← The Wolf Of All Streets
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- [00:00]
A
Bitcoin is crashing. Altcoins are getting decimated. And fear across global markets is hitting extreme levels. Today I'm joined by the legend Anthony Scaramucci at a moment when crypto is facing its biggest test since 2022. So we opened with the only question that matters right now. What is actually driving this meltdown? Scaramucci breaks down the OG whales cashing out.
- [00:21]
B
I look at those OG people like venture capitalists in a stock at an initial public offering, meaning when the venture capitalists come out after their restrictions are over and they come out and now have this brand new ownership base of something, it's typically very good, fundamentally. So said differently, you want less concentration of ownership in bitcoin and more diversity. And I think we're getting that. Plus the unlevered or the deleveraging that.
- [00:48]
A
Took place and why a single geopolitical shock triggered a full scale liquidation cascade.
- [00:53]
B
There was some over leverage in the system. So when Trump came out with that China tweet where he said that he was upset with the rare earth deal, it pulled a pin in crypto and that happens when you have too much leverage in the system and so you had the massive deleveraging.
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A
But he also explains why despite the panic, this looks like a textbook bitcoin correction and why long term investors should be paying close attention.
- [01:15]
B
This implosion, I will submit to you, Scott, is much better for us than people think. Because now, if you're telling me we're basing out in the 80s and a lot of the stuff that was wrecked is cleared out of the market and there's been four and a half billion dollars worth of OG selling in the last six weeks and that's already passed us. I'm telling you, those are good things.
- [01:38]
A
If you're trying to make sense of this moment, you do not want to miss what he says. This episode is brought to you by Binance, the world's number one crypto exchange, trusted by over 270 million users worldwide. Start your crypto journey with binance@binance.com Binance is not available in prohibited countries, including the U.S. check its terms for more information. Www.binance.com ENTMs where's the bull market we were promised? You go back now to the beginning of 2025 as we're trading here on a Friday before this comes out on a Sunday. Bitcoin, obviously down on the year, down from a year ago. Altcoins absolutely smashed. How do you explain what's going on in the market?
- [02:37]
B
Well, I mean, listen, like you I see this thing very, very long term, but let's just step back and talk about some things that have happened. And so, you know, you know this and I know this, but what, what does happen is whatever you think is not going to happen will happen. So the trade, the trade was set up for, we're going to 150, 200. We had an explosive post Trump election number in November. You know, we were in the 60s. We shot right up to 100. And then, you know, we, we had our little correction in April. Then we shot back through those numbers into the 120s, you know, and so people were like, okay, well we're set up and we're on the march to go higher. But, you know, what happens is the unexpected. A lot of OGs in the space sold and I don't know the exact data. We could go over it together, but there were OGs that said, yep, I've owned this thing since 2008, 9, 10, 11, whatever it was, I'm going to buy a yacht or a piece of a sports team. And so we were absorbing that. But on the road to absorbing that, there was some over leverage in the system. So when Trump came out with that China tweet where he said that he was upset with the rare earth deal, it pulled a pin in crypto. And that happens when you have too much leverage in the system. And so you had the massive deleveraging. I watched the Tom Lee interview yesterday with Brian Sullivan three times last night because I really was trying to understand what he was saying. And I think he's generally right, but I think Tom got stung by some things. He was a little flat footed yesterday. But if I took out the mooch decoder ring and I said what Lee was trying to say is that there were operational difficulties. If it really feels like to me that a group linked to trade fight, I don't know who, but a group linked to trade fi got hurt. They began a process of systematic liquidation of inventory and clearing out things alongside of OG selling, which led to whether people like me saying this or not, it's a garden variety Scott crypto correction. It's a garden variety bitcoin correction. The altcoin stuff is separate. Okay, so my opinion on the altcoins, and again, some people in crypto who love Donald Trump are not going to love me saying this, but I think he crushed the altcoin market. And I'll tell you how he did it. He entered the altcoin market with a meme coin prior to the inauguration. It sucked a Lot of liquidity into that meme coin. Then that meme coin busted or combusted