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Scott
I think we just had a fake Gary Cardone up here, Dave.
Dave
Yeah, I like the real one. I don't know much about the fake ones.
Scott
It's a clone of Gary Cardone.
Dave
The thing is, his voice is so distinctive. I mean you could, you could tell it from a mile away. So I don't understand the point of that, but whatever. Yeah.
Scott
Pretty funny though.
Dave
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I mean it, the topic is funny because I'm putting together a post thread which I'll do in the middle of the show as when someone else is talking because I already have it written. I just got to get it out on X. But effectively I wrote an article in February explaining my thesis that Bitcoin is an option. And the fact that Mark Cuban is selling to me is almost classic capitulation behavior. And it's funny because I have a lot of respect for Mark's investing acumen. But using recent price action to talk about whether bitcoin will be an inflation hedge when it's effectively trading at a 5% probability of becoming an inflation hedge is both. I mean, it's kind of stupid, to be honest with you. I mean, it's at least short sighted, but it generally is the sort of thing that happens at market bottoms and these sorts of capitulation signals. So, you know, I find it amazing in a way, the timing of it as bitcoin's rallied, you know, what, 20 some odd percent off the bottom. It's actually done better since the Iraq war, since the Iraq, since the Iran war started than any other than anything else. Although that's mostly because it had to, it changed what happened.
Scott
Can I say something? His video looked, his video looked edited, like there was a glitch there. I played it this morning because he actually says since the Iran war started, gold rocketed up to $5,000 and Bitcoin did nothing. Which is just obviously like everyone knows is not true. Like gold was trading, I mean gold was trading at $5,000 before and is actually down 11%. So I don't know if they edited that wrong and it sounded like he said it or if he really believed that, but it looked like almost edited to say, to make that narrative. Because we all know, I mean literally you just have to look at any chart. Gold went up long before the Iran war.
Dave
But the point, the real point, forget editing or anything else, I mean the real point is if you buy something, if you invest in an asset because you want to be protected against long term inflation, then looking at short term price action is rather silly. Particularly in an asset like Bitcoin. And we could talk about. And I'm sure people will bring up. I mean, I see a couple of people who want to talk about power law, for example, and understanding the waves and why investor psychology makes it volatile, et cetera. I obviously have my theory on this, et cetera. But the timing is really odd. It's just, it's odd. And one. It, it's. It's funny because people look to see the. You look to these people like, like Mark Cuban as signalers. And it's like, okay, sure, you know, but most of the money that he's made is by. And I triggered panels on the power loss. So great. That's what I was hoping to do. Most of his money is made by patiently buying things that are undervalued and then waiting. That's how you make real wealth. You had Mike Alfred on last week, Scott, and that was his point. You can. He said a lot of really good things on your show. But the truth is that's the most important point. The most important point is find something you believe in, stuff it away when you buy it really, really cheap, accumulate more when you can buy it cheaper, and then wait, that patience. Anyway, Panos, go for it.
Carlos
Did he make like a public announcement or did he say anything about selling? Like, is this like just a podcast?
Josh
Podcast?
Scott
He was on a podcast and he said that he sold all his bitcoin. He was like, okay, almost all of it. And so he just did it because it didn't perform well during the Iran work.
Carlos
So he, He's. Is this like a long term play for him? Like he's out for like a while or is this like a short term trade because he thinks he might buy back cheaper? What do you guys think?
Scott
No, he's out.
Dave
He's out.
Scott
You have to watch what he said. Yeah, he's like, I've lost faith in it. He's like, it. It. What did. He didn't say it failed to perform. What did he say? He's.
Carlo
I think he said it lost the narrative.
Scott
Lost the plot. Lost the plot. That's what he said.
Carlos
Interesting. I'm gonna have to go back and watch that podcast. Yeah, that's quite interesting. I mean, he's not wrong about, like, the performance has been pretty shitty as far as, like, if you compare it to other assets, like, you could be making a lot more money in other assets right now. But to capitulate and be like, well, I'm out. Because it didn't perform well during the war, which I don't think that it's, that's totally true. That's kind of weird.
Scott
I mean, he also said he was not disappointed in Ethereum as much, just for the record.
Carlos
Okay. He, yeah, he's out to lunch.
Ryan
Yeah.
Scott
Just for the context, because I was like, wow, have you watched like how many people are exiting the Ethereum foundation and everything's happening there and how much it's underperformed? So yeah, good timing.
Carlo
Yeah, that's wild.
Carlos
That's wild.
Dave
Yeah, I'd like to. I, I mean, look, I, I on this show basically told, I, I don't remember what, when it was when I sold most of my, my Ethereum because I think it, it, if you're, you're basing your, your Ethereum buying on the use case of its use, I just think it's overvalued compared to its competitors just in terms of where it is and TVL etc. If you think it's going to be digital money, I think you're smoking something. So, you know, but, you know, but I said that many, many months ago, I mean, almost a year ago now, so it's, it's okay.
Scott
Well, the people who are the people who were pushing that super sound money narrative, by the way, I think that started with Bankless. They just fired like half their staff and David Hoffman, the head of Bankless, which was the biggest eth podcast and company, said he sold all of his Ethereum and he's done.
Dave
So, so there you go. I mean, now it's too bad William's not up here, but you know, Carlo, you're, you're here. But Ryan had his hand up first and then, then we'll. Well, that, that will let you defend, defend your turf.
