← The Wolf Of All Streets
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- [00:01]
Scott
Morning everybody. Happy Monday. Welcome to Crypto Town Hall. 10:15am Eastern Standard Time. Every weekday here on X we are having some glitches getting people up on stage, including myself as co host. So apologize for the delay, but I would imagine that you're all used to us not starting at exactly 10:15am with the actual conversation at this point. So we've got quite a bit to talk about today. Tom. We have Michael Saylor obviously buying yet again a metric ton of Bitcoin. Kind of his thing. I think nobody's surprised by that. Obviously on Mondays we have the wild underperformance of Ethereum. The ETH Bitcoin ratio dropped to a five year low of 0.02193. It's fallen 39% relative to Bitcoin this year and it's the first time ETH has underperformed Bitcoin in the 12 months after a bitcoin having. So that's a first here, making many wonder if the four year, four year cycle is effectively dead. That said, Bitcoin also usually does well in the first quarter of the post having year and was down the most since 2018. So obviously market not performing as many would have anticipated. Worth digging into by the way, for that number on strategy. MicroStrategy purchased 22,048 Bitcoin for $1.92 billion between March 24 and March 30. Where's this guy get 2 billion more dollars? It's unbelievable the amount of dry powder that he somehow digs up to buy more bitcoin. Listen, we can talk about Sailor buying bitcoin, nobody's surprised, but is there any point where we scratch our heads and say how can you keep doing this? Feel free to jump in.
- [01:51]
Alex
I mean, so long as people buy weird esoteric financial instruments from strategy, I think he'll keep buying.
- [02:02]
Scott
Yeah, I think that's the case. I guess. Then the question becomes how many more of these strategies can he come up with to raise capital?
- [02:10]
Alex
Yeah, no clue. I think the thing that is clear is he's kind of the only one who can do it. Like I know Gamestop is doing a convertible to do it and I know there was lots of talk about everyone doing this, but it really doesn't work for anyone else because it's just such a commodity thing. So it's only the MicroStrategy brand and like the Sailor brand that lets him get away with doing this. Other companies can add bitcoin to their balance sheet, but it's not going to do anything for Their financials. They're not going to be able to, I think, raise convertibles at scale in order to pull it off.
- [02:40]
Scott
Marathon's doing another big one, though, correct?
- [02:43]
Alex
Yeah, but they've been to them since. They're like a bitcoin miner, so it fits in there. But I'm talking about, like random companies trying to pivot in and do this. I don't. So I think Sailor basically gets to take whatever demand there is for these types of instruments because people just want to do it through them.
- [03:03]
Scott
Yeah, GameStop. Dave, what did we surmise they have about 6 billion cash as of last Friday? Is that what we talked about this morning? I know originally was four, but I think they actually raised another billion and a half last week, somewhere between five.
- [03:17]
Dave
And a half and six. We don't know how much they're willing to put into bitcoin, how much they need for dry powder. So, you know, who knows?
- [03:24]
Scott
I, I don't know how much does the amount matter as much as the symbolism at this point?
- [03:33]
Dave
Look, I, I, I think that had they done this at any period of time when we weren't going through the macro situation we've been going through, the price impact would have been substantially more. I think as the crow flies for, as the cards delay, they couldn't have possibly picked a better time because whatever they're buying, they're probably soaking up and they're buying it cheap. You know, sometimes better to be lucky than smart. You know, I got all in with Ace, King and a pivotal point toward the bubble in a poker tournament this weekend. And I, I was neither smart nor lucky. And it happens. Right. But I think in this particular case, they got in the right situation. So we'll see.
- [04:22]
Scott
Ryan?
- [04:24]
Ryan
Yeah, I mean, I, I have friends trying this strategy in markets all over the world where they're picking a publicly traded company, they're putting a CEO in place that is, Mike, that is MicroStrategy Esque, or D.A.V. sorry, Sailor Esque. And they're just putting them in front of people and promoting this same strategy that MicroStrategy is doing, and they're doing this in markets all over the world. I'm also, you know, having friends contact me about doing this with Doge and doing this with other coins and just basically leveraging the company's assets to buy more and more crypto to build the balance book. And it's, they're looking at this microstrategy strategy as a legitimate build.
- [05:12]
Scott
Wait, did you say that, you know, people that want to put Doge As a reserve asset on their books.
- [05:18]
Ryan
Yes.
- [05:19]
Scott
Like on purpose.
- [05:20]
Ryan
You can't make this stuff up. This is where we're at.
