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- [00:00]
A
Oh, good morning everybody. Welcome to Crypto town hall. Every day at 10:15am Eastern Standard Time here on X we like to keep it very interesting in the intros. Sometimes we just want you to hear our personal conversations in foreign languages. So let's dive in to what's happening in the market today. Let me pull up coin market cap. Since I wasn't quite ready yet, start talking. We got Bitcoin trading at $88,000. Ethereum 2936, BNB 841 XRP a buck 90, Solana 126 66. It looks like we're kind of chopping sideways. Markets have been really uninspired. I would say the bulk of the year, but certainly for the past couple months we haven't really gotten the blow off top that we were promised and leaving many people to wonder what the hell is going on with price action. But as we talk about every single day here, still a lot of massive fundamental tailwinds and huge news happening. We have sort of this title today was picked whales by 23 billion Bitcoin as market bleeds Coincidence. I don't think that one has much to do with the other, but we have sort of some conflicting on chain data that I find interesting. So there's one thing that says we have 23 billion in Bitcoin buys in the last month by whale wallets. While we have conflicting stories that there's been 300 billion of whale selling including over the past month. This year in 2025, 300 billion in Bitcoin has been moved from whale wallets that were long dormant. Joe, I don't want to put you on the spot. I mean do you see any of this in any of your data or anything? I mean do you have an ability to track these wallets or take a look at them? Because we have one narrative that it's been the whale selling massively, but we have another that of late they've started buying again. Or maybe it's just different wallets, the dormant wallets selling and new whale wallets buying.
- [02:06]
B
Yeah, I mean that's been the narrative that the kind of the old school guard is leaving in the new, the new guard is coming in. You know, I didn't see any of that as of recent right here with this volatility. The one thing I did see is some rumors around Wintermute, you know, cycling or moving a lot of capital around to Binance. So not sure if that has anything to do with this. Not sure if that's rebalancing. Not sure if that's selling, not sure if that means any sort of instability there at all. Obviously all just like rumors, but that's what I heard and I think it makes sense. I think people are trying to figure out. I'm kind of surprised we're all even here every morning. Scott, what are we even talking about at this point? Bitcoin's at 88, you know, there's, there's no, I would say, sign of any sort of narrative for altcoins coming up in the future. So it's at this point we're in some sort of odd psychosis that we just like love it here and we love the pain. But I mean, Coinbase had a bunch of big announcements and those announcements were kind of like we're looking at things other than crypto.
- [03:17]
A
We're so jaded. We're just so dated.
- [03:20]
B
We're looking at stocks, we're looking at prediction markets.
- [03:22]
A
We have five stories. We have five stories a day now though. That would have been entire shows two years ago.
- [03:30]
B
100%. Yeah. They would have shaken like the market to the core, upwards or downwards. We would see like 15, 18% moves in Bitcoin with some of these stories a couple years ago. And it shows the maturity, right? Like Cathy Wood's talking about. Everyone's like, oh, the four year cycle is dead, it's dead. I kind of agree with that. But the fundamentals of bitcoin will still come in place. We're still two years away from the next halving, but those fundamentals will come in place. At some point it will become twice as expensive to get bitcoin. And so in a way it's still all hard coded in.
- [04:03]
A
God, I want to buy so bad at lower prices. I'm a glutton for punishment, for short term pain, for long term gain. But now that we've got the 80s, I'm feeling greedy. Give me 70s, let me buy some more. I'm still buying now, just in case.
- [04:19]
B
If it's 70s, I mean, the size of the buy will just be unbelievable.
- [04:23]
A
Hey, I will mortgage my children. I love you guys. Can you do that? I don't even know if that's the thing, but I saw a hand up, I think lawyered. And Andre. So lawyer then. Andre, keep on this topic. Go ahead.
- [04:37]
C
Yeah, I think more and more now it's becoming obvious that at least going forward there's the narrative for bitcoin and the narrative for like altcoins, at least the vast majority of them are very different.
- [04:46]
D
Right.
- [04:47]
C
You know, if you're Looking at buying bit like there's a lot of interest and if we see bitcoin go that low, it's probably because someone that's someone who like that's an institution that died and we get to eat their blood. But you know, if like a token that's was airdropped to NFT holders that's been struggling goes down, like that's just means more people are worried and selling. Right. So I think the altcoin narrative right now is very shaky. I don't see anything that makes me excited to hold long term because you don't really have like a retail adoption or anything to drive a narrative of something that already exists. Maybe you can hope for something new to drop and you can get in early. But altcoins are, you know, I would be, you know, could be a great time to buy some of them, but outside of the majors I'd be pretty nervous. But bitcoin's a whole other narrative.
- [05:33]
B
Is.
- [05:33]
A
A whole other asset class personally. And I've said that even when we've gone through altcoin booms, I just don't think they're particularly competing. Andre, go ahead.
- [05:44]
D
Yeah, sure. Thank you. So I just want to say on.
- [05:48]
A
Like, Andre, it's a little hard to hear you. It's a little hard to hear. It's a bit echoey. Is there a possibility you could change your mind?