Ryan
Yeah, I just, I'll just say like Cuban. I don't think he's really had his finger on the pulse for quite a long time. I think, I think he got rugged by a stablecoin called Titan early on. And the only reason I know that is because I was the CEO of a company called Titan and we got mixed into that on accident. But he, he doesn't seem to have super good instincts in the crypto space to begin with.
Scott
There's a big NFT guy. He was a big NFT guy.
Josh
Yeah.
Ryan
Yeah. So, and then when it comes to Ethereum, like Ethereum's always lagged Bitcoin. So, you know, Bitcoin makes a move. Ethereum typically stutter steps for about three months and then we'll see the Ethereum play. And that's just Typical market patterns when it comes to usage of Ethereum. We've spent so much time developing out these layer twos and layer threes and everyone's moving on to things like base, which is highly centralized. And the trade off is they get low transaction fees, which Ethereum is only really used in these layer twos for transaction fees. So we've spent a long time, a couple of years now, building systems to not use Ethereum. So the long term flight path here, it looks like, is less and less dependence on the token Ethereum and more dependence on these centralized transaction indexers, essentially. So it doesn't mean that the EVM is not going to be used or the Ethereum technology is not going to be used, but no one wants to be dependent on the actual token Ethereum. So it does seem to be a downward trend.
Carlo
Yeah, good morning guys. I talked about this a couple of weeks ago actually with William on one of our spaces where I think that Ethereum is. Its core value is in its infrastructure as a plumbing layer. And I agree the token price is kind of secondary to that. And I think just like we are seeing marketplaces emerge for compute tokens, I think you could see something similar to that happening on the Ethereum network where the true investment value of it is in its resilience as a smart contract platform. Now on the Cuban thing, I don't understand what his thesis is. If you listen to someone like Saylor who has a very clear thesis on why he thinks Bitcoin is what it is and why he's 100% committed to it, and then you listen to Cuban saying I just dumped all my bitcoin because I think it's lost its narrative. But what is he saying? What's the alternative to that? Mark, are you going into fiat? That's clearly lost its narrative. And unless I hear his underlying thesis for why he sold the way he did, I can't really judge his decision because I don't know what he thinks is better than Bitcoin. Is it gold? I can't believe that, being he's a technologist.
Scott
Well, he said gold was better. I mean, he did say that gold performed, but he was wrong.
Carlo
That just makes no sense, Scott, because that's kind of the opposite of everything that he's been building his whole career. He knows everything is getting more digital and. And gold is not.
Scott
Dude, he took dogecoin as payment for the Dallas Mavericks.
Carlo
Exactly.
Scott
If you remember, it's not exactly a bitcoiner.
Carlo
Yeah, but even if he's not a bitcoiner, he is a fundamental believer in blockchain technology. And first of all, how does an entire decentralized network, which is the biggest, most secure, most pristine collateral that the world has ever seen, lose its narrative? What does that even mean?
Scott
I think he lost the plot maybe.
Dave
I mean it is, but the thing is people are like jumping on it. I think that if you look at, and if you expect Bitcoin to be trading like a mature asset, then you're going to believe what Mark Cuban believes. There are many people who keep acting like that. They keep forgetting that bitcoin is, yes, it's a trillion dollar asset. Okay, cool. So we're not talking about a small cap stock now, but you're talking about an asset that is designed to be what gold could be. And it is still trading at less than 5% of what gold is in terms of value, which makes it extremely immature asset in terms of where it's going to go. And I'm not saying it's binary, but it's not binary. Right? The fact is bitcoin at its success looks like a dramatic price appreciation from here. Its failure might actually be staying here. That's a kind of asymmetric bet that people really always spend their entire investing careers looking for. I mean, yeah, it's not the same as buying Shiba Inu and, and watching it go up by a hundred thousand x. Yeah, sure, it's not a lottery ticket, but when you have a 10 to 20 bagger that could be at scale, that's, that's a big deal. And you know, people go, a lot of investors go their entire lives without finding that. So to me that's, that's the thing. And if you're looking at short term squiggles to make the decision that it's not no longer, that that is losing the plot. I mean it's almost impossible to look at it any other way. But it doesn't mean a lot of what people are saying, right? People. There are too many bitcoiners or too many people who claim to be bitcoiners that I've heard that actually have lost the plot. I mean the one saying, oh well, I could buy it back at 30, you know, it's like, no, the plot is buy in slowly, don't try to time it because if you do, you can miss it. I mean, what's the old stat, Scott? You miss 10 days, you miss an entire year.
Scott
Entire year price action if you miss the best 10 days.
Dave
And, and we've all heard, you know, many people on these spaces I mean, hell, I've taken a lot of crap over the last six months for being quota permeable. I find that amusing. I just have a, I have a thesis and I'm going to stick to my thesis. I mean, a lot of people say the same about Sailor. They say the same about a lot of others. Now, you know, you can make arguments and that's fine. You know, you can be smart and say it's going to be that 126 and after 10, 10, you know, bad things are going to happen. But now, after having survived the liquidity flush and basically being as your friend Mark Yesko says, we are in crypto, Winter, the only reason the price hasn't moved is because Saylor has been able to tap into the fixed income market to bring extra capital and it's kept the price higher. But the truth is pretty much every other metric, says Winter. I mean, just look at the volatility. It's way down. Look at the volumes, way down. And so, you know, it really is an interesting scenario. And so to me this is kind of, it's, it feels like a capitulation event. You know, it's kind of like one of those things. This is, this may be his Paul Krugman moment, you know, with the fax machine and the Internet. Anyway, I, I didn't see Ryan if that's an old hand or a new one, but I see how Mateo jumped up.
Ryan
Old hand.
