Loading summary
Transcript105 lines
- [00:00]
A
We got the topic here. Have the whales finished selling? This was obviously based on the article that said, I think it was our topic this morning on Macro Monday. 115,000. Was that the number bitcoin sold by whales over the past couple months?
- [00:14]
B
Yeah, I mean it's, look, it's, it's about 200,000 over the, you know, since July at least. And you know, I'll repeat for the audience here what I said on Macro Monday, which is if you drew up a playbook that said bitcoin is going to go mainstream and you're going to start towards hyper bitcoinization, the first step that has to happen is it needs to broaden its appeal outside of the OG niche community that was bitcoin into the general public, into the financial system. And this is a necessary statement of that. And if you ask yourself the question, could that happen at a price like this, at a market cap like this, without any real impact on the price, you know, without. With volatility being dramatically lower than past sell offs? Yeah, you know, that's what we're seeing. To me that's bullish and it's a long term thing. It doesn't mean that we're going to go up immediately. It doesn't mean any of that. But it does mean that a lot of technical analysis might be misapplied.
- [01:13]
A
Yeah. Gorov, do you have any insight on the whale selling and what that might look like moving forward, being a market maker and all given not for bitcoin.
- [01:24]
C
But still not really. I don't think that's. I mean it'll be encounter. It will be a counter argument to what I said on my last space three weeks ago. Practically it's a large market with massive liquidity from around the world. 24 7. Do you think anyone knows that? Anyone knows what's happening? Not really, but what I would like to say is everybody was expecting these datcos to actively go and blast the market with all the billions that they show they have raised. And by the way, this was also one of my arguments and narratives. But after being in New York for the last 16 days and of course before that in the rest of us, including Wyoming SALT conference, the reality has sort of surfaced to me, at least for those who know it, probably know it, that almost 80 to 90% money raised in DAT cause is, is bitcoin and is in kind. So there is no active purchase of bitcoin, that, that there was no active purchase of bitcoin planned for these months and hence that liquidity hasn't actually hit the market. On the contrary, we have started effing the equity markets because now all these equity investors, all these kind investors take the shares that they've got through their in kind Bitcoin and Ethereum contribution or even you know, Solana contribution whatever to the DAT cause and they on the day of their stock registration they just simply dump it and cash out the premium as their profit in arbitrage of token versus equity not getting too much into that rabbit hole. So we are missing that equity purchase. I'm not saying there is no cash liquidity coming from the datcos. It's just that it takes a whole lot of time to deal through the regulatory and compliance paperwork, registrations, understand the landscape. Not everybody is Tom Lee who has been in the market and around the circuit for the last decade and just jumps onto it right away. And so we have seen when just one or two companies bring that massive public market liquidity to Ethereum, Ethereum goes in large circles and good volatility and good pricing of course all time high. And we should expect that in the coming time while most of our friends get ready with the capital in their datcos and more capital rushes in. I'll take a pause with that.
- [04:11]
B
So just gorav, I'm, I'm recognizing your voice. You show us a listener to me by the way, just anyone who cares. But doesn't that indicate that the amount of distribution from whales is dramatically underestimated at 200,000? Because wouldn't that mean that all of the in kind donate, all in kind donations, all the in kind transfers to datcos which then got scooped up by equity investors, Isn't that effectively whale coins that were broadened to new investors via the DAT goes? I mean that, that's in the hundreds of thousands, isn't it?
- [04:46]
C
Yeah, but it's a churn. And, and, and I don't think I have to tell you or anyone that you know that I mean bitcoin is still super liquid and much in demand even in retail. So while this arbitrage also means, don't get me wrong, they are contributing with their bitcoins and the bitcoins stay with the, with the datco and they exit their liquidity and then they go buy their bitcoins most of the times. Right. So there is an active buy pressure. There's just like I'm just saying that all that tens of billions coming in week on a weekly basis from global DAT goes that hasn't actually started injecting now when I'm on my own, no.
- [05:36]
B
No, I understand, but my point is this. Just objectively forget everything else.
- [05:41]
D
Okay.
- [05:41]
B
If you told, if you had said three months ago or four months ago that say, I don't know, I don't know what the number is, but it's probably like 500,000 bitcoin are going to be sold by OGS, and that new money is going to come in to buy those and the price is going to be roughly where it is today. You would be, you would say, wow, that seems unlikely, but. Okay, that would be very bullish. And what I'm saying is, okay, we know 200,000 or so have been sold by whales as bitcoin in the open market. Right. You know, we know that that's just what the numbers and the numbers. But it looks like at least 300,000 bitcoin were transferred into Datcos, which then new money equity investors bought shares of the datco. Am I missing, am I, am I getting that wrong? I mean, because maybe I am. Maybe my numbers are totally wrong. I don't know. I'm just curious.
- [06:32]
E
Probably, Dave, probably not. All of the bitcoin has been that's been transferred into these companies has been. Has been sold by the people who received shares in return. Right. They still are the overwhelming majority shareholders.