- [05:54]
D
Is that better?
- [05:55]
A
Yeah, it's way better. Yep.
- [05:57]
D
Okay. Thank you.
- [05:58]
E
Yeah.
- [05:59]
D
So I just want to say on the whale versus like long term holder topic, I think what you can see right now, but transfer volume is still quite large. So we're seeing still around $10 billion per day. So a lot of value still changing hands. And buy also matches the cell. So entities are picking up volume in size and that of that volume sell 78% is actually originating from transactions larger than $1 million. So I think institutions are dominated or large players, Whales are dominating. And I think what's the confusion around that topic is all the key confusion is there's a difference between whales and long term holders.
- [06:44]
F
Right.
- [06:44]
D
They're not like identical.
- [06:46]
G
Right.
- [06:47]
D
What you've seen is long term holder selling. That was like the key narrative. But what you're seeing now is like whale buying and whales, they actually tend to be short term holders, just like retail, but they tend to be more countercyclical in their behavior.
- [07:04]
A
Yeah. So I guess that does clarify. What I was pointing to at the beginning is that it's a different, a different class. Both huge, huge in size. But a whale then to, to your point is someone who could be new and buying and a long term holder of those old wallets unlocking that we've seen move not the same people. Does that make sense? So the long term, the long term holders, kind of price agnostic, very rich, just want to get out for whatever reason. But there's some big money and smart money that looks like it's buying. All markets are down.
- [07:37]
D
Yes, 100. And I think my personal assumption, or I think it's most likely crypto hedge funds because what we've seen over the past couple of weeks is.
- [07:52]
G
What we're.
- [07:52]
D
Actually looking at is like the aggregate beta of like global crypto hedge funds to Bitcoin. And that beta is some kind of position proxy positioning proxy for these global crypto hedge funds. And that has been increasing steadily. Right. And it's now close to one. They used to be like extremely underweight relative to Bitcoin but now they've, they're now in sync with Bitcoin again. So they've increased the exposure countercyclically into this correction.
- [08:29]
A
Anyone else thoughts? We can talk specifically about the whale wallets and I guess if there's no specific thoughts on that. Joe, we did have all the Coinbase news you kind of tipped your hat to. One of the stories is they're rolling out stock trading. It seems like a big deal for Coinbase. The other, which is kind of blowing my mind is that they're offering basically custom stablecoins. So I can read what they said in the announcement was Coinbase launches custom stable coins. Users can now issue branded stablecoins backed one to one by Coinbase Custody Collateral. It's like a affiliate marketing for stablecoins. Like I can have a Scott coin that's a stable coin and share in the fees. Seems pretty, pretty epic panels. Go ahead.
- [09:19]
E
Yeah, I'm not sure if you covered this. I joined a little bit late but the just to go back to those whale wallets, were they new wallets or were these older wallets that have been trading? Do you know?
- [09:30]
A
I guess that's what Andre was just pointing to. So we kind of have. It seemed like they were conflicting stories but the 300 billion has moved from wallets that were dormant and Whale wallets is non specific to the amount of time. It's just based on size so we don't really know. They don't necessarily have to be long term holders I think was the point there.
- [09:50]
E
Okay, cool.
- [09:51]
A
Thank you, Lou. Yeah.
- [09:54]
G
Hey guys. I wasn't on, on the listening to the show last Week because I was at BTC Mina. I don't know if there was much chatter about that on the show.
- [10:03]
A
We, we talked almost, you know, we had some people that kind of called in from Breakpoint and various places in Abu Dhabi, but Mina, actually somebody was here. I think Mark was at Bitcoin Mina, and we asked him a bit about it. Yeah, we did get that, but still would love any further insight. I think it always gives a vibe on where the market is to see how international conferences shake out.
- [10:26]
G
Yeah, definitely. I mean, that's where I go. And the previous bitcoin conference that I'd gone to was BTC Vegas, which was mod and I think that was like 20% bigger than the previous year when it was in Nashville. And while, you know, I found BTC MENA to be very impressive, you know, it was a nice sized venue, lots of great companies. All of the folks who had been there the previous year said that it was dramatically smaller in terms of the number of people who were there. So just from, you know, again, anecdotal, the feeling was not nearly as positive in Abu Dhabi for BTC mean as it was in Vegas.
- [11:09]
A
Did you go to Breakpoint?
- [11:11]
G
I did go to Breakpoint.
- [11:12]
A
And you know, this is like, what. What did you notice at a. Let's just. I don't want to be so general, but an altcoin conference versus a bitcoin conference in United Arab Emirates.
- [11:22]
G
Yeah. You know, I mean, personally I don't consider Solana an altcoin unless everything is an altcoin.
- [11:29]
A
Yeah.
- [11:29]
G
But I mean, it. Undoubtedly it was electric just in terms of how excited people were to be there. You know, Solana has a core competency in putting on these shows. This is the third one I've been to and it was the most professional one. The speakers obviously were incredibly well trained. You know, for me though, the most. And if there were a lot, tons of people there, it was hard to compare it to the previous year because it was a dramatically different venue. But you know, I will say one anecdotal thing that I took away from it, which I thought was interesting because when I first got there, it was actually fairly. It wasn't nearly as many people as I thought when I was wandering around. And then I went in to listen to the speakers and see what was going on and that room was totally packed, which I must say is different than Most of the Web3 conferences I go to where most of the people are ambling about with their community members instead of listening to talks which they could listen to, you know, on replay when the conference is over.