Scott
Okay.
Mauricio
Hey guys. Yeah, I think we're just seeing full blown capitulation events across bitcoin and eth. I don't want to get too deep into Bar Cuba, but he definitely has a troubled past in terms of his involvement with crypto that I know firsthand from the days of the Maverick. So it's, it's very, very dicey for him. I don't think that the, the plot has changed significantly, but I do think that we're just reaching peak irrationality. Not even just in bitcoin, but also in Ethereum. And I think that the memos that are being put out there, look, I understand that it's very difficult for market performance to not dictate the thesis. That's how thesises are developed. But we've clearly been in downward pressure for a very, very long time. And I just don't think that with how much AI has dominated the narrative, how much data centers have dominated the capital expenditures. Now robotics and getting into quantum. I think that the entire industry is looking to find its place within this entirely new technological environment. Just because crypto and blockchain were the forefront of everything for the last cycle and now it just hasn't been. However, I don't think that this is bygone. I don't think that it's over. I think that it's going to be a full circle moment where it's very clearly determined that it is the Rails that are being built today. And Dave, we talk about the Rails, a lot of that are going to be the financial infrastructure of where all this technology ultimately resides, transacts and subsides and will continue to dominate the market share of where all of this lives. So I just expect to see more of this. I don't think it's over. I don't think it's rational. I think people who have a lot of capital exposure are talking to their friends who are just ripping on all these other things and they might feel a little stupid for holding and believing in this stuff that has underperformed since the recent Trump term. And so I think it's justified to feel the way that they feel. But I think that we would be. It's not the best use of all of the minds here to just get super caught up in, in this irrational decision making and propaganda when, when the truth is that, that, that the Rails are developing extremely quickly and adoption's not actually slowing down from a pure user and institutional standpoint.
Dave
Well, I agree. I think that's that, that that more or less is. I, I literally just posted this thread. I'm trying to figure out how to put it into the nest because every it usually it used to give me a button. I don't see how it is. I'm just going to copy it and put it as a reply to here. Maybe someone else can figure out how to post it. But I mean the reality is high profile capitulations are often, you know, signposts to where things go. And I'm not saying today is the day, I don't really care, but the thesis and the rationality just isn't there. And that's important. When we talk about eth, it really boils down to the token economics of Ethereum, which is let's talk about it and say, okay, $10 trillion of value is going to flow through Ethereum. What's Ethereum going to be worth? Well, Ethereum's market cap, I have to look it up. But let's ask the question what's Ethereum's market cap compared to the market cap of dtcc? Now it's an important question because DTCC price processed quadrillions in value. But I don't think DTCC is incredibly valuable. Right. You know, as an entity. Why? Because it's a utility. So the question is, is Ethereum going to be priced like a utility or is it going to be priced as something where it gets a big piece of the action? That's really the question with Ethereum. In my mind, it's always been that question and I honestly don't know the answer. I'm not bearish on it. I just don't. I'm not sold on it. That's really the difference. Bitcoin is different. The bitcoin investment thesis is it will be digital gold or more and gold has kind of lost its ability to do what it does. It's followed purchasing power parity pretty well. It's followed investment returns very poorly. And if you think about it, gold is really structured or it used to be the denominator for all investments and it isn't anymore. So I mean really it boils down to that. And I know this is very basic and I guess it's good that we're talking about it today because the market's doing absolutely nothing. It's been between 70.
Scott
That's why I wanted this topic. Not because anyone would agree with it, just because it gives a point of
Ryan
something to talk about.
Carlo
Yeah, there's something else to talk about too. Even though the market sucks right now, what the hell is going on with hype? Well, I mean, that thing's just going crazy.
Scott
I think that there's 12 people still trading crypto and all of them are really interested in hype.
Dave
Well, I mean, going crazy. It's funny. Think of what we're saying. I mean, hype in the last, you know, in October was trading pretty close to this level, right? Yeah, it's doubled. Yeah, it's doubled off the bottom, but it was trading between 40 and 50. Most has been its average price for a while. So now it's at 60. Consider that we're talking about a 20% rally or breaking out of its range as going crazy. I mean, going crazy would be hype at 600, not at 60.
Carlo
Well, that's when we were spoiled. We were so spoiled.
Dave
Well, no, but the thing is, if you look on a price to cash flow basis, hype is essentially structured or it would be better structured if it really did have profit participation quite directly. But it's close, right? I mean, you know, the behavior is to is for the hype token to be a proxy for owning a piece of the hype network. And the hype Network is earning a shit ton of money, right? I mean, you look at it, I mean, hell, you know, if you want. People are trading, you know, gold, silver, oil, s and P all on Hype. And the model is a really good model. I mean, there are flaws in it, sure, but the notion of being able to trade whatever the hell you want to trade with assets that are locked and kept by yourself. And the Token is a great model. There's no two ways about it. I mean, Ryan, is that a new hand?
Ryan
Yep, new hand.
Carlo
Good.
Ryan
So one comment about the previous conversation, real fast, where it's, you know, Mark Cuban selling at this point in the cycle is the equivalent of, you know, him selling spring of 2022, where it's like, oh, we had this crazy high in 2021. We came up the bull cycle. Now we're going into the summer of 2022 where we were. We're bottoming out at, like, 16 grand or a little bit below. We're at the same point in the cycle. We're 2026. We just came off a crazy high in 2025. And we're probably going to have a sideways down if we follow the same pattern. And I know everyone wants to say that we're following different patterns now because there's different, you know, things around the world and all this stuff, but, you know, a pattern's a pattern, and we'll see if it plays out, but at this point in the cycle, it's just pushing a penguin off the cliff and how many people actually want to follow them? When it comes to, like, watching these other markets like Hype and these other chains, like, one I'm super focused on right now is. And obviously my background is Venice and Morpheus and these decentralized AI tokens. If you bought Venice five months ago, you would have been under a dollar a token. Now today, it launched over 20 bucks. All these different AI networks are going crazy, and that competes with bitcoin and the mining arena.
