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- [00:00]
A
Well, good morning, everyone. A little bit different. There's green on my screen. Not really sure I'm used to that, but here we are. There's Ethereum up, you know, over 10%. Bitcoin is doing well. Most of Crypto doing well. Is it a new morning? Are we. Is. Is it. Is this the dawn? You know, what do you. What are you guys thinking? I mean, Jamie, you've been toiling, you know, talking about this stuff for, you know, morning, noon and night for, for weeks. And, and all of a sudden this is, you know, we get this kind of day when it kind of seems unexpected. What are you thinking?
- [00:35]
B
Yeah, we. Well, you know, we talked about this last week. Scott was right on when he was accurate to mention the $74,000 area was key resistance. And sure enough, it hit that and then came back down. We've gone back up and we're, we're right at that mark again. So, you know, we're. The more times you hit, hit these resistance areas, oftentimes you do end up going through it. So, you know, that's what I'm hoping for, is that we, we can continue to test this area and finally push through to the upside and, and get some momentum going.
- [01:11]
A
I mean, you know, on the macro side, I mean, you know, gold is dropped below 5, 000 for the first time in a while now. It's just slightly above it. Silver, you know, you know, treating at 80. You know, we've been talking about this for months, that a lot of the precious metal investors were the hot ball of money and ignoring crypto. And it looks like some of them got bored and decided gold at 5,000 and silver at 80, it's not going anywhere. Let's move and look at Bittensor. I mean, I just, you know, just to pick one app that's up like 50% in the last week. You know, it does, it does certainly look like that. And, you know, I don't put a whole lot of faith in that particular narrative. Certainly we've had no progress on legislation or any of the other major things that are going on. But there's this, this thought, and I think a bunch of people have said it on the stage. Curious, is, is the sector a beach ball being held underwater or is this a, you know, crypto dead cat bounce? Because it was just beaten down so badly first, you know, for the last six months that, you know, you're going to see days like this. Do I have to. Do I have to call on people to ask?
- [02:20]
C
I'll take the bait.
- [02:21]
A
Okay. Go, go, Carlo.
- [02:22]
C
Yeah, no, I think you're, you're seeing an asset that has matured in Bitcoin. It has shown incredible resilience throughout this war. And compared to other assets and other asset classes like the S and P and even gold, you're seeing divergence now. And I think that that is an important indicator for the maturity of Bitcoin. Even though we don't have clarity and even though that seems to be bogged down over this fight about stablecoins, we do have great positive indicators because we had both SEC and occ, I should say SEC and cftc, reach an agreement, a mutual understanding that Ethereum should be considered a commodity like Bitcoin. And that to me demonstrates positive momentum from the regulators that regardless of whether we get a market structure Bill, you cannot deny we have two regulatory agencies that are pro digital assets. And I think we're starting to see the makings of an alt season here because I think everyone knows what's about to happen as we continue to see massive deficit spending devoted toward funding this war. And I think that all points to a more positive crypto market.
- [03:51]
A
Well, I mean, the question in my mind is that the story is that why ethereum is up 10% in one night, in 24 hours.
- [04:01]
C
I think to an extent it is because, you know, you had the ETFs go live, especially the staking ETFs, and a lot of the uncertainty about staking over Ethereum was resolution of whether it would be deemed a security or a commodity. Now that you have a mutual understanding from both of these agencies, you do have a little bit more comfort that you're not going to get hit with an enforcement action, at least during this term. And I think that's an upward positive momentum trend for Ethereum.
- [04:36]
A
I mean, I don't see any of the usual Ethereum suspects up here, but it is, when you see this is exceedingly rare. I mean, I'd be curious for those who are market watching, but Scott and I were talking about it this morning on macro Monday. Normally Bitcoin moves up first, then alts take off this point. Yeah, Bitcoin's been, look, it's, it gravitating up toward resistance to me is not remotely surprising given what's been going on with STRC and just the supply demand dynamics. And, and we definitely could talk about that. It's probably worth talking about it. But when you look down and you see a day where alts are actually leading the way, that is surprising. And, and some of them, like, dramatically, I mean Ethereum is 9.76%. Right. You know it was flirting with blowing, going below 2000 and now it's at almost 2300. You know, you're looking at Solana is up 7%. You know it's funny when you look at the 30 day, the 7 day and the 1 day they're almost the same, you know it's like it is, it's, it basically was flat and then boom. And you're seeing this across the board on a lot, on a lot of tokens and you know, I can't explain it, I'm curious what you guys think as to why. What I will say, and this is important from a listener point of view. What I will say is it is extremely rare that you see a speculative bounce. That's one and done. That is extremely rare also.
- [06:06]
C
Remember David, you had I think the Wall Street Journal report on Friday, this massive market that's beginning to develop in perpetuals trading 24,7 on blockchains, especially when it comes to oil volatility. So even traditional markets are taking note of the fact that tokenized assets on blockchains and the ability to trade them on weekends and at night has value. And Ethereum is a huge player in that and crypto is a huge player in that.
- [06:36]
A
Yeah, I was talking with someone over the weekend who has been building trading systems using AI. Obviously it's a Mac mini based trading system. They come up with the signals and they tell the AI to look. And of course what is the AI going to do? The AI is going to pick whichever asset, doesn't matter which asset. Right. You know, it'll trade oil, it'll trade silver, it'll trade, you know, dogecoin, it doesn't matter. You know, if it's on hyper liquid they're going to trade it. So you know, I think there's some truth in that Ryan. I see a hand up.