- [12:34]
A
Yeah. So it's interesting though. I mean, Bitcoin Vegas was a bit of a circus, right? And we had digital asset treasury mania. So Nakamoto. Well, that was the narrative of that conference, in my opinion. Right. And I've said it over and over again, obviously. We had like Nakamoto and 21 both announced immediately before that conference. And the minute you walked in the door, like, seven people were pitching you ten new treasury companies. Right. Was that.
- [13:00]
G
That was.
- [13:00]
A
That was the moment that was. I assumed that was slightly diminished already. No.
- [13:05]
G
Seven months later, there was none of that. I mean, that I heard of. It's like digital asset treasuries were a bad word. But one thing that I did learn, or I did hear people talking about, which I had heard before, and maybe I just wasn't paying attention, was that, you know, the expectation is from the folks at, you know, BTC Inc. That, you know, Nakamoto is going to buy BTC Inc. And I never made that connection.
- [13:29]
A
I. I just had a conversation with David Bailey just over two weeks ago. It was on my channel about, I think a week and a half ago. And he was very clear. He didn't specifically say BTC Inc. But that their new focus, when I asked him about it and the focus he believed that treasury companies should have is buying cash flowing businesses. Right. Yeah.
- [13:53]
G
Which I guess BTC Inc. Is one.
- [13:55]
F
Right.
- [13:55]
A
So that makes a lot of sense. And they can do that, obviously, with minimal friction. I would imagine that one shouldn't be too hard to get through and pass the lawyers and bankers. But that was kind of the. I certainly and many others were harping on the fact that I love the idea of a bitcoin balance sheet company. I hate the treasury term because bitcoin. I think there's a differentiation. I think everybody, individual institution, government across the board should just buy some bitcoin instead of holding cash with money that they've actually made in the real world. Using financial engineering to try to beat bitcoin has been proven exceptionally difficult since the beginning of bitcoin. And so the treasury company part. And so I guess the point is even Nakamoto and the treasury company, the most treasury of treasury companies are saying maybe we should own cash flowing businesses is to buy bitcoin. Exactly.
- [14:50]
G
Which I personally disagree with. I mean, I love the idea of being able to stack sats faster. I don't personally want to mess it up with other things. I just want to stack sats faster. But obviously they're Smart guys. And they've got another opinion. And I will say what was super impressive was watching David walk around the floor with a posse of Shakespeare. Yeah, I've not seen that very often.
- [15:17]
A
Not at all surprised. I wonder. I know this is off topic, but it feels like we've had peaks in those conferences, all conferences. But obviously one of them was, I GUESS it was 22 when they moved it to Miami, when they moved it from Mana Wynwood, which was a few thousand people, to the convention center, when there was 35,000 people. And getting across that conference was walking terminal, terminal at jfk. Then obviously there was that.
- [15:43]
G
That was the peak.
- [15:44]
A
Yeah, that was the peak. That was still the peaks, right? Yes, but then, but then you had 25 and Donald Trump speaks like, what do you do next year?
- [15:54]
G
Yeah, no, it's. Yeah. I got to say that the show itself, super impressive, you know, anybody was able to do there. So.
- [16:03]
A
But what are people talking about if not digital asset Treasury? Like, what, what's the, what are the. What are people excited about?
- [16:12]
G
You know, it was a bunch of companies, I'd probably say of the companies that were on the floor, I was maybe familiar with half of them. So it was fun for me to go around and meet some different companies in the ecosystem, I would probably say the highlight for me actually of my whole week was I met the folks from Web3TV and the owner is an impressive billionaire and he invited me to come to his facility in Dubai and I went. And I grew up in Hollywood, so I spent my youth on the, on the different movie lots. But, you know, it's. It's next generation. What I saw, you know, the future of, you know, of video production and how AI is going to be used to do everything was really mind blowing. And the volume of content they're going to be producing there.
- [17:03]
A
So there's still quite a few things to be excited about, even if prices are down.
- [17:09]
G
I don't know about in the altcoin space, but certainly in the bitcoin space, it's been eight years of every single day. There has not been one piece of news that's changed my view.
- [17:22]
A
That makes sense. Anybody else thoughts? I don't think anybody else on stage was at any of those conferences. I would imagine from what I've heard though, that Solana Breakpoint, because, I mean, I guess it made sense, like, because it's a layer one and people are building all of these things. There's always excitement at a conference like that, right? I mean, because you just have hundreds of Companies or protocols or projects that are building things, presenting, so they're always pumped. Like, I feel like you can go to if. If the market's down. A bitcoin conference is really depressing. And then you can go to token 2049. It's always exciting. Maybe I'm wrong, but that's always been sort of my feeling about it. But I think Lou just dropped, so I can't continue that conversation. We've had this talk as well before, but. Well, let's go back to Coinbase, actually. So Coinbase launching custom stablecoins. I would love people's thoughts on this. It seems like stablecoins are just going to become a massive commodity and everybody's going to have one.
