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- [00:01]
A
Bitcoin saw a major setback when it was rejected at 94, 95,000, even going as high as 98. Well, now we're back below 90,000. Saw over a billion dollars in liquidations with 182,000 individual traders wiped out on a move with relatively low volatility. I have no idea how there's still a billion to be wiped out after all of the nonsense that we've seen over the past few months, but it's definitely worth discussing. I'm going to dive into that and everything happening in the news right now with Chris Perkins. Let's go, let's go.
- [00:50]
B
Let's do.
- [00:51]
A
Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the show. I'm going to ask you to like and subscribe for the first time in about three months because apparently it's important for the algorithm and it's going to hate me if you don't do that. So if you like me at all, like, but if you don't, just leave. Otherwise, I'm going to go ahead and bring on Chris Perkins right now, the president of Coin Fun. Good morning, Chris. How are you?
- [01:13]
B
Scott, how's it going, man?
- [01:15]
A
It's going better for me than the 182,000 people who apparently not only hit a stop loss, but got entirely liquidated on this move. I don't understand it, man.
- [01:28]
B
Really?
- [01:28]
A
Here it is. Crypto liquidations top 1.08 billion. As 182,000 traders get wrecked. I would say definitely wrecked if you're getting liquidated. This is almost as large with Bitcoin, basically, in this period between, I don't know, 94 and 88. Five, as we saw in the entire FTX event. The entire FTX event was 1.2 billion. We saw almost 20 billion on October 10th. Now, just on Casual Tuesdays, we get 1.08 billion liquidated. What is happening here?
- [02:00]
B
Yeah, it's a very uncertain time, isn't it? And. And I think if you look around the world, the world is starting to really think about it's rupturing, right? The. The market order as we knew it is really coming apart. I mean, look what's going on. We just had Trump in Venezuela. We have Iran, we have Trump taking Greenland, we have NATO coming, you know, massive pressure in Europe and NATO and the markets are just like, God, there's so much uncertainty. Tariffs, right? We're about to have the Supreme Court ruling on tariffs.
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A
No, we're not.
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B
Well, we will.
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A
That's sarcasm. That's sarcasm. I'm just saying, every time we think we're getting that ruling. It magically doesn't happen. Yes, we, yeah, but like we're in.
- [02:42]
B
A max period of uncertainty and I think bitcoin is trying to figure it out out. It hasn't emerged yet as the digital gold that we all know it will be someday. It's still this like balance between this frontier risk asset and digital gold. Regular gold's doing just fine along with other commodities. And so it's just not there. Now a part of the problem here is that these markets are going through a massive, what I call flipping and that flipping is not bitcoin versus eth. It's retail versus institutions. Right. And like you said, I think retail got wrecked on 10, 10 got destroyed. Why? Because Gary Gensler forced all the derivatives overseas and they didn't have those like all the risk management in the waterfalls. You know, frankly I was one of the guys who built the risk waterfalls onshore in the US after the crisis. I was at Lehman, I came across. They completely ignored those lessons. Retail got wrecked, they keep getting wrecked. But what do you have, you have. Institutions are marching forward and now they're able to because you have a 180 degree difference in the regulatory framework and, and the regulate and the institutions need that to enter the space. So they're not there yet. We don't have market structure. We should talk about the market structure. Bill. I was on the phone with DC all weekend, got some good updates there. But, but the institutions are coming and so you're going to see the grown up capital slowly moving forward as the conditions settle. But man, we're in a period of max uncertainty right now. Who knows? Trump's speaking at Davos right now. Who knows what's going to come out of his mouth. And you'll see the markets respond in real time because they're jittery, right? They're frontier assets.
- [04:16]
A
I haven't looked at Poly Market, but if I had to place a bet on what Trump's talking about, I would imagine we will own Canada by tomorrow.
- [04:24]
B
Yeah, might as well go to Canada or actually, or perhaps parts of Canada, right? Like you can see some of the states coming across like, seriously, like anything's on the table right now. I don't. Did you see Mark Carney's speech last night?
- [04:35]
A
I did not.
- [04:36]
B
Dude, this dude is a, he's a central banker, right? He's very reserved, he's kind of liberal. But he was going after it last night, you know, say, you know, he was evoking this theme of, of communism with, with, in Czechoslovakia there's this famous thing where people would put up the signs and play along and play along and he's like, I'm not playing anymore. I'm not playing this American game, this big power game. You know, I'm out. And you know, that was very, very uncharacteristic of, of a guy who's generally reserved as a central banker. Now Trump's not coming across. I don't think he's going to take that lightly. And if anything I think he's going to ramp up the pressure on Greenland which will lead to some again, I think it's near term uncertainty. I'm super bullish about this market. Medium and long term same.