- [06:46]
C
Yeah, there are. I mean, there are some incredible investors. One of that I've got to know. Of course, we cannot name out bad participants. We can definitely name good participants. Tim Draper happens to be holding all of his Datco holdings. So there are good people, no doubt.
- [07:04]
B
Right. But Tim, he's holding his Datco holdings, but investors have bought into the Datco as well.
- [07:10]
C
Yep, yep, Definitely.
- [07:12]
B
Yeah. So I'm just saying that it'll take time to deploy part of this distribution.
- [07:16]
C
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It'll take time to deploy. And then let's not miss the fact that for some reason, I mean, not some reason, I mean, people still live by technical charts. So 100k and anything around 110k is a big selling point. It's a big mental barrier. Haven't we seen that with ethereum too? Around 5,000. So, yes, there is a lot of sale incoming. There's a lot of contemplation. A lot of people, can you hear me?
- [07:49]
A
I would have muted Dave's mic listener. So you gotta get off there. Which was funny.
- [07:54]
C
Yeah, exactly. I was like, are you okay, Dave?
- [07:58]
E
He said he was in the car. It might just be traffic.
- [08:01]
C
I thought, it's a spilled coffee. The ocean wasn't like fully spilled coffee, but just a little.
- [08:08]
F
Dave, what are you doing Dave?
- [08:11]
E
I was thinking that Dave had road rage.
- [08:13]
B
Yeah.
- [08:15]
C
Okay. So I think I've covered the point. Unless you want me to speak more on that, Dave. All good.
- [08:25]
B
Okay, yeah.
- [08:26]
A
If I can pick up where Dave was back.
- [08:30]
E
Yeah, no, I mean, I think there's stuff that's clearly been sold, Scott, which is what you're referring to. A couple of hundred thousand bitcoins appeared, based off of on chain activity to have been transferred to exchanges and over the counter desks and been sold. And there were public announcements and this was a. We're talking billions and billions of dollars of bitcoin. And the point you're making is the price is still well over $100,000. So Bitcoin has been dispersed to other hands without a price shock. You know, it's managed to absorb it. And that's, and that's really intriguing.
- [09:09]
G
That is.
- [09:12]
E
Probably largely unexpected and especially since all the hoopla over the ETF launches as well behind us now we're a year and a half basically into the ETF existing and it had been a success. So we keep seeing, although we don't know exactly where it's from, we do keep seeing significant inflows of cash into bitcoin and through many different mechanisms. I think if again we zoom out on time, we see the ETF inflows, we saw the debt market inflows through the convertible debt offerings that strategy was putting on. We're now seeing various different types through strategies preferred shares that each target a different source of capital. And they're not all gushers that never stop, but they're all significant amounts of capital as compared to the size of bitcoin's daily volume or Bitcoin's total market cap.
- [10:12]
A
I'm also in the glitch now, so good luck. Yeah, we got it.
- [10:17]
C
We can hear Dave's, Dave's car again.
- [10:21]
B
You can hear my wife yelling at me to put the phone down. Yes, that's right. Yeah, yeah, that was exactly. It was well articulated. Tomer. That's exactly what I was trying to say.
- [10:28]
C
Yeah, yeah. And, and probably I was not able to like articulate my response clearly because I was like more focused on discussing why aren't we already at 200k? But almost the same thing which, which has been established. Large supplies were moved, but large supplies were moved because there was a promise of it not moving further, which is the Datco promise. So a whole bunch of. This is one more detail probably you guys would like. Who are the biggest Datco investors? These are the same guys that have been backing miners and investing in large mining operations for the last decade or so. So essentially, if you see large holdings of bitcoins that haven't moved for a decade or eight years or six years moving, today they are moving on the promise of DATCO that it won't move further. So, yes, while the movement is real, you're counting 200,000 bitcoins. The bitcoins are just changing hands and moving from one party to another. Right. So it's not really hitting the liquid market or exchanges.
- [11:37]
E
Yeah, but what else can bitcoins do besides moving from one?
- [11:41]
C
Exactly. That's amazing. I mean, I was meaning hitting the exchange liquidity. Sorry, I meant exchange liquidity. So the price fluctuations that you would expect either going down because of that liquidity hitting the liquid market. I mean, that amount of bitcoin hitting the liquidity market didn't actually occur. So it was just probably. Again, I started by saying nobody knows exact. We're just contemplating, but it is probably just about a very small percentage.
- [12:16]
B
Going.
- [12:16]
C
To the liquid market, which was of course bought out. And we are waiting for the next wave of buying pressure for us to hit 150.
- [12:25]
A
What about on the. On the digital asset treasury side? Not the bitcoin treasury side? Just had the huge announcement here. Well, it was announced last week. Galaxy, Jump and Multicoin, I think they were raising 1.1. I think they ended up raising 1.6 or 1.7 billion for a Solana treasury company. And that's being banker. The company, I know it trades under Ford. I can't remember the exact name. I don't have the news in front of me. But do you have any more insight into the. Are you talking about treasury market?