- [18:26]
G
I, you know, I, I let other people talk, but I think that I look at them like credit cards and, you know, everybody's going to be issuing them. It's just. It's really another way to make contact with your customer and give them value and have a unique relationship.
- [18:44]
B
Yeah, it's marketing tools and it's fees. You know, there's a lot of. And this is where I think what you're going to see is a. And this is why they did the big partnership with Shopify is you're going to see a lot of these app developers on Shopify. What they're going to do is they're going to issue their own stable coins. And then, yes, it's just a marketing tool like points and rewards, but the fees are lower and it's something that they would do regardless at some point in integrating their own stable Coin. But this is where it's pretty smart for Coinbase and Shopify to get way out ahead of that because they can still capture those. Those fees and the credit card fees. So at the end of the day, this is actually really bad for credit card processors. And it'll be interesting to see how that actually all unfolds because we are just. I mean, all the. It's like all the technology is there. It's kind of like, you know, when MySpace came out and then Friendster and everything and like Facebook, it was like it was just time for. For social media to kind of take on. It's just time now for stablecoins to really take over and get rid of the fees and, you know, give people back the, the billions of dollars that gets squeezed out for, like a very simple technology. But again, there's got to be transactions, right? Like billions of transactions coming through every single day by these credit card processors. Like, everyone's like, oh, we're going to use Bitcoin for payments. It's like Bitcoin's theoretical max is like 640 million transactions or something a year. And these processors do billions a day. So stable coins need to happen. But again, I don't know if I'm calling that like, people aren't going to jump from their like Shopify app stablecoin like into some meme coin. So I don't think this like helps the market anyway. But it is an adoption of the technology. But the, where does the value flow? It flows to USDC and Circle and Coinbase and the public stock markets.
- [20:33]
A
Yeah, I mean, do we launch crypto town hall cthusd and let people tip us?
- [20:40]
B
Doesn't hurt you.
- [20:40]
A
I mean, are we going to make money?
- [20:41]
C
I'm already doing the paperwork, thank you.
- [20:46]
B
We could track everyone that comes in and then they post about it and then we can take, we can incentivize everyone with how much social they post.
- [20:53]
A
Right, but is this like, is this a, I guess, is this a thing for companies? Right? This isn't. Is this saying to, you know, every company out there, you know, when we tried to launch Libra from Facebook years ago, is it saying, hey, just come white label this from Coinbase, you get your own stable coin, it's safe, you don't need to build from the beginning. Or is this literally like every person launches their own meme coin but it's a stable coin? Or is it both? I don't really know what this looks like, I would imagine.
- [21:25]
B
I don't think there's any value in launching a stablecoin for like it's, it's stable, right? Unless like, you know, and it's probably all USDC backed, so it's like all the other liquidity is all locked around Coinbase. So it's not like you're out there creating a liquidity pool on Apeswap for whatever meme coin that you're trying to create. You're just utilizing a branded stablecoin that's usdc, that the value flows back to your business versus somewhere else, but it also continues.
- [21:58]
A
Coinbase is basically getting ahead of the trend of everybody starting to launch their own stable coin and trying to capture some of the value of that.
- [22:04]
G
This space was downloaded via spacesdown.com visit.
- [22:07]
F
To download your spaces today from institutions.
- [22:12]
B
Yeah, I got a lot of friends that have like decent sized Shopify apps. You know, they're doing 50 million a year in revenue and you know, they pay 3 to 4% or more like depending on how many fees are out there to these credit card processes. And they're kind of wondering like, you know, man, how do I get like a million dollars back a year or $1.5 million back a year at that size of business is like, you know, a pretty big 5% back. And so they would love to hop on this if it was proven and it had the backing of someone like Coinbase. Like, they probably wouldn't like hire a team of six to launch their own and do something very special there. They're focused on their core business, but if it's plug and play, it's something that they'd probably be interested in.
- [22:52]
A
Yeah, I wonder how much Coinbase keeps. Probably like a 50, 50 split or something. I have no idea. Tony, go ahead.
- [23:00]
F
Yeah, I think this is a very smart move by Coinbase because if you see what they've been doing lately, they've been working with a lot of banks like JP Morgan, Citi, pnc, and they use their crypto as a service platform to help those banks to launch crypto trading and custody. And we know they've been partnered with BlackRock. Well, the banks, if we've been seeing the rumblings from the Fed, they want to launch stablecoins. Well, what do you do? You launch a stablecoin as a platform or service to help them to do that. So I think it's a smart move on their part and with the stock trading going to be able to compete with Robin Hood. So they're making some very smart moves.