Scott
Did Venice Token just launched today like. Or was openly available?
Ryan
No, no, no, no. Venice Token launched, like, a year and a half ago.
Scott
Right there. Yeah.
Ryan
40. Yeah. Over the last 40 days, it's gone from, you know, four bucks a token and now it's 20 bucks a token. But I. I think what's gonna.
Scott
You could have shared that before it happened here.
Ryan
Ryan, apologies.
Dave
Yeah, I mean. I mean, Ryan, really. I mean, you know, what do we. What do we have to do? You know, talk, you know, three or four days a week, you know, constantly for. For how long? And, and you know, you wait on this stuff. I mean,
Ryan
this is not investment advice nor disclaimer. Watch all the AI tokens right now. Anything that is tied to inference. So like Bittensor is tied to training. A lot of these models are very well trained. Now it comes down to long term inference play. So anything around like Morpheus, near any Bittensor subnet that is around inference, like everyone and their mom cannot get enough of this inference right now for these AI agents and all these different AI platforms, they're realizing they can't afford the API costs, so they have to go to tokenized networks to save money. But long term, over the next six to seven months, what we're going to see is all these different compute facilities have switched over from bitcoin mining over to inference. And what that's going to do is it's going to drop the difficulty on the bitcoin network, it's going to make mining way more profitable, and then you're going to start seeing margins widen up for a lot of these miners. So all the publicly traded mining stock is, you know, they're probably going to be way better. And there's AI stocks which are oversold, which will.
Scott
No, I'm saying the miners are just. Yeah, I'm saying the miners are just becoming AI stocks. Right? Oh, bro.
Ryan
Yeah, exactly, exactly, exactly. So there's this.
Scott
Did you say nearby?
Ryan
You said another one. Yeah, like Morpheus and Near are the two ones I'm watching right now because I think they're way under, but there's, there's a handful of other ones.
Scott
I have a near bag that's way under. I have a near bag that's way under. So it piqued my interest that you came on here pumping my bag. So thank you, sir.
Ryan
No problem. Not investment advice.
Scott
Thank you. Thank you for the clarity. Yeah. I was not actually aware of the performance of Venice, but I think I looked at it as a platform and what Eric Voorhees is doing and think he's incredible. So I'm not surprised. But I had no idea that the token had done that. That's really astounding. Why isn't everybody talking about that?
Ryan
He's like this wizard when it comes to tokenomics and he has this platform now with Venice, where they have over 3 million users and they're using a lot of their cash flow to buy back and burn the Venice token. And then they have a bunch of people locked into the DM token, which is that daily reoccurring inference. So this double bind model that he built is locking people in and then also creating upward momentum on the token through buybacks. So it's a crazy model and I think we're going to see a lot more token projects actually copying Eric's model and to create the same flywheel.
Scott
I wonder how many people just went into Claude right now and were like, show me Venice's token model and how I can replicate it exactly.
David
I could hear the typing.
Josh
Exactly.
Scott
It wasn't me. I'm on my phone. Avateo, you're up.
Mauricio
Yeah, I was going to touch on what Ryan said. So you kind of look at the current state of our economy as a whole and you see that it's pretty much going from an asset economy to a tokenized AI economy, where everything is powered by AI tokens. Right. And all that AI tokens is essentially inference that's powered by compute, that's essentially this hardware and these data centers and this is really. And then electricity. Right. So that's like the full stack of this. And so essentially it's been kind of ironic that were existing within a modern token economy, but none of that actually correlated to tokens on the blockchain. There's been a disconnect between the tokens. Everyone's talking about AI tokens, but they're not actually talking about crypto tokens. And this is actually what's being bridged right now through Venice and through other inference providers. And there's a couple of benefits to this. So as a whole, if you're a service provider that's providing inference, you can actually essentially route that inference in a way that gets that cost down and still is multi model. So Venice, every time there's an AI model that's released, they're essentially being able to introduce that model on Venice. So you can access the latest Claude, latest Codex, whatever it may be, the open source models.
Dave
This space was downloaded via spacesdown.com visit to download your spaces today on Venice.
Mauricio
And then they also are not actually saving any of the prompts. So there's a privacy layer to it, which is one of the benefits of crypto and one of the benefits of running this. So it's combining this privacy element with AI. I think it's really exciting that we're starting to see this bridge here between AI tokens and crypto tokens. And I think that this is another way that the entire AI economy will continue to move towards decentralization on chain and then with near in particular, like what we're actually seeing. And this is something that we achieved here at Our project as well is really the introduction of on chain privacy and the ability to move these private tokens in a way that is completely obscured and is totally accessible. So I think that this is the crux of where the sweet spot is currently within our market. It's inference and compute made tokenized, adding a privacy layer so that we can access uncensored AI, so that none of our data is being tracked and that we can open up this entire private economy both for users to protect their privacy and for institutions and international enterprises that need it, but that need to build with AI to deploy faster towards this goal. So I actually think that I'm glad we're talking about this because this is the real story that's happening right now in our industry. It's not getting enough attention and the market is recognizing this in all of these niche activities. But this is going to be an enduring trend in my opinion.