- [12:58]
C
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I am building the largest altcoin basket. I mean, do I have an insight who else has. Thank you for bringing the attention to me, but are you talking about the one set up by Multicoin and Galaxy?
- [13:15]
A
Yeah, Multicoin Galaxy and Jump. Yeah. And I think that just started trading today on public market under Ford, I believe. But I'm gonna look it up to make sure.
- [13:23]
C
Oh, wow. Wow. Okay. I didn't know that they had already started because, I mean, last time I checked, Kyle was raising. But most of the cash capital is basically the FTX sale that was purchased. So those Solanas have gone in. And then of course, Multicoin is a seed and early investor of Solana. So those Solanas have gone into that. And Jump, we all know was like there are three large contracts of Jump that the world knows about and that's Terra Luna, Solana and Sui. So the secret is out there. I mean we know how $1 billion worth of Solana have been assembled.
- [14:08]
A
So I've got the story here. It's just to be exact. Ford Industries Incorporated announces 1.65 billion private placement and cash and stablecoin commitments led by Galaxy Jump and Multi Coin Capital to initiate Salana treasury strategy. Kyle Samani, who you just mentioned will be the managing partner of Multicoin Capital to become chairman of the Board of directors. So yeah, it's Forward Industries and it trades I believe under Fort.
- [14:35]
B
So does that mean Gaurav, you can hear me, right?
- [14:38]
A
Yeah, we hear you.
- [14:39]
C
Yep, yep, I can, yeah, I can.
- [14:41]
B
I can't look at my phone, but I can talk the. So last was it last week or maybe maybe the week before, there was a story from the typical, you know, sleuths that said Galaxy Digital moving, you know, big slug of Solana from wallet to wallet. And of course Solana dropped on that on the theory that people expecting that meant they were going to sell on the open market. Are you effectively saying that the risk of that is now basically zero because they've moved it into this treasury company and so that overhang is gone now?
- [15:12]
C
Exactly, Yep, yep, yep. That goes are not evil at all.
- [15:17]
B
For those who want to understand. Yeah, that is beyond that is much more bullish for long term Solana than you know that they're going to then some nebulous we're going to go buy it from people because effectively people have been pointing to that overhang as the reason that's kept a lid on its price and why it hasn't gone back to its all time highs. So you know, just speaking as a Solana holder, I kind of look at that as oh that's really good and you made me smile when you were describing what was going on. So that's.
- [15:46]
C
Yeah, yeah, yeah man. Look, I am telling you and now I can speak with so much more confidence and real detail. But the problem is in the public markets you can't go out with details. So up until, you know, last month when I was joining this space, I had slightly less confidence but I had a louder voice. Now I have a whole bunch of more confidence and data but I can't speak anything because we are getting into these privilege.
- [16:17]
B
Having lived my life as running three broker dealers. I am well aware.
- [16:22]
C
Yes. So now I'm communicating that my taxis under the building on emails which is stupid. But coming to the point, the Amount of liquidity. I was just explaining this phenomena to some somebody yesterday in crypto. I mean who are our investors? The initiation of datcos happened with crypto investors that were like large holders or backers of other crypto companies. Right. So the numbers that we saw were largely in kind. And then some institutional investors started coming in, but all thanks to the participants. Like so far we are blessed in the DATCO space that everybody doing a DATCO is like not everybody, but almost everybody is very reputed, is here for the long run, has been in crypto for like a very long time. Most of the times, you know, and, and has good intent. So we haven't seen the wave of fraudulent, you know, and bad actors who would come and destroy the DATCO reputation. And because of that most of these are well over performing or let's say actually performing. And so the word is going out into the institutional space that this is an industry worth looking. I mean look at what ethermine has done. Tomd is just incredible. He took a company with 40 million or 20 million, I don't have the number to eight and a half billion dollars in Ethereums.
- [17:51]
A
Right.
- [17:52]
C
It's insane what you can do if you know how to play in the public markets. And the amount of liquidity, so the amount of cash now ready to gush in and coming in every day is insane. And we'll see that increasing exponentially almost every day. And let's not forget this is not NASDAQ liquidity. We are talking about one DATK launched somewhere in the world every day now. Right. And maybe two. I mean, I don't know. So that's a massive amount of liquidity across datcos. We'll have an incredible alt season in the next six months.
- [18:31]
A
David. Yep.
- [18:34]
C
Yeah, I'm gonna hop off. I have something but unless somebody has last questions.