- [05:22]
A
We talk about the near term uncertainty. So I can take it from two sides. So first of all you said maybe we're under pressure because of uncertainty and bitcoin sniffs that out and it goes down. The only issue I have with that is that we haven't seen seem to go up when other things go up. Right. So it seems like bitcoin only sniffs out downside, it doesn't participate in the upside of late. That's the cynical view. The silver lining to that is it's clearly uncorrelated. And if you want bitcoin to have a future, it should not. Even if it is digital gold from characteristics, it shouldn't trade like gold because you don't want it to just follow the price of gold. And it certainly shouldn't trade like the Mag 7. Right. As a real asset. And I don't think it's been trading as either. So my silver lining is that Bitcoin is a market of its own.
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B
Yeah. Let me tell you something I've been thinking a lot about as well. And what you're looking at right now across the globe is that there's this anti globalism push where everyone wants to onshore their supply chains. They want to be self independent. I, I talked to the folks at Academy securities and what they talk about is that we're going from a post war world to a pre war world, which is really interesting. So looking for those not worth turning, very forth turning like, like securing natural resources. Right. And so it's, it's, it's inward, inward fraction fractionalizing. Right. Fracturing. But against that backdrop, what is the one technology that actually brings everyone together is blockchain. Right. One of the ways that gets me very excited about underwriting crypto investments is that anytime you deploy a token onto the blockchain, guess what? It's instantaneously Global. Right. So this is a really interesting, in a way, contrarian technology that is truly, truly global in an age when this global order is pulling apart.
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A
Yeah. I want to talk, I guess, more about market structure because you obviously, no pun intended, have some clarity on what's happening there because you are very much involved in what's happening in D.C. i'm just going to play a quick clip from David Sacks, who seems to still. And maybe it's because he's within the Trump administration and this is his purview. He seems to speak about this as if it's a foregone conclusion, which I find very interesting in context of what happened last week. Let's just watch the clip quickly.
- [07:39]
C
Compromise. Everyone leaves a little bit unhappy. Right, Right. But I think what's going to happen.
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A
Sorry, that didn't hurt.
- [07:46]
C
The banks are going to get fully into the crypto industry. So we're not going to have a separate banking industry and crypto industry. It's going to be one digital assets industry. And I think.
- [07:54]
A
And will they be.
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C
Their opinions are going to evolve over time. And I bet you over time the banks like the idea of paying yield because they're going to be in the stablecoin business.
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A
But will they also be regulated the same way? And I guess that's a big. I mean, the banks will say, hey, if they get to do all the same things we do, how come they.
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B
Don'T get regulated the same way?
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C
Well, I guess because they're offering slightly different products. Right. So, but I mean everyone.
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A
So you get the idea there. Obviously we have the CFTC chairman at the same time saying Congress is now on the cusp of enacting the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act. And at the same time, you have Patrick Witt, who is a crypto advisor to the White House, basically saying that we're very privileged to say no bill is better than a bad bill. He is pushing back on Coinbase saying, no, actually a bad bill is a hell of a lot better because there will be a much worse bill one day. And I do, I guess that does resonate. A bad bill under Trump, who's obviously pro crypto, regardless of your thoughts on him, with a favorable cftc, favorable sec, pro bitcoiners everywhere, even the bad bill we get under them is better than the inevitable bill because this will be a regulated industry whether we like it or not, and there will be legislation under the next administration. So I'm of the opinion after last week that this thing is not getting done now.
- [09:06]
B
Yep. Yeah, period.
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A
But I Could be totally wrong.
- [09:11]
B
I've long said it's not getting done. I'm still in that camp, but I'm actually more optimistic after being on the phone with people like the White House and Coinbase over the weekend. So Coinbase at Davos yesterday, I think it was yesterday, outlined six issues that they have with, with this current bill. And as I go through those issues, I'll be honest with you, they're all solvable and where I'm coming out right now and we can go through them if you'd like. Things like stablecoin interest. Well, stablecoin interest, it's kind of insane that we're re litigating that because we already have the genius bill. So come on guys.
- [09:50]
A
But that's the bank lobby.