- [07:09]
D
Yeah. So for years and years and years we would just trade all the other assets against bitcoin. So Bitcoin was the only one for a long time that was priced in USDC or sorry, USD. And then when we had USDT come about that made everything really nice. But we'd always price all the altcoins to bitcoin. So all of the fringe exchanges would have a ton of different bitcoin markets. If you look at the Bitcoin to ETH ratio, Bitcoin to Solana ratio, you'll notice that all of these major altcoins are down compared to bitcoin. So right now my Read on. It is they're regaining some ground against bitcoin and not necessarily regaining ground against the market in general. I think they just got a larger amount of the sell off when everything got spooked. I'm very wary in markets like this. I've gotten caught when, when I see the price pump a bit, I'm going oh, okay, we're out of it. And then I want to throw back in or I want to, you know, you know, just kind of dive in again. And a lot of times it's a head fake going right into the summer. I've gotten caught year after year after year and stuff like this where you know you will bounce back up to 60 and next thing you know we're down to 16 over the summer. So a little, little wary when I see little, little jumps like this. I'm not sure it's, it's coming back like we think it is yet.
- [08:46]
A
Yeah, I mean one day does not a trend make, right Jamie?
- [08:51]
B
Yeah, just to that point. I mean again I, I agree with Ryan. You know, we, you definitely have to, to consider some caution when seeing some of these moves. But I will say that the Ethereum Bitcoin pair, you know, if you look at the weekly, you know, it's broken out of a long downtrend, it's retested in that channel and it looks like it's, it's curling back up at least over the 50 ma in the high time frame. On the low time frame. It's, it's clearly above all, you know, the 50, 100, 200 and it's, it's going up. I mean it's, it's out, outperforming in the near term. What Bitcoin. So you know, it will the momentum continue? I don't know but it, it certainly is indicating that Ethereum wants to, to break loose and, and, and, and take off. You know, also this week we had the, the Ethereum yield products that were I guess launched or, or made available was from, from Black Rock. So I, you know, I don't know if that's, if that's something that's in the narrative. That's, that's uh, certainly for, for investors to be able to get some yield uh, from a Ethereum and a traditional, a product safe, regulated is something that is certainly bullish for Ethereum in the long, in the long term. I don't know if that factors in but at least in the charts perspective, ETH is outperforming Bitcoin in the near term. And it looks like on the weekly.
- [10:20]
A
It's a post. I think the, the latter part, I mean, I think the ETF is obviously a big deal. That's probably where the buying is coming from today. But I mean I look at eth Bitcoin at 0.03 as a pivot point. I mean, you know, the fact is, look at that long term chart. It's, it looks like the chart of death, but in the short run, yeah, sure, you know, recovery level. Anyway, Rich.
- [10:43]
E
Hey, other day.
- [10:44]
A
Yeah.
- [10:45]
E
I mean if we're talking technicals, it's coming up to some serious diagonal resistance. I mean I know diagonals aren't always the greatest technical indicator but you know, it is a nice move. I mean I, we're talking altcoins here, which. That's nice. It's a refreshing change. I mean there have been some, some solid moves. I think the two that I've been watching the closest have been Potensa Tao, you mentioned earlier, and hyperliquid. I mean, I think we've said this a couple of times. We probably need an honest flush of wasted market cap attributed to dyno coins and ghost chains. And if that takes the rest of the year for that to happen for genuine rotation and people just moving, you know, across into real value, I think there's some really good prospects. And you know, I think Potenza, I mean there's, there's a lot to be said about, you know, what's underpinning this price move. I think it's largely speculative. If you've watched news on X, all of a sudden there's, you know, big accounts, you know, pushing commentary, which is the usual story. And, and, and then what's interesting really is, you know, they, these subnet coins that have started to follow the narrative and that's typical crypto Twitter getting a big move from, let's call it the layer one aspect of Potensa. And then there's about eight subnet coins that have started to gain some traction. Once again, I think that's going to be speculative. Potensa's real revenue is, is, is not really derived from these subnets, but you know, they're looking roughly collectively about 20 million. The subnets, collectively about $20 million. So if you look at the, the evaluation of two and a half billion, it's pretty skewed. But I do believe that crypto people are looking for what represents the big winner for AI in crypto. So that one's definitely on my, on my radar, always has been. Been a big fan of them all along. And once again, I think Hyper Liquid are proving outright winners in the Pertex space. Just really dominating. I posted something earlier today. It is a bit of an old chart, but it's quite comical that last week the top 10 pairs on hyperliquid were predominantly trade fire trades, commodities, metals, oil and so on. And I think that's a great thing. I think that should have happened sooner. I think people like to just stay on a single venue. Hyper Liquid is a good venue rather than have to jump around and move capital onto other traditional trading brokerage platforms. But yeah, I'm enjoying the move from those two and nice to see bitcoin and ETH having such strong moves. And yeah, seeing gold and silver lose their luster for a bit.
- [13:41]
A
Yeah, lose the luster. Well, I mean, it is what it is. I can't see. By the way, I see Jamie. Is that a ghost hand or a real hand?
- [13:50]
B
That's the ghost.
- [13:51]
A
Okay. And Ryan, same question.
- [13:55]
D
Yep. Ghost.
- [13:57]
A
Yeah. So. So Lou, you gonna have a wild, a wild crypto Monday this, you know, today after, after this action?
- [14:08]
F
Sorry, I have to mute myself. Yeah, it's crypto Monday Bitcoin in New York today. We've got a good crowd coming and should be, should be fun.
- [14:19]
A
I mean, every time we get to this, you know, this, this level and it looks like, well, we didn't get a 10:00am sell off that where we get a 10:20 sell off or a 10:15 sell off today in bitcoin. But I mean, look, you know, we're at the level. This, this 74 level is where all the technicians have like kind of drawn their lines in the sand. Now. It obviously it's not really a line and you know, it'll be interesting to see what happens. The real question is generally today and Tuesday is when strategy buys their bitcoin versus, you know, from the STRC inflows. So I guess, I guess we'll see. I guess we'll see what happens. Oh, we have a new hand up. So, journeyman, what are you thinking about all this?
- [15:03]
G
Hey, Dave. Morning. How are you, man? Well, strategy bought like a 1.67, $1.6 billion worth of Bitcoin this morning. So. So they already did that.