- [18:42]
D
Yeah, I was just going to talk about the alt season as well. But if just to piggyback on what everyone is saying and to give you guys some specific data that we see see across our exchange. The alt season, which I now call a fundamental season, is really reflecting within the Swissborg app users. And I wouldn't define them as whales, guys, sorry, because I don't know what a whale is. Is it someone who's in the millions or someone in the ten millions or in the hundred millions? I guess a BTC well is different from a crypto whale. But if we look at people who have like six digits of wealth, one trend that's really, really interesting guys, that what we're seeing is a Lot of the die hard fans of the previous cycle. So let's talk about the Cosmos ecosystem, let's talk about the Polkadot ecosystem. Let's talk about Algorand Near A lot of the people used to have six digits in some of the coins that performed extremely well in the altcoin cycle of 2020-2021 are actually offloading guys. A lot of them are offloading to tokens like the Hype token that have very strong fundamentals, are offloading to ave that once again has very, very strong fundamentals, are offloading to Curve, are offloading to all the tokens that actually have various fundamentals. And so is someone dying there?
- [19:59]
E
Someone's having a reaction to what you're saying.
- [20:02]
D
Someone really hates altcoins here. But anyway, Scott, I just wanted to piggyback and just give you like some of the data that is within our exchange that is confident, not confidential, but it's not public to show that there is a change in spirit and that it really feels like this altcoin season as of today. Right. And if you look at the general market data and you compare all of the coins that outperform Bitcoin, so bitcoin is roughly 95% up year on year and since the beginning of the year it's roughly up 35%. If you think about all the coins or tokens that have outperformed bitcoin so at least doubled it. All of them are fundamentally based, so there's some sort of maturity. And also some people who are jumping ship regardless of all the pain they've endured, you know, across, you know, let's say the three to four years that have passed.
- [20:52]
A
David?
- [20:54]
F
Yeah, I was just going to add into the comment about Ford the Solana pipe.
- [21:00]
A
Yes.
- [21:00]
F
Was a very interesting announcement that came out just before the open is NASDAQ filed with the SEC to basically trade stocks, tokenized stocks, and they indicate that they'll do so by the third quarter 2026. The question comes down if you're looking at a real world application that's going to be supporting stocks and the volume of that, the transaction throughput per second, obviously it favors Solana more than Ethereum. I would also say going back to a call I think we had last week, Dave, you had said something about Novogratz obviously positioning himself for something like this to the extent that Galaxy's participating in what is now going to be the largest Solana treasury company. Very interesting move to look at here. And I would also just say, you know, don't want to rain Anything on the alt season here because we work with a lot of these companies. But you know, the players who are getting involved in the space have much, much deeper pockets. So it's going to be very, very interesting in here. But yeah, for the meanwhile, it's all up and to the right.
- [22:04]
A
I mean that.
- [22:06]
E
May I ask a question? You know, like we talk a lot. I hear a lot about stocks moving to the blockchain because it's open 24 7.
- [22:18]
A
And I guess it's not just because it's 24 7. I mean faster, cheaper, no third party in between.
- [22:24]
E
But yes, okay, but, but you know, again, for me, I think the question when we move to stocks in there is, and I don't want to sound like a Luddite, so I want to be careful, but I want to sound like a healthy skeptic as far as the 247 is concerned. If there's a new channel that's going to move these things, 247 wouldn't NASDAQ, New York Stock Exchange and others just like all they have to do is not shut down their databases at 4:30pm every day. And if it's looking like it's going to move, then the regulations should be able to follow suit. So there's another competitor to Solana here, which is NASDAQ itself. And I guess the question becomes are people? One of the things we see with the big liquidity area, which is Bitcoin, is a lot of the liquidity has come in and maybe way too much of late through non self custodial solutions where people are counting on BlackRock and their stockbroker or MicroStrategy and their stockbroker to hold these assets. So there seems to still be a very strong preference for custodial managed solutions. I don't know exactly how it all plays out, but I just don't. I think that it's dangerous to analyze the market while playing a blind eye to what the incumbents might do. I don't think they're going to be big winners.
- [23:50]
A
Potential iterations that we're not even discussing. Right. Because I would say that if it actually ends up that the NASDAQ wants to adopt full tokenization, it'll be on a NASDAQ blockchain that is fully centralized and controlled in the same way as what we see now. Right. So it's not supposed that that would be on a decentralized 24 7, 365 blockchain with no. With minimal guardrails I think is maybe not going to happen. But Also, I will say, Tomer, to David's point, one thing I think maybe you didn't add or maybe you did say it, but Galaxy actually tokenized their own stock.
- [24:27]
F
Correct.
- [24:28]
A
Solana like, and not a wrapped version like the actual stock, which was the first time we'd really seen that happen last week. So that's another sort of data point in your theory there.
- [24:40]
F
That's correct, yeah.
- [24:42]
A
Lawyer, do you had your hand up?
- [24:44]
G
Yeah. Hopefully there's not too much background noise here. But you know, I, I think there's something to be said about normalizing this thing. Even if it's held centralized, you know, in this way, the idea of normalizing the 24 hour blockchain trading is still beneficial. You know, there's a lot. Even if we could do it both ways, if we had both options, people would still use the NASDAQ centralized one because we like paper trails. People who are not just around, you know, usually you want to have those in place so that you can, you know, for lots of reasons, legal and accounting and otherwise. So I think even if everything moves to a centralized NASDAQ blockchain, it still opens up think sheets of things that are not on that, that do trade freely. And just normalizing self custodying stocks like they used to do when they first invented them, I think is cool and a huge paradigm shift.