Scott
Yeah, Josh, did you have your hand up? Joshua.
Josh
Hey, yeah, yeah, thanks for having me. My first time joining you guys. But yeah, I come from more of a trading background. Run the trading desk here at Falcon X and just hearing a lot of the topics that you guys are talking about regarding the major L1s and their tokens. I think we've obviously seen a lot of activity on Hype and I just want to point out there's a lot of really important, important near term catalyst for that. In particular, in the last week or so we've seen real inflows from the ETFs that have recently launched both Bitwise and 21Shares, which is a portfolio company of ours, launched ETFs and have attracted 50 million plus in AUM. On top of that you have the digital asset treasury that launched on that asset last year and it's starting to really accumulate assets meaningful way and start start staking it. So it's really creating another sync for that asset outside of the protocol itself, buying the tokens back. And then if you look at it from a price to earnings ratio type metric, it is expensive. But most people are looking past that to some of the upcoming product launches. In particular, there's been a shift in the way they handle their stablecoin
David
and
Josh
sort of redirecting it back to usdc which is allowing them to capture a lot of the revenue generated from the net interest on stablecoin that's basically parked there in perpetuity to support the perpetuals trading on top. It's collateral that's sitting there and then you have HIP4 which is allowing people to build prediction Markets on top of hyperliquid and eventually there's going to be a full suite of options markets on top as well. All these things are really going to be additive to revenue for the protocol. Our view is most people are viewing this as analog to Solana. When Solana had a bit of a sell off post 2022 and the market crash that was the low for hype around the 20s. So people are kind of thinking like now is a good time to accumulate in terms of some of the theses around bitcoin and ETH you guys were talking about. We think bitcoin has a lot of near term headwinds. Maybe the biggest point towards Cuban's statements are just that bitcoin has become much more of like a US aligned asset over the last couple years. And so if you think of gold as much more of a neutral asset that people universally can hold as a store of value, it's been much more challenging for bitcoin. Especially as you've seen China and other superpowers deplete their bitcoin holdings or ban.
Scott
Hey Josh, can we dig into that? Because that's the first time I've ever heard anyone say Bitcoin is a US aligned asset. Is that because of the launch of of the ETFs here in the size and strategy being here or is it because Trump has grabbed the narrative? How do you really mean that?
Josh
I really think it is a combination of all those things. In particular, the political environment in the US has shifted much more favorably regulatory environment as well. But it's also mostly an effect of other countries running down their participation in bitcoin. Maybe China's probably the best example been net sellers of the asset and net buyers of gold throughout this whole cycle. And our view is like that's just a reflection of how much US companies and US ETFs asset holders are dominating the bitcoin cap table basically. So we think that's a big driver and it's actually probably been a net decrease in addressable market for bitcoin in this cycle. That's one factor. I mean there's a couple of other factors. Like for instance the IPO calendar just probably is going to be net depletive towards capital coming into bitcoin and crypto assets this summer.
Scott
You think it will be depleted even of capital coming into other AI and tech assets? I mean my view is that SpaceX and if OpenAI comes behind it, it's going to suck liquidity from literally everything.
Josh
Think yeah, I think that's generally true. That's why I think we've seen if you look at volume on bitcoin, it's at the lowest level it's been in months, if not years. And a lot of that is being driven by volume, selling, call, selling call, overwrites primarily. People are basically saying bitcoin upside is very capped right now. The IPO calendar, China, even the comments from Saylor most recently about his willingness to test the market and sell some of the bitcoin that he has. That's also been a big overhang for price action. He had to say that all these things. Yeah, of course he had to say that eventually at some point. I mean that's what we're seeing. So hype, I mean to some extent, zcash, Venice, these are favorite assets of liquid funds to hide in these types of names. While the majors have a little bit of a range bound market.
Scott
So much there. Yeah, I agree with a lot of that actually. It's interesting I guess because we've seen charts of massive institutional buying of bitcoin relative to the retail exit. Right. I think there was a chart from river last, last quarter or something said, Yeah, I think 69,000 Bitcoin had been bought by institutions or 61, I think it was bought, I don't want to Misquote it, but 69,000 solutions sold on the flip side by retail. So I think you're right that the net addressable market has clearly shrunk. It's just a bunch of bigger buyers are buying and the kind of breadth of the market is shrinking as the smaller holders capitulate. I don't know if capitulate or sell, but it aligns.
Dave
Yeah, Dave, Yeah, I mean it's exactly that. I mean look, retail has been absent. I mean I made the statement before and Josh, you know, you just look at the flows. Take STRC and Sada out of the equation and where's the price? The price is probably somewhere between 40 and 50. Right. You know, maybe it's between 50 and 60, but probably 40 and 50 just in terms of just supply demand dynamics. So you know, in, in a, in a sense we are in, you know, we are clearly towards the end of the cycle, but we are certainly been in a winter cycle since 10:10 and I don't really think it's even all that arguable. And so as a result, at the same time, by the way, we know what's been going on with global money flows and money supply and all the various things that normally are correlated that aren't because the Investor psychology is awful. I mean, look, I've been talking about SpaceX and the IPOs as sucking liquidity out of everything on the risk asset side. And if that's true, and obviously it's certainly correlation wise true, you would expect more of it. The real question is who's left to sell in Bitcoin that isn't locked up. And Saylor, what he said was he can't have Bitcoin as an impaired asset on his balance sheet. That doesn't mean he's a net seller. In fact, his exact words were more likely. Yeah, it's going to be a net buyer, but some selling, farming, tax losses, etc. Etc. So all that's true. So there's a lot.