- [05:25]
Scott
I mean, Doge is cool, I guess, but that seems absolutely absurd.
- [05:32]
Ryan
I mean, if it plays, I mean.
- [05:34]
Scott
What'S the argument for that? So, like, if you want to be microstrategy esque, you have to have a belief that the asset that you're buying is obviously going to continue up for the reasons we know that Bitcoin is likely to for the next 20, 50, 100 years because he has committed to never selling. You can't view almost any other asset not to pick on Doge, but who looks at Doge and is like, this is the thing I need to definitely have in 50 years on my balance sheet.
- [06:04]
Ryan
Well, I think they're looking at the mining aspect right now, whether it's very heavily profitable to mine litecoin and Doge. So they're looking at the near term aspects of it. But there's some, there's some very weird staying power with Doge. No one expected it to be, you know, 12 years in the future. You know, where it's at now, but, you know, 50 years in the future, who knows, Maybe they have foresight.
- [06:32]
Scott
I'm not pitching on it, I think, and I'm not commenting on future, future price action. I think Doge will probably go up, assuming that we have a cycle and Bitcoin does. It just seems like a strange thing to commit your balance sheet to as a company. Go ahead, Alex.
- [06:47]
Alex
Well, yeah, they're not a company though. Like they're finding a shell company, they're pulling in. They think they can get retail people to like dump money into it, not understanding what's going on and that it'll work like the micro strategy meme stock and, and they're just going to dump more shares and against that, like it's that they're just grifting money off retail. Yeah, there's no trade here.
- [07:13]
Scott
I'm a tab.
- [07:14]
Amateo
Yeah. What's ironic about that idea?
- [07:18]
Scott
Your mic is really, really quiet.
- [07:20]
Amateo
Oh, can you hear me better now?
- [07:22]
Scott
Not really.
- [07:23]
Amateo
Okay, I'll jump off and rejoin.
- [07:25]
Scott
Yeah, Try to try to take a shot at that and try to fix it. I mean, I certainly didn't intend to discuss assets on the balance sheet other than Bitcoin for these companies. But maybe, Ryan, that's just a sentiment gauge that people are still willing to make these sort of exotic bets on crypto with balance sheets or companies at this point. That seems crazy. That seems crazy.
- [07:49]
Ryan
Well, I think Yeah, I think Sailor was, you know, crazy with bitcoin at first and everyone's looking at Sailor going, well hey, if it worked for him, he took a shot in the dark and he built this giant vision around this asset, maybe we can do it with another asset that has a decent cult following.
- [08:05]
Scott
Yeah, I agree with that. You just have to wonder that if Bitcoin goes 20, I'm not saying yet again, not a prediction on price action, but If Bitcoin goes 20% lower and starts to flirt with sailors cost basis, what that commentary will look like. Right? Does it could happen. Obviously. Imitate. You want to take another shot?
- [08:27]
Amateo
Yeah. How's that?
- [08:29]
Scott
Louder. Good.
- [08:30]
Amateo
Okay. Good morning, Scott.
- [08:33]
Scott
Morning.
- [08:33]
Amateo
Yeah, I was just going to come. The irony of the Doge thing is that when we look historically it was actually the GameStop madness that actually led to the Doge madness of it actually going crazy after all of the Halts and the Robinhood stuff, which actually led to Doge, which actually led to the meme coin cycle starting to actually show its potential, which then ultimately yielded into the meme coin absolute madness that we saw that led to complete value extraction, which was a huge contributor to where we are now. So there's some kind of irony in all of that. But I think the question I have here, I posed this last week and I looked at this, which was who's actually buying these microstrategy debt instruments? I got an answer from Dave and someone saying Brocket and I had already done the research, but hedge funds, asset managers, et cetera, but there's no actually distinct disclosures. There's information on who's underwriting the debt, but there's no clarity on who's actually buying it. And that's just still a big question I have on like is it debt being used to purchase debt and if so, who is actually taking on the risk here? I don't know exactly how much risk is in this microstrategy trade. I don't think really anyone knows. And it's just, it just raises a lot of questions and I think for the desire of we hold the most transparent asset in the world, it should be clear who's holding the debt instruments for them to purchase the most transparent asset in the world, isn't it all.
- [10:15]
Alex
Traders buying the volume?
- [10:19]
Tomer
Well, just, just as a clarification, this 1.92 billion, only 19 million of it was the strike instrument. The rest of it was at the market share offerings. So there was no, there was no convertible debt issued in the last week.