- [25:39]
A
Yeah, I agree with that. We had sort of a similar conversation when Circle announced they were launching their own Layer one. Right. A lot of people were appalled that they wouldn't be using a decentralized, permissionless network for the future of their stablecoin. But kind of the example that we discussed is if you have Peggy, who's 71 years old in accounting at some random firm in the Midwest, who is now told that she's using stablecoins to settle invoices and accidentally sends USDC on Solana instead of USDC on Ethereum. There's no customer service for her to call, so it's not going to happen. They're not going to use it. But for better and for worse, if you're using Circles Layer one, you'll probably have someone to call and a way to reverse the transaction. And to your point, Larry, that's still in the right direction, but it's certainly not the ethos of a fully decentralized blockchain. But there are certain institutions that are never going to settle in stable coins if they don't have recourse, right?
- [26:35]
G
Yeah, I think that's right. And I think it's like, you know, hard to Quantify exactly why and how. But it is in the right direction even, even with the ethos in mind. Like it just normalizes the black market for that or the, you know, the gray market.
- [26:48]
A
Exactly. Let's talk about, since speaking of markets, let's talk about the market. We've got Mish here. Mish, can you give us the quick summary of how you're viewing bitcoin in context of everything else happening right now? Obviously we have PPI this week, CPI this week, you know, I think expectation of cuts in another week. Where do you see bitcoin right now in context of all that?
- [27:11]
H
Well, can you hear me? Let's start with that.
- [27:13]
A
We can.
- [27:15]
H
Okay, good. Because I'm in my car. Well, before I even say anything about that, I have been trying to learn. I mean things are happening so fast. It's difficult, I think for many of us lay people in the crypto space to learn. And listening to all of you this morning has been an incredible education for me. Just want to mention that because I'm like committed to learning about tokenization and stable coins. And I was interviewed in China last week and they asked me about tokenization because China's already using it against real world assets in real estate. And so listening to try to see how we're doing it practically here in this country has been fascinating. And I also wrote a whole article on Circle. So I was, was so happy to hear you talk about that because I know that there's been some issues obviously that stock has crashed, but it looks like it might be bottoming. So now, now I can switch. So last week when I was on with you all, I said, you know, I thought bitcoin might have bought in at around 107. Right now I haven't looked in last half hour but it was trading at around 112.
- [28:25]
A
Yeah, almost 113.
- [28:29]
H
Yeah, I'm bullish. I think 114 is a good area for it to cross. That's kind of where the 50 day moving average is if you like to look at charts. I also over the weekend bought more Ethereum and bought more Chain link. And now I'm listening to you all about Solana. I'll take a look at that as well. Yeah, I'm very bullish in the space. I don't necessarily, like I said, have the knowledge that you guys are all providing, which is just fantastic. But that's my, my plan is to do all this research. One thing that is interesting to me is that I did when I did some research about stablecoins and tokenization. A couple of companies came up, obviously, Robinhood, Coinbase, but also what came up was IBM. And if you take a look at IBM today, it's up on the day it cleared a major moving average. It had gone way down and bottomed. So that's something to look at. And if we're looking, it's back to circle, just from a technical standpoint, because you guys know I'm a trader. I know just enough to be dangerous about some of this stuff. And circle, if it clears Friday's high, which was I think somewhere around 118, then it's probably worth a little bit of a, of a nibble in terms of the overall market. You know, I always say you got to watch it. The weakest link, the market is as strong as its weakest link. Yet on the same time, that weak link doesn't necessarily have to be concerning unless it becomes an anchor. So I'm watching transportation. That's really, I think, going to be very key. If it holds, that whole transportation sector needs to hold, number one. Number two is obviously we're seeing a rotation a little bit back to growth today, which makes sense considering all these headlines. I did see the one about nasdaq, by the way, that you were talking about, so I wanted to learn more about that. And yeah, I mean, I think you have to be very selective here. Obviously, you know, I've been a big bull in gold and silver, so the way I'm looking at silver more than gold, if that starts to go parabolic, I think the one thing that can shut this rally down in equities would be if people start to get really spooked about inflation. And with CPI coming out, that could be a. That I really think that number is so key. But speaking of energy, I mean, oil obviously rallied after opec. More raises on production, and so that that tells you about that. And natural gas definitely looks to me like it's bottom. So I think that's kind of how I'm looking at things right now. I've got a bunch of positions, but I've already trailed up my stops because if we do see anything to spook the market, it would be inflation and equities. That that could be good for some things, not so good for other things.