- [15:13]
A
And like, how do we know, you know, how you know, whether they're smash buying it or what they're doing? I mean, you know, it's, it's. I know they have the money. The question is, is the thing they announced was from last week. They announced it from last week and then, you know, they announced it on Monday. But, but we have no idea. I mean generally what you look and you see a week before. So they bought it at 70 last week. So we kind of know where they bought it. It then fell back and then came back up. But it's not that easy to tell, is it?
- [15:44]
G
No, I don't, I don't think it's that easy to tell. I'm not, I'm not too sure what the answer is there. But I was, I was merely gonna suggest the fact that, you know, we've seen a lot of just bad news so far and that's, that's all we really know is bad news. And most of X is just recycled bad news. And I think that's very priced in. So now that you've broken this line in the sand that you talk about, we're kind of, I think we're just going to really chop between the 74 to 85 level. And if you think about any other news, we don't really know if there is any other bad news. So I think you just stay there and then if you flip kind of at the 85 level, you've essentially flipped the bear. And STRC is probably a big reason for that because all they do is buy more bitcoin. Didn't they buy like 11k worth of bitcoin from STRC last week?
- [16:34]
A
I think that's the number, something like that. I mean it is interesting for people that for those who don't understand, STRC is a really interesting bet. You know, I get into on, on some bitcoin spaces. A lot of bitcoiners like, well, why the hell would you buy that? You're not getting the upside. But there's a lot of money in the asset management world and I don't think this is readily appreciated. That is fixed income money. That is the only thing they're allowed to buy are yielding instruments. They can't take principal risk. You know, they can take credit risk obviously because you buy a high yield bond and it could go to zero because the company defaults. But you know, effectively STRC is being treated by a lot of asset managers as a high yield product. Then the question is, well, what's its risk of default? Well, they have two years of dividends in coverage already and they have, it's around 11% collateralized. I mean 11%, you know, it's almost, you know, somewhere between 7 or 8 to 1 over collateralized based off of Bitcoin. So effectively strc is a vehicle which at today's ratios is really the only way you lose your money if you put it in there is if bitcoin it fails. And then there are a lot of people who think bitcoin will fail. And so it's like, okay, cool. And that's why it's such an attractive, it's an attractive high yield instrument because there's a lower risk of failure than a lot of really high yielding bonds. And it has that high yield. And so that is a totally different class of investor than the people who would own bitcoin or own crypto in general. And that's where that's so effectively what Saylor has done and Fong Li have done is tap into an enormous source of capital that would not be bitcoin investors and turning it into bitcoin. That's where it comes from. And this is a non trivial thing because we're talking about numbers that are significantly more than the mining supply. So we used to worry about the having and the miner supply, but now the equilibrium price of Bitcoin is higher. It's just that simple. Now that doesn't mean. Equilibrium price doesn't mean dick. If the markets are crashing, right, things can crash above it. But if you want to understand what it's doing is it's putting a multiplier on the chart lines. So when you're looking at a price, understand that over time you would expect the price to continue to go higher, 8 to 10% a year or so. And if that's the case, then looking at a chart from five years ago, you really have to adjust that. And so a lot of people haven't. And so that's what we're seeing here. That's what I think anyway. I think that's the easy mathematical way to understand it. But let's see if there. So David, you're up here and you know, you've been around markets a while. I mean, what do you make of all this?
- [19:20]
H
Well, just given the conversation earlier on, I went back to kind of look at what the volumes have actually been over the past week or so in terms of Ethereum and obviously noting that it's a somewhat less liquid market than we've seen historically. And you know, clearly when you have thin markets, I don't know if you want to call it a thin market, but let's say that on a relative basis it is that, yeah, we could see exaggerated moves and I would kind of like just go back to a comment that I made last week which was looking at the portability of cryptocurrencies and looking at the people trying to get out of the Gulf and trying to take their money with them. And I have seen some comments where people were basically going in with cash in Dubai and trying to get as much USDC as they could to get the money out. And that what was slowing them down were the payment rails on the banks. So I'm still looking at the flight of, at the flight capital trade here as something that supports this market. Can you hear me?
- [20:40]
B
Yeah, we can hear you. I think Dave is glitching.
- [20:43]
H
Yeah, I never, he's never. Tongue tied.
- [20:47]
A
Yeah.
- [20:51]
H
All right, we'll wait for Dave to come back.
- [20:55]
B
Well, I know.
- [20:57]
A
There he is. Breathe. I figured you're gonna talk longer.
- [21:01]
G
Dave.
- [21:01]
A
Yeah, Is anybody on, Is anybody in Dubai right now that's on the panel. I guess that's enough on the panel.
- [21:11]
G
No, I don't think so.
- [21:12]
A
No. I'm just curious if anybody, anybody who's up here is actually there to, to, to get a first hand account of what's going on. I mean Ian is in Hong Kong right now, so I, I don't, I lost my eyes and ears on the ground there to know, you know, what the situation is. But definitely when you get travel like this, I mean bitcoin takes on a new and usdc, you know, stablecoins take on, you know, new.
- [21:35]
C
Hey Dave, I don't, I don't know if you see him out there in the audience, but we have someone who's a regular on the finance show, Timothy V. I believe he actually lives in Dubai if I'm not mistaken. And he gave some on the ground conversation about what things look like in Dubai. If he's able to come up and speak.
- [21:56]
A
Yeah, well if he requests, we'll certainly get them up here. But in any case. Yeah, journey, what's on your mind?
- [22:03]
G
I was actually like looking at the BTC dominance chart today. I haven't seen anybody talk about that for a while. It's almost going towards 60%. So my question is how do you guys think Ethereum is going to respond to that? If BTC dominance is up, do you think Ethereum follows? I see a lot of chatter on the timeline that, that alts are kind of dead.
- [22:28]
A
Well, I mean they were until today.
- [22:31]
B
I mean maybe that 59 has been, that, that's been like a, a stable range for a long period of time.