Scott
And if you don't believe Dave, it was the two of us sitting there when he said it.
Dave
I was literally there. Yeah. Now, by the way, Josh, I think you still have me under my old. I actually wasn't following you, weirdly, even though we've known each other for years. So my, my original account got hacked if, if you didn't know it back in February. So I gave up trying to get X to get me a new get, you know, get me control of it. So. But that's aide. Anyway, I see Carlo's hands up. You haven't talked in a while. Was that old hand or a new one?
Carlo
No, no, it's a new hand. I mean, I think first of all it's, it's fantastic to see what's happening with hype considering it's an 11 person team, $15 billion market cap with no outside capital. And I, I found it to be a fascinating thing to look at around the start of the Iran war because I just saw the oil perpetuals market exploding and I actually pivoted out of some underperforming coins and looked at hype around that time for that very reason. And I think that that narrative is playing out pretty nicely. Not financial advice, of course. Another thing that I've been thinking about is we've been talking a lot about the AI market and I don't think people are fully pricing in the AI agentic market as it relates to stablecoins. I wrote a piece today that I put out which built on something that was written by one of the more brilliant thinkers in the space, someone who's been on the precipice of a lot of what's happening in blockchain technology, and that's Professor Aaron Wright. And Professor Wright's been talking about the fact that we're going to Be seeing massive, massive infrastructure development when it comes to the AI marketplace. And it got me to thinking about stablecoins are supposed to be this big force multiplier for Treasuries based on global demand, people wanting digital dollars. Then I add on to that, the layer of AI agents transacting in stablecoins. What is that going to do for the global demand for US Treasuries? And I think it just creates an infinite, potentially infinite, totally addressable market. When you've got agents buying from agents using stablecoins and those stablecoins are regulated under the Genius act, that's a flywheel for treasury demand. I don't think anyone's priced in. And that's a thesis I've been really kind of unpacking of late and I find absolutely fascinating.
Scott
My mic glitched. Yeah, yeah, yeah, go ahead. Was there more hands and. In a couple minutes. But yeah, Ryan, go ahead, please.
Ryan
Oh, I, I was just gonna say exactly what Carlos said. They're just spot on. Like we, we don't even realize the, the onslaught that's coming, you know, once we solve this inference piece. Right. The scalability problem with the API and the inference, and this is why, like Eric's model is so crazy, is because it does give scalability to the access to inference. That's the only limiting factor on people spinning up millions of these agents. And these agents are going to be handling everything from ad campaigns to marketing to DevOps on servers, to purchasing to acquisition, like peer to peer commerce, like everything. And you're not going to be giving these agents credit cards. You're going to be giving these agents stable coins and on chain resources. And once they start transacting with each
Scott
other,
Ryan
that's when the layer 1 tokens really start pumping. Because now you see any network that has proper transaction flow, that can handle the peer to peer agent economy, that's the network to watch. Anything that's throttled, that has very limited transaction flow, the agents are going to avoid it. It's going to be too expensive to use. But that's like the coming tsunami that no one realizes is once the inference piece is solved, stuff like Morpheus, stuff like Venice are just gonna. It's gonna be crazy.
Scott
Really making me think, because a lot of that was totally off my radar, to be honest. Oh, Mauricio, you're here. What's up, man?
David
Hey, Scott. I'm just taking some notes here because
Scott
that was also awesome. I always invite Mauricio when I want to figure out what the hell's going on. In defi and lending and such. So I wanted to ask you. I saw. I think I haven't looked since the 19th, but on the 19th, we had like, 15 more, I think definitely defi hacks in May. So we're 15 out of 19 days we'd had defi hacks. Do you have the updated numbers on how much capital flight there's been? I mean, I remember it was 1213, but I've heard as high as like 20 billion since Cal Dao.
David
I don't want to have it. Let me just down, because I. I got. I got. I think it's just from Abe, actually. Let me. I have it right in front of me, but I think it's the. The number I was watching yesterday is 25mil has left just from AAVE after the attack and haven't returned. And so there has been a bit of an exodus of capital in the defi space. And I think my view generally around that is that even today, right, like, if you go to aave, a protocol that was long thought of as the blue chip, and experienced this hack, the hack's not fully resolved. But as of yesterday, I think aave was paying 3.92% on tether. So that's 30 bips over overnight funds rate. And so clearly, I think what the market's signaling is that this isn't a pool of capital that is appropriately assessing risk. It's acting like a pool of capital that is trapped, that it doesn't really have anywhere else to go, and they're happy taking an absurdly low rate for an incredibly high amount of risk. And what I see, what I interpret from that data is that that capital is trapped. It doesn't want to leave or it cannot leave defi. Maybe it's because of reporting issues. Maybe it's because people using these protocols don't necessarily have access to other traditional financial investments. But I think over time, this will get arbed out. I look at this today almost like simplistically, remember the kimchi premium between the Korean exchanges in North America because it was so hard to arbit out. I think you're having a very similar setup with defi liquidity. There's a pocket of liquidity trapped in there that I think now Michael Saylor and others are identifying as saying, hey, if I can tokenize STRC and I can loop and I can basically get it into defi, people will be much more willing to buy tokenized SDRC and earn 11.5 than to get 3.9 to Arabic, right? And I think Sooner or later some of these traditional financial products are going to come in and basically vampire attack that defi liquidity to the point where they are about that defi discount or that the negative kimchi premium. So there's definitely a lot happening in defi. There's a lot of risk that's become pretty clear and the rates are not reflecting that. And I think that that is set
Scott
up in defi right now for sub 4%.