- [23:36]
A
Yeah, I mean, there's clearly a few horses leading the race for being everything. Apps for finance. Right. Robin Hood, Coinbase, etc. And these are the, in my opinion, the Schwabs and, and you know, and Morgan Stanley's of the future. But I think that to your point and what we were saying is that why there's this kind of bifurcation in the way people are approaching stablecoins post Genius act. I actually asked Dante Desparte from Circle about this yesterday. The conversation hasn't been released, but it's either like reinvent the wheel and try to do it yourself, but then you have much more, I think, upside in how much money you make or just partner with USDC or Tether or something. And it seems like USDC is capturing most of that because they have the most regulatory clarity in the United States. I don't know if that's true, but it feels that way.
- [24:26]
F
What's going to be interesting?
- [24:27]
G
We. Look, sorry, go on.
- [24:30]
F
I was just gonna say what's going to be interesting is when tether launches their U.S. approved, if you want to call that in quotations, stablecoin, which is I think USAT or something like that. It was supposed to launch this month but maybe they're holding back a bit. But it's going to be interesting to see how that plays out.
- [24:48]
G
Move. Well, I've long believed first that Circle USDC was going to be eventually the US digital currency cbdc. Cbdc. It just seems like that's just. And it's more so every day. It feels like that to me. And I think when we look back on 10 years at stablecoins today, like the innovation has just started. I mean a dollar is still literally basically just a dollar. Other than that it's now digital, but now it can be anything. And I think when we see what stablecoins are in 10, you know, in a lot less than 10 years, in a couple of years, all of our minds will be blown away with the amount of innovation that's brought to the table. And it's probably not going to be brought to the table by us, by Circle.
- [25:37]
F
Tony yeah, to add to what he said is I've been talking about this for years. Like I think this CBDC name or has been replaced or it was, you know, made to be this bad thing. We're going to ban CBDCs in the United States but stablecoins can do the same thing. I remember having these conversations with Chris Giancarlo of the Digital dollar project and he's like, look, everybody's seeing CBDC as a boogeyman but they're just letting the stable coins walk in the back door. Right? And, and if you guys recall recently that CBDC ban act failed to be pass in the defense spending bill, I believe it was. So we got to watch as closely.
- [26:20]
A
Privacy has become more of a narrative. I mean the SEC even was talking about how these things are going to need to be private. It's interesting. Also, I think dtcc maybe this is worth discussing for those who have better knowledge. We saw that crazy announcement by the DTCC last week that they'd gotten a no action letter from the sec, meaning that they can move forward with tokenizing. And then said that by the end of 2026 that most things would be settling on blockchain rails and tokenized ETFs, index funds, ET cetera. And then we saw the news. It was either yesterday or the day before that they had chose Canton Network to do all of this, much to the dismay of, I think Solana and Ethereum Homers. But Canton Network, one of their biggest, I guess, selling points is privacy. Right. This is way out of the bounds of my knowledge, by the way, so I'm giving the broad point. Point.
- [27:12]
F
Yeah. I interviewed UL Ruse of Digital Assets. That's the name of the company they've been working the Canton Network and it's backed by Citadel, Goldman Sachs. A bunch of Wall street firms have invested in this.
- [27:25]
A
They funded it from the beginning. Right. So that. Yeah, they were the initial investors. Not even just. Yeah, yeah.
- [27:32]
F
So it's built as a public blockchain, but privacy built in, doesn't need a third party ZK integration or whatever.
- [27:38]
A
And purpose. And I learned all this today. But purpose built effectively for high frequency trading and such as.
- [27:44]
F
Well, Right, Yeah. So it's pretty groundbreaking. Obviously I still need to do a bit more research on some of the details of the blockchain and functionality, but I think more details are coming out now. But that's something to pay attention to for sure.
- [27:59]
A
Dan Token. Is that Danta Networks Token?
- [28:04]
F
Yep.
- [28:05]
A
I mean, I'm looking at the chart like it's up 8% in this week. This week, the largest. If this just shows where we're at in the market and we're up 3% in 24 hours, the largest institution on the planet talking about trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars. The dtcc, that settles literally every securities transaction in the United States just announced they're using this blockchain and it's not particularly liquid and it's up 7%, 3% depending on the timeframe. How is that humanly possible? Laird?
- [28:40]
C
Yeah, I mean, I invested OTC in this a while ago and you can see from the chart it hasn't performed very well. I think the reason might be that there's a question of whether the value will flow to token holders. And with all these big banks being the major supply holders, you know, will do they have an agreement not to dump on each other. I mean, we don't know exactly how this will go, but there's a lot of market cap already. So, you know, it's over time. I think it's probably a good investment. It's there, it seems to like when I've been, I've been on this show saying, you know, a lot of the things that will go on chain will not trade on Solana, on Ethereum and things like that, they'll trade on proprietary blockchains. And this is sort of what I had in mind. But I'm not fully convinced that any of that value will flow to token hold. Well, they'll even allow that value to flow to token holders such as us.
- [29:32]
A
Nothing like an OTC. Nothing like an OTC deal in 2024 or 2025 where you thought you got a 50% discount and are now down 99% from your 50% discount. It's been a really good time.
- [29:44]
C
You know what it felt like? It felt like friction, right? It's like, oh, this is a really cool project that the banks are doing and it's kind of hard to get tokens. So that alone was like, I'll take a shot. But, yeah, it's been disappointing.