- [10:33]
Amateo
So I didn't realize that for this.
- [10:34]
Tomer
One, this is almost like it's 99% at the market share offerings at an M nav of around 2. So there's still a lot of people buying MicroStrategy shares and doing whatever strategies they, they want to do with it. Sorry for calling it micro strategy. They. There's still a huge market, like almost $2 billion worth of shares in the last week where people are buying as a market and holding the price. So I don't know, I don't know where all that money is coming from. It's all then getting plowed back into Bitcoin and then we're still seeing the selling pressure which that to me is the big question. It's like if MicroStrategy is buying and GameStop is announcing it's buying and all these other people are making modest announcements of buying, who's selling the billions of dollars so that the price is staying flat or even going down.
- [11:29]
Scott
I have quite a quote here from Larry Fink that kind of just dropped in his annual letter to investors on Monday. This one is pretty astounding. I want everybody to listen to this. So BlackRock CEO Larry Fink warned that if the US doesn't get its debt under control and deficits keep ballooning, the country risks losing its world reserve currency status to digital assets like Bitcoin. Here's the quote. Could undermine America's economic advantage if investors begin seeing Bitcoin as a safer bet than the dollar. That is Larry Fink, the CEO of BlackRock saying that the dollar could lose its reserve status to Bitcoin.
- [12:09]
Tomer
That string that was attached to it if Americans begin to see Bitcoin as a safer asset. I can't remember the exact wording there, there now, but it's like all you have to do is study Bitcoin. It is in intrinsically, I hate to use that word, but it is intrinsically safer because it is intrinsically uninflatable.
- [12:32]
Scott
But what an astounding statement from the man who controls the largest financial institution by AUM in the world. Go ahead, Dave.
- [12:42]
Dave
Yeah, I, I mean look, you know, he, he had previously called for 500 to 700, 000 bitcoin. What he didn't want to say in that letter would be if that occurred, that he would have been under reporting or under predicting by probably an order of magnitude. So you know, just consider that and understand what he's basically saying is, listen, you know, if you don't realize that inside the halls of power people don't see Bitcoin getting towards gold as and us leading in that doing is a good thing. But don't let it overshoot too much because if that happens, then we lose a lot. And that is, it's an interesting needle to be thread, but it seems to be de rigor for the people who are running this, this particular administration. And I'm not saying that I think it's running the administration, but if you don't think that he's able to talk to dissent and others, then you're not paying attention.
- [13:43]
Scott
Yeah. I mean speaking of the administration, we'll jump to you in a second, Ryan. There was news today that the Trump sons, Eric and Don, I think are launching a mining venture with Hut 8 and that they're on the board of a wealth manager. I don't have the name of it in front of me. And that wealth manager is buying IBIT for its balance sheet, which is BlackRock's Bitcoin ETF. So no question where that family stands right now on bitcoin going ahead, Ryan?
- [14:11]
Ryan
Yeah, actually dovetails really well because when I started seeing Blackrock getting into bitcoin and one of their biggest holdings were going into a publicly traded miner, I, I do firmly believe that BlackRock, you know, takes very educated bets and they're not going to lose on this. So it was kind of the changing of the tides with Bitcoin When BlackRock started getting involved, especially on the mining side. So now that seeing that the Trumps are getting into the mining side also, what re don't realize is you can own all the bitcoin in the world, but if you don't own mining capacity, you really have no control of the network or transaction processing. Okay.
- [14:52]
Scott
The flip side of that, the same argument really quickly, Dave, before you jump in. Okay, I'll let you go because I want to pivot. Go ahead. Yeah.
- [14:59]
Dave
I mean I think it is worth understanding the history what real estate investors which are that were the Trump family, what they're always looking for is to be vultures. And anyone who's. And you had Mike Alford on your show recently, anyone who's invested in miners knows that the premium that they're definitely not trading expensive right now. So them looking to get into mining now is two things. It's. Yeah, okay. Mining has probably been beaten the crap out of and we look at the hash rate, we see how globally competitive it is. But it also is indication of, hey, we think we have an edge here. And ask yourself the question, what could their edge be? And you don't have to Connect the dots too far to understand that this is a, that we are at, and I've been saying it for three weeks, we are at a tradable bottom part of the range. You know, you can pick up nickels here and there, shorting, buying, shorting, buying. It's nowhere near confirming a breakout, but we, it definitely feels bottom around these levels.