- [09:51]
B
But you can thread the needle, right? How do you thread the needle? Well, you say you can't pay interest on idle balances, so mobilize it a little bit and you can have one touch action where you move it into an LP and you're starting to pump interest. Right. So there's ways to technically solve that issue. The other big issue is that when it comes to tokenization of real world assets, the bill is trying to tie the hands of, of the SEC and forbid them from giving what we call exemptive relief. It's, it's just fascinating. Right where, and, and this is again.
- [10:24]
A
Like that's relatively new language according to Kinsky on last week and he said the whole tokenization side, that wasn't even in clarity until a couple weeks ago. And they sort of slid it in.
- [10:34]
B
Why do you think? Because we're on the verge of launching Internet capital markets. Equity markets are massive. $127 trillion globally humongous markets, right. If I'm a fiduciary, and I am, I, I run, you know, I am, I'm an institutional fiduciary to my LP's right. Given the choice I have to buy the token. I have to, it's a better instrument. I can risk manage it when China invades Taiwan on a Saturday night, right. Provided there's enough liquidity. And so this mo, this entire asset class will move into the tokenized space and it will be the de facto instrument that you use if you're a fiduciary. And liquidity is going to go up. So remember I said 127 trillion. How do you buy those things you buy with stable coins? And so when the Treasury Department is saying that it's $3 trillion in the next few years, they're way too low Right. So stable coins are going to go through the roof because you need to buy and sell these equities on the weekends when China's invading Taiwan, you know, using an instrument as an example. And of course, I don't want them to do that, and I don't think it's going to happen in the near term. But. All right, getting back, if you're an incumbent, Right. Do you want. You've spent billions of dollars to create to be the best of the best Flash boys, right? And now you have something where, oh, it's going into defi. This thing called reg nms, which is like what underpins all of the Flash boys thesis. Equity gets routed to the best price. They pick it off. Now you have this decentralized, fragmented. Oh, so what we want to do, because we're the incumbents, we want to stop that. We don't want. We want to tie the SEC's hands and not allow them to exempt the system type of experimentation. That's a challenge, and I think that's getting worked through. And so as you go down the line and you look at the issues that remain, my real belief here is that David Sachs is right to an extent. The policy issues will be solved.
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A
I'll give you one.
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B
Yeah, go ahead.
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A
Okay, well, I didn't mean to interrupt you there. It was a very definitive policy issue. I could jump in. Here's the one. Okay, so obviously, coinbase I didn't see yesterday, but I've seen Armstrong's tweets, right? You've got kind of tokenization attack on DeFi stablecoin coins and the CFTC being too powerful versus the SEC. Those are the main four he outlined. Not. Not with. Notwithstanding. The one that nobody's talking about, that I think is the actual conversation is that the Democrats aren't going to allow Trump and his family to trade crypto or participate in the industry, and they're not going to allow a bill that says that. And Trump's certainly not signing one that bans him.
- [13:06]
B
Damn it, Scott, you took the wind out of my sails.
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A
Hey, you shouldn't have paused.
- [13:11]
B
So. No, no. So exactly. That's my point. The policy issues will be solved. But I don't. In the beginning, I said, I don't know if the bill gets done, why Trump derangement syndrome? You know, I talk to leading Democratic senators, and what they'll tell you is I can't get anything through heading into midterms until the Trump ethics issues are addressed. With world liberty like, they just see red, Right? And there's no talking around them. And the way you respond to that is be like, hey, listen, guys, I think we do have ethical issues with Congress trading various instruments, but it's not a crypto problem, right?
- [13:52]
A
It's not Pelosi problem.
- [13:54]
B
It's an everything problem. So let's do ethics. Like, why are we discriminating against this little asset class called crypto when we have much bigger problems across the board? So, yes, let's address ethics. Let's address it holistically. I can't. So what's going to happen? I believe, I believe we're going to get through the policy issues. There's one policy that I think is missing and that's around security. I think we've talked about this in the past. We got the North Koreans coming in, they're licking their chops around getting their hands in that $127 trillion equity market. And so what I've been trying to get into the bill last minute is this concept of privateering. We need to unleash the private sector to go on offense, to hack back against the people that are our adversaries to provide that umbrella of security. We can talk about that later. But like, I'd like to see some security issues addressed. But regardless, we're going to get through the politics, the policies, but it's going to, it's going to stagnate and it's going to fail at the politics. The good news is, is that there's going to be, I believe it's going to get to the floor of the Senate and then people will have to sleep in the bed that they make. And by the way, we're going into midterms. There's a lot of crypto capital out there that a lot of campaigns would love to have. So the timing is going to be interesting. But, yeah, my base case that is that it fails. But what does that mean for us as crypto people? Honestly, we have like, we couldn't dream of a better SEC chair or a better CFTC chair. I know them both really well. They are focused on doing the right thing. And so what are you going to get? You're still going to get three years of amazing precedent no matter what. And so does that give institutions the full clearance to jump into this full speed ahead? Maybe not as, not as much perhaps as. But I feel very, very good. I mean, I talked to these guys all day long. I was in banking for forever, right? They're all moving forward. They're not moving. They're slowly, methodically moving forward. They're coming, right?