like other meme coins want to do. And he, he caused a regulatory slowdown. If you had said to me, after November, what's going to happen in crypto? There's going to be a bipartisan, particularly younger people in the Congress who don't want to go up against crypto PACs or crypto billionaires are going to give up the ghost. There's no non crypto voter, Scott. And so, you know, they're going to give up the ghost. They're going to be pro crypto or find propitious regulation pursuant to crypto. But I think the Trump meme coin stung, that it stunted, that a lot of Democrats have dug in and we've made crypto a little bit more partisan than I would have expected, which is why you don't have both pieces of this legislation that we expected to be out already. So I think that's created some uncertainty and it certainly hurt the altcoin market. So those are my comments on all this. And the question is, am I right? Are we going to 150 or is Peter Schiff right? Or are we going to zero? Okay? And so what I love about Peter, every time something happens, he comes out of the woodwork. Even though he had the chance to buy Bitcoin at 10 cents, it's now 84,000. He's right, everyone else is wrong. And so that's part of his marketing shtick. And I get that. But if you tell me what do we got going for. It's just three quick things. Cause I wrote these down. If you don't mind, I'll just share them with you. Digital assets are becoming a core institutional allocation. That is happening. Talk to Robbie Mishnik at BlackRock. Talk to financial consultants, financial advisors. That is happening. Okay? The blockchain, if you, if you follow Larry Fink around, he is literally on a bully pulpit standing there talking about the tokenization of assets. And so again, the blockchain is quietly going to replace the financial plumbing that's going on. We're already seeing things like tokenized treasuries. We're seeing things I tokenize. They fund on Avalanche, okay? And I think you've got Avalanche and the subnets of Avalanche Solana, you've got things like Ton. Even Ethereum are going to be part of the infrastructure and the financial rails, whether people like it or not. And let's talk about Bitcoin for a second. The supply shock in Bitcoin in my opinion is now structural. Okay? You've, you're at 19.7 million mind. Okay, so you've only got one two point, sorry, 1.4 to go. Okay. ETFs are being bought by sovereigns. The having again, we're, we're gonna, gonna have another having before you know it. I think that's gonna also help the supply curve of Bitcoin. And so for me, I don't know, I'm, I'm, I'm watching deleveraging and I'm watching a little bit of a tech wreck for crypto, which is ahead of the tech wreck for stocks. And I like it. I'm not really mused by it. I'm not really plussed by it. I'm not ready to pull the alarm bell yet. And since I am Italian milker and I've said one last thing four times. Let me say one more last thing. If you and I were on this program together and it was January of 2023, and let's say you took out a crystal ball and you looked at me and said, mooch, November, it's going to be the 21st of November, it's going to be 2025. And this sixteen thousand dollar Bitcoin that we're looking at is going to be eighty four thousand BE5X. I'd see it in my crystal ball. I would have given at least one testicle for that, possibly two and a kidney. Okay, and so for people to get crazy about this, what are they talking about? Okay, well, you and I were underwater getting our asses kicked less than three years ago. Okay, so, so. Oh, but Mooch, it was at 124, so we should now be in a depression. So, you know, that's how I see the whole thing.
- [09:36]
A
I think something psychologically, especially for people who are speculators and not investors, is to always compare their current situation to the all time high. Like your portfolio all time high. We all know, right? If you start with $100,000, you go to a million, you go back to 500,000. Most people say they lost 50%, not that they made a 5X. Right? So I think for some reason it's just so painful for people. We were ecstatic on the way up at 84,000. Static.
- [10:06]
B
Well, I'm seeing. So I'm in your camp. So I mean, are you a bear here? Now you're like, okay, this is the end of the bitcoin story and the Solana and these other coins are going to zero.
- [10:16]
A
I don't even understand that. Argument at all. I mean, people look back. You can look back at 20, 21, right? The most bullish year for crypto. One of them, the fourth year in that four year cycle, we went to 65,000 in a month, we're back below 30 and went back to 69. And that was at least because China went offline and we had narratives and Tesla stopped taking bitcoin. Whatever the stories were at that time, we have nothing but tailwinds. Now. There's no way you can convince me that this is anything but a technical drawdown. As you said, maybe someone blew up, maybe some bodies are still floating to the top from October 10, that leverage liquidation event that you're talking about. But institutions are just getting here.