- [22:40]
A
Like
- [22:43]
B
it briefly broke down over the last month like like around 58, but it wouldn't break back up to 59. You know, it hasn't really changed much at all. Even through the. Going to its all time high.
- [23:03]
A
Sorry. Yeah, look, I think that when you look at bitcoin dominance, it's lagging, right? So as I said before, it's like the 0.03 on the ETH. Bitcoin ratio tends to be an inflection point and we'll see. I mean that chart, as I said, it's been dog shit. But it could vary. It's way overdue for a little bit of a bounce. Just technically I'm not saying that that's sustainable. But if people believe in the yield idea and we don't have anyone from Bitwise up here, at least I don't see anybody to talk about what they're seeing from institutional flows. But to me that's a large part of it. When you look at the market today, there's a relief rally in the stock markets or all the indices are up. What are we about, about 1% give or take on the stock market. So risk assets are generally okay. Oil is down a little bit, which I think shocked a lot of people. I think that caught people offside. I was expecting. And what the hell do I know? I don't know anything about oil. I saw Gary up here before he could talk about it. But when oil opened up this weekend, based on the kind of if you believed X, you know, you would believe that the oil markets would be going nuts. And of course what happened, it opened, you know, a little bit over 100 and then started fading. And that's kind of where we're at. And so I think markets are kind of digesting this stuff without really caring. You know, it's almost, it's almost that, what's the word? Markets get numb to this stuff and say, well, you know, how are we going to invest? And so I guess we'll see. No one's seeing good news. It's just lack of bad news. Right. So Rudo, what are your thoughts?
- [24:47]
I
I have to agree with you. I think the, the funny thing is what I, what I see from trading on the smaller time frames is that you will have a day or two worth of really good momentum build up and then for some reason the US market opens and then basically you get it deleted in a few hours time. So it's an exceptionally hard place to be. And you know, the alts itself showing a little bit of relief I think might be just because people are turning their backs on it. So there's no, not that much excitement activity. So it's a tricky thing. I'm exceptionally bullish on bitcoin with the hopes that we're going to reach that 80k. There's a CME gap there, there's imbalance there. So you know, if you imagine bitcoin just as a. Take the weekly and you know, imagine it as a five minute chart. How would you trade it? You would wait for 80 before you start shorting again. So it's a, it's just going to be a choppy ride and I think that's that nobody knows kind of thing. It's just going to keep on eating you up if you want to try and leverage straight this thing.
- [25:43]
A
Hey Thomas, I saw you throw up a hand. Oh, I did get you up as a speaker. I tried to and it worked. Wow, amazing. X work this morning. That's awesome. You there?
- [25:55]
J
Yeah, I, I just had a, I, you know I had a question. I, I spent a lot of time listening over the last couple days to guys like Robert Papp who was on Dyer CEO. I thought he had a very interesting interview. A bit of a, you know, an Iran expert. He's basically studied his, spent 20 years studying this kind of scenario what's going to happen and then listening to oil analysts like Anas Alhaji and then reading through some of the issues with some of the administrative issues outside of the military ones with the respect to oil flows through the straits with insurance and, and things like that. And so when I listen to all that and then I see, you know, so I'm thinking going into the weekend you don't want to be short oil because you just don't know what's going to happen. And then I was surprised to see, you know, you know, overnight it opened up a little bit higher like it dipped over 100. And then now it's fading back. And I'm just trying to get a sense is there a misread of the situation here? Like it's not that bad or is the market in a form of denial about how long the duration risk is for the oil markets?
- [27:07]
A
I mean, you know, as I said, not an expert and I see Tony with his hand up so I'm not going to say it. All I'll make is one quick comment which is this is not until something happens. I was at Cargill, I'm going to pronounce it badly but until, unless something happens on that island, this is all about transportation. It is not about production. Meaning people bidding against each other for scarce oil that they can get their hands on is very different than bidding on West Texas crude because there's no problem getting West Texas crude out of the way, out of the ground, none at all. So it is, when these sorts of things happen, they tend to be very temporary. And I think that's what the market is basically saying. That said, if there were a massive decrease in production capacity or ability to get oil from the Middle east, that means all the other sources of oil where you might be able to get it will go up in price.
- [28:05]
J
I'm, I'm by far next right this one, reading and observing as best I can. And you know, you don't, you don't want to be overly naive, but at the same time you want to make sure that you understand what's happening. And if there's 20 million barrels coming out of the Gulf and only a little bit is now coming through the typical classical straits, they have the pipeline offsets, but let's just figure for round math that only 10 million, there's a $10 million hit to the global supply. I guess that can be adjusted somehow through supply chains and mitigations and things like that, but it takes time and you have this duration risk, like how long does this last? And the broader question I really have is, is the damage to the infrastructure
- [28:56]
D
have
- [28:58]
J
impacts that last months, quarters or years, meaning that they're, they're impacting the way business is getting done in the use in the, the Gulf, the gcc, the Gulf area with impacts refineries. Now is this or, or am I misreading this? Because this is all FUD on social media and I just, I honestly don't know.
- [29:21]
A
Yeah, I certainly don't. Can you guys hear me, by the way?
- [29:25]
D
Yep, we can hear you.