David
It makes very little sense.
Scott
Right.
David
Like especially when
Scott
it didn't just get hacked for. That's what I mean, million in a month. Right. So I made it.
David
Yeah, no 100%. And I think I wanted to make a comment on some of the discussions, the earlier part of the conversation around Mark Cuban selling his bitcoin, et cetera. And listen, you know, I've said this a few times here already, but we've been building in this space for over eight years. I've been in bitcoin for almost over a decade now. And we've had periods like this before bitcoin. I think of bitcoin often as the sort of real estate equivalent of digital assets.
Mauricio
Right.
David
It's going to be an asset class that isn't always exciting, it's not always the fastest rising, but it has the most sound fundamentals out of anything out there. And it over time with enough patience. And it is an investment that has paid out historically and we are seeing some of that in our book today. Because one of the interesting things at Len now is that we estimate a third of the bitcoin backed loan market share. So we see a lot of the flows. And again it's consistent with what everyone else has been saying. We are seeing positions from small retailer retail clients get closed out because they're not patient enough. And you're seeing much larger, more sophisticated people coming in and start doing proactive or not proactive, but taking on new positions. And the people that are coming in now, you can see the shift in maturity, you can almost feel it. These people are older, they're better capitalized, they read the terms and conditions. It's almost like a changing of the guard as I would describe it.
Scott
Yeah, I want to go back. Yeah, I agree with everything you just said, 100%. I want to go back a bit to the defi side because we've talked about this, but it seems like they just kind of had this patchwork coalition that came together to try to make people whole. But there's absolutely no precedent still, as far as I'm aware of, on what that would look like in the future. Right. So I think we've also talked about the fact that had been a $5 billion exploit. It might have looked very different as a solution. Right. So I mean, we talk about kind of institutions coming into DeFi. Doesn't it seem like they would have a major problem with that sort of improvised after the fact strategy?
David
It's a huge issue. And just to kind of recap, you know, there was a loss in the, in the AAVE protocol, right? There was a big hack, somebody borrowed an immense amount of hundreds of millions of dollars of stable coins with assets that did not exist. So there is a hole in the protocol, Right. The protocol does not have enough assets to give everybody else their deposits. In traditional finance, what would have happened is the protocol or the company would have been deemed insolvent. They would have had to pause all activities for the people that were inside. They would have clawed back any withdrawals that left within the preference period. And then they would have divvied up all of the assets minus the hole to everybody that was in the pool. Fairly right. In DeFi, of course, none of this exists, so it didn't happen that way. Those who were able to get out fast got all their money out, those who weren't living on Twitter got stuck and were going to be left holding the bag. Right. There's a big problem with this because there was no precedent for this in DEFI before. So the solution would have been if there had been no bailout, somebody at ABE was going to have to decide who was going to take the losses. And that the very uncomfortable part about that is that that would have become a political exercise. And once you attribute those losses, even though DEFI is not supposed to have courts or anything, I think what would have happened is you would have triggered a series of lawsuits of why are you assigning the losses to these people and not those people? And it would have just created a disaster that would have highlighted a lot of the problems. And so you had a bunch of people scrambled together to close the hole so that no losses would have had to been assigned and stop that conversation. And that might have worked now, that might have worked today. But if you're a serious capital allocator, the worst thing you can do, you should be fired if you are thinking of allocating capital, assuming there's going to be another charity bailout.
Scott
Yeah, for sure. And like there's this interesting kind of nuance right now where open source code and DEFI is sort of auditable by attackers. Right. So like do you think that they were at a point actually where the transparency could make defi structurally more vulnerable than regulated lenders? I mean, it's so anti the thesis of crypto, but seems like that's where we're at.
David
Well, I just think that there's fundamentally different values for the two different propositions. Right. In decentralized finance, it's supposed to be unstoppable, permissionless, and it could be accessed by anyone at any time, anonymously. Right. I'm not supposed to know who's in there. I'm not supposed to know where they're coming from or who they are or what transactions they're doing. How then can I determine if at the moment of a hack, how then can I determine who got out or who didn't?
Mauricio
Right.
David
Like this absolute privacy concept goes against a lot of the guardrails and protections that you need in traditional finance. Right. And so if you value your privacy, the lack of guardrails, if you think that these types of guardrails are a bug and not a feature, then you're better off using defi. Right. If you think that you can move faster than anybody, if you live on Twitter, if you have the fastest, you know, instructions to, to process your transactions, then you might feel like you have a leg up and you're better off in defi. Most people that are not professional traders or investors don't do that. They don't actively manage their investments or accounts. Yeah, you're not looking to be the
Scott
first out the exit on top of every single exploit or risk. Right.
David
Plus you have a job, you have a normal life. Most people do. And so most people actually look at these protections. And I know they're not perfect, I know it comes with a lot of privacy issues, but they do in many ways protect you, the littlest person, when some of these things happen. Now again, we can wax poetic or talk all day long about how governments abuse these and banks take advantage of this and they get bailed out all the time. I'm not saying it has no issues, but I'm saying one system has guardrails and has processes for bankruptcy. Another system has nothing. It's a free for all. And so you can decide there's benefits to both. And I think people can decide what they're more comfortable using.
Scott
I mean, you guys survived all of the 2022 contagion. Now I think you have a rating from the S and P. I mean, what did you do to survive when everybody's collapsed? And now having going through all these defi Wobbles as well.