- [31:12]
A
Yeah, two things, Mish. Take a look when you get a chance. When you're looking at the Solana chart. Look at Solana bitcoin chart. Solana denominated Solana over Bitcoin. And I wanted to hear what you think at some point because if you're in this market, sometimes you can find the next runner by seeing how things are performing relative to Bitcoin. And that chart looks a lot like. Looks pretty good, I would say. So definitely, I think worth a look. And when you see that kind of buoyed by all this treasury company news on Solana, the Spidey senses start to tingle, I think. And I think the other point I would make in talking about Circle, and maybe there's a general conversation and we only have a few more minutes before Buzz jumps in, but a stock like Circle is effectively just a bond, right. I mean you're just buying interest rate exposure because Circle's primary revenue is buying Treasuries. Right. And so I wonder what happens to sentiment around a publicly traded stablecoin stock when rates start to drop. Because if there's a sentiment that you know the Fed's going to start cutting and that later, obviously Powell will be gone and we'll really start seeing a cutting cycle. There goes all, you know, 75, 80% of the income of stablecoins as a company.
- [32:30]
H
Yeah. And also. And there's a dollar exposure too.
- [32:33]
A
Yeah, yeah. I mean technically, I guess, like if you're speaking, they're fully exposed to dollar because they're just a digital representation, I think. I don't want to misquote. Does anybody know exactly what percentage of stable coins are backed by short term Treasuries versus cash? It's minimally cash, but mostly Treasuries. I just don't want to get, get the number wrong. But yes, Mish, you are correct.
- [32:59]
B
Yeah.
- [33:00]
H
Okay, because. Yeah, because that, that would be the concern for me too because the dollar obviously looks very vulnerable here. And I think DXY, if you're looking at that as your indicator under 97, starts to feel concerning.
- [33:14]
A
I guess the good news is that digital dollars trade against dollars. So there's parity there, right?
- [33:20]
B
Exactly. It doesn't matter. One point before we go back, something that Tomer said and actually Mish asked about. So look, I, I'm happily will bet that NASDAQ's not going to create their own blockchain for this or if they do, it will fail. And I know the people at Nasdaq and if they ask me my advice, I will give it to them. And the reason is because the major benefit of tokenization is cross is effectively to be able to be fully multi currency, fully on demand and fully interoperable. If you do something that's not interoperable, you're controlling it. That will create that friction where it will lose if you Tomer asked the question why the competitor isn't the current system? Well, because the current system is based upon batch computing code that is handling stock certificates under 55 Water street that are still in the vaults of DTC. DTC is trying to develop their own blockchain technology to be able to replace what they currently have to be able to do this. But keep in mind the goal here is a full multi currency, full on demand settlement and significantly cheaper interoperability being able to settle between all the various players. And all you have to understand about Nasdaq is the vast majority of their volume. And even in their own listings they don't have dominant market share. Right. You know, there are many exchanges even in the United States that trade all of NASDAQ's equities that they're, that they're listing. What they want to do is make sure because they make more money from listing than they do from anything else. That and market data. So they want to have their piece of the pie. What they don't want to do is try to go down the road of creating their own ecosystem. That is because everybody else will then shoot against it. It's just not, it's not smart business. They're better off from a business perspective having you know the protocol and keep in mind they don't own dtcc. They don't have anything to do with the settlement right now. So why would they think they would want to try to expand into the settlement side as much as get at the trading volumes and profits that are being made by the Coinbase's Krakens, Robinhoods, et cetera. I mean that was a long diatribe, but it's a longer conversation and it's one that definitely is worth having. But it's just, it's be careful because it's not the same thing as stablecoins when you're talking about when you start tokenizing equities. And I've said it before, it's going to take a long time to make it all happen. But it's extremely exciting.
- [35:55]
D
I don't know if I agree with that. Can I, can I challenge those ideas here?
- [35:58]
A
Yeah, quickly. I think we're gonna. Buzz is gonna be jumping in soon. Go ahead.
- [36:02]
D
First of all, like all the major banks on Wall street are developing their own blockchains and I know many of them, including Fidelity, JP Morgan, including Goldman Sachs, behind the scenes with the. And I really don't see it like that. I think what's going to happen interoperability is that eventually you're going to have systems that are going to be bridgeless. You're going to have bridgeless systems where liquidity will be balanced across the different chains and you'll be able to go cross chain without having to use any of the bridges. The bridges are all rethinking their models. But long story short, why would a company like Goldman Sachs want to go on another person's chain when they can create their own chain and then just have all the dapps sit on top of it and then absorb all the fees that will actually be generated by that? Because one thing that is generating lots of fees these days is the blockchains, right? The layer ones and twos and then you have the Dexes of course that generate a lot, a lot of fees. And then you have of course the asset managers like AAVE and all three of these specific verticals can be owned by Goldman Sachs, can be owned by different of the banks. And I think they're going to find a way to for adoption. Of course us natives to crypto, we're not going to be really intrigued or attracted by any type of their value propositions. But they can bring in the current clients that they have, they can bring in the institutional clients to interact on their chain, which is going to be way more volume than what let's say a community based chain or someone that raised funds across a few VCs can bring in. So I would challenge that and I think there are cases for everything. But I do think that the, the mega banks, if they really want to own the entire infrastructure, which we know, that's what, that's our playbook since the creation of Wall Street. I don't think we're going to see them adopting, adopting other chains. I think they're just going to be playing with them, fiddling and then coming in to take over the market share as they always do.