- [29:26]
A
Okay. Yeah, I, I, I, I have no, I have no idea. Anyway, Tony, is that a real hand? Yes, it is. I was actually trying to get on when the topic of bitcoin and all coins, but X is not working this morning. I just want to share some thoughts on bitcoin. I think the charts were screaming oversold with sentiment in fear. So I think this relief rally was certainly due. And the charts for certain altcoins are screaming the same thing like Solana and Ethereum and so forth. So I think bitcoin runs to about 80 to 85k hits heavy resistance and then rolls over. And I think alts have a mini rally and outperform bitcoin, but I don't think the bottom's in. I think there's probably one more downturn maybe to 55k or so for bitcoin and we'll see how the rest of the year plays out. Yeah, I, I, I, I, I could barely want to prognosticate beyond a week, much less the rest of the year. I mean, you know, given everything that, given everything that's going on, I mean, you know, we could talk about, and I'd love to talk about alts. You know, there was some fascinating conversation that Austin Campbell had started and he often is up here, but he's not here today where he, he was talking about, I think it was Celo, token Celo, where they've achieved dramatic gains in use, et cetera. And all the utility that people were saying would be there and would drive the price higher has happened, except for the price is 95% lower. And I look at that and my answer to that is something I've been saying, and you guys are probably a little sick of hearing me say it, which is what goes to the token holder versus the issuing foundation or company. And that is a very important point. And it's like you get this, the response when I actually responded in some way and someone said, well, you have to understand that most tokens are unwilling to take the risk of giving clarity, not to use the word from the act, but giving clarity to investors of what the token is worth because then they'll be called a security and then they'll go to jail or they won't really go to jail, but then they'll get fined or shut down. That needs to change. And I strongly suspect, strongly suspect that if in fact we did get that sort of clarity and it did actually work, that quite a few tokens, the bubble would pop because people would say there really is no there, there. And then there are a few where people would say, okay, great, now I understand that this is going to be worth a lot of money and here's why. And we could talk about which ones are which, you know, But I do think that it will cause changes. Ryan, what do you think that is?
- [32:05]
D
I think especially with the, the altcoins and maybe more of the fringe altcoins, a lot of the, the traders aren't looking at the, the tranches of tokens and the unlocks, and a lot of it is the sentiment of the community and the, the way some of these tokens trade, it's, it's like they've never looked at, you know, the, the cap table or, you know, who's holding what tokens. I know Solana had a huge unlock and there was a, this looming cliff with Solana and I, I've been a part of a lot of projects where there's looming Cliffs. And it almost feels like the more fringe the project is, the less people actually pay attention to this stuff. This is why I think token man like Eric, I have to, I have to give a shout out to Eric Voorhees on this one because Eric has created several token systems over the last decade or so, and each one gets more and more sophisticated and they seem to function better and better with each iteration that he does. And right now he's using Venice and Diem with his AI compute systems, and he has it paired with a company that's actually cash flowing. And this entire model that he's created, if you look at the chart around the Venice token, the Diem token, it's going crazy. And when you look at the mechanics that he built around the token and the issuance around the token, it's like he took all of the hard lessons that everyone's learned over the last decade and kind of built him into his new tokenomic model. So I think over the next couple of years we're going to see a renaissance, if you will, of better tokenomics, where people are going to start looking at the hard lessons learned from 2016, 2017, 2018, all the way through. Probably just what we're currently learning right now. And I think over the next couple of years we're going to see way more sophisticated tokenomic systems that just function way better, especially in this new agentic trading economy that we're going to have. Everyone has an open claw trading now. These, these token systems are going to get crazier and crazier.
- [34:26]
A
Yeah, I think. Whoops. Yeah. Okay, good. I thought I was muted for a second. Yeah, I, I just, I'm. The ones that I'm mostly concerned with are some of the. Look, I don't want to pick on anything in particular, but there are tokens that purport to have major sources of revenues, incoming with absolutely zero clarity of how much the revenue goes to token holders, either by burning tokens because there's scarcity or etc. Like, ask someone. I have these conversations all the time just because every once in a while I'm a glutton for punishment. And so I'll poke the XRP army and I'll say, okay, great, so let's say everything you say is true. How many XRP will institutions need to buy? And you get two flavors of the conversation flavor. One is just clinically insane, which is that, well, XRP is an intermediate asset for providing liquidity, which you don't need anymore. I mean, it's just like the whole world used to use Bitcoin to trade, but everything trades in stable coins now. So there's literally. And. And you do. Why would anyone insert a volatile asset into the middle of a trade between asset A and asset B?
- [35:38]
H
You.
- [35:38]
A
You don't want a volatile asset. You want something that has no volatility in between the two. So there's still this collective delusion that that's going to drive demand. But there's another piece which is perfectly reasonable, which is okay, no, you know, we have our own Stablecoin, and XRP will be used by all of these people for all of these things because of whatever. And then you have to figure out what's the actual demand? Well, how much will they need? And you start modeling it. And there. There are a few people who will do that, but unfortunately, if you do that, you can't get the price predictions that they want to be able to claim. Right. So it's. It's. It's just. It becomes almost impossible to get at that. Similarly, if you look at Chainlink, I've always said this. I mean, Chainlink is being used more and more. If it was a company and we were talking about revenue potential, I'd say, oh, okay, cool, that I understand that. But what do you need the token for? And how much will go to the token? It's the same question we ask it time after time after time. Ondo Finance is another one. Same thing. Lots of potential. Who knows what the token holders will get, right? And this has been going on for so damn long. I'm tired of the conversation. But the truth is that if you listen to what Austin was saying this weekend, and I see Gaurav is up here, so you probably care about this, is that, well, are we in a situation where as soon as we get clarity and as soon as token holders could start demanding things or the issuers start doing things that people will say, well, wait a minute. The emperor has no clothes. We thought it was going to be worth X. And you're telling me that I'm going to get a hundredth of X right now? And all of a sudden, well, that's not very good. It's. It's the same problem that Internet companies had during the bubble when they first started showing revenues. And Scott always points to the show Silicon Valley, where. Where that was, you know, that there was a scene in there. It's like, oh, revenue. That's the worst thing you can do because it distracts from the story. Ryan, is that a shadow hand or.
- [37:36]
D
Yeah, no, no, I Wanted to jump in there because, you know, bringing up Ripple is a. Is a great point of this because, you know, 2013, 2014, we were just issuing tokens.
- [37:49]
A
I think Ripple Labs as a company is doing really well. Yeah.