- [29:53]
A
I've made quite a few mistakes. I think I'd rather the same thing.
- [29:57]
B
It's like, wouldn't it be great to go.
- [30:00]
A
Go ahead.
- [30:01]
B
Sorry, Scott, I was stepping on you there.
- [30:03]
A
No, I stepped on you. Sure.
- [30:05]
B
It's like, wouldn't it be great if you could have went long, like, Tether's market cap?
- [30:10]
A
Yeah, please. How did I just get long Tether making more tokens.
- [30:15]
B
Just printing, printing, printing. And it's the same thing with usdc. It's like, again, you know, part of the promise of. It felt like part of the promise of this market was that the average everyday person could get access to, you know, interesting technology or new companies at an early stage, right? Like, you know, we didn't. I mean, love Gary Tan. It's great, you know, but did his 25k from Coinbase or whatever need to turn into 400 million?
- [30:43]
A
Right?
- [30:43]
B
Or could everyone have put like 5 bucks in and got a new house and like, thousands of people, you know, gotten advantage, like, taking advantage of that. That was part of the accredited investor rules. And that's what everyone was like, kind of fighting back on, was, hey, like, oh, you need to have like a million dollars or you need to make 200k a year for a couple years in a row in order for you to, quote, like, qualify to be smart enough to invest in new technologies? And like, that's obviously just bullshit. And so it, unfortunately, it feels like we're kind of. I mean, obviously there'll always be an asymmetric advantage for an institutional investor or someone that's building something from scratch. Like, that's fine. But part of this promise was to get some of this money to flow down to and, you know, the, the middle class. And I'm just not seeing it. And you know, Elon, like, obviously is like, you know, amazing, but, like, I don't know if that guy needs $680 billion, right? Like, I I just don't know if he needs it. It's like, I do. You know, do once he. Once he gets to 250 billion, do we just say, like, hey, dude, you have to build, like, 10 airports and, like, you have to build some roads? You could decide, do you build airport or something else? But I don't know, it just seems like it's getting a little out of control.
- [31:57]
C
Do we allow people to keep their money because they need it? Is that the test?
- [32:01]
A
I need it. I need all of his money. Send it to me. It'll be in good hands. But, yeah, I don't think we need to go on a debate about billionaires today. It's funny, you reminded me of a story. And while you were talking about that, Joe, I threw up an old tweet, I guess, from two years ago that a friend of mine, speaking of Gary Tan, was in Y Combinator with Brian Armstrong when he was pitching Coinbase. And apparently Coinbase was far from the darling of that Y Combinator. And Brian Armstrong sat my friend down and said, you know, please just invest 10 grand in Coinbase. And my friend had only 10 grand to invest and chose some other Y Combinator thing that went to zero in, like, 18 months. It's right above, like, I'm sitting with him in this. In this. In a bar in Aspen. I think he's telling us, my wife and I, the story of how he would have made $40 million, like, right off the rip if he had just given Brian 10 grand. Oop.
- [32:58]
G
Wow.
- [33:00]
A
And, yeah, I mean, like, I was doing the math that's in there. Doing. Doing the math at some point on, like, how much Doge I once owned and used to trade to, like, make $5,000 when it would go from 15 SATs to 180 SATs. And, like, if I had held it to the top, it would have been like 40 million bucks or something. So. Yeah. So Elon can send us each. Me and my friend, each 40 just for our. For our losses before.
- [33:23]
B
Just. Just toss us a new LAX something.
- [33:28]
A
Right? But it's. Yeah, there's a lot to unpack in all of that, and I'm just still really surprised that we're at. We're so bad on sentiment that even lawyered. Like, I understand what you're saying, like, who owns the tokens? Blah, blah. But, like, things used to pump when there was good news because nobody dug into that stuff. I mean, maybe it's good that our investors are more educated and they actually then now take a look at tokenomics. And say, yeah, there's a huge deal, but is this going to actually accrue to the token? But the DTCC is the largest financial institution on the planet and chose a out of nowhere left field network and the coin doesn't even move. This leads me to believe that most altcoins, there's nothing in the world that could ever pump them again. Maybe that's a bottom signal. But we're cheering. It's kind of like be careful what you wish for. We're cheering for all this adoption and all of this adoption is making this asset class uninvestable for the average person because the value is just not going to accrue. Am I wrong? Am I like too bearish here? Because like we can cheer for all these huge things to happen, but how the hell does that like it's the technology is getting adopted. How does that, you know, help your average person who wants to invest in this stuff? Tony, you can go ahead. I see you, Joe.
- [34:48]
F
Yeah, I think you're right on. In the short term, I do think long term, you know, based on different macro factors like liquidity returning, being a better spot for retail, being in a better spot right now, you know, you look at inflation and layoffs and so forth, it's not the same environment that we've seen historically with the bull markets where you have retail participants. So I think, you know, that's putting a bit of a damper on, on everything that's going on. And I do think that this is the direction we're headed to where everything's running on blockchain rails.
- [35:21]
A
Right.
