if you own something for the long run. So iron is down. Yeah, I mean it's down basically over 10 in two days. You know, it's. These moves happen. Did anything to the, the, the thesis for investable data centers and need for AI models go down? Well, no, of course not. But momentum stalls. Momentum stalls. People start selling to take profits and when they do that, it wears the bid right. You know, and that happens with everything. So whenever you start looking, you know, for reasons understand that there are, there's a lot going on, particularly this time of year. Remember and I've said this before, we are nine days away or eight days away from the books being closed on fiscal year for a lot of financial companies. And a lot of companies, a lot want to have their, their portfolios adjusted by the end of November, end of October as they go into their year end reporting. So October is always kind of squirrely for that reason. And by the way, it could be up and down. This is not necessarily down. We're talking like it's all gloom and doom, but you know, whatever, you know, that's what happens when markets get boring, liquidity decreases and moves are exaggerated on individual assets. It is a story as old as time. I mean, Gary, I assume this is not, this is not new to you, what I'm saying?

[Gary]

Yeah, no, no.

[Dave]

And that's why a lot of people consider this a huge opportunity. Right? For exactly that reason.

[Constantine]

May I ask you questions? Like I have people who DM me like, and after listening to this like bigger conversation about the Fed Wire and everything, like what, what do you think will happen with banks? Like you know, when the stable coins will actually be like, you know, like the rails, like which, you know, they're faster, better, cheaper for someone than Fed Wire and Ach. What do you think was going to happen with the Fed Wire and ach?

[Dave]

Personally, I think that, you know, Fed Wire will just morph the technology. It's just a tool. They don't make money off of it. They don't really care. They just want to. So I don't think that really matters. Ach, will they probably leave. The way technology ends up being done, they'll leave the wrapper on top of it, but it'll just be replaced by stablecoins. The bigger difference here is that banks, business models are going to need to change. Now the large banks, they love the subsidy of having deposits, not having to pay on deposits because it is a subsidy. It's somewhere in the neighborhood of 20, 30 billion in subsidy. Right. That they're getting a year for that. Anyway, sorry, someone just came to the door to fix our air conditioning. Anyway, the, the. So sorry about that. But the bottom line is that their business models are going to change. Banks that are investment banks will continue to do extremely well. They'll be investment banks. Banks that are community banks are going to have to order fee models. It's a much larger conversation. Right. That's really the point. But you know, all technologies cause change. I mean, any people have seen it, brokers are totally different now than they were 30 years ago. And so don't expect any of that to be different. Hey, Dave. Yep. Yeah, the person at the door. Those are altcoins looking to crash at your place. Yeah, I would add to that. Well, is this pocket that deep? We know it is, but I would also say maybe Coinbase is down basically because the pressure in the alt space and the news about Kadena obviously should be raising people's questions about, you know, what about these tokens outside of the top 10. Yeah, that sounds.

[Joe]

Having followed altcoins for the last eight years, you know, having interviewed over a hundred founders that started these things, having watched the adoptions, you know, the adoption skyrocket, come down, skyrocket again, watching people kind of close things down. You know, what I can say is certain projects, you know, have just, they, they still have war chests. Right. Some of these people are some of the largest bitcoin holders out there. They, you know, made some, some smart moves and they, they bought a bunch of bitcoin. You know, some of the things that we know don't make any sense, you know, are the, the valuations. Right. I did a post the other day about like, I don't know if you guys have heard of like Del Taco, but Del Taco got bought for $115 million. They have 500 locations. They just kind of like throw off cash that's worth one tenth of what Bonk is Worth. And so it's like, would you rather own bonk or 500 locations of a restaurant?

[Scott]

Right.

[Joe]

And so I think people are kind of understanding that the valuations are still just cannot be validated. And the other problem is a lot of these chains, it's, they don't know how to make money outside of selling their own token, some staking mechanisms. And then what ends up happening is they have to issue more. And if they don't have the correct mechanisms in place. And the tough part is a lot of what happened in the early days is that they would do pretty good deals with these market makers and they would basically share in the upside of the arbitrage of the tokens across all these markets. And that's why they wanted to get listed on a lot of these centralized exchanges, because that's where they could profit the most, was off the trading activity. What's kind of happened is that the margins there have gotten squeezed and they're not actually making any money off of the market making.

[Dave]

Right.