- [37:51]
B
I'd love to respond.
- [37:53]
A
No, how about it? We do have time because whoever Buzz needs to speak to is not on.
- [37:57]
B
So speaking of someone who was literally responsible for at Citigroup for their adaption, adaptation to technology and responsible for Solomon Smith Barney before that, involved in all of what happened with the ECN wars and everything with, with the electronification of Wall street at 2000, you know, in the early 2000s. No, that's just not. No, wrong. Wall street tends to understand that there are certain areas where they want to work together. It is possible that the Wall street firms will cooperate on blockchain technology and in places. But you can't oversimplify aave a hundred percent. You're right. I mean, you know, they're going to try to compete and build things that are low cost, but what will happen is the actual underlying mechanisms for clearance and settlement is something that they're going to be extremely protective of, not because they own it, but because it needs to work and they want to lower the cost of it. Everything they can do to lower the cost of settlement. And this is true not in the U.S. only in the U.S. by the way. It's actually more important in Europe and in Asia where the cost for settlement is significantly higher. They're going to want to drive those costs down relentlessly. And the best way to do that isn't to have teams of technologists working on competing blockchains. And so understand you have to follow the money. This is not a univariate situation here. It depends on the vertical and what it is. To the extent that owning a blockchain is where the fees are going to be. Yeah, you're absolutely right, but I don't think so. I think most of the use of blockchain, you know, for the nuts and bolts, is going to be commoditized, I. E. Not. It's not going to generate enormous amounts of fees. Where the fees will come in are in the value added services, securitization. So businesses like stock loan and interest rate swaps, which are massive businesses, you know, repos, those sorts of things, those are massive businesses that even small fees can generate. Large, large tams, large total addressable markets for blockchains. Yeah, there you may be right, but in the stock market, you know, DTC doesn't make that much money. I mean it's a utility, it's, it's worth a lot less than Solana is worth much less Ethereum right now. So why would we think that, that they would care that much about, you know, about that? It just, it just, it's just illogical. And it's not where they're going to put their money. What they don't like and what they're caring about. What Wall street really cares about is they look at Robinhood and they say, wait, 33% of their income or more is coming from crypto, which is a small fraction of the total overall mark, you know, total or investable universe that they want to change and that they want to go after. So they're going to care about the consumer side.
- [40:44]
A
And Robinhood just joined the s and P500.
- [40:48]
B
Of course. Well, it probably overdue in a sense Given, you know, what they were doing, you know, given how dynamically and importantly they've changed the investing landscape. I mean, after all, commission free trading is now everywhere. That doesn't happen without Vlad pushing that envelope.
- [41:07]
A
Yeah, absolutely agree. We're trying to figure out in the back end if someone else is joining here, but we can continue this conversation. I mean Alex, did that jive with what you're saying in conflict? What do you think?
- [41:23]
D
Yeah, I think there's some really good points. So I think what, what Dave was saying is that there are different verticals in finance, right. So for instance, as he said, if BlackRock wants to create their own chain and they create an asset management firm on chain, they could absolutely blow away Ave's, you know, $64 billion. It's a joke for them, right? And obviously like bringing all the AUM there, then if all of a sudden you have the aum, they're going to want to create their own dex as well. If they are going to tokenize securities, which we know that BlackRock will obtain all the licenses necessary before any other crypto company simply because they've been in the game for so long. Is that like step by step? What I'm trying to say, Scott, is there are going to be a lot of the banks that are going to want to absorb really maximum value extraction by creating a chain for specific purposes. And then there's all the privatized side of things, right, where a lot of these banks, they move really, really big amounts of money. They can't go on a public, you know, blockchain like, you know, hyper liquid where you can see, you know, the different openings and you can see all the transactions. So there are a lot of plays, I think a lot of verticals and niches which I think Dave and I will agree upon, which can really, really be once again taken from Wall street. Unfortunately. And I'm not pro Wall Street, I wouldn't use a Wall street blockchain per se. But listen, if they have the best yields, if they have the T bills, they have all the liquidity that people need. Eventually we may be using their instruments for some purposes to reach our financial goals.