- [15:48]
A
Yeah. My only problem is that they erase. And this is not a problem. I shouldn't have said that. We all hated Gary Gensler. He was the worst. I hope he dies in the fiery depths of hell. But, but Smithers. Yes, excellent. Every day. But they were able to erase his entire legacy in five minutes.
- [16:07]
B
Yeah.
- [16:08]
A
Because there was no legislation. So let's just say that after that three years, we go right back to a Gary Gensler type. If we do have the misfortune of the anti crypto army, regulation can be quickly reverted. Executive orders and regulation are not going to protect us for the next 50 years. That's the point I'm making. So we still do need sensible legislation. And to be quite frank, right now Coinbase is in a really good position to block this and make it not work because they can offer rewards on stable coins.
- [16:39]
B
Yeah. I'm going to push back a little bit and here's why. Under Gary Gensler, there was no precedent. Right. He was the master of ambiguity. He said, I'm, you know, I think these are securities. Right. But he f. But he failed. And he absolutely failed every time went to court. But his, his policy was one of ambiguity to prevent progress. Right.
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A
Purposeful ambiguity.
- [17:01]
B
Absolutely right. But once we have these two guys in place, you're going to have actual decisions about what's a commodity and what's a security. I'll give you a market to watch. Everyone needs to watch this market. It's the most under observed and important market out there. It's called the US Futures market. Okay, Right now we CME only has like four futures on crypto, Bitcoin, Ethereum, XRP and Salana. Right. What about all the other alts? Here's the deal. If you have a future, guess what? You're a commodity. Why are you a commodity? Because the SEC can say no to your listings. But when you talk to Atkins, you talk to ce, they're like, yeah, of course, send the futures up. These are commodities. Go. And so now you have a US future, now you have a commodity. Now you have regulatory certainty for that asset. Right. And so one of the things you can expect to see is an acceleration of futures listings. Oh, and by the way, once you have a future, then you can avail yourself of generic ETF standards. And then you're have an etf. And that again crystallizes you as a commodity, gives you that certainty. Oh, and then again, remember how we talked about, about institutions?
- [18:07]
A
Yeah, go ahead.
- [18:08]
B
Yeah. When we talked about institutions, guess what guys? Institutions can't buy crypto right now because it's too damn volatile. Like we took all the regulatory risk out of the way. Great. They can't buy it. When can they buy it? When they can trade basis, when they can hedge with futures, then they can take some of that market volatility out and benefit from the yield.
- [18:26]
A
That's why we've seen options on IBIT just absolutely explode. Because it finally gave the, you know, those with the appetite to hedge the ability to do it. Yeah, exactly. You've made a very like eloquent, important point. Point is that no matter how badly they want to be here, if they can't legally hedge it, they can't do it.
- [18:43]
B
That's right. And so what I'm saying is you're going to get clarity one way or the other. Is it going to be enshrined? Well, in certain cases. Think about it. Fast forward three years from now, we have all these tokens, they've got futures. Then somebody rocks up and says, no, they're all securities. What are you going to do?
- [19:01]
A
I guess the question though, sorry to interrupt again. How many will have futures? Because right now the generic listing standards, basically without saying it out loud, is whatever Coinbase has listed.
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B
Right.
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A
So there's like 12 tokens that have some sort of futures on Coinbase and therefore they can get approved for ETFs on generic listing. So then the impetus is up to, I guess Coinbase to approve more futures on Coinbase. By the way, Shiba Inu is one of those. Right. So it's not like we're getting the most serious and high quality list of assets. Nothing against your guys dogs, but you know, so the CME is not guaranteed to list another 15, 20, 30 tokens. So does that just leave us with the haves and have nots like you, you got a futures listing and you got a commodity and everything else is dead because it doesn't have the stamp of approval.