[Joe]

So there's really no profit center for these foundations at all. And so the foundations have kind of just bled these things dry. And so you're just going to start to see some fail. Some will survive, you know, if they're, if they're kind of thinking a little bit differently about revenue. But a lot of these will die. And so we always kind of said, you know, the majority of the tokens that you see today will not exist in the future, but there will be many more tokens in the future than exist today. And that's, you know, go look at the wayback machine of CoinMarketCap back in 2016 and the top 100 coins versus what's there today. And you probably have a 6% retention rate. Right? And you'll see that again and again and again. You know, obviously if Bitcoin continues to exist, the rest of the market will continue to exist, but just in different ways. But yes, I wouldn't be married to your, to your bags for life.

[Dave]

I mean, I, I'll go further. I mean, you mentioned Del Taco. I think that's a great example. FTT token, FTX token is still worth double Del Taco. Explain that. Please explain how it has a value that goes beyond zero. I, I have never heard one. But yet it trades four million bucks a day. It has a market cap of $257 million. And effectively it has less value than trading baseball cards. In fact, a lot less than baseball cards because people collect baseball cards. It's just, you know, they're memes. Right. And it's people, at some point the music stops. I actually, my personal belief what will happen, this will drive people nuts is that if Congressman Davidson yesterday talked about the Accredited Investor act, if the Accredited Investor Rule, if somehow Congress could get their shit together to understand that if you got rid of the Accredited Investor Rule and told the SEC to get rid of all the plumbing around it, that would eliminate. Which would be really good for a lot of reasons. Right. Because the incredible rule not really enforces wealth inequality. It allows firms to be able to package for retail to sell private companies at like 25 markups. I mean just absolutely ridiculous. That hopefully will happen. But if you got rid of that, then being called securities would all of a sudden not be a death sentence. In fact, the rules would be easy for tokens and it would be. And it would just require disclosures, etc and if you put everything, all assets on level playing fields, I think you would see some really interesting changes. I think some crypto assets will be worth a lot more and some will be worth a be worth nothing. And that kind of value discernment is what's going to matter in the end. At least that's my belief. I mean, we'll see, we'll see what happens. But that seems like a lot of what you were just saying, right? Can you guys hear me? Because I couldn't hear you.

[Scott]

Yeah, I hear you. I just thought they'd respond.

[Dave]

Yeah, yeah, it just. I couldn't even tell who was talking because I can't see it. Everyone looks like listeners to me. So I think it may have been Joe, but I'm not sure. Like I see David up here as a listener. I don't know.

[Joe]

Hey guys, sorry, I got a phone call.

[Scott]

Joe is Del Taco.

[Dave]

Yeah, yeah, I thought it was Joe because I thought I recognized his voice, but you look like a listener so I couldn't see.

[Scott]

All good.

[Joe]

Sorry, what was your question, Dave?

[Dave]

The question is, is that if you put tokens and securities on a level playing field that it would be incredibly powerfully good for a small subset of tokens and absolutely God awful for the majority of tokens.

[Joe]

Yeah. And we're kind of seeing it happen in a non fluid way with the treasury companies. Right. Like all of the top, the top tokens have some sort of treasury strategy.

[Scott]

Right.

[Joe]

And they're accessing capital markets in a way that other tokens are not. And the retail bid has completely moved there and then into things like prediction markets. Right. And it's moved away from the number 400th like layer one that's out there and the tokens on top of that. Obviously you'll. I think you'll have Meme coins that continue to exist in interesting ways. But, yes, if you broke down that barrier, you're breaking down the function that's kind of already happening. Not overt, but just in a backwards way by launching on the Nasdaq and you're seeing these companies launch and some of these things have held their value pretty good through all of this, even compared to the tokens even look at Defi Dev Corp with Solana and what they're doing with staking. So you're seeing some things there, but then you're also seeing things like NACA just get absolutely obliterated because, you know, they're getting punished for the strategy. Right. And trying to kind of say, we're going to have these things in every single country. And that's the strategy. It's like, it seems like the market's not rewarding them and they're rewarding people that are going deeper into a singular focus, like staking and, you know, fundraising and, and potentially launching companies on these chains that make sense. But yeah, I, I just don't think, I think there. It would be amazing to have it knockdown and then these markets coming together. But I, you know, like you guys said, the regulatory. It's so gray and odd right now with this administration where it's like the US is probably the place where you would want to launch a token just because there's no. It's like it's just free game right now. But it also does kind of create this world where it's like you're not. You're kind of unsure about the future because you just don't know how long it's going to be. Free game. And is another administration going to come in and crack down in other ways around tokens, but obviously not bitcoin with the ETFs. So I just think it's a. You know, people have made a lot of money. Even we're talking about Coinbase. Coinbase is still up, what, on the one year? 100% or 50%.

[Scott]

Right.