David
Well, we're very, I don't think there's any other lender out there that shares their book size every month. So Atlantin, we share our book size every month. We, we were the first company to ever do proof of reserves. So I let in all of our loans. All of the Bitcoin is held at qualified custody at all times. We are very proud of our transparency. We just launched a bond that was the first ever bitcoin ABS bond that be rated by S and P. It got an investment grade rating by S and P that is actually the highest investment quality digital asset instrument in the market today. And you can see it. Anybody can Google let an S and P bond right now and see all the details of that facility. How big is it? How many loans are in there? It's a $200 million facility. You can see what we pay for it and you can see that the cost that we pay for our capital is lower than what we charge for our loan. So you can see that our business is sustainable. We try to operate and take the best of defi, which we think is the transparency. And we layer on the best of cefi, which we think are those guardrails and protections that allow us to source capital from banks, bond markets, US public markets, et cetera. Because our view has always been that in the lending space we win by offering you the best loan experience at the best possible price. Who has the cheapest cost of capital? It's these very regulated entities like banks, pensions, insurance companies, and we had reinsurance companies buy our bond already. And we're going to keep getting more and more of those players funding the loans that we distribute to our clients. And I think another one of these, one of the things that I'm most proud of is just to show you how bitcoin and this technology can transform even the traditional structures. So Leden's ABS bond is the first bond in the ABS market in the history of the US that has more, that has loans from clients of more than two countries. Leden's bond has clients from 30 countries in the facility, more than 30 countries. And it's the first time that the S and P has rated a bond with countries from loans from 30 countries as investment grade. Why? Because historically if your loan, if your car loan of your mortgage was in Canada or Australia or another non US country, it was perceived to be more risk. And now in our bond they're actually saying because the collateral is the same for these people, the risk is the same. And so we were able to put in loans from people in 30 different countries into this facility. So now we can source capital from the US debt markets and deliver it to bitcoiners across the world. And so I think that that makes me really proud.
Scott
Incredible. I lost Internet. Can you guys hear me? I just say that I lost wi fi. Hopefully you can still hear me. Can you guys hear.
Ryan
Yeah, we can hear you.
Scott
Okay, good. And so Mauricio, before I want to go back to the panel for a second because we had a couple hands before. I know it's kind of time to wrap, but where can people check this all out?
David
You can check us out. Len IO. Leten is here in the chat with Len. Want to go over anything about this? Sorry guys, I think it glitched.
Dave
Did everybody glitch or are we done? Scott?
Unknown
I think we glitched.
David
I'm back, but I don't know. I just heard you, Dave.
Dave
Okay. Yeah, it seems to be working fine. David, did you have your hand up? Yeah, yeah.
Unknown
I just wanted to go back to the earlier comment about the use of agents and stable coins and I agree, basically. But I did throw something into the chat which might be worth taking a look at, which is essentially as the cost of using AI models is actually going higher from prior versions, we're seeing effective price increases to users of say, roughly about 60% from one model to another. There's a good chart in the note in the thread that you can take a look at there. But obviously I agree with the long term goal. Stablecoins, energentic commerce are going to be great, but there's some speed bumps on the way.
Dave
Maybe that's a good spot to. To end. I. I think we lost Scott. It's 11:15, it's Friday afternoon and everyone have a good weekend and we'll see you all on Monday morning.
Unknown
It's Memorial Day, Dave.
Dave
Oh, you're right. Well, you know, I guess we'll see you on Wednesday morning.
Unknown
Enjoy your long weekend.
Dave
Yeah, yeah. We just heard here in Miami on Memorial Day they do the. The air shows and the overflight. So I've heard during this I had my mic muted multiple times because we had these massive sonic booms over our heads. So should be a fun weekend. Anyway, let's. Let's hope that nothing bad happens. But we'll see. Anyway, I guess we'll see you all on Wednesday morning. Take care.
Podcast: The Wolf Of All Streets
Episode: Mark Cuban Sells His Bitcoin – Is He Wrong?
Date: May 22, 2026
Host: Scott Melker
Theme: A roundtable discussion on Mark Cuban’s public capitulation on Bitcoin, market cycles, Bitcoin and Ethereum’s investment theses, the rise of AI tokens and platforms, DeFi risks, and the convergence of AI infrastructure with crypto.
This episode dives into the crypto community’s reaction to Mark Cuban’s public statement about selling almost all of his Bitcoin and claiming it “lost the plot.” Scott Melker hosts an engaging conversation with a panel of investors, analysts, and market participants who dissect Cuban’s rationale, the state of Bitcoin and Ethereum, and wider trends including the rise of AI tokens and the ongoing transformation in DeFi. The discussion explores market cycles, investor behavior, institutional vs. retail dynamics, and what the next cycle might bring.
Timestamps: 00:19–04:43
“The fact that Mark Cuban is selling to me is almost classic capitulation behavior.” (00:19, Dave)
Timestamps: 04:43–09:53
Timestamps: 13:25–25:31
Timestamps: 30:24–37:13
Timestamps: 41:07–54:52
Timestamps: 37:13–40:56
The episode is characteristically frank and energetic, featuring smart skepticism and deep experience across crypto, traditional investment, and technology. The tone is at times irreverent—challenging “celebrity” investment theses (Cuban)—and consistently centered on market structure, long-term strategy, and technological shifts. The panel offers a compelling inside view into crypto’s changing guard, the interplay between DeFi and mainstream finance, and the yet-unrealized potential of the AI-token fusion, making this a must-listen for anyone tracking the cutting edge of digital assets.
For further exploration, listeners are encouraged to research: