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- [00:02]
Scott
Today we have one of the potentially largest catalysts we've seen in a very long time. JP Morgan and Coinbase joining together to offer crypto services. As they say in their press release. J.P. morgan, Chase and Coinbase launched strategic partnership to make buying crypto easier than ever. Yes, the same JP Morgan led by the same Jamie Dimon, who is one of the biggest haters, critics and evil villains in the crypto world. We're going to dig into this and more with one of my favorite guests, Mauricio, from Len. We've had him on a few times. He's going to keep coming back. Always has incredible, incredible insight into everything happening in the market. Let's do it.
- [00:47]
Mauricio
Let's do.
- [01:03]
Scott
This is absolutely crazy. I'm just going to bring Mauricio on right now. We had to change the whole title and everything about 15 minutes ago when this news dropped. I'm just. Before we dig into it, I'm just going to show it up here. J.P. morgan, Chase and Coinbase launched strategic partnership to make buying crypto easier than ever. These are the three, like, main points. Direct to bank to wallet connection. So you'll be able to just go into your JP Morgan account and through an API, connects to a Coinbase wallet buy, sell. So you're doing it on Coinbase, but within the security of JP Morgan that you're familiar with. But this is where it gets kind of crazy to me. Transfer of Chase ultimate reward points. So Chase customers will be able to transfer their Chase Ultimate Rewards points to their Coinbase account at a one to one redemption ratio. So that means you'll take your points and you can go buy crypto with them. And then beginning this fall, the ability to use Chase credit cards on Coinbase. So you'll be able to literally fund your Coinbase account with a Chase credit card. This is. I mean, listen, I. I'm not cheering JP Morgan per se, but if you want everybody to have access, these are the kind of things that, for better or for worse, are gonna have to happen, right?
- [02:12]
Christopher Inks
Good morning, Scott. Man, I. I see this as basically capitulation on this idea that banks are going to be resistant to incorporating these services. This is probably the biggest, to your point, one of the biggest. A bank that's been painted in some ways as a. A villain in the crypto space just because of their public stance against Bitcoin and crypto, particularly by Jamie. But this signals to me that the banks in the US want to play and the administration is continuing to pave the way to make that easy for them. So they want the banks to participate in this industry, they see this as the future of finance and they want the US to continue playing a role. And what I think is super interesting about this is that you have two things happening at once, which is seemingly banks, the regulated players are getting more and more comfortable embracing this space. And if you look at what's happening in the Tornado Cash in the Samurai trials, it seems that the life in defi is getting increasingly harder because of the lack of regulation. And again, I think the perception that these services could in the future compete with the banks themselves without having to carry those regulatory stacks that banks do. So lots to talk about, man. I don't know where you want to, how do you want to thread this out?
- [03:32]
Scott
I don't really care about all the news, there's a lot of it. But I want to dig into all those things you just said. So one yes is a clear signal that there's going to be some centralization here. Doesn't mean that the decentralized side can't exist, but it doesn't get more centralized than JP Morgan on the JP Morgan side. What I also find interesting as I'm thinking through this, because this just happened, they were only really willing to offer these services to their wealth clients. This is a Everyman product, right? This is actually a product that might woo a lot of crypto people to J.B. morgan. The irony. And J.P. morgan, by the way, has still been debanking crypto people. So I can't really like align these things. But I mean this is a, it's an everyman product like every, it's a very popular credit card, right? And if you can go take all the points you've earned from your business credit card and stuff and put it into your Coinbase account and buy a couple hundred grand worth of crypto, it's pretty wild.
- [04:31]
Christopher Inks
Frankly, I'm also surprised, I would say, to see this concept of being able to fund your Chase bank account with a credit card or, sorry, your Coinbase bank account with a credit card. So theoretically you could be buying something like, you know, smoking chicken fish on credit card leverage, which doesn't sound to me like a recipe for a good outcome, but here we are nonetheless. And, and again, you know what I, what I continue to see and in fact, if you look, there was another headline this morning which I thought was super interesting, which is they've authorized in kind minting and redemptions for spot ETFs, which again signals to me that they are trying to make the, the lives of banks and authorized participants and ETF regulator products, the whole stack of regulated crypto products. That's the type of path that they're trying to make easier. And again, just reading between the lines, what I'm seeing here is more and more embrace from regulated instruments like banks and ETFs for the space and the regulators, making that path easier for banks and authorized participants, et cetera. And conversely, at the same time, kind of behind the scenes, you have them signaling the complete opposite to the unregulated solutions in the space, which I can't say that I'm shocked by, but. But it is. It is what I interpret from, from these news today.
- [05:59]
Scott
Yeah, I mean, there was another one and then I want to talk about Tornado cash, but acquired SEC rule shift moves crypto ETFs closer to mainstream. I hadn't seen this either, but they just increased the size of available options on iBIT. It's in here somewhere from 25,000 contracts to 250,000 contracts. So this IBIT product and options on it have been to my knowledge, the fastest growing options market anywhere. And the biggest complaint was we can only do 25,000 contracts. This isn't big enough to truly hedge and use it. Now they can go to 250,000 contracts. So this, I mean, I guess the moral of the story here is Wall Street's here and it's only increasing. It's not going to stop. And that, you know, maybe that speaks to the other side, which is we need to protect defi at all costs. And here you go. Tornado Cash developer Roman Storm will not take the stand. Lawyer said so. Now, because they rested their case, we could get an answer on it goes to jury today, I believe, right?
- [07:03]
Christopher Inks
Yes, it does.
- [07:04]
Scott
And you pointed out something. I'm going to put it all out here and let you just go. Right. Last night you told me this before. I hadn't even seen this, which is crazy. Crazy Samurai Wallet co founders who were kind of next on the docket. Right. For their trial, plead guilty. You have to imagine they would only plead guilty if they think this is going to go badly for Roman Storm.
- [07:24]
Christopher Inks
Yeah. And I want to give a big shout out to Frank Orva from Bitcoin magazine who's been covering these trials and putting out these updates. He's been doing a really amazing job. That's how I've been. Him and Inner City Press are the two main things that I've been following for these trials. And he similarly, he showed this yesterday. And the reason the Samurai, the way he described it was a gut punch for the process because for those following the trial, it seemed that the Roman Storm trial was going in the right direction as far as a positive outcome for the developers and potentially for the future of these unregulated, no KYC type of services. But what you saw over the last 48 hours has been a huge turn in the tides where now the Samurai devs have changed their plea to potentially to guilty plea, potentially indicating that they expect the guilty plea out of the Tornado Cash trial today. And again, if you look at the price action in the decentralized finance world, all these tokens are selling off. They're down 10, 15% plus some of the major players over the last three days. And I think again, this is the market signaling that the life of these types of services that do not have the same regulatory standards than than regulated services, that that world is going to become increasingly more challenged. And I would again, I'm not shocked because on the one side you see a lot of news and headlines that seem to be protecting or making the way, paving the path for regulated offerings to have an easier way. And conversely, at the same time you have this concept of the regulation. The US isn't going to sit still and watch these unregulated services compete with its regulated banks. And I think that makes sense to me. Not saying that that's the outcome everybody.
- [09:15]
Scott
Wants, but we have this interesting sort of scenario. The US Treasury a few weeks ago actually dropped their issues with Tornado Cash, which was on the ofax sanction list or something. They got rid of that. Right. So Tornado Cash kind of got a pass, but the guys who wrote the software now might go to jail forever. Why aren't we talking about Tim Cook and Steve Jobs going to jail because drug dealers use iPhones. This is literally no different. All these guys did was wrote some code and they could potentially go to jail for the rest of their lives. Samurai Wallet's different by the way. Those guys, I think, I don't remember the details of the case, but there's. They did some things. I think these guys might actually be guilty of things other than writing code. But Roman Storm, this guy wrote some code that people used for a purpose that the government doesn't like down the road, which by the way is just a mixing service. It's not like they were committing crimes. They were just laundering money using this thing that was just meant for privacy. And he's going to get in trouble for. Makes absolutely no sense. And this is completely antithetical to everything we've heard from this administration and government about crypto.
- [10:30]
Christopher Inks
I, I would listen in principle, Scott. I agree with you. And, and I'm, I'm a libertarian. I support freedom and I think everybody, it's a free market. There should be options out there for everyone to be able to use whatever they choose to use and whatever is best for them. What, what I think is a, what I think is the pickle that regulators are trying to, to sort through is this idea that somebody could just write code that create, that facilitates a function or a financial service in a completely unregulated and unchecked manner. Very pro privacy, but very sort of, it's a black box for a regulator. So they, I don't believe, feel comfortable with this idea that any, any, any person can write some code that would allow people to, in, you know, sanctioned countries or bad actors or whatever to participate without them having any say or filtering. And again, I'm not suggesting that that's the right way to do it. I'm saying that if, if they're trying to protect their regulated players in their markets because in many ways a lot of these unregulated players are offering similar things like yields and loans and they don't have lawyers, they don't have, you know, chief compliance officers. They're not talking to the regulators. And so how do you, down the line, how do you protect say, a bank from these services where a piece of code can do it without having any information need to be shared and no way of really determining if a bad actor is using this or having any means or recourse to prevent or stop that or anyone to even go after. And so again, I'm not saying that that's the outcome everybody wants, but to me, I can, I can see where the incentives it and who they're going to want to try to make this life easy and whose lives they're going to try to make hard. And, and again, I think the way we, we fix this is by standing up to these decision like making, letting them know that this is not where we want this industry to go. But that said, you have to read what's in front of you. And, and what I'm seeing here is.
- [12:34]
Scott
That, yeah, this is not great, honestly. And so you kind of operate personally, I had lead. Right. Obviously you kind of operate sort of at the crossroads between, oh, we're dead. In my opinion. I don't know if that's an accurate assessment. But you know, you kind of operate right, right in the middle of this.
- [12:54]
Christopher Inks
We, we are and, and listen, we, we've taken the regulated approach and the centralized regulated approach. Not to say that I don't believe options that are decentralized should not exist. I think there should. Again, I think it's a free market and people should be able to use what they feel most comfortable using in our world. We again, we're a regulated business. We follow regulations, we follow rules. And sometimes, you know, again, I'll speak candidly, sometimes we're up against some of these platforms that don't have to go and get a lending license application, that don't. Some of these companies that compete against. Let it sometimes describe legal agreements as messy and unnecessary legal agreements. I don't do legal agreements because I think they're cool. I do legal agreements because it's the way to do these services with, without getting in trouble, at least in the regulated markets in which we operate. And so there is this weird setup at the moment where you have seemingly two different ways of offering a service. One needs you to have lawyers and talk to regulators and have a stack of compliance and legal people. And the other one just requires some people writing some code. And again, there's trade offs to each one of them. But I think what makes regulators very uncomfortable is that again, they have no visibility into the transactions that go in through these protocols. They have no way of filtering them. They have no one to go after. And so what does that do to the entire sanctions regime that they've built over the years? Like, what does that do to their international monetary policy stance against people they consider to be bad actors? And I think they're just trying to wrestle right now with how they can get comfortable with this future of finance. And again, you know, everybody, it's a free market, everybody is able to build what they want. I do think there will always or not tell it's a Roman storm, but.
- [14:46]
Scott
Yeah, I hear you.
- [14:46]
Christopher Inks
Fair enough. No, that's fair, but. But I think they're trying to really, you know, wrestle with this idea that the future of finance will have two sides, one that's clear and regulated and they can go and see and know exactly what's going on. And another one where they're going to have to tolerate some more, some lack of visibility. And again, I don't know how this plays out because the way these things go, it seems that regulation can be somewhat reactionary rather than proactive. And they're not really coming into these protocols, they're not really getting upset until these protocols get to a certain size or there's certain events that happen. So, like the Tornado cache thing was triggered by the Hack and Lazarus group. And similar with Samurai, there's been bad actors known to be using those services. So that's what triggered or prompted it. But they don't know how much of that is happening in these other defi protocols where there just hasn't been that catalyst for them to go look at it. And I think that's what they're saying right now is we're putting all these efforts to get this, to get this beautiful regulatory stack made easier in the US and we want to protect the, the groups that do want to follow that journey.
- [16:03]
Scott
Right. Yeah, I actually like that view. But to, to that end, we have. And this isn't, I'm just going to mention this as a, as a news story because we've been waiting for a long time crypto industry braces, I don't know for incoming White House regulatory bible on rules, bitcoin reserve and taxes. So we had, obviously right after Trump was elected, we saw David Sachs, you know, he was appointed to his role as the crypto nar. And then Bo Hines and their entire, entire council. Well, at that time, the executive order said you have, it was 180 days, I think, you know, for every agency to send me a report how they want to handle our plan. That drops today. Right. And it's big news. Obviously, maybe the biggest part of that is actually getting an audit on how much bitcoin the US Government owns, which is supposed to be a part of that for the strategic. We will know how large our strategic bitcoin reserve is if they actually did that. But when you look at this and all the things we just talked about on Wall street that are happening and then what's happening in defi. Actually, this becomes a hell of a lot more interesting to me. What are they going to say and is it going to actually clarify in any meaningful way what can and can't be done here?
- [17:18]
Christopher Inks
That's a great question. And I don't, you know, I don't have any sort of inside baseball here to, to kind of speculate, but there's been a big push from, from what I recall into creating a bit of a tax exemption for the minimus bitcoin purchases, which makes a lot of sense. I still don't think that's going to drive people to use more bitcoin because it just. Why would you sell, why would you buy things in something that's appreciating when you can use stable coins or dollars?
- [17:45]
Scott
Nobody wants to use bitcoin as peer to peer Cash, I said it.
- [17:49]
Christopher Inks
Yeah, for now at least. I think it's, it's a, it's a challenged view because it's going up in price. Like think about your self interest. If you could pay with a dollar or borrow a dollar to use it rather than paying with the thing that's been going up, you know, 50% on average over the last few years. Like which one would you use to pay? And I say this because I live in Venezuela and in Venezuela there was this big push for people for, to dollarize the economy. So because everybody wanted to get paid in dollars a lot. A lot of people wanted to get paid in dollars but the people making those payments didn't want to get rid of their dollars. They wanted to keep paying in go. So even as, even as it became easier and easier for you to use dollars in the economy, most people still opted to continue making payments in bolivores because you're, you're. Because bad money or good money drives bad money out and it's just, it just goes back to personal self interest.
- [18:38]
Scott
Right?
- [18:38]
Christopher Inks
You will always going to. If there's a currency that loses value over time, which one would you want to set up a long term agreement on? The hard one or the one that loses value over time? And every type of financing, every type of long term agreement, they still want a price in the debase one again. Now the other side of the transaction may not be too happy with that, but that's where that tension starts. And again going back to the report that's coming out today, to your point, I think the biggest things would be how much does the US hold? Is there a de minimis tax exemption? And what other types of tax treatments are you proposing by way of capital gains or such? Places like Germany for example have these rules where after a year no cap gain supplies to your bitcoin after you hold it over a year. I don't know if they're considering something similar in the U.S. but there's a lot of tax incentives and bells and whistles you can put around to make people's lives easier and encourage some type of behaviors.
- [19:34]
Scott
There's one more story I want to point out. There's 100 of them, but this one we got to point out. Saylor Strategy buys another 21,000 bitcoins after raising 2.5 billion in stretch preferred stock offerings. So by the way, I've been trying to dig into the mechanics of this with much smarter people than me because this stretch offering was advertised as an IPO strategy tweeted this is the largest IPO of 2025 at 2.1 billion. I think it ended up going to 2.5 or 2.8. But how does strategy do an IPO of a completely separate company or product but benefit it from it directly? To be able to buy Bitcoin? I haven't really understood the mechanics of that. But either way, this guy is not stopping. There's no price that he will not buy Bitcoin at. And how the hell can he just keep raising billions and billions and billions of dollars to do this on a weekly basis?
- [20:29]
Christopher Inks
I think what Michael has, has done or is doing is he is very good at identifying these trapped pools of capital in, or pockets of trapped capital in and again in the capital markets just to be redundant. For example, he went into the bond world where these people have been starred for yield and he figured out a way of giving them a convertible, a piece of convertibility and selling those bonds at 0% coupon. Because these guys were so, the, the, the instruments that these bond companies or funds could buy were so boring and had so little upside that he was able to sell them a piece of this ginormous call option on microstrategy common shares and sell that into a market at 0% coupon. He raised money at 0% coupon. He basically just sold a massive options block to these, to these bond funds who gladly took it because they wanted to have a little more upside potential if Bitcoin went their way. Now he's going into the fixed income markets because there are trillions of dollars sitting in Treasuries earning four and a half percent secured by the full faith of the US government. Now you can deposit those same dollars to Michael at. I think it's somewhere near 10. I can't remember exactly exact yield of a stretch offering.
- [21:47]
Scott
Yeah, but basically just sub 10 it was.
- [21:49]
Christopher Inks
So, so you're basically getting 2x treasuries and I believe they're somewhat secured. I think they have some, some, some downside protection on, on the Bitcoin stack. So they have some preference and I.
- [22:00]
Scott
Think a very fast redemption. I, I think there is basically to what I understood these are competing with short term Treasuries as you said. Correct. You can be out of this in two months. I've made nine of 5%.
- [22:10]
Christopher Inks
Correct. So this is basically a very, a very similar product to a, what you know, a bitcoin secured treasury. And again this actually is very similar to the USDC growth accounts we offer at Lenin. Because at Lenin you can deposit USDC or USDT earn 8 1/2% on our growth accounts. Mind you, this product is not available for US clients and its eligibility varies by market.
- [22:36]
Scott
Our government hates fun.
- [22:37]
Christopher Inks
Yeah, okay, so, so you can, actually, we've been doing this for years. You can deposit stablecoins that let it. And all we do with those stablecoins is we fund our loans. So again we pay eight and a half on those stablecoin deposits. Our loans go out as you can see from the website at 12.4. That's our delta. That's, that's how we make money. And the guys that have been depositing dollars over five years with us to earn that yield have done phenomenally because they have gotten, you know, multiples of fed fund rates without ever having any issues. And Michael's realizing this and he's doing the same thing. He's basically taking dollar deposits, paying a yield on them and using that to buy Bitcoin. And so it's not to me I'm very familiar with this transaction and I, I believe that, you know, bitcoin financing instruments like these, like our growth accounts, like Michael Saylor's stretch offering will slowly start cannibalizing Treasuries because they are protected by the world's greatest collateral as US you know, as the financial wherewithal of the US or the, or the sort of chances of no defaults start coming into question as these, you know, debt, as the, as the national debt continues to balloon. So it's going to be an interesting dynamic. I think investors are going to continue to eat or consider moving more and more of their short term Treasuries into these types of vehicles. And that's actually one of the things that's going to drive rates down for products like ours over the next few years. So again, I think this all to me, at least from my vantage point in bitcoin backed loans, this all suggests to me that these loans are going to get materially cheaper over the next few years and that's going to make their popularity soar even more.
- [24:32]
Scott
Right. So will, do you think these treasury companies end up using Leaden and others to actually increase their yields on the Bitcoin that they're buying? So we know they're effectively taking leverage to get the Bitcoin. Are they then going to go earn a yield on that Bitcoin to increase their, you know, bitcoin per share share?
- [24:56]
Christopher Inks
So I, I don't know, you know, if I do believe they will, some of these companies will go out for guild, right. Like they're Going to try. If you're looking at some of these miners are already doing this like there, there's been some public announcements from I think Mera or I forget which ones specifically but some of them have struck some deals to try to go get yield on that bitcoin. I personally think that's a pretty risky proposition for a, for a public company and I, you know at Lenin we only do bitcoin back loans. We actually, we do work with publicly listed companies that use us to get leverage from their bitcoin either to finance operations many times to buy more bitcoin for you know for obviously for confidentiality I can disclose the names but there's many, there's several of them already and we speak to more and more each week. We don't do yield. They did they some of them have come ask me asked us but we have know xed out those products. There's other people stepping into that market and wanting and they're going to try to do that.
- [25:53]
Scott
I that question totally wrong. I just realized yeah, no, it's all good. No, I know you don't do yield obviously I but they take the loan and go get that yield somewhere else I would imagine. But yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [26:03]
Christopher Inks
And now is that a, is that a conservative thing to do? Should you be investing in those instruments? Personally I, I would favor the instruments that don't touch that type of activity because there's, there's a risk of loss whenever you do yield. And I think the cleanest one, I don't have an issue with raising dollar liquidity to go buy bitcoin at fantastic rates. I think if you can do that you should do that.
- [26:29]
Scott
Right?
- [26:30]
Christopher Inks
But taking that bitcoin then and starting to do something funny with it, try to outperform the market. I think that's where you get into trouble. But if you have the means to go get dollars sub 10 or the rate that Michael's getting it I still think that it makes sense. The interesting thing though is if you look at the, the evolution of the preferreds that Michael's been offering sdrk, sdrf, those are both yield bearing instruments. So there's a, there's like a 10 coupon on those. This one also has a 10 coupon. And so it seems to me that his cost of capital is somewhere in the neighborhood of 10%. And this again goes back to many people at Letin ask us why are the rates on bitcoin back loans what they are? Look, Michael's paying 10 on their dollars. We have to pay eight and a half percent on our dollars. This is why our loans still go out at rates like 12% and again over time these will get bit down. But that's the reference you should be looking at when you look at the cost of capital for dollar financing in this industry. Which also is what makes me, makes me question how and why some of the funding options in some of these defi pools with no KYC seem to be going out around fed funds rates. And I just don't, I can't for the life of me comprehend who insides in the hundreds of millions of dollars range would be depositing on these one year old protocols to get fed funds. And there's a big disconnect there that I just can't make sense of.
- [28:08]
Scott
There was a time when one of the big pitches for Defi and I know we're at time, but I'm going to keep you a little longer if that's okay. Yeah, got a few minutes. That the pitch for Defi was it's like we're in a zerp environment and you can't get anything on your money and so you go into Defi and beat it. There was a time when eth staking was crushing the fed funds rate by many, many multiples. But once the fed fund, once rates went up and you could get 4 or 5% on treasuries, DeFi would have had to be at 8 to 10 to be worth the man the risk of doing it, if not higher. And I'm not saying that any of these, there's anything wrong with any of these protocols, but there's just always unseen risks. We've seen it. Right. So you have to handicap that somehow and no, no institution can do that right now. If we go back to zero rates.
- [28:54]
Christopher Inks
Maybe I agree with you and that's why I have a hard time making sense of how much size is seemingly and I say seemingly because we don't know what other incentives are being paid on the back and what type of agreements are being done. Because there's no kyc, nobody can see what type of, you know, back room or back door deals would be happening. We have no visibility into that. All we see is seemingly hundreds of millions of dollars sitting at a protocol that's two to three years old earning the same as fed funds rates. And to me it's just hard to put those two together and say that is a free person operating in the free market. I just have a hard time reconciling those two things. When you see someone like Michael Saylor raising dollars at nearly 10%. Why, why wouldn't all that defi, why wouldn't all that defi money just go to Michael and get two times the money? I, I, it seems like a no brainer but seemingly they're there taking more risk and getting half of the money for it.
- [29:56]
Scott
Is it, is it because North Korea can't buy microstrategy treasuries? I'm just kidding, Kidding. Dang. Don't clip it.
- [30:07]
Christopher Inks
Yeah, so again I, I think that this, this, these, these sort of inconsistencies will eventually land one way or the cars will land one way or the other. But to me I see it as, as, as that today as an inconsistency. Why is the largest bitcoin treasury company in the world raising a 10% and you know, people getting half of that in, in a seemingly riskier proposition. It's just a hard one for me to, to grasp and if anybody has any insights, you know, I'm, I'm all ears.
- [30:37]
Scott
I hadn't really thought deeply about it. So listen before I let you go, I, I, how can people participate? Sign up. Check this out. This has become obviously wildly popular. As you say, you've got rid of the Ethereum side, you got rid of the yield side, you've really hyper focused on the bitcoin backed loans. Super safe, super straightforward. You just explained why this works. This is coming to a bank near you, right? So why use let in better than.
- [31:05]
Christopher Inks
A bank near you?
- [31:08]
Mauricio
The.
- [31:10]
Christopher Inks
This LED has been built for bitcoiners by bitcoiners and we've been doing this longer than anyone else in the game. We, we have over seven years running and after a recent announcements we've broken all sorts of records on the Latin platform. This has been our biggest month of new clients originations the size of our book everywhere across the board. The, the records are being broken and, and we, I just want to say a big thank you to everybody that's entrusted us with their bitcoin and supported us along the way. You can check us out at Leden IO we offer dollar loans backed by your bitcoin. That's it, that's all we do. That's all we've done for seven years. And you can use us to get dollars when you don't want to sell your bitcoin, you can keep the upside of it. And yeah, if you have any questions, I'm always open. My DMs are open. Support at LEDEN IO is you can also get any info you want. And you know I, I think this product has a beautiful future. Everyone that's used it so far has done phenomenally and responsibly. I mean and, and we, we just want to keep feeding this flywheel of allowing people to go short a hard currency and stay long what we think is the world's greatest collateral.
- [32:20]
Scott
Yeah, you're. I, I'm not only a podcast host, I'm also a user like the, remember Hair Club for Men? Right. So.
- [32:28]
Christopher Inks
Great.
- [32:28]
Scott
It's a great product. Listen, you're not telling everybody to yolo every penny that they have in the world into something like this. Use it responsibly, make sure that and I would say this in anything in DeFi CEFI, anywhere in between. Make sure if Bitcoin drops 50% you're going to be fine because it can happen. Always make sure you're not going to get margin called anywhere in any protocol non specific to leaden. If you use these things responsibly, it's very, very minimal risk.
- [32:59]
Christopher Inks
Appreciate it. And yeah, we have auto top up and a few other things to help you protect against downside moves and market volatility. Check. I won't get into it now, but.
- [33:06]
Scott
Didn'T last time we talked you said like even on that huge last downside move you had zero liquidations or something like zero on the entire platform. It was very rare that someone gets margin called and liquidated. Right?
- [33:18]
Christopher Inks
It is. And also because we're pretty obsessive with letting people know what could go wrong and how they need to protect themselves for it and then give you the tools to keep your loan healthy in a volatile market. And the response times from our team during volatile markets is what we're most proud of. Listen, anyone can be a lender in a market that's up and to the right. I know there's seemingly a new person coming into the space every week. Everybody's can be a great lender up and to the right. It's in the volatile times, it is in the darkest hour when you truly see a lender's true colors. And the reason people keep coming to us today is because we've been them through Covid, we've been them through the collapses of FTX and Voyager and Celsius. We refinanced the Celsius borrowers out of bankruptcy. In fact, we're just working with the Celsius team for another distribution to those guys. And so we're here. We are the torches in this race like we are. We know what this can be and our job is to just stay on the horse and do right by our clients, and the rest will take care of itself.
- [34:23]
Scott
Awesome. I've heard stories of lesser reputable platforms where people find out they're about to be liquidated and then literally don't even know how to, like, deposit or get in touch with somebody to save their loan and they get liquidated even when they intended not to. So, you know, it's crazy.
- [34:40]
Christopher Inks
No, I. I actually. One of the things that I'm most proud of is people actually have written reviews around our liquidation process, and even though some of have been impacted by it, they say even though I was liquidated, I think the process was great. I had loans in other platforms, and Leaden was by far the cleanest, easiest process, even as I was going through a margin call. So again, we. We're here for the good and the bad. I know everybody likes coming out and saying, yay, you know, go, you know, up into the right bitcoin back loans, but we're here when you also need to top up that loan and when you don't want to get liquidated and when you're trying to, you know, send extra bitcoin to your loan or turn on auto topo so it happens automatically. That's where we shine.
- [35:19]
Scott
Yeah. Really, really important. Well, Mauricio, man, thank you as always. Incredible. This I'm still, like, going to process all the news each day is absolutely insane. But one thing I'm sure of is that you guys keep chugging through all of it. So thank you, guys. Give Mauricio a follow. You check out Leden. Leden IO, and we'll see you very soon, man. Thank you again.
- [35:39]
Christopher Inks
Cheers, Scott. Have a good one.
- [35:41]
Scott
All right, now we're going to take a deeper look at the market, of course, because it's Wednesday, which means we got Mr. Christopher Inks here. What is happening?
- [35:48]
Mauricio
S. Can you hear me?
- [35:51]
Scott
I can. Oh, that's right. We got awesome ice last week. I already forgot about that. That's how my, my, you know, look, there's a squirrel. I forget.
- [35:58]
Mauricio
Oh, man, it was crazy. I don't know what happened, but, you know, we were on beards and bitcoin just, you know, two hours later, hour and a half later. So I don't know.
- [36:06]
Scott
I forgot we got caught in the matrix last week.
- [36:08]
Mauricio
That sucks. We did.
- [36:10]
Scott
It was funny.
- [36:11]
Mauricio
Yeah, funny for you. Oh, man. Oh, man. You know, listen, bitcoin just continued his thing. No surprises, you know. You know, everybody keeps missing these. These lows down here, right? Everybody freaks out because everybody else is telling, these are Tops and they're missing the opportunities to buy, you know. And so here we are pulling back. We're looking pretty good right now. We just need a breakout here above 119, 290 and a half or so on this chart. And if we can get that, you know, this gives us a one and a two and you know, wave three is up there around 125, 619 five waves up minimally around 127, almost 750 there. And so I like the way we're looking up here. I love the volume down at the low. We had a nice spring on this range. It appears we've got a pullback last point of support here. So again looking for this push up and you know, looking at this, what I would expect are larger candle spreads, larger volume spike coming through this breakout here that gives us what we refer to as a jump across the creek, which the creek is just that, that overhead supply. So you need a lot of volume, a lot of demand coming in because that supply is going to come in. And so that's where you see that volume really start kicking up. And you see this candle spreads, you know, getting larger like, you know, you'll see like that right there coming out through here. And so especially if we're getting that, you know, you should be on board at least to probably about 127, 750 or so. And I think you'll be pretty happy with that. Now I can go higher. You know, these are just kind of minimum targets that we look at. But man, oh man, people complaining when we're sitting here at 118, 120,000 is just absolutely mind blowing, isn't it?
- [37:55]
Scott
It's very depressing. Prices makes, you know, makes us all very sad. So listen, this is tight consolidation. I mean this is like, this is actually, this is, we've, we've gone back to summer price action year, right. So you know, just kind of floating sideways and boring and it's fine. But like being bored I guess at 118,000, a few percentage points under the all time high. Pretty awesome.
- [38:18]
Mauricio
Well yeah, it could be worse, right? We could be talking about how it just can't seem to break out above a hundred thousand, right?
- [38:24]
Scott
Yeah, can't seem to break below I think a hundred thousand. So what do you make of the rest of the market while this is happening? We are seeing a bit of as I'm looking, I mean Solana is pretty far down. I think a lot of this, as the last guest Mauricio said, has to do with defi is just kind of selling off specifically because of these trials, which makes a lot of sense.
- [38:44]
Mauricio
Well, you know, and at the end of the day, you know, price only goes so far before it has to pull back, right? And, you know, crypto, Twitter, you know, retail traders are, you know, known for saying, oh, my God, it's dumping when it's, you know, move like 2% down, right? And so, I mean, if we take a look out or we zoom out here to the link chart, for instance, still love link, still thinks it looked really good. You know, we've had this. This great bit of rally here, and then we had a pullback, and then we're kind of up here a bit, right? And so at this point right now, you can see we're just finding some resistance here at the yearly pivot. And so I'm looking for this around this area to kind of, you know, maybe break out higher here. But ultimately, you know, we're looking at a one and a two here. That gets us a three, a minimum expected wave three up there at 2766. And of course, this is an interior, right? We've got what appears to be a running flat here. And so that would see price, you know, running up much higher. But right now, what we're looking for, what you're really looking for on link right now, is a nice, impulsive weekly candle that breaks out and closes above this yearly pivot here. And if we've got that right there on that 1960 area, and if we've got that, you know, it's. It's all but guaranteed, you know, that the lows in here, we're breaking out, you know, heading higher. But, you know, again, people want to freak out. They want to zoom in on the daily here, and they go, oh, my God. You know, it's dumping. It's not really dumping. You know, we're just pulling back. Look, we've had this run from way down here, right? Was 100%, almost 100% on this run here. It's going to pull back along the way. And so as long as this low is holding right here, what I'm actually looking for is a breakout above that 1999 to confirm that that lows in. And, you know, we're gonna head on up there toward that 2766 area. If we do happen to lose this low here, we're pretty close to it. I don't know if we will, but if we do, that would mean that we would just drop one lower here and we'd Actually, look at, look for the breakout here above that 1956. Whoops. 1956 there to kind of get us up. But either way, you know, life as a trader is about looking for your setups. Right. And that's where, you know, a lot of traders have the issue is they're trying to buy the breakouts of the swing highs rather than looking for the setups on the pullbacks. And that's the issue, Ryan.
- [41:15]
Scott
Yeah, just really quickly in context, I happen to just be clicking through charts while you're doing this and look where dominance is. Not that charting dominance is a little bit nonsensical sometimes because there's no orders in the book. Right. But I mean, it's a very clear area that it's finding resistance right here. So you could make an argument if you're a dominance maxi, that right now you just kind of had the little retrace you would expect after the move up on altcoins. And if it gets rejected here, then the party continues.
- [41:42]
Mauricio
Yeah, yeah. I mean, if that's what you're going to look at, you know, you can look at that. I'm not a, you know, I'm not a big fan of looking at all these other charts. You know, for me, it's really the chart you're on and you just work with it, with where you're at. But yeah, you know, if you're looking at that. But again, you know, we've talked about it multiple times here. I don't know that dominance chart really has the. The same kind of bearing it used to. Again, because of all the money that's flowing in through, you know, especially into bitcoin through the ETFs. So, you know, it is what it is. But yeah, you can sit there and you can watch it if that's your thing and check it out.
- [42:14]
Scott
Okay. Right before you go on, there was just like kind of breaking news that's relevant to the show. We never do this, but I just saw this on my own Twitter feed that I don't actually manage for news, but White House issues Crypto policy report skips Bitcoin reserve details. Yeah, yeah, we got the report, but they left out the holdings of the United States for bitcoin. Okay, you can keep going on. I just wanted to share that since I just saw it.
- [42:40]
Mauricio
Wow. Yeah. Well, I think it's kind of interesting. I mean, I think there's probably a couple of reasons for that. The report seems to be.
- [42:44]
Scott
Mostly I just haven't got. They probably haven't figured it out yet. That's why.
- [42:47]
Mauricio
Well, yeah, but you know, the report itself is also on, you know, figuring out the, the industry and the regulations and that's what it's really pushing towards. So, you know, not to me, not really a huge detail. And so far, you know, we seem to be doing all right in response to that. But Salon is another chart I really like here. And you know, again, kind of like link, we've got this pullback right here. So if we can dip on down right below this low here at 175.63, we're just looking for a breakout above 195.26 to signal that that pullback's complete. But again, you know, we've been rallying since, since April 7th here. You know, we've had this nice big pullback. All we've done is pull back to this previous resistance as support here right into this high volume node. So I could see this pulling back a bit further, maybe to 173 and then I'd look for that breakout higher. And if we can get that initially, I want to be looking at least around 231 as a likely target. We could get up there a bit further around 248, but I would at least look at that 231 right above that low volume node. You can't really see it when I push over here, but is that low volume node right here into the high volume node. So that's what I would be looking.
- [43:57]
Scott
For.
- [43:59]
Mauricio
Bigger picture again. I mean this is just what, what people need to understand is we are sideways. We've been sideways since what is this 18th of March, 2024. Slight deviation to the upside, slight deviation to the downside. Big bounce at the, the yearly S1 pivot here broke out above the yearly pivot. We're kind of retesting as support. So again with this large kind of long term sideways here, this consolidation and the volume looks really good within it. I would expect a nice strong move up higher. I wouldn't be surprised to see us heading up there to 590 at least on that next kind of real push higher. But locally right now I think we look up at least around 231. Could potentially hit 248, 250 before we get more of a pullback. And then I would expect this yearly pivot here to kind of hold this support right here around that one. Was that 177, 178 or so. I would expect, you know, us to come back toward that, try and hold that as support you know, and then we get that move up there. So, you know, saw continues to look good.
- [45:05]
Scott
I agree.
- [45:06]
Mauricio
I mean, he's just absolutely. I like this. You know, we're just right up here kind of hitting that, that previous swing high up here and coming back up. So I like it. I like the, the way it's moving. Why don't you see a little bit of follow through now and then we've got BGB USDT again, I have no clue.
- [45:26]
Scott
Bitget. It's like the BNB of Bitget. Oh, is it Exchange token. Yeah.
- [45:32]
Mauricio
Okay. All right.
- [45:34]
Scott
It had a huge run when Bitget actually started to grow massively. So that makes sense. It's got an actual utility. It's one of those.
- [45:41]
Mauricio
Yeah, it looks like here. Yeah, big move up there, but it looks like a triangle to me. It looks like we've got three down, three up, three down, three up. And we're working on three down here. So either done or very nearly. So you just want, you know, to confirm this pattern. You want wave C to hold here down at the low. What is this right there? Around 3.91 cents or so. You want that to hold and then you want to break out here above wave D right there at $5 and almost 14 cents. If you can get that, that's going to signal this is probably complete. Break out above wave B here at $5 and almost 85 cents is going to confirm that. And then you can just look, you go, okay, well we've got this big move here so we can throw a quick pattern target on there and that'll get us up here around $14.25. So, you know, again, this one's been going sideways here since the end of December of 24. So once again, like we're looking on SOL there a lot of sideways consolidation here. Volume looks good within it. Just looking for that breakout should give you, because of its length of time it's been sideways, should give you a nice rally up and, and head up there. So, you know, again, I think we've got a lot of good options still coming out. Bitcoin continues to still look good. It's doing its little sideways here. So I mean, at the end of the day, you know, if you're not long, if you're not looking for reasons to be long, why are you even in the market today right now? You know, a lot of people are, you know, oh, I'm shell shocked because, you know, all six hit whatever. I'm like, well, you know, that's part of, you know, that's part of trading. You gotta, you gotta move through it. You gotta. Because otherwise you're gonna miss these opportunities. And then you end up chasing price when it's already rallied multiple hundred percent, right? Multiple X's and you're chasing it and then you're scared to, you know, get in because you're scared. Oh my God, what if I'm wrong? It's the top here. And then your emotions really start working against you. So, you know, you've got to have a plan in place, guys. Absolutely. I talk about this all the time. Your emotions are never going to go away as a trader. They're always going to be there. And so the only thing that you can do is to make sure you have a plan set up and what to do when those emotions kick in. As long as you do that, you're going to be okay. A lot more likely.
- [48:02]
Scott
Or just get a bot, right? You do bitcoin and beards with those guys. Or just get a really good algorithm and.
- [48:08]
Mauricio
Yeah, exactly, exactly. That said, that said, I'm gonna tell you right now, man, we did open up. Somebody said, hey, listen, you know, everybody out here says they can teach you how to trade and you do all that. Why aren't you putting your money where your mouth is? So we actually just launched something here and we're going to test drive it on the first 20 people that sign up for our annual, our liquid. Our liquidity cartography cohort, which basically just teaches you structure and where liquidity is and how it's going to likely appear as price moves and how to take advantage of that. And so the, the guarantee is this, you join in and by the way, you can get 50 off, use the word tw o x so 2x. And if you don't measurably become a better trader over the next 365 days with us, double your money back. So not only getting half off, but you're getting that double money back at the end there because of what we do actually works. And we give people, you know, every day they're coming in saying it works. So if people are really serious about learning how to trade like legit, want to learn, this is absolutely the best. Nobody out there does this. Absolutely best opportunity. So, yeah.
- [49:16]
Scott
I mean, it's like free money.
- [49:18]
Mauricio
It is, right? If you don't, if it doesn't work for you, you're getting, you're getting double it back. So you're getting better than interest, right? Better than inflation on that. So. So, yeah, absolutely nothing.
- [49:29]
Scott
Well, guys, give Texas West Capital A follow and go check that out because it's. It seems like free money. And everybody likes that money where your mouth is. That's. That's what we like to see here. Otherwise, we'll be back with Chris, who will be able to talk again, obviously, next week. Thanks, man.
- [49:45]
Mauricio
Thanks a lot, man. I appreciate it.
- [49:47]
Scott
Bye.
- [49:48]
Mauricio
That's dope. That's dope.