[Joe]

So people still did pretty good. Probably 100% off the lows in April and people are just taking. They're taking profits and they're unsure. The one thing Dave, you probably know better than me is, you know, just like rates coming down and the amount of money that's in these money markets. Like, I feel like people at some.

[Scott]

Point should be betting 7.5 trillion? Yeah, 7.5 trillion.

[Joe]

Yeah. It feels like that's a lot of money on the sideline still that needs to come in. That's not being accounted for.

[Dave]

Well, it's not. I, I think people on both sides, sides of this. The truth is, is when rates come down, some marginal people will say, I'm not getting enough interest. I need to go out on the risk. It's really a question of just risk right now. You can get paid. And Michael Jones has been saying this for years. If you can get paid 5%, people will take 5%. You get 4%. A few less people will take 4%. If you're getting 3%, a lot more, less people will take it. It goes to 2% and all of a sudden, probably virtually nobody wants to. To take it. And they go out of the wrist curve. So it's really that.

[Scott]

I mean, you'll see Dave has much cleaner hands now. I can hear it.

[Dave]

No, no, that was the air conditioning guy vacuuming the block.

[Scott]

You're washing my, my, my, my image was that you were washing your hands and had your phone like up against your shoulder.

[Dave]

So, Gary, you and Scott understand that in Florida, when your air conditioner, when the condensation line gets blocked, your air conditioner turns off so you don't get flooded. It is a very big deal here. And so you need to watch that because people do not want to have no air conditioning.

[Scott]

The wet drive act, he was going.

[Gary]

With, yeah, bro, happens three, four times.

[Dave]

But we're.

[Gary]

I paid 200. $300.

[Dave]

So today is the day. We actually haven't had this happen for three years. It's been clean. So, you know, maybe I'm taking. Maybe I'm doing a better job with my filters, but also I'm in a building, so it's not. I don't have a palatial estate like you do, Gary. So we don't story about that. And, and I'm. So. I apologize for letting the conversation straight to Naka because I know that, I know that triggers you.

[Scott]

Yeah, we not gonna talk about that.

[Dave]

But whatever. Anyway, any other final things that people want to talk about today? Because we're getting. We're coming up to time.

[Scott]

I think we covered it.

[Dave]

I mean, I think, I think triggering Gary on Naka is a good way to end the show for today.

[Scott]

Hey, hey.

[Gary]

No, seriously, they own that. Hey, before we close though, Scott or anyone on the audience, if you're NACA or even Meta Planet, what are you doing right now? Like, like if you're running the Company. What would you be doing? And what is the exit?

[Scott]

Launch a meme coin? I really don't know.

[Gary]

Now, Scotty, come on.

[Scott]

Gary, I don't know. Yeah, we're gonna talk about this a lot more tomorrow. But, I mean, you. You really got me thinking about it the other day in a way that I wasn't, which is that if you're out of money, you're just. They're stuck. There's nothing to do.

[Joe]

They could. It's just management change. It's like, let David go back and do what he does really well, which is put on really awesome conferences and use that brand to. To grow what's happening and then break.

[Gary]

David won't. David won't let that happen. Dude, that's too big of a crush for David.

[Joe]

But that's what makes companies move forward, right?

[Gary]

Swallowing your ego.

[Dave]

Yeah, exactly. I was gonna say this and bring.

[Joe]

In someone that's so well connected that they could just inject tons of cash and buy Bitcoin, and then it'll recover.

[Scott]

Should have hired Bo Hines.

[Dave]

Well, here's. Here's the deal. You know, David already has the connections. He doesn't need someone with connections. He needs someone who actually knows how to operate and understands capital markets and understands what he's trying to do. That's what he needs.

[Gary]

Correct.

[Dave]

And, you know, I. Look, I've been very critical of things they've done. You know, I. But turning around a company, and, you know, I have friends who have done this professionally. Right. You know, and done this in multiple examples. And the one thing, you know, if you're trying to turn a company around is it's. You really need to have a deep dive. You need to understand what are. And you have to be honest with yourself and your board of directors. You need to know, what are the fundraising opportunities? What is the edge that you have? What have you done that's right? What have you done that's worked? And it's a very complicated question that we. I personally don't have the information. What I will say is that what it starts with is, if you're the CEO, if you're going to. To be publicly making proclamations about it, you better damn well be right. And you need to understand that investors don't want to hear pom poms and cheerleading. They want to see actual stuff. It's a reason why some companies, we always say, are very PR oriented, but the ones that are PR oriented, they still try to get even though they're not worth the paper they're printed on. You know, Lois, or letters of, you know, indication or MOUs, memorandums of understanding. And they still try to get these things done so they can say something. But if you're in the habit of constantly telling people what you're working on in vague terms as a CEO, the market thinks that you're drowning and nobody wants to be the one to throw the life, throw the life preserver to you. And that's clearly where they're at. Now. That doesn't mean that all hope is lost, because it isn't right. You know, someone's going to buy them below, you know, from below, Nav for sure, because they have real assets, but we don't even know how much of their assets, you know, how much of their credit lines have been exhausted, what they've done, what the rates are, how they could use it, etc. Etc. Etc. There's a lot there, right? And you know, Gary, you're a major shareholder. I don't know if you've gotten good information, but to understand how a turnaround situation goes, it requires actual analysis and not, you know, I'm not going to be the one to pontificate because without the analysis, I wouldn't make that statement. But you need an operator. The people in crypto are so overwhelmingly focused on connections and media clout that that's not what actually works. It helps, don't get me wrong, but it's not. It's not sufficient. Okay, that's my rant for the day. I've had a few of them already.