- [10:56]
B
Well, let me say something that buttresses you. So this is a weird thing to say and it's somewhat contrarian. Weirdly, Gensler actually helped us. Just hear me out for a second, okay? I thought he was the worst SEC chairman ever. But because of his delay of the cash etf, the spot bitcoin etf, he actually exposed pockets of corruption and pockets of over leverage. We might still be living in an FTX world if we got the cash bitcoin ETF on time. He was wrong. He did it inappropriately, he lost the lawsuit. But weirdly, he opened up a fissure, if you will, and all of these over levered or these corrupt companies imploded. And it set the base for really good building in growth on an unlevered crypto story going from 16 to where we are now. So if it got over levered again, which it likely did, this implosion, I will submit to you, Scott, is much better for us than people think. Because now if you're telling me we're basing out in the 80s and a lot of the stuff that was wrecked is cleared out of the market. And there's been four and a half billion dollars worth of OG selling in the last six weeks, because that looks like what the numbers are and that's already passed us. I'm telling you, those are good things. And, and as a trade fight person and an institutional person, I can tell you that I look at those OG people like venture capitalists in a stock at an initial public offering, meaning when the venture capitalists come out after their restrictions are over and they come out and now you have this brand new ownership base of something, it's typically very good, fundamentally. So said differently, you want less concentration of ownership in bitcoin and more diversity. And I think we're getting that plus the unlevered or the deleveraging that took place. So those are reasons to be very bullish if you're a long term investor in bitcoin. So I'm a buyer this week it.
- [13:09]
A
Was the heaviest buying I've done in as long as I can remember.
- [13:12]
B
Okay. But I'll confess to you, I bought earlier in the week and I thought I was patting myself on the back Melker at 93,000. Okay. So obviously I didn't catch the bottom, but I'll probably buy some more next week. Okay. Just wanna see where things settle out and I've got some firepower and I wanna own bitcoin for the next 20 years. If I'm on the planet, I wanna own bitcoin. So that's where I tend to be.
- [13:38]
A
Yeah, I agree. So what I wanna ask you about that maybe put this in context of tradefi as you keep mentioning. We're at this strange inflection point where the market, stock market is down about 5% and the fear and greed index for stocks is the lowest, it's effectively ever been like 6, 7, 8. Absolutely absurd fear numbers. How can you have markets effectively at all time highs? I mean, 5% off is a rounding error. How can you have that and have this extreme fear in the market? And maybe is that what bitcoin is suffering from? A bit?
- [14:11]
B
Yeah, I mean, listen, I mean that's, that's, you know, I've seen a lot. Listen, this is my ninth bear market in life. I started in this issue in 1988. So I got 37 years into the industry. I guess what I would say to you is the market less the Mag 7. I get that number. Okay. Because if you pull out the Mag 7, the market has broadly seen the S&P493 Scott has underperformed and there is fear there. And so then you're looking at the Mag 7 and you're saying, Whoa, will the Mag 7 present a problem for us? You know, meaning are there pockets of bubble activity, AI bubble activity, et cetera? I think they're somewhat connected, but not 100%. I think the disconnection really was the leverage in bitcoin and the leverage in the crypto market, which caused a cascade last month and we're getting the aftermath of this month. But if you said to me, let's say I just landed from Mars, have been out of the market for five years and you were debriefing me and you said, hey, we've got an administration that's pro friendly to crypto, likely to get some legislation passed. There's two, there's 11 ETFs that cropped up. Blackrock having the largest one. Bitcoin went from 16 to 126. Anthony, it's now back at 84. And the fear, the fear index is seven. Okay. And the overall aggregate index, if you marry the stock fear index, Scott, with the crypto index is 14. These are literally all time lows. I'd be looking at you saying, okay, I gotta, I gotta raise some cash here and I gotta buy some bitcoin. And so that's what I'm doing. And so again, you gotta step back from these things. And, but listen, you know, if I bought because I had my first bitcoin, I bought at 126, let's say a 125. My message, those people is, okay, if you have some dough average down here, this is a good opportunity. But you know what happens is people buy and then if it doesn't go in their direction, they get skittish or they get nervous.
- [16:29]
A
I mean, Peter Brandt once said to me in an interview, he said, I tell my son, buy a good company and hope it goes down 50% so you can buy some more.