- [37:52]
D
Oh, oh, yeah, yeah, the company's doing really well. But if you think about the trajectory that we've had in this entire ecosystem, originally we were just happy that we were issuing tokens, right? So we had bitcoin, we had Litecoin, we had all this crypto script alternatives. 2013, 2014, we were just happy to get a token out the door. And then we just started mass copying them and forking the GitHub repos. In late 2014, 2015, we started introducing this idea of utility. And then we started asking the question, but what does your token do? What's the point of it? Right? 2017, 2018, this was huge. Like, what's the narrative? What's the reason for having a token? Then we got even more critical. In 2021, 2022, we started saying, like, do you even need a token? Why? Why do you have a token? What's the real use case here? And we started tying it into like, app tokens and started tying it to like, real world use cases. And then 2024, 2025, we started tying it to more revenue flows where it's like, okay, now it's tied to a company, it's tied to a revenue. And each iteration we're trying to justify the token more and more and more in our own economic system. So now we're issuing stablecoins and we're issuing all these different layers on top of whether it be EVM or our own smart chains. And we're trying to justify it more and more and more. I think it's going to get to a point where we might have this huge pendulum swinging the other way to where we don't even need a token anymore, and we're just using stable coins for everything. And a lot of the original Ripple and Litecoin and every coin but Dogecoin, somehow Dogecoin is like the cockroach that will survive every apocalypse, but I think all the other original tokens will eventually just kind of phase out, but it's going to take time. I think people are just kind of tired of the narrative of I have a token now, what does it do?
- [39:53]
A
Yeah, I mean, I think that that is absolutely. The key is, I've always asked and look, I. I started in crypto in, in 17, right? You know, that's when Ian and I started Building towards, started building coin routes. And the first question I always ask people when I was trying to figure out what was going on, because at that time I didn't know anything about, you know, crypto. I mean I knew roughly, I read the white paper, that was pretty much it. And so my education started that year and I would ask, well, why do you need a token? And most of the time when you asked an issuer why you needed a token, you got some version of hum and a hum and a hum and a hum and a homina because they start arm waving and talking about things and there was no need. The reason they needed a token was because it was a way to create and extract non dilutive capital. Which is another way of saying get rubes to give them money to build their business. And that's not sustainable. And we kind of know that's true. So then it evolved and then we got had the Gensler which I actually think that just to be clear, I think Gary Gensler was, if his goal was to destroy or set back crypto as an industry, he was devilishly intelligent by forcing crypto issuers to memes and things like governance tokens that have absolutely no value other than people's, you know, feeling good about themselves because they couldn't vote themselves revenue. That's exactly what he did. And so understanding that, that his goal was to set crypto back for years, I would say he was brilliantly successful at it. I know that, you know, you could take, take that with however you want to take it, but I think he was, it was very smart. And so if you want to understand the real damage that the anti crypto army did is this is what we call jiu jitsu finance. They use the greed and power of the industry against itself. And so all the own goals that we've had since then kind of derive from that stuff. So I think we've seen a lot of it and we have to come out of it and it will. I mean that's why this fight over the Clarity act matters so much. Not so much because of the specifics. And yes, there's some things that are going to end up getting passed that we're all going to hate. There's no doubt about that. But if the one thing it achieves is allowing founders and allowing people to design assets that make economic sense, then it's a massive win. That's the way I look at it. Clearly that was designed to be controversial. I see no hands up. So, okay, I'm going to call on Carlo to Start. What do you make of that sense? Because I know that forget stablecoin yields for a heartbeat. All the other issues with Defi and everything else. I mean what do you see as the big deal going on with clarity? Or do you think that the industry is starting to say screw it, if the regulators aren't going to kill us, we'll still try to build?
- [42:48]
C
I think that's exactly what's going to happen and I think that this push by the banks and you came onto my show Friday, the stablecoin solutions show, and you were very gracious to share your thoughts on this. But I think the fact that the banks are fighting so hard against yield and a lot of people are starting to jump onto this narrative, I'm seeing more and more stories in the news cycle talking about this. First of all, there is no stopping this train, especially when it comes to AI agentic payments. I don't think people understand the TAM of what's about to happen. The massive volume of payments, agent to agent that's going to be built over stablecoins. And I still maintain blockchains have a place here because stablecoins need fast blockchains to run on, especially when you're talking about micro payments on the AI agentic scale. So chains like Polygon, Sui Base, Solana, these are all going to continue to see adoption but they're going to have a different profit model and they're going to have a different revenue stream because they're not going to realize the prior windfall that they had in previous cycles. They're going to have to adapt. But what I think is going to backfire badly for the banks and all of this is that I think they're going to drive more and more adoption of Defi and I think they're going to drive more and more interest in self custody by being so adamant about restricting yield opportunities on these centralized exchanges like co Coinbase. You've already seen Coinbase pivot and they're now paying in bitcoin yield for custody of usdc. So this is whack a mole for the banks and I don't think they're going to win this in the end.
- [44:35]
A
Yeah, my opinion on this subject is rather, is rather well put by saying the banks are film camera companies trying to outlaw digital cameras and they're not, it's not going to succeed. And so you know the ones who are. And, and look, they kind of know it too. I mean the, the bigger banks understand that that's true. So they're just gonna, it's just a delaying tactic. It's just, you know, when you run it's like the movie where they're running down and the guy's coming after them and they're throwing chairs at them and you know it's not going to stop the guy coming after them. But you know, it doesn't mean that, that it's going to change. I mean eventually everything gets sped up. I mean Kraken was out and their CEO was talking this weekend about how they will be able to do exactly what I've been talking about which is offering an integrated platform that gives payments and investing at the speed of light as opposed to wait a day, wait a day. Oh, did my wire go through? I mean there are many inefficiencies in
- [45:36]
C
the system and the neo banks like Kraken are coming. They may not be full fledged banks but you know what, if people have enough exposure to other alternatives in defi for yield and for lending, you're kind of losing the narrative for banks in a lot of ways. And I think when consumers realize that they can on and off ramp through something like Kraken, put their money in self custody and do defi and other things, they're going to start to think there's no point to the tollbooth economy that is the current banking regime and the banks that adapt to this. I spoke virtually, I recorded a session for a conference that's coming up for the Bankers Institute where I had to talk about use cases and making stablecoins sticky for banks. And I wrote a piece that I'll be happy to put in the nest where I basically talked about this very thing. These community banks are at a crossroad. They need to pick whether they want to stick to the old way of doing things and become marginalized and lose market share or do they want to be nimble and adapt to stablecoins and give consumers actual options that I think in the end will retain Depositors will grow their lending base and will take business away from the big banks.