- [42:52]
B
Of course. Yeah, I think it's, it's the important is the devil's in the details on all of this stuff. Look in the, in the, in the past era that I was describing, what ended up happening was the following happened. New York Stock Exchange had 80% market share88.0 before electronification. It dropped dramatically. Right. You know, you look at the futures markets, the company that we now look at, you know, called ice, which owns the New York Stock Exchange, and got in, they, they were new, they were a tech company, and they just came in and totally changed it. If you look at the world of stock trading, the two largest stock trading firms in the world now effectively didn't exist before electronification. What's now Virtu, which is a roll up of a bunch of companies, and, and Citadel, you know, Citadel didn't really roll up. They just kind of built and built and built. They were the first electronic market maker. Now they're in every asset class electronically. So Citadel and Virtu are companies that basically ate the lunch of Wall Street. They're, they're antecedents or places like Get Go and Knight and itg, et cetera. But, you know, you will see those things happen. But the traditional firms will lose market share. The biggest difference with the, with crypto is the potential for breaking down cartels by creating open access to certain businesses. And they're going to fight those tooth and nail because they make a ton of money on things like stock lending. And the ones I keep talking about, you know, stock trading is an interesting one. What we're seeing with the public markets of the Datcos is there's a lot more money that's available in the public markets for stock trading necessarily than there is in the crypto world, because people trust it more. And you're right about that. And so they're going to be very careful there. But what they want to be able to do is bridge and offer all the products. Remember, these companies have not been allowed to offer crypto in any sense for a very long time. And they've seen a lot of. They see the valuation of Coinbase, for example, and it drives them freaking crazy.
- [44:58]
A
All right, Alex, did you want to finish that one up or good?
- [45:03]
D
No, I think it's really, really good. And one thing, you know, Dave, we had a little bit of the beginning of a little battle in the previous session, I think last Friday. But, you know, coming back to specific stocks on chain, you know, what I was trying to explain the other day is that obviously there are many, many issues before this actually happens. As Dave was mentioning, he's worried about liquidity, he's worried about real securitization and real small smart contracts that give you the ownership of the stock. So there's still many hurdles to go through. But what I was trying to explain essentially with the whole stock idea and why it's awesome to have it on chain and be modular as much as the decentralized world is, is that one thing that I really want to see eventually Dave, is to be able to swap anything to anything. And I think that's going to be the ultimate Wall street trading experience that they'll want to do. So if you could go from Bitcoin and swap to let's say one of the NASDAQ 500 or the Magnificent, magnificent sevens that those are, there's some use cases there that you can do probably that nowhere else in the world you'll be able to do without, you know, having to go through multiple hurdles. So one day if we see Bitcoin and you can swap to Apple and then from Apple you go to, I don't know, bittensor and then Bittensor you go to gold. I think eventually you'll have like unlimited type of trading pairs in the future, you know, once everything has the, of all the requirements and pillars to do so. So that for me is an amazing experience. And then on top of what you mentioned, Scott, you know, just all of the benefits of the blockchain, real time 24 7, transparent, no middleman and all these typical traits. But then one thing that I was trying to explain and then Dave kindly, we took it actually in our DMs, you know, to kind of continue the debate, which was a lot of fun. And by the way, I'm always trying to tease you, Dave, because it's just for, for the fun of the conversation. But you know, one thing that I think is really cool is nowadays you guys may know there's a V22 type dex model where you know, once you, the dexes are starting to fight for, for liquidity, right to, for you to deposit pairs. But let's say in the future, on top of liquidity provisioning, if I want to provide liquidity on one pair, let's say Apple and I don't know, Microsoft for instance, because I think that there are more positive correlated. First of all, the impermanent loss would go lower because there's less volatility than there is when you're, let's say putting Solana and usdc. Right. The crypto markets are very volatile. So the impermanent loss problem, first of all, it will soften a little bit. It'll still be there, but it should soften a little bit. But then on top of that, you know, the way DeFi is working now is nowadays on top of getting fees from the liquidity provisioning, you have an extra layer of earning protocol fees. So the tokens from a specific Dex via the V22, which I find extremely exciting. So anyways, I just wanted to cast some positive light on why I think on chain stocks makes so much sense in addition to all the core blockchain benefits. And I look forward to that future of having unlimited trading pairs and being able to go from anything to anything in a simple click.
- [48:03]
A
Yeah, I agree with that. And I think the future of how that will manifest is still uncertain. I still lean towards walls. Maybe my cynicism that Wall street will just try to capture as much of that value as human, the gospel. But at the moment it does seem that they are, you know, Dave, I know you disagree, but at the moment it does seem like they're using it.
- [48:20]
B
No, no, I don't disagree. They will. They will try. I think they will try. I think they will succeed in some places. And you know, it's going to depend on the battles are going to be fought in the halls of Washington D.C. as well as in the market. The stuff in the market. The markets are going to end up in a reasonable place and you know, we'll see what happens in the halls of power.
- [48:41]
A
Well, it's already happening in D.C. right. We can see it. We had the genius legislation. Now the bank citadel's freaking out. The banks are freaking out. We see these.
- [48:50]
B
Yeah, yeah. Of course it's complete. It's totally predictable. But you know, I think we've covered it for today, don't you think?
- [48:55]
A
I do. And I know, I think there was supposed to be an IBC sponsor but they weren't able to a get. Get on stage. So I'm assuming that will be rescheduled. But otherwise I think, yeah, we covered everything we we had for today. So move on to tomorrow. Thanks everybody for tuning in to Crypto Town hall and we'll see you tomorrow. Bye.
- [49:14]
B
Check.