- [19:48]
B
Yeah, I think you're missing one of the exchanges to watch as well. And that's ice. ICE has been awfully quiet, but they did just did the Poly Market deal. Jeff Sprecher is a, is a founder led, it's a founder led business. He is very aggressive right now. So don't forget ice. Don't sleep on ice. But I think you're spot on. I think you're going to have the world of have and have nots. Who are the haves? It's those alts with fundamentals, those alts with utility and those alts with futures. Those Are the haves. The have nots are those without so and that's. And again who knows like a couple of them retail hop. All the money comes back, they'll find a certain meme and get after it. But the true value will be found in those tokens with those fundamentals and utility as the institutions take over. That's how I see it. So front run the institutions as you're looking to underwrite the tokens that you want to invest in. Non investment advice.
- [20:39]
A
So I do want to show a very based clip of the bald man himself, Brian Armstrong at the WEF World Economic Forum. I'm not sure if you saw this speaking to the French central bank governor but it's just something we have to play. Just have.
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B
It's awesome.
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A
So good.
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D
Doesn't have a money printer. The supply is fixed and people will go to it in times of uncertainty. Kind of like they did with gold.
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A
Sorry to say that I trust more independent central banks with a democratic mandate than private issuers of Bitcoin which have a very useful role.
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D
But Bitcoin is the decentralized protocol. There's actually no issuer of it. So that's. That's in the sense that central banks have independence. Bitcoin is even more independent. There's no country or company or individual who controls it in the world. And so anyway, I think it's a healthy competition because. Because if people can decide which one they trust more and I think it's actually the greatest accountability mechanism on deficit spending.
- [21:37]
A
First of all, I think it's interesting and we should not lose sight of the fact that Brian Armstrong or crypto CEOs even being at the World Economic Forum is interesting. Is worth discussing because they would have never been invited before. But we could also have a conversation about whether we want the crypto industry as part of the World Economic Forum. But I mean he just schooled that guy. So either this French, you know, central bank governor is either willfully ignorant, which. Which is very possible. I'm not sure if there's a signal of how far we still need to go on educating people or if the central banker is just protecting it.
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B
But I mean he schooled him 100%.
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A
And then Central bank.
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B
And what do you notice in that exchange? You notice a lot of hubris. Right.
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A
From the audience as well.
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B
Absolutely. Why? Because they haven't taken the time to understand and learn. Everything is mischaracterized. And remember they're still trying to get their heads around Bitcoin. How the hell are they going to get their heads around Ethereum or the other alts that do incredible things. And so sometimes in the crypto world, we get into this bubble for things that are so obvious, which is an edge, which just makes me even more bullish about the asset class. But here's Brian's fundamental thesis and we can unpack this in many, many ways. Central banking, independent or not, it's centralized. It is as centralized as it gets. How much time do we spend staring at Bloomberg if you're in finance or wondering what the Fed will do? And all of our bags are a function of what these guys decide, Right?
- [23:17]
A
Not even what they decide at this point. Just to interject, but if he coughs, if he wears a red tie, if he sneezes at the wrong moment, the way he carries his briefcase, it's not even about their policy. It's literally about interpreting the signal of the way that he even describes their policy.
- [23:34]
B
Yeah, well, I got news for them because I have a company, we actually invented the risk free rate of Ethereum and if you step back a little bit and you look, it's staring at you in plain sight. There are risk free rates all over crypto and before long the staking rate of Ethereum is going to compete with sofr. It already is. Right. And so they have no idea what's coming. And I think that's alpha. Look, man, I think this is just the other thing that I think we should really talk about actually is stablecoins. Right. So the one thing that I haven't heard yet, obviously bitcoin does challenge a lot of fiat, but stablecoins, now that we have post genius, I think they're going to infiltrate the entire world and you're going to see more dollarization of the global economy and there's no stopping it. That's going to lead to even more strength. We saw how scared the Europeans were about Libra and that's why they put out Mica. Mica is overregulated. The European stablecoins are not really coming out. He mentioned CBDCs in that clip, if you continue to watch it. But this dollarization clash is about to happen all over the world and I think there are going to be wars fought over it. But then what keeps the dollar honest? Bitcoin. It's kind of all playing out. All the thesises that we've had on our side since I really began studying crypto, it's all playing out. And to your point, amazing to see crypto again being featured prominently in Davos. I was there in 21 and it was front and center. It's back.
- [25:05]
A
Was there a lull in between?
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B
Yeah, absolutely. Like it like followed the four year cycle. It's crazy. Yeah, yeah, we got spf. I testified in Congress with that dude. But yeah, it was like back in the day it was the polka dot house. And you know, you walk down the street, crypto, crypto everywhere. And then it disappeared. Now it's back. So at some point I think it's going to stay.