- [35:21]
F
Whether people know it or not. And I think price, I don't want to get conspiratorial or whatever, but I think price action needs to happen to drive more people into this market. That's kind of their, in their pathway to learning about blockchain and adopting it and being comfortable with using stable coins and being comfortable with using crypto. That's just my thesis on it long term, but yeah, in the short term it's painful and I don't know the timing of all this and what's going to happen maybe next year is a bit better, but it's a very different environment this time around.
- [35:58]
A
Yeah, Laura, I think you were jumping in there on that as well.
- [36:05]
C
Yeah, I mean look, it's, it's just not alt season.
- [36:07]
A
Right.
- [36:07]
C
Like, but what, what I do think that all these things bring more money on chain and more eyes and all that's good for Bitcoin, which ultimately is what drives the eventual Alt season. So hold on.
- [36:20]
A
Right. I guess. But alt season was always like the catalysts were stories and narratives and nobody cares. Economics. And then do we get there again or are people actually smart enough to look and say that? So here's my problem is we are clearly moving into a phase where fees and utilities should matter. Right. People are going to start looking at projects and trying to value them in the same way that they value other companies. Problem is that everything that exists right now, if you actually value it that way, is probably overpriced and needs to go down 95% just to find the base of where you can actually value it based on those things.
- [36:58]
C
People will stop caring again when certain things start to feel like crash game again.
- [37:02]
A
Yeah.
- [37:03]
C
And then they jump in and that causes more jumping in. Because there's two things that are happening, right? There's people buying things that are actually things that people will want to own for some purpose and that's not very many things. And the rest is just crash game. Price go up and we all buy and then it go up more until it doesn't. And malware and it doesn't. But that'll change.
- [37:25]
A
Yeah, we've been waiting a really long time for it to change panels.
- [37:29]
E
I mean the problem here is that retail have no money. And alt season is very much driven by retail money. And it's just not here. No one has money. That, that's, that is the issue. Like if you look at the state of just society right now, there isn't as much money circulating. Like if you think about last cycle when everyone was getting stimulus checks because of COVID we had crazy old season. And then the cycle before that was a complete different time as well. It was like crypto is very new or like altcoins are very new. And there was a lot less money in the market, in the in as a whole. So it was very easy to pump a lot of these assets. This cycle it's just been driven by institutional money which has gone directly into bitcoin and retail. That the retail money that has been here has gone into pump fund shit coins and all these meme coins and most of it has just been blended up and you know, gone. So the, the question is what is going to bring retail into the market? Where's that money going to come from?
- [38:37]
A
$2,000 stimmy checks from tariffs.
- [38:39]
B
Right?
- [38:41]
F
Yeah, I was just about to say that.
- [38:44]
C
Sorry, military guy is going to get money.
- [38:47]
A
Like if they fire up the printer and start, you know, throwing cash out of the helicopter, then maybe that's the catalyst we need. Do we believe that's going to actually happen? I don't know. I mean how else does retail get some money in their hand?
- [39:00]
F
Midterm elections are coming, politicians are going to do it.
- [39:05]
A
They're going to do it. The markets tend to be really, really unpredictable and kind of all over the place in midterm years. So I don't know, it'll be interesting. But if it is going to happen then you'd imagine it will happen within three months of the election. Not now. Right. Helicopter money now everybody would forget that they got paid for their vote.
- [39:24]
F
Yeah, exactly. It feels again like I know the charts and, and all that showing bearish signals and the four year cycle and all that but it feels like certain things, the timeline has been pushed into 2026 I think starting with the release of the tariffs that crashed the market at the earlier this year, kind of breaking that timeline a bit. So it feels, feels like there's another leg left. You got the macro, you got Trump with his stimmy checks, you got QE started. So I don't know, crypto companies are looking to do IPOs, AI companies, tech companies looking to do IPOs in 2026. So that doesn't align with people saying four year cycle is over, liquidity is going to dry up. I think there's, they're going to step in with the money printer and it's going to continue.
- [40:14]
A
Anybody else thought somewhere our liquidity may come from if we believe alt season is dependent on free money. Any ideas what could be a spark for an altar?
- [40:28]
B
I think prediction markets need to cool down a little bit and I think it's probably sucking up a little bit of the capital in the market. But I think what retail will realize is that betting on which word Trump is going to say next isn't going to potentially get you a new house. Being able to invest in early stage technologies and watch that investment and make an educated decision and feel good about that and the long term value that that brings is a different value proposition. And so I do think we see that capital rotate back at, at some point. I think people are degening so hard because they think that there's not, they're just like whatever, there's, there's no options.
- [41:17]
A
That's how the Weimar Republic was, by the way.
- [41:21]
B
Yeah, I mean it's not a good, it's not a good situation but people are being squeezed right now big time. Most people that, you know, they especially like Gen Z, it's like they don't even like buying a house doesn't even seem like a, like, that's just not even like a. It's like a pipe dream.
- [41:36]
A
Right. Rampant speculation on everything, fueled largely by desperation or indifference, has been. Has preempted many depressions and absolute end time collapses. So good times.