- [46:54]
A
I mean it's certainly possible. I personally think that expertise in localities to evaluate creditworthiness of businesses is important and expertise in understanding how to source within communities is useful. And community banks can profit from that. It's when they get bigger than that and become outside their expertise they can't. And why this matters for crypto is and for even an agentic economy is there's some knowledge LLMs are, are based on, you know, training on large data sets but there's always idiosyncratic data and idiosyncratic data is something. There's going to be advantages. And so you can. Both things could be true. Anyway, Jamie, you've been patient. I've seen your hand up for a while.
- [47:40]
B
Yeah, no, just, I think it's important. Like, you know, we talked about this a little bit before. You know, the Clarity act is, you know, the Republicans have the majority, but, you know, they need 60, so they're seven votes short so that, you know, that they can overcome the potential filibuster. Right. But what, you know, what's interesting, and we kind of talked about the idea of them kind of pushing it down the line. Maybe they have no incentive right now. You know, there's nothing that could benefit the bank to lobbying the people who support them in voting this in right now. But, you know, as we get through the midterm, as we get into the next election, this could shift where it goes back to the Democrats, maybe the administration actually gets voted in. And then now, you know, you have another opportunity. What I find interesting is that the CBDC bill was passed. It was overwhelming, 89 to 10, but that one was a ban just until 2030. Which is kind of ironic where, like, this is kind of like positioning the, the bills that we're trying to get real clarity and lockdown. But it's getting moved to this next administration opportunity. And I think people need to be aware of the nuance of that and how that could really affect how these get approved, when they get approved, and, and depending on which administration has the, the majority when they have the opportunity to vote on it again.
- [49:10]
A
Yeah, I mean, I really, I'm. How do I phrase this? It's sickening how often we have to end up talking about politics. I think the most important question really is will there. Will the Democrats continue to be marshaled by Elizabeth Warren to try to block innovation and push everything offshore again? And. Or is it okay, we're going to adopt it? We're going to, you know, we've slowed it down enough, and our friends, the people we can control, will. Will run it. And this, this notion of banning a CBDC until 2030 is essentially, let's just, let's ban it until 2030 for now. And the people voting for it fall in two camps. The camp that says, we really want a CBDC and this is perfect because we won't have the White House until 2028 anyway. And the other is saying, okay, well, maybe we can get this and make it permanent later. So it really, in other words, it's essentially a waste. It means Nothing. Because, you know, it's, it's if you want government power and pure statism, you want to see bdc. And honestly, you know, if as stablecoins grow, given the, the amount and the ability of control that are built into it, I'm not sure it's that big of a difference anymore. Although I see BDC definitely could be worse. That's about the one thing anyway. But we're talking about altcoins and Gaurav, you've been up and down a bunch. You know, I wanted to get you up here before we close. I mean, what are your thoughts as to what's going on today on any of these topics?
- [50:39]
F
I've been dealing with, I don't know, X application because like, my last attempt was with the browser and this worked. So I have no idea what's been going on in the tourist space today. But I'll go back to the topic that you said. We have discussed a zillion times and you know, we have discussed a zillion times, probably just the two of us, which is tokenomics and why is nobody interested in tokens anymore? And I think there were incredible points presented, though I didn't hear them all through this cracking connection. But I want to quickly, you know, as a, as a concluding summary of today's space would go back again to why did we started liking the crypto ethos in the first place? And why did ICO succeed in the first place? Because we were looking at an economy that though, was new and had a promise of the future and was a small part of the larger tech stack and did not come here to change the world in its initial claims. Of course, Bitcoin came to change finance. Whatever was the fact that, big or small, the promise was transparent, the economy was transparent, and it was perpetually rewarding as it grew. So if I was to take a small piece of it represented by a token, I was at least sure that my bet, winning or losing would be transparent. And I would know that that very promise faded away. I would go back to somewhere around YFI for the first time where we created one. Rewards and DeFi returns and yields were though shown as if they were transparent but hidden behind this operating AI or operating logic. That was the first time something I mean, I know you can call me out on that statement, but that was sort of the emergence. And I'm not saying before that there weren't broken tokenomics. There was like that was the, the beginning of silliness when people started raising capital over WhatsApp messages and maybe even just, you know, iMessages, whatever, two liners. And.
- [53:02]
H
And I'm.
- [53:02]
F
I'm sad that, that every single high quality conference or assembly from Satoshi Roundtable to Alpha gatherings across, you know, Davos or you name it, everybody talks about this, everybody understands this, and everybody's passionate about this topic. And these are really, really powerful people. And still, even with the smartest people, like an attorney, co founder of Solana, making a statement around Jupiter's recent buybacks, are actually advocating against the buyback and keeping that capital, it's surprising. Like, how can you advise or how can you even think about holding your capital at your will? I know the reason is noble. They're saying that you need that capital to survive the winters. But dude, like, you raised capital from the people in that ICO and even the VCs on the promise of a decentralized economy. And it's stupid how everybody's so passionate about it and nobody's doing anything about it and nobody's able to make an impact strong enough to get us back to the transparent economy. So I'm left with questions. Usually when this topic strikes, I'll not stop speaking about it because my reason of being in crypto is my extreme conviction that we'll be able to restore the same ethics of the tokenomics. And sooner than later. I think VCs are largely responsible or getting this implemented, not not submitting or not surrendering to whatever broken tokenomics and making sure that there's a pipeline of implementation. The rise of memes is the biggest example of the same. Ryan wants to say something, so I'll
- [54:59]
A
take a quick stop.