- [25:28]
A
But is it back now as Coinbase and Binance and the exchanges and less Polkadot and Avalanche and Shiba Inu?
- [25:40]
B
Really good question. I think that's obviously going to be the first stop. Right? Because as institutions come into the space, they're used to that white glove treatment, they're used to that centralized experience. But again, I think it's all a leap pad into DeFi. And look, even with the stablecoin bill or the market structure bill that we're talking about, if you can't pay interest on idle stable coins, guess what? Send them into defi and you're going to get plenty of yield and then eventually you're going to turn it over to the agents and they're going to get that yield for you. That's been an ongoing part of my thesis.
- [26:21]
A
So I want to talk about that thesis and the idea of the have and have nots. Because that I assume has to mean that you from a business perspective have to pivot to some degree or at least refocus because Coin fund, you guys, I'm assuming, have 100 plus portfolio investments. You do, I assume both venture and liquid historically. Right. Well, if it's going to take an ETF futures to get the stamp of approval, it's very hard to get excited about a new VC investment in crypto, which is where the money used to be made. Right. And lost, but made. How do you invest in a new protocol that's going to vest over the next three to four or five years if we also know that that's not getting an ETF anytime soon and those are the tokens that are going to have clarity.
- [27:12]
B
Yeah, look, it's a great question. So from our background we have seed, venture and liquid strategies. I think the underwriting thesis remains the same. And remember, we're trying to think about what happens five, seven years out.
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A
Right.
- [27:26]
B
This is not easy to do. The liquid strategies are a little bit shorter in nature where we're trying to underwrite for sooner outcomes and we can actively risk manage those strategies. But when you think about any type of Investment. Let's start with venture. It really starts with the founders, right? You find a killer founder who has a great idea, who's attacking a big problem with a big tam. Guess what? They figure it out. They figure it out. It's almost 100% founder led and it's about finding those right founders. On the liquid side, we've always applied very, very deep, disciplined e like we've take the best practices of, of equity fundamental research. You know, you ever go to like one of these like Michelin star restaurants and like they take you know, Korean food and they, they offer it to you in the French like design, whatever. What we do is we apply that deep fundamental discipline, equity research to underlying crypto tokens and that's how we underwrite. I don't see that going away. In fact I see that becoming even more important in this age of convergence. And the other thing you overlay very advanced AI tools, it really, it really expedites your decision making process. And so like I don't see, I don't see us changing our process. I see the market coming more and more to us. It's really hard to underwrite shib like you know, a couple years ago when it just went crazy. We're not, you know, chasing that retail hot ball of money. It's impossible to do. But again the thesis is, is that fundamentals matter. Fundamentals matter long term. They're going to matter even more going forward. As, as more and more traditional folks come into the space. Lines are blurring. Guys like lines are blurring between equities. Crypto like look at the DATs. Right? It's all but, but our job is to identify the value, right? Right. And I think these worlds are going to come crashing together. We haven't even gotten to fixed income yet. Right? Fixed income is going to be here. Crypto native fixed income is going to be big, massive market. Crypto native derivatives under underdeveloped. So like it's super exciting.
- [29:37]
A
You said look at the DATs and my, I giggled because in my mind I wanted to say do I have to ha.
- [29:44]
B
Look, look, watch the debts, watch the debts. Right? They, they came out again. Look at the teams, look at the fundamentals, look at the M Navs. I think I would love to get your take. I, I thought Tom Lee's deal with Mr. Beast is super interesting if you look along the right time frame. But at the end of the day watch them because they're going to start being the primary ecosystem drivers within their underlying token.
- [30:10]
A
They're going to be the smarter. Yeah. I'm not smart enough to unpack that and underwrite it. I. But interesting is definitely the right word. I don't think that I've taken a positive or negative. I think it just really is a unique deal. I think it obviously surprises the market when someone who says they're fully committed to being an eth purchasing vehicle only spends 200 million on Mr. Beast. But I think he understands where the puck is moving and that's probably a great investment. It's just very hard, I think, for people to wrap their heads around that. That said, like every time I talk to the CEO of a dad I Bailey on here not long ago, obviously from Nakamoto, and they're starting to say the quiet parts out loud, which is this model's broken. If we just buy a bunch of things and wait and pray, that's not a business. Right. That's just a hope. And hope is not a strategy. So even him saying we're going to be looking for cash flowing businesses. I mean, this is what sensible people have been saying since the first minute of DATs, myself included. Not sensible, but just earn some money and buy bitcoin with it. It's not that hard.