- [16:03]
Scott
The pivot I wanted to make was based on what Ryan said obviously about Larry Fink and the Trump family and both of them, this ramping commitment towards Bitcoin, they're clearly starting to get it. Well, at the beginning I read to you all the negative metrics about Ethereum. I think the original title here was that they're doing less than $100,000 in transaction fees or something absurd in 24 hours. Is Ethereum dead? It's at its lowest point on the Ethereum. Bitcoin ratio has wildly been underperforming. Well, Trump's world, Liberty Financial has been buying Ethereum massively and Larry Fink is tokenizing BYDL on Ethereum and has in those same investor letters where he obviously becomes more satoshi every day, has also been talking about the fact that every asset in the world will eventually be tokenized and points out the fact that that's being done on Ethereum. So why is Ethereum getting absolutely disproportionately smashed here? Doesn't seem to make sense by the same arguments. I mean, Robbie, you're obviously looking down this rabbit hole. What do you make of Ethereum continuing to underperform so massively?
- [17:16]
Robbie
Honestly, I don't know. It doesn't make any sense to me given its obvious utility and community and the world of projects there. So I think it's just that maybe there's a disconnect in terms of Ethereum as an investment proposition, as a token as opposed to the pure utility that it offers. But you know, to be honest, I haven't been paying much attention to it because, as you might know, Godzilla has been launching their token today. And, and I think that's a, a good bellwether for where we are in, in consumer stuff.
- [17:50]
Scott
Yeah, I saw, I, I haven't looked, but that's one of the few things I personally invested in. I think it's incredible. Didn't intend to talk about it, but did see it launched over a billion ftv, which is pretty decent.
- [18:01]
Robbie
Yeah, for sure. And I think it, it, the main thing is that it's, it's really touching nerves, you know, in all kinds of web2 places in traditional gaming circles. And it Seems to be a product that's kind of cutting through, so to speak, to non crypto audiences who are coming around to the idea that it's providing utility and, and functionality in the game, that the blockchain infrastructure is providing that and doing things for gamers that gamers want to do to create UGC content and stuff like that without thinking of it as being crypto. And that's a been kind of a holy grail goal for, for the game industry, at least for a while, to figure out how to get traditional gamers not paying attention to the tech, but just enjoying what it does for them.
- [18:52]
Scott
Sorry, my mic is glitching. Amateo.
- [18:57]
Amateo
Yeah, I was looking at the Ethereum data today and I mean we're down on active wallet addresses, we're actually even down on stablecoin transfer volume and stablecoin wallet addresses are only at 30 million. It's actually just the supply. So I mean you're not seeing, you're seeing the big players use stablecoins more and we're seeing adoption but not in any significant way. The actual activity is lower. Obviously TVL has dropped significantly dex volume, fees, revenue, I mean everything is just on such a steep decline. But I think when you combine the regulatory news, you combine the infra, you combine the rails, I think the benefit of this is that we're seeing a lot of the crap that congests Ethereum, Ethereum just really start to fade to oblivion while the actual real utility infra is being stabilized and being built faster than ever with AI. So I think between RWA and everything else that's happening, Ethereum still has the promise to be the sort of de facto reliable financial rails and the market is just not reflective of what's actually happening.
- [20:20]
Tomer
Yeah, I think that for all, for everything but Bitcoin, a lot of the value is, is moved by speculation narrative. And because of what's happening to Bitcoin now all the speculation narrative is moving to who, who will institutions own. And so a lot of people are concluding, well, it's Bitcoin and that institutional money is moving in. So they're, they're taking their speculative dollars out of Ethereum and putting them into Bitcoin. But I think it's also why you see something like XRP outperforming Ethereum, because XRP's narrative, I don't know that it's truth, but its narrative is oh, it's for banks, it's for institutions. This thing is going to do well when the institutions arrive. So again, speculative dollars move out of Ethereum and into XRP on the basis of narrative rather than fundamental values. And we'll see. I mean, I think all these issues with where exactly Ethereum is headed are problematic for Ethereum. It's not exactly clear what its vision is or how it's going to get there. So that also is probably cooling a lot of people's enthusiasm.
- [21:30]
Scott
Ryan, you had your hand up.