[Scott]

I'm just gonna have. Yeah, go ahead, Joe. Say a good rant.

[Joe]

Yeah, I mean, it's not that if you talk to any CEO or that things aren't working in this case, it shouldn't be an ego hit. It's not even like he didn't invent the idea of Bitcoin treasuries, right? So it's not like that's a hill to die on, right? Like there's other companies that are. Are doing this and have done it before. So he's kind of hopping on another, you know, strategy. And, you know, he's good at other things. If you're good at other things, that's great too. It's not a knock on, like, your ability to not do something. So you probably can do those things a lot better than other people can do those things. It's just this thing in this market, hey, it was your first shot. Come back around or do something.

[Scott]

You're far too rational.

[Joe]

Oh, man, it's just so easy in My mind to say things by not, you know, knowing that it's about you. That like when other people can't see that it's just so blatantly obvious that like it's okay to say that you, you. Not that even you were wrong. It's just I can't do this right now. You might even be able to do it in the future. And hey, you learned a lot. But maybe it's time to let someone else.

[Scott]

They have no. They have no atm.

[Dave]

Correct.

[Gary]

Like they.

[Scott]

Gary, is it true that there's no way for them to buy more bitcoin right now? Is that accurate?

[Gary]

Well, dude, they bought the bitcoin. They've got 5780 or so bitcoin and they raised 750. They have 250 of debt. Like I think they spent the money. But the question, one shot and they, and they bought 15. Or maybe they, I don't know how they acquired the 15 of Meta and then Meta goes down.

[Dave]

Well the question is, wasn't there other companies too, Gary? Weren't they like.

[Scott]

Yeah, I, I know that they've done other investments. I think 30 million with round Table, which I'm, I haven't dug into it but like I have done a lot of content with those guys and stuff. There's other investments but I just don't know how much Dry powder.

[Gary]

Yeah, see that's the other thing part of it's a media company. So it's just, you know, I think it's. Look, certainly it needs a different management company. I think actually the solution is somebody just picks it up for 90 cents on the Bitcoin valuation and go and let's get this thing corrected and does the same thing with Meta, consolidate them. I think this is a good play for strategy because it's hard to get into Japan, dude, I don't think. Sorry, I don't think strategy can launch in Japan quite easily.

[Scott]

I just wonder if strategy could directly buy Meta. I mean the signal would be wrong but they could directly buy metaplanet as well. Right. Without having to go through the nonsense of doing NACA to get it.

[Gary]

Yeah, exactly. Well, yeah, exactly. I'm just saying The NACA owns 15% of Meta, so it's. And it's not a big bite, dude. Like these are not, these are rounding.

[Scott]

Errors for Sailor with. Oh my God.

[Gary]

But you'd have to buy it at a discount because he's buying the market. Well, he is the market but he have to buy and hell I'd be, I would sell my shares right now at, you know, 85, 90 cents on the dollar and let Sailor deal with it.

[Scott]

Yeah, good times. I'm wondering when we're gonna see if. When we'll see a bounce back in the treasury market in general, but.

[Dave]

I'm not sure there's a need for it. That's the thing. Well, it depends on the treasury. For what? Right, you know, like what? Obviously for far coin, the edge. Well, obviously Fargoing. Yeah, yeah. I mean if you don't know the.

[Scott]

Edge for a far coin treasury, I'm not telling you, man.

[Dave]

Sorry. Yeah, well, sorry, I'm just. I'm just not with it enough to understand. I don't get the joke.

[Scott]

Clearly.

[Dave]

Anyway, we will see what happens tomorrow, right?

[Scott]

Good show. Run it back tomorrow. See you guys then. Thank you everyone, that was awesome. Bye bye.

[Constantine]

Thank you everyone.