- [55:01]
F
I'm speaking more because I see Scott isn't hair. Who would call my speech?
- [55:09]
A
Before we go to Ryan, I do want to make one point and that is the reason. Capitalism.
- [55:13]
F
Are you speaking, Ryan?
- [55:15]
D
Dave's going. I think that he can't hear us.
- [55:19]
F
Can anybody hear me?
- [55:20]
A
You guys can't hear me?
- [55:22]
F
I guess it's glitching again. I'm gonna go on mute.
- [55:25]
B
I can hear you, Dave. It's just. It's just garage. We can't hear. They can't hear you.
- [55:30]
A
Yeah, all I was going to say,
- [55:31]
F
for the record, I can't hear anyone.
- [55:34]
B
You may need to drop them down and bring it back up.
- [55:36]
A
Yeah, I'm gonna have to. Okay, well, sorry, Gaurav. The. The one point is, is the reason free markets work. When free markets work, it's when. When all the information is people understand what's going on, they can price it. There's Whatever. Greed is good is the famous expression from the movie Wall street. Right. Gordon Gekko. But greed is only good if there is a way of channeling it. So when you have, when you can raise money because people are dumb and just because Binance or, or lists a token, it gives it an imprimatur and people think it means something. Look, the VCs are never going to discipline themselves. They'll discipline themselves when they can't raise money anymore. Right. You know, and move on to the next one. And that's the real issue here. So I, I keep talking about disclosure and about tokenomics because ultimately that's what makes an investment sustainable. Because if you're not, if there's no way to, no path to value whether. And that value doesn't have to be revenue. The value could be scarcity, it could be a lot of things. But the truth is that has to be something. And VCs got trained in this space that they could just extract money from, exit liquidity and live happily ever after. And founders did the same. I mean founders actually were able to do to raise before they built anything. And then once they had that war chest, why would they wasted building? You know, it's like the incentives are completely, completely fucked up. And you know, I think, Ryan, I think you've made that point before. But anyway, you have your hand up, so we'll let you up toward the left.
- [57:06]
D
So you know, he's talking about decentralization, how we believe in these decentralized economies. And then all of a sudden a founder or a founding team steps in and changes things. People forget that just because it says decentralized on the COVID of the book doesn't mean it's actually decentralized. And we're in the space of decentralization. But behind every multisig, behind every white paper, there are people. And those people can override things. And just because they say they're going to do something doesn't mean they're going to do it. And very few protocols have actually just launched themselves into immutable smart contracts. Most of the smart contracts for a lot of these ERC 20s and tokens can be upgraded and changed. So even though you read a white paper that has a tokenomic model does not mean that's what they're implementing or even what they're going to stick to. And a lot of times they've actually changed their wording to path to decentralization and not decentralization. I will add in to this as well that I believe VCs and investors are getting smarter with the advent of being able to drop a white paper into ChatGPT and actually doing a BS check. Before I used to do the BS check on behalf of investors, they would send me the white papers, I'd read through them and I'd say, yeah, no, this is fake. Or just for fun, take the Bittensor white paper and drop it into ChatGPT and ask it a few questions. Not saying anything bad about Bittensor, but just do it. It'll be interesting. A lot of people passed with, you know, two guys, a dog and a white paper in 2017 and raised millions and millions of dollars because no one was actually reading or understanding the white papers. Now we have AI for that. And now I think investors are becoming more savvy and they're not just throwing around their money at every single token that has a white paper. But all that to be said, just because it says it's decentralized doesn't mean it is.
- [59:06]
A
Well, I'll make two, two predictions. Prediction one, whenever there's a major bull, bull market, not like a day or two, but something that starts to rampage higher, investors aren't even going to bother putting in a chat GPT. They're just going to buy based on momentum, because that's what they do. So that's prediction number one. It will happen. Now, it may happen From Bitcoin being 20,000 and it starts rising again, or it may happen from here. I mean, I don't, I'm not making that statement, obviously. I think that, you know, I think that short term at least, I think that we have hit a. We have seen the bottom, but in Bitcoin, but on the altcoin market, it's different. People don't learn. Anyone who believes that, investors learn. I mean, there's a bridge I used to be able to see from my old New York apartment that I'd love to sell you. It's just that simple. So I'm very skeptical. But the other is when there is, if there ever is disclosure rules that work, you will see analysts that will start to outperform. And pure momentum, buying and selling will, will, will be a part of the market, not the market, because right now it is the market. But it will. If you look in stocks, it's in the equity world, it's, it's certainly a part of the market. There are lots of people who buy and sell stocks. I don't even know what they do right. And then there are others who actually are called value investors and they can do well, too and people wonder how could growth and value investors both do well? But that is in fact the case. The good ones do well and the bad ones do badly. It's pretty straightforward. So for what it's worth, that's where I think we're going.
- [60:36]
D
Dave, I want to ask real fast. I don't know if anyone knows this. Does anyone know how many stable coins are currently in the queue for being reviewed? Because I know there's a timeline that if they don't get reviewed in a certain amount of time, to get automatically approved. I was curious how long that queue is right now.
- [60:54]
A
I have no idea. Carlo might know, but he dropped, so. So don't know. We'll have to wait for another day,
- [60:59]
D
but topic for another day.
- [61:00]
A
Topic for another day. So anyway, you know, we. During this show, we saw Bitcoin go from 74. 2 to 74. 4. It touched 73, 000 and now we're at 73.8. So we're right in the middle. So who knows what tomorrow will be, but we will see, see everyone on Wednesday. Since we're doing this every other day now, I think I'm still hosting, so you got to deal with me. Scott's in Costa Rica enjoying spring break with his family. So everyone stay safe out there. Those of you who will be in other spaces, I may see or speak with you at some point soon. Follow every one of the speakers up here. They give their time and effort and, you know, at least more people are smiling today. But that's it. Unless anyone has a final thought. Going once, twice, sold. Okay, have a great day, everyone.