- [41:54]
B
Well, hopefully not end times collapses, but I do think that we will see some sort of altcoin rally at some point. I mean, it happens in the stock market still. I mean, Palantir is trading at 450 times earnings. It doesn't mean that things can't be overvalued. So I think that people will rotate back in at some point. Obviously, there's winners and losers every time, but a lot of these foundations still have a ton of money. They're just waiting. A lot of them that you think are dead, they're still hiring, they're capitalized. Yes, they have less than they had before, but some of them have made very good decisions to rotate into Bitcoin, to rotate some of that into stable coins. And they're going to come out with a bang. So I think that'll be a. It will happen. It's just, I think that, you know, unfortunately, I think Dems get, get midterm elections. You're kind of seeing that go down. There's a lot of people that were in the center before that have, aren't happy with the way that things are going, and I think they vote the other way. And the money printer comes on and Wall street gets stoked again because they get to push people around and do whatever they want.
- [42:59]
A
But both sides are going to happen equally. There is no, no, no political party has any claim to fiscal responsibility. Well, I, I don't know if you were saying, but like, if it goes left, you're saying they're going to print more money. Because last, I think the bigger thing is about $2,000 to every citizen.
- [43:18]
B
Yeah, I mean, they're, they're saying they're going to try to pay that with like tariff money, but again, I don't think it matters. I think that Wall street pushes the left around more than they get to push the right around.
- [43:29]
A
Yeah, well, that's true.
- [43:31]
B
And I, and I think that their capital markets seem to be unlocked in ways there, and they seem to be more apt to work with that side and that way. You know, again, I'm not saying I agree with it or anything else. And I think that, you know, yeah, a lot of things need to be cleaned up, but that would, hence we would get some sort of interesting rally in all markets.
- [43:52]
A
Yeah. I mean when you look at actual fiscal and monetary policy, it's like the twin spider man meme just pointing at each other. Andre. And they're the same. Andre, go ahead. Thank you. Yeah.
- [44:05]
D
I hope I'm not glitching too much, but I think what, what could surprise to the upside though is retail participation.
- [44:12]
B
I know.
- [44:13]
D
I mean retail has been largely absent from the market this cycle. If you look at Google trends for like bitcoin or search terms like crypto, they've been like cycling around but they, they've never really crossed like 30%. Right. And so retail has been largely up absent. But I think what could turn this around is the labor market. Right. We are already seeing an acceleration in US Leading employment data like the ASA staffing index and temporary help services.
- [44:50]
A
Right.
- [44:51]
D
And so actually I think that could be one of the key upside surprises. Kind of out of the box scenarios for next year. And in terms of semi checks, I mean, we're already seeing semi checks.
- [45:06]
G
Right.
- [45:06]
D
I don't know where they've seen that announcement of the warrior dividend. Right. One $1,776 stimulus check for each US soldier. I think it's 1.45 million u. S. Soldiers. So talking about billions in, in stimmy checks already. And as. As far as I know and as far as I've understood it, the checks are already on the way.
- [45:34]
A
Right.
- [45:37]
B
Yeah.
- [45:37]
A
I was honestly not even on my radar. Somebody else had their hand up. I, I can't see now. I'm not sure if I'm al. If I'm not seeing the panel correctly. I see Andre Loyard and Joe, was that. Did you guys see anybody else on stage? Still somebody?
- [45:51]
F
Nope.
- [45:51]
A
Okay. Lawyer, did you have your hand up? Guess not. No.
- [45:58]
C
That's old.
- [45:59]
E
Okay.
- [45:59]
A
Yeah, the, the, the, the. I, I went into the glitch for a second and then you come back and you, you never know. I was not even aware that there was already stimulus checks going out. So it shows how on top of this I am. But I mean. Yeah, I'm just wondering.
- [46:13]
D
Yeah. The, the letter, they, they posted this, that it was also confirmed by the white House. They, they announced this kind of warrior dividend. So we have like the warrior dividends left, soldier dividend, which is a stimmy check, and then we have these tariff dividends. Right.
- [46:36]
A
Interesting. Interesting. Yeah. Listen, it's. It's easy to be bearish when prices are down, but there's always seems to be some catalyst that comes right. The clarity act could be it. I mean, do any of you three think that the Clarity act could be that next catalyst for real interest in all? Guess not.
- [47:00]
B
Yeah. Say I let lawyer dance.
- [47:02]
D
Sorry.
- [47:05]
C
No, I. I don't think so. To bring alt season back? I don't think so.
- [47:11]
A
Yeah, well, you know, thought maybe more regular regulatory clarity on what all of these things are could do it. But I agree with you. Now, even though people are saying could be a catalyst because we've had the SEC really clarify these things, we have Paul Atkins literally saying he doesn't think anything's a security unless it's a tokenized security. So I think we're getting that clarity. All right, guys, I think we're gonna go ahead and wrap it. We've cooked through all the topics, and so we will be back tomorrow 10:15am Eastern Standard Time for the next edition of Crypto Town Hall. Thank you guys for joining. Appreciate it. Have a great day, and we'll see you tomorrow. Bye.
- [48:11]
G
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