- [21:32]
Ryan
Yeah, a couple points here. One, I think transaction fees are way low because a lot of the layer 2 networks. So a lot of people have been moving their trading over to Arbitrum, moving their trading over to bas. I think BAS is actually one of the main hubs for trading now and the, the fees are just non existent over there. So I think that's taken a huge slice out of the Ethereum, you know, block fees. But I'd also say that people are moving into a lot of stable coins as kind of a safe harbor when there's uncertainty with these different crypto assets. So they're moving into usdt, usdc. And I really don't think the Ethereum reflects the utility of the network at all. On the AI front, you know, we're building out Morpheus and we're building out all these different agents and I know there's just off the top of my head a dozen or two dozen different projects that are building out all these different AI systems that are all running on top of Ethereum and they're using the stable coins on top of Ethereum to do interactive commerce between agents. So all that's kind of this, you know, groundswell that no one can see. So I think the price right now is kind of dormant. It's not doing anything. But when it moves, I think it's going to move very, very quickly and take a lot of people by surprise.
- [22:51]
Scott
That's effectively what's always happened in the past. Right. I think people are just frustrated that it keeps dipping and that this was quote unquote supposed to be the time based on the four year cycle. This is when Ethereum usually outperforms and it just hasn't happened. But I agree with you. I'm dumbfounded generally. Amateo.
- [23:09]
Amateo
Yeah, I just wanted to double click on that and agree. I think what we're seeing with the rise of AI agents is we're actually abstracting away a lot of the chain interface where the agent's just going to execute on the chain, where whatever the task or the project or the infra lives. So right now, while it's currently a manual process very fueled by users Obviously fueled by fees. That's all being abstracted away in real time. And I think what we're going to actually see during these bear market conditions is the technology for those agentic applications be deployed, usable. We've seen some interesting experiments like Bankerbot Appearium, we've seen AI Wayfinder is on its way. Like the abstraction of the actual crypto experiment experience is coming which is also going to lead to a lot more automation from institutions and wherever the infra lives is where it's going to execute. And I think that that's just going to continue to be the case. And there's enough infra on eth to provide so much value to that process. I just don't think people will see it coming.
- [24:19]
Scott
Alex, not sure if you can hear. Go ahead.
- [24:21]
Alex
Oh yeah, yeah. I think it's just, you know, markets are very driven by sentiment and themes and utility is very off brand right now. So you can have whatever debate you, you know, you want over what chains we think will end up as the basis of stuff, whether it's East Salon or something else, whatever. But you know, psalm is also off 36 I think I saw yesterday relative to bitcoin from time, like it's. Nobody's really just looking for that right now. I think folks are looking for one of two things which is either the relative stability of bitcoin as they don't know what's going on or two, you know, how can I 10, 20, 30x pump in six hours or something. Which leads to another interesting dynamic where because I think those cycles have gotten so fast around meme coins and other assets and things that you don't even feel like there's any particular thing coming up the charts and doing well. Because it's the agglomeration of like the different things that might be a challenge, but they're just kind of popping up, lasting for a day or two, dropping back down.
- [25:26]
Scott
Yeah, I mean if you blink you miss it. Right? The, the. The hundred X's or ten xs or whatever of previous cycles took time. You're saying Basically you can 50x in two hours and it's the whole life cycle of an altcoin in a matter of hours instead of months or years.
- [25:42]
Alex
Exactly.
- [25:44]
Scott
Brutal. Robbie, let's talk more about Godzilla and just generally about gaming. Do you think that this can be the catalyst for us to finally see real adoption and that angle? Because it's an interesting conversation on the tail end of what Alex just said.
- [26:01]
Alex
Right.
- [26:01]
Scott
We know that the interest has been on bitcoin and Memes, can something actually show some staying power and give us a bit more hope?
- [26:09]
Robbie
Yeah, I think it can and I think it can for a couple of reasons. I think on the one hand, obviously they've built a great game and people just love playing the game. It's one of the most popular shooters in the market, full stop. Even when comparing it to, you know, all kinds of Web2 products out there, it's. It's literally just a game that people who love shooters love playing. So they have like two and a half million MAUs, I think, if I'm not mistaken. And they were also the first ones to break through onto traditional console platforms as a blockchain game. Right. Or as a game with blockchain infrastructure. So I think that part they've kind of, you know, they've created a brand Halo to show that, yes, it is possible for a game to hit that quality bar and hit all of the seemingly impossible metrics that Web2 gamers were expecting when they came to Web3 games but found Web3 games had not previously delivered on. And so it shows that actually it is possible to do it. And then the second part of it is obviously they're on binance launch pool, they're widely listed. I think they have perps out already. And so for the Web3 native community, there's a lot of products there to get them excited as well as just the gameplay itself.