- [16:39]
B
Well, that's what Buffett would do, right? I mean, you know, you use the price as your friend. The manic depression of the market is an opportunity for you. You know, I didn't think I was going to be able to buy Bitcoin at 93,000 this year. Now of course could have bought it lower if I just waited two more days. But that's the market, the crystal ball. You know this, and your viewers and listeners probably know this. But it's worth emphasizing if you missed the 10 best days of an asset. So you decide you're gonna market time and you're a guru and you're gonna pick the high and then buy back in at the low, which is impossible if you miss the ten best days of the asset, you miss all the returns in the asset. So, so if something happens here, the Fed says, hey, we're going to cut rates or the selling a base from ogs, or there's a, there's turns out there's going to be year end or into January demand for Bitcoin, like a Santa Claus rally into January for bitcoin. And we saw a $15,000 move in Bitcoin in the next six weeks. Neither one of us is going to be surprised by that. And so why juke yourself? Why talk yourself out of something, you know what I'm saying?
- [17:56]
A
Yeah, I think that this is an incredible buying opportunity once again, and I've been putting my money where my mouth is for that. But do you think that that fear is at all warranted? Let's talk about what's actually happening in markets. Obviously there was tariff scares, which I think have largely worked their way through the system. But questioning what's going to happen with the Fed debt to gdp, a lot of fear that this could be the great fourth turning next, Great Depression happening here. If that happens, I think we should have our concerns about all assets.
- [18:24]
B
Yeah. So, I mean, I've read the Fourth Turning. I read the new book Neil Howe put out. The Fourth turning is here. A lot of fourth Turning things are happening. But one thing that the fourth turning doesn't fully factor is the exponential rise of technology and the exponential enhancement of, of productivity as a result of that technology. And so, you know, you're on the cusp of, if Elon Musk is right, you're on the cusp of robotic helpers, you're on the cusp of better logistics, you're on the cusp of automated cars. You're about to crack the codes in drug discovery. If we stipulate that there are compounds on planet Earth that can help cure our illnesses, you're going to have situations now where you're going to be able to run a trillion permutations of those compounds over AI, which will lead to faster and faster immunotherapy benefits, faster drug therapies for different diseases that people have. And if you just think of what we've done recently, whether they're GLP1s, peptides, other things that we're using, we're making ourselves healthier, we're making ourselves more prosperous. I think one of our issues is political, frankly. I think we've got to figure out what we're going to do politically. Okay, in terms of, like, making sure that people have opportunity and making sure there's not. I mean, I'm for equal opportunity, Scott. I'm not for equal outcomes, but I feel like we have to figure out a way to help people that are in disadvantaged situations. You know, the mayor elect won on an affordability message. He got a, yeah, 2x the turnout. Now. I didn't want him to win. And I was. I was with Andrew Cuomo. I grew up with Andrew. I supported Andrew, but he won and he won on a resonating message. And I just want to make sure that we help people and stay capitalist. Okay? And if we do these things, the Fourth Turning is not going to be that consequential. Okay. I just think we're gonna once again our human innovation is gonna out match our policy miscues or policy missteps. And by the way, you know, Bitcoin, in a age of fiat currency uncertainty, Bitcoin I think is gonna be an even more important part of this story. Because the beauty of bitcoin is you don't be by relying on nobody and seeking the value of hundreds of thousands of people in nodes and networks to purify transactions. It's one of these beautiful stories. We've got drunk driving central bankers that have run our currencies off the road. And now we can have a robot which is a software base of this technology that can offer us a hard currency solution for all of our policy mistakes. I don't know, I'm all about that. And by the way, we don't have to have 100% acceptance. All we need is 20% acceptance globally and you're going to have a 500 to a million dollar coin.
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A
When you talk about the drunk central bankers, do you think that that's what gold is sniffing out? That's why gold is trading at $4,000 right now?
- [21:51]
B
Yeah, well that and gold is old, okay? Don't forget that gold is old. If you're a 100 year old fossil, okay, you're buying gold, you're not buying bitcoin. If you control a central bank, you're not the 25 year old controlling the central bank, you're the 65 year old. You're buying gold. You're sniffing down still at bitcoin. But remember, there are people younger than you, Scott, that are someday in 15 or 20 years going to be in their mid-40s and they're going to love bitcoin more than they like gold. They're going to say, wow, gold is good but bitcoin is way better. And they're going to be shifting into bitcoin and you and I are early, I don't want to miss that. But gold is definitely trading on the macro topic of currency debasement. People are looking around saying whoa, unsustainable deficits everywhere. There's only, look, look, take this to the bank, Scott. Deficit spending is unfunded tax liability. So anybody who says otherwise, they don't know what they're talking about. There's no free lunch. You want to borrow the $2 trillion, absolutely no problem. You're going to have to pay it back somehow. And so we've decided that the way we're going to Pay it back is through the most pernicious and the most regressive form of taxation. That's inflation. We're chicken shit. We're not going to tax the people at a level that they need to be taxed at to give them the services. But what we're going to do is we're going to inflate and destroy and debase their currency so that we can pay it back with dollars that are worth less than the ones that we borrowed. But that kills the middle class, it kills the lower income people because those people typically don't have any assets. And so you're taking their time and their energy. That's why they're turning towards populism and that's why they're turning towards, you know, they're turning towards the politics of envy. But to me, bitcoin solves that. Bitcoin is a potential solution for that. So any which vector you want to go fourth turning, you know, macroeconomic depression, currency debasement, bitcoin sitting there and bitcoin is something you're going to look at and say, okay, I got to own some of that.
- [24:14]
A
I mean, you and I have been talking about drunk central bankers for as long as we've been talking, right? And you even probably longer. You know, that's one of the reasons that I really fell down the bitcoin rabbit hole. But now it's not just the crazy bitcoiners screaming about debasement. You have JP Morgan talking about buying bitcoin as a hedge for the debasement trade. Paul Tudor Jones, of course, Ken Griffin of Citadel. Are these the guys that we thought would be saying, hey, buy some bitcoin because the dollar is being debased? Larry Fink's been out there a while, but even he. You have told me the story before. He hated bitcoin. Five years ago, three years ago.
- [24:52]
B
This is so interesting. I mean, first of all, you're bringing this up and this is a lot about what I wrote in my book, the Little Book of Bitcoin. There's an odyssey for trade Fight people. I hate bitcoin. I don't understand bitcoin. It's for money launderers, it's for drug dealers. And then it's all of a sudden, okay, it's a, wait a minute. It's a hardened spreadsheet that's fully distributed and possible to hack, but that's how we tabulate money in our society. Our bank is effectively a less secure spreadsheet than bitcoin. And so really what we're doing is we have a spreadsheet known as money. But then the government can corrupt that spreadsheet by adding more money to it. So our numerator, denominator mix gets screwed up, and you're telling me, wait, we have a denominator of 21 million? It's really all that can be produced. And we have this scarcity over the Internet, and this is an operating system that we can use to be literally an operating layer for our money or store value. And all of a sudden, these people start changing their minds. You know, I was with Paul Tudor Jones about three weeks ago in New Orleans. Mike Novograst was having an event for Galaxy. He's best friends with Paul Tudor Jones. And Paul came down, he was the morning presentation, and I took notes and he said something. One, the inflation is going to be rampant. It's a genie that's out of the bottle. And there's nobody in government right now that's even offering any type of solution to contain it. Number two, as we enter an exponential debt crisis defined by us having to borrow money to pay the interest on the money that we borrowed, okay, that's going to cause a crisis of confidence. And then the last thing was there really are not a lot of scalable assets to defend yourself with. Gold is a reasonably scalable asset. It's gone up a lot in value now $40 trillion of market cap. It's still small on the relative overall market capitalization. But what is easier to use, what is more fungible, what can be put on a USB as opposed to carry it around in crate boxes, is bitcoin. And so he made a very compelling case for owning bitcoin. And guess what happens? Druckenmiller owns it. Dalio owns it. Novogratz owns it. Pete Brigger owns it. The smartest people I know in the hedge fund community have some exposure to it.
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A
How many beads were Novogratz and Paul Tudor Jones throwing around on Bourbon Street?
- [27:34]
B
Because Novo's got a house down there.
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A
Noah's got a house everywhere. Yeah, I was down the Dominican and walking down the beach.
- [27:42]
B
He's got a beautiful house down there with a swimming pool right off of Bourbon Street. God bless him.
- [27:47]
A
Of course he does. And that guy, what a legend. But still, does that mean that Ken Griffin owns bitcoin? I mean, he's out there talking about it now that it's part of the baseball chain.
- [27:59]
B
He said he owns it. He also said he's trading it. And he's also in the camp that I think you and I are is that there's fiat currency trouble ahead and maybe we'll miraculously solve for it and it won't end up in a debacle. But you know, even if it ends up in a mini debacle, it's good for bitcoin. And by the way, I'll say I'll channel my novo. Since we're talking about Mike, we're talking about a million dollar bitcoins. Like, let me. If there's a million dollar bitcoin, it could be a total fiasco from an economic macroeconomic perspective that got us there. So my hope is that we get to great levels in bitcoin and we still solve some of our fiat currency issues so we don't go over the, don't go over our skis.
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A
Remember when Balaji made that bitcoin will be a million dollars in three months bet?
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B
Yeah.
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A
And then he finally came out, he said, listen, I was willing to burn a million dollars just to open everybody's eyes to inflation and the problems. But my response when I was talking to him about it on a spaces was we go to $1 million in three months, you and I are going to be meeting on our rigs with our armies of clones in Gastown like Mad Max. There's no world where we go quickly to a million dollars. It's a civilized world.
- [29:13]
B
You know, and I, and I agree with that. And, and by the way, we gotta, we gotta really be careful here. We gotta make sure you know, the message, the Mandani message of affordability, we have to come up. I'm. Again, I'm not. We can debate his solutions, we can debate all the different stuff, but the message of affordability we have to pay close attention to. We have to figure that out for people. I'm not saying his policies are going to be the ones that get us there, but the message of affordability won him that election because really resonated. You know, you said an anti Semitic thing. Let's get the message back on affordability. You said you were going to defund the police, which is going to turn our city into Mad Max. Let's get the conversation back on affordability. And, and he got record turnout, Scott, you know, and so, so there's a resonating message there. Again, it's tied into crypto, it's tied into bitcoin. People know that there's trouble and we need solutions. We need off ramps for the trouble. And you and I are sitting on top of things that provide that one place.
- [30:26]
A
There's been trouble. Is the altcoin market as hard as it is to discuss? We can argue there's been a bull market for bitcoin over the past year, maybe even a cycle which I don't really ascribe to anymore. But outside of a few large caps that have seen some level of institutional adoption, we've effectively seen Slaughterhouse 5 for the altcoin market. Right. I know that you and I are both enthusiasts about a number of projects there. We believe that there could be some serious technical solutions to major problems. How do you frame that right now considering price hasn't reflected that generally?
- [30:58]
B
Well, first of all, it's absolutely terrible. And I think the best framing I can provide is that a lot of these altcoins are down to or below where they were during the FTX crisis. You know, Bitcoin's at 16,000. I get, we have ambers and flaming flamed out altcoins, but Bitcoin's at 84,000. And you go look at these prices, these prices are FTX crisis prices. And so you got to ask yourself a fundamental question, what does that mean? And I get down to utility. And so what I would say to you, and I would say to your viewers and listeners, is there utility in Solana, yes or no? I'm going to say yes, obviously. Is there utility in Sui? I would say yes. And I go down the list. Avalanche, yes. And so then the question is if there's utility in these, will they come back? And I believe that they will. I think that there's platforms of tokenization. I think it's a lot like the cloud where you don't have one company providing the cloud. There'll be a multitude of layer ones that provide real world asset tokenization and real world utility. If I'm channeling my Tom Lee, maybe Ethereum will have a lot of stable coins on it which will boost the Ethereum network. But, but if I'm looking at 20,000 coins, Scott, could this be a body blow to a lot of those coins? And I think the answer is yes. You know, and I'll bring up, I'll bring up a coin, probably upset the founder, but I had a, I had a position, I don't have it anymore, but I had a position in this gaming token called Vulcan Forged. You know, the token got to 10, I'm looking at it here, it's trading at 60 cents now. We, we, we exited the position a long time ago, but I think it's very hard to recover from that. I don't, if you're telling Me. And I hope he