- [31:19]
B
Yeah, yeah, I totally agree. But they provide really interesting infrastructure to do a lot of things. They're permanent capital, they're equities. You can buy them just like any other equity. Again, just like the tokens we talked about. There will be haves and have nots. The haves are going to be guys who understand what they're doing. Now. Let's look at Tom Lee as an example. Right. Super interesting. He does the Mr. Beast deal. Hundreds of millions of distribution into the. Into Gen Z, into a demographic that's been kind of disenfranchised. The boomers have all the money. They're trying to figure out what the hell to do with their finances as they're starting to get their jobs, blah, blah, blah. Very, very interesting distribution. This is a distribution play. Thomas never said he's just going to accumulate eats.
- [32:03]
A
Right.
- [32:03]
B
He said his goal is to accumulate 5% of supply. He's almost there. That is a yielding asset like ETH yields around 2.8%. When you bring together fundamentals and memification, I think it gets kind of interesting, to be honest with you. And I think that's what he's trying to do.
- [32:25]
A
Yeah. If he gets 5% of the supply, job well done, deploy elsewhere. Makes sense.
- [32:32]
B
Yeah.
- [32:33]
A
The problem is that everybody else just kind of bought the top and then things went down. And they didn't even have fair enough by the dip, like you and I would.
- [32:42]
B
Yeah, fair enough.
- [32:43]
A
Fair enough. When people do things that the average investor knows is wrong.
- [32:48]
B
Yeah. I mean, but look, we're at the beginning of this story, not the middle or the end. There's going to be a lot of volatility in between. So it's going to. I'm really interested to see how it plays out.
- [32:57]
A
What happens to the have nots in the digital asset treasury space? Is it mergers and acquisitions? Do they go quietly into the night? I mean, they. They. They own assets that have value. Right. So it seems like if they're trading at a discount, there's going to be a lot of people looking to take advantage of that. Yep.
- [33:12]
B
Yeah. I. I think it's going to be ripe for M A, particularly if you're trading at a. At an M nav less than one for a protracted period of time, depending on that discount. Yeah. You're going to be subject to M and A. One of the trades, I think, is super interesting. I published a little article on this would be something like an enhanced basis trade. Right.
- [33:31]
A
Where.
- [33:31]
B
Where you find, like, typically, basis is where you buy a spot asset and then you sell the future and you take advantage of what we call contango, where the future is priced higher than the spot. Well, gosh, now you can play it on the front end a little bit, where if you find something that's a negative, that's a low M nav and M nav less than 1, if you think it's going to be acquired or that M nav ultimately mean reverts to one, you can get that additional yield. And so that's an interesting thing that we're. I think that's something that people are going to start looking at.
- [33:59]
A
Short the future, buy the spot. You know, like, I mean, there's a lot of different versions, but.
- [34:04]
B
But here you get a little bit more action on. On the.
- [34:07]
A
On.
- [34:07]
B
On the spot end, because you can buy something at an M nav less than 1. Now, there's still risk if it goes less than that, but it could also mean revert to one, which is interesting. So I think what I'm trying to say is that these are all new instruments that people really haven't gotten their head around yet. But I do think there's going to be a lot of opportunities, you know, from an investment perspective, going forward.
- [34:28]
A
Yeah, listen, everybody calculates these differently. While you were talking, I figured I would just bring up Nakamoto's own dashboard and it says that they're trading at 0.836. Obviously that includes debt, the value if you don't include the debt, which is disingenuous. But their Bitcoin holdings are worth a hell of a lot more than their entire stock market cap. Right. There are other actors in there, but it's ugly out there. But this is a lot of bitcoin up for grabs theoretically at a discount already. Right. And if they continue to underperform, I think that's exactly the path they're going on. But I agree with you too that people are just going to find novel ways to trade all of this 100%. Problem is that ended really badly when they did it with gbtc. And so I think there is some cautionary tale of how this has ended in the past. It was really roses and puppies and unicorns when GBTC was trading at a 40% premium. But when everyone was locked for six months, it dropped to a 50% discount that it didn't look so good.
- [35:23]
B
Yeah, I think this is a little bit more of a nimble instrument where you're not, you're, you're generally not allowed. Yeah, yeah. Unless you're in a, in a pipe or something. So. Yeah, I, I agree.
- [35:34]
A
So what else is exciting you then? Right. You're obviously actively investing. You're on the ground every day. It's kind of, it's encouraging to know that we're getting the regulatory and legislative stamp of approval. But also like the original bitcoin libertarian excited about the tech guy in me is a little bit disillusioned because doesn't seem like there's many paths for new innovation some of the time. And I really miss talking about the future of gaming and defi and not about Trump and Greenland.
- [36:04]
B
Yeah, man, it's. A lot of these sectors are like been just clobbered. But even NFTs, I think NFTs are going to come back in a new form. The technology was proven, but man, they've gotten hammered. Gaming's gotten hammered. Consumer hasn't found product market fit. And to your point, I just got back from the CFC conference where it was like the who's who of CEOs and it was very, very institutional deal making. It almost felt like I was back in one of my trad conferences where people are strategic this deal making that, you know, people are saying crypto is dead. Long live crypto. You know, the libertarians are out of here. Where do they go next? They go to precious metals. I don't know. But Look, I think that retail is going to come back. I don't think people understand how badly retail was injured along with all the market makers on 10 10. We have not yet recovered. And what happened was all those market makers, they ended up with holes in their balance sheet. They're still repairing those holes. I think there was a lot of.
- [37:13]
A
Folks too, by the way. Nobody's talking about that, but you're kind of unregulated. No name, no KYC exchanges. I've heard some horror stories of negative balances in people's accounts for weeks that nobody talks about because everybody was so focused on Binance.
- [37:27]
B
Yeah, yeah. But I do think that people were given enough of a lifeline to not go down and now it's on them to rebuild their balance sheets. I think that that's starting. We're coming to the end of that. And as we come to the end of that and those balance sheets are repaired, you're going to see more risk taking. Retail will again get interested. But I at the same time like those institutions are marching forward. I do think you're going to see a lot more probably coming onshore in the US as Celig and Atkins get their act together. They have their act together, but as they, as they start moving forward with their agendas. I couldn't say enough good things about these guys. But like I think you're going to see a transition from maybe perps overseas to maybe onshore perps.
- [38:15]
A
Why not?
- [38:16]
B
It's better, it's regulated. Like there's still nobody cares. Like I want to be in a world where you can take as much market risk as you want and you live by the sword and you die by the sword. But it has to be fair. You can't be getting ADL's, you can't be getting like liquidated for putting on the right trade. Like that doesn't fly. And, and that undermines confidence in markets. So yeah, I'm just pretty pumped about getting past that. Like it wasn't an anomaly. It was, it was wor. I would say, I would argue it's probably worse than FTX was 1010.
- [38:49]
A
Look at the numbers on the industry because of how far put us back with the government and census. But sheer numbers, it was magnitudes larger. Yeah, but the good news is people lost their money. Amen.
- [39:04]
B
Yeah, but the good news is, is that I think that's starting to look further and further in the rearview mirror.
- [39:10]
A
You can see it in the market. You can see it like we, until January 1st, we had systemic timed like Selling every single day. Somebody was blowing up and had to liquidate and was not done. Now I think we've got a bit more of a free market back in bitcoin for whatever that's worth. It doesn't mean it's necessarily going to go up. It just means that maybe that's systematic selling pressure is gone. I know you have to go. Just one last note on the retail conversation. I think it's important in my mind to differentiate retail because I think it falls into at least two buckets. One is crypto native retail. They got rinsed, right? So that the crypto guy been here forever fighting against one another in the leverage market, player versus player. They all lost all their money, whether they were right or wrong, because that's right. But the retail that's going to that is not the retail. As sad as it is that sending Bitcoin to 200 or 250 or 300, that retail is not here yet at all anyways. That's the retail that came and bought NFTs and Doge and was on 6 month signup lists to get exchange account in the past. That's the new people who have not participated in crypto and it only takes one thing to bring them back and that's a higher price.
- [40:21]
B
That's right. That's right.
- [40:22]
A
Bitcoin goes to 130. All of a sudden your bus driver's buying bitcoin again. It's that simple and there's nothing else to it.
- [40:28]
B
Couldn't agree more, sir. That's exactly how the world works.
- [40:31]
A
Well, now you can go give your presentation to Fidelity. That is much more important than anything that we're doing here. Chris, thank you so much. Absolutely great guest. I love your shows, everything you've been doing. So keep it up and look forward to doing this a lot more often.
- [40:46]
B
Thanks, Scott. Good to see you, man.
- [40:48]
A
Have a good one, everybody. We'll see you tomorrow. I've got I think John Woo from Avalanche on the show.
- [40:53]
B
Oh, God, not. There goes the neighborhood John Woo.
- [40:55]
A
John's awesome.
- [40:56]
B
He's the best.
- [40:57]
A
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