- [27:32]
Amateo
Yeah, I was just going to add that the actual gaming industry is also down bad, tremendous. There just hasn't been new games that have come in to the fold that have really sparked interest. You've got viewership sponsorship down on Twitch on Kick. I mean there's a few outliers but. But not a lot. So I think that there's a real built up interest and demand for disruptive gaming that starts to gain a lot of market traction. And there's obviously millions of young streamers and gamers ready to jump on to anything that's exciting. And I do think that if we've got these AAA games coming to market that have a crypto value layer which we know that the gaming community loves the crypto value layer and we're a huge part of the meme coin cycle, it's going to be really significant in driving attention and activity back into the market. And I do think it holds promise. I just don't think we've seen that killer games start to rise up. Maybe Godzilla is it. There's some others that are sort of there, but I do think it shows promise.
- [28:45]
Scott
You broke up there at the end. I guess the next question then is it can show promise for adoption, much like the conversation about Ethereum, but does that mean that it will be investable for people looking to speculate on the tokens associated?
- [28:59]
Robbie
So I was going to say for the Binance launch pool, I think about two days ago they were up to four and a half billion dollars of stablecoins locked up for the launch pool. Clearly there was some market anticipation there. Obviously that's playing out in real time now that the token has launched. But I think the other side of that, which is interesting from a gaming industry perspective is, you know, GTA 6 is going to launch in the second half of this year and it is going to be by far and away the biggest media industry event of the year and perhaps of, you know, one year either side of it as well. I mean, it's going to dwarf anything that we see in, you know, in gaming, in film and music, you name it. And so I think that is actually going to draw have a waterfall effect on everything else in the game industry. And so I think what will happen is people will look around and they'll be like, oh, I'm really excited about games now again because I've been playing GTA 6. What else can I play? What else can I do? And Godzilla and everybody else is going to benefit as a result of that.
- [30:06]
Scott
And do you think that these will benefit the underlying chains that the tokens are built on?
- [30:13]
Robbie
Yeah, for sure. Because if we look at guns already, it's, if you just look at activity on guns, it's one of the most active chains just because its community is so active. And also, you know, the important thing about like the North Star metric of gaming is retention and people coming back and playing day after day and measuring what you're, you know, day seven, day 30, day 15, retention is. And so because you're designing the products for that kind of retention, it's also conducive to chain activity because you've got people who are using a product that's designed to retain them and keep them active.
- [30:53]
Scott
Yeah, that, that is a great answer, but I was actually trying to get at if it's built on Solana versus an Ethereum versus an Avax, how much will it bring to the ecosystem as a whole and how much value will accrue to the actual toke token that the actual chain, the token is on. I mean, I guess this is on its own with Avalanche framework, but sure.
- [31:16]
Robbie
I think it's difficult to say how direct the correlation would be. But my rule of thumb is always that we call it attention, I like to call it activity. As long as you've got a good, active, large community there, then value will follow. As I think we found with Ronin and the Axie community that that has been a very durable community that been, you know, very active for the last several years and continues to support what happens on Ronin even though, you know, there's no defi. There's not meme. No Meme Coins. But that gaming community is very active.
- [31:54]
Ryan
Makes perfect sense.
- [31:55]
Scott
And Ronin had a brief period even sort of in the bare market of outperformance. Right. Where it started to see some traction once again.
- [32:03]
Robbie
Yeah, for sure. Well, because the people who love to play those games just keep playing them forever. I mean, just like people still, you know, play Minecraft as adults because they love it.
- [32:15]
Scott
I'm really hoping that we start to see interest come back to utility, whether it's gaming or elsewhere. You know, I, I find Meme Coins a bit exhausting and I did see that Pump fund was somewhat popping off again here and seeing renewed interest and you know, pretty annoying, but I guess that's the nature of the beast here. Is there anything that anybody on the panel is looking at that they're equally excited about a launch that's coming or a potential catalyst that they think could somewhat bring a larger focus back to utility and actual use cases beyond what we've discussed here? I mean, Robbie, I was looking for Godzilla for a very, very long time. I mean, maybe you have other answers since you guys are exposed to so many things.
- [33:03]
Robbie
I think honestly it's the usual narratives, at least the stuff that I've been seeing lately. There are some interesting RWA projects coming out and some interesting stuff going on in Desai, but I wouldn't say like on a timeline of weeks as opposed to months. I don't see anything in the next couple weeks.
- [33:21]
Scott
Yeah, weeks is fine. I would say. I'll go ahead.
- [33:27]
Amateo
Yeah. I think that the big thing that we're going to see is AI agent based DeFi being a huge trend in addition to the things we've already talked about, RWA and gaming. But I think the AI agent DeFi trend is going to really take things by storm. Gaming itself is abstracting the chain away, automating everything within the ecosystem and we'll see how value accrues on the under layer. But I think when anyone's able to interact with chatbots, that automate trades, that automate algorithmic trading, that automate APY pool distributions on the fly can do really creative things. People launching tokens directly from X for really creative purposes. I just think it's a wellspring of interesting ways to interact with this market that completely removes the complexities at a level that we've just never seen before. And I think it'll carry the trend really strong.
- [34:36]
Scott
Yeah, I've seen a lot being built on the AI agent side. It just seems that the hype has diminished over the past few months. Kind of had that very brief moment. But to your point, I mean, I know there's AI exchanges coming, there's a lot and we're going to see AI Everything.
- [34:51]
Amateo
I'll just add real quick is that those were really conversational. They were just sort of like chatbots that you could talk with on X that would just repeat stuff. This is a much deeper utility level that I don't think we've fully seen the user interfaces, but agree this prior trend, I think it was the test run.
- [35:13]
Scott
What other areas do we think that we're going to see a major crossover between crypto and blockchain and AI? I mean, is there anything else I'm going to tell you on your radar you think is coming in that arena? And then at 21 million after.
- [35:28]
Amateo
Yeah, I'll pass it to everyone else. I want to hear their thoughts.
- [35:31]
Scott
21 million, go ahead.
- [35:36]
21 Million
Yeah, for me, I think one of the biggest things, if you saw Avax, I believe he's working with the state of California when it comes to like the, I think his driver license. Right. The DMV system, basically. So for me, I think we're going to see more just governments adopt what they can do on blockchain. Now, which blockchain, I'm really not sure. Obviously we see many states kind of having a reserve when it comes to bitcoin, but I think that number one, I'm a big believer in gaming. But I feel like, you know, think about this. If we have like your city hall, right, you have these two homes, what people own, what taxes they pay. We saw a few. I think Miami was one of the cities that actually adopted a few years ago. To me, that's going to be one of the biggest things that kind of forces people to get onto blockchain is when there's, you know, local city hall does it. Their local town government, the city government or even at the state level kind of has them to be on there to make transactions, make payments, and especially when it comes to taxes, I think that the people will eventually want to see more things on blockchain because hey, I paid $1,000, for example, you know, random number last year or last month. What exactly, exactly did that money go to? What did you guys use for it? I think, you know, I'm from New York City. We spend a lot of money just on any type of, you know, old tax, New York City tax, New York state tax. And sometimes we just question ourselves like where is this actually going to? Are we, who are we funding? Because our roads are shit. The schools, excuse my language, are not great, you know, so it's one of those things where I think the transparency level that people don't act like we don't understand what we're going to get from this. You always heard about business bitcoin. Early on people use it for money laundering. But the truth is this is actually the anti money laundering because we can see where every single dollar down to the second, where it's going, how it's being invested and how it's being used. So to me, when we start seeing like people's car titles, right, like I said, the house deeds in city hall, just all personal information. And it might not be the greatest thing, but at the same time I think we'll have something that's going to be on there that's going to make that big difference now is how is it going to maybe be on a decentralized chain? Because we don't want our information out there. I get that. I get a lot of people don't want it. But I tell you what, it'd be a lot easier to transfer a title or a deed, you know, to somebody if it is all on the blockchain. But that's my point of view, Dave.
- [37:53]
Dave
Yeah, yeah. Before we pivoted, I was just going to make a couple of points. First. Now is the time I always say. I don't give investment advice, but I will give this tidbit. Now is the time to actually be looking for projects that create utility. Figuring out and doing the deep dive and putting your money into those projects before the time when everybody is doing it. Because that is going to be a different part of the cycle. I mean, forget four year cycles because you all. It's bullshit, right? You know, and by the way, the four year cycle was doomed, was doomed. Certain to, you know, become less and less relevant as having, as you approach, you know, the, the terminal stick. But look, build. Now's the time for building and investing. And this is where money is made. By finding those projects, utility will matter. Remember, the government is literally about to unleash Builders to raise money and get a regulatory framework. They're still not in the seats yet. They're reading very close, but they're not there. And so it's really important to understand that the questions you're asking in this town hall will be incredibly relevant for people a year or two years from now. In my, in my guess, you know, that's, that's the first thing. The second I want to make a quip that I want to know where the beta of Bitcoin to the Nasdaq is right at this particular second, you know, obviously if it's going to come us back to where it was on Friday and Nasdaq is still falling, I mean, I think that Larry, what he said is extremely relevant. And the third point, which you haven't talked about but is worth discussing is the big battle politically that's going on right now is about stable coins and in particular whether or not you can have yield on stable coins. The only argument against allowing yield on stable coins is that it will hurt the banking industry and more specifically hurt fractional reserve banking. And the dinosaurs out there who believe that that's important think that the Internet will not come up with ways or, and blockchain will not come up with ways for people to be able to fund mortgages. When you start talking about AI agents and DeFi. I mean look, more cryptos, internal self masturbatory trading isn't going to matter. But what will matter is AI agents searching or being used to allow people to buy mortgages and sell mortgages. Right. Creating investment pools based on mortgages and allowing mortgage shoppers to be able to find mortgages from unconventional places which will become necessary as banks lose what's going on, people building in that arena. And I know that I personally have some knowledge of some people who are. That's going to be a big time part of the future. But it's not investable in weeks, it's probably not even investable in months, it's a year sort of thing. And I think that that's the sort of stuff that matters. But this battle is a very important one.
- [40:49]
Tomer
Tomer then Ryan Yeah, really quick, I think to Dave's first point, which he kind of circled back to at the end. Whatever is going to happen with AI and blockchain, the barriers to entry are going to be relatively low. There's going to be so many people competing and entering, so many people announcing projects. It's going to be really, really hard to be able to separate the wheat from the chaff in these early days. And so it ends up being a very, very risky proposition to try to place a bet on something and expect positive returns. There may be a wave of capital that comes in and raises all ships, but that which can't sustain is going to eventually get drained out. And these things can happen very quickly. So I think I don't want to cast a verdict on what the long term impact of AI and blockchains is going to be, but I think it's going to be really wild up front and because of the nature of the space, it's going to be filled with failed projects, some which just didn't have the skill or the value proposition, many of which are probably just going to be scams without the full effort behind them, as we've seen in wave and wave and Wave before. And everything that's touched blockchain so hard.
- [42:06]
Scott
To find the signal through the noise or what's just not an outright scam when you're trying to invest in some of these things. Go ahead, Ryan.
- [42:14]
Ryan
Yeah, two things. So one, keeping your head down and building is typically a sign of a bear market. You know, we, you know, as engineers and project teams will typically push through the bear markets to build and then bull markets, we're scaling our teams, we're marketing, we're pushing to conferences, that type of thing. I've been very heavily focused on the Morpheus ecosystem and building out AI agents. And Dave's exactly right. These financial instruments that we're building out, the AI agents, they can consume so much more information than humans can. It can make so much more complex decisions than humans can. And as it dovetails with gaming, before we pivoted in the conversation a few times on the Morpheus ecosystem there's several games being developed. Everything from role playing games that are real time content through AI engines building out all the different characters, to there's a project called Only Cats which is literally generating cat NFPs and using AI to make them fight against each other. And it's just getting more and more complex where soon you're going to have real time rendered videos of these different fights.
- [43:28]
Scott
But.
- [43:31]
Ryan
It'S called Only Cats. But there are so many projects out there that are building on top of the AI ecosystem that are merging into Blockchain for the real time economics and then getting yield on stablecoin, getting yield on all your different meme coins, that's all coming. And like I said, it's a groundswell that no one can really see unless you're actually in the builders communities. But it's going to come fast.
- [44:01]
Scott
Matteo, go ahead.
- [44:04]
Amateo
Yeah, I just fully agree with that. I mean, I think the thing that maybe is not being highlighted enough is that the entire front end UI UX of the crypto experience is about to completely change. And that's something that we've desired for a very long time. And it's very close to being completely ready and available for anyone. And I think that that is a dramatic step, function of evolution for this entire market and industry and it will come faster than people think.
- [44:41]
Scott
All right, everyone, that was a great show. Going to go ahead and move to wrapping now. Please give everybody on stage a follow our amazing, tremendous, stupendous guests that show up every single day and grace us with their free time to discuss all of these important issues. It's an honor to be on stage with them every single day. And so tune back in tomorrow, see what we have at 10:15am Eastern Standard Time. Thank you, everybody. Let's hope we see a sustained bounce here. Should be an interesting week with the tariffs coming, which we didn't even discuss today, and we'll probably dive into tomorrow. Thanks, everyone. See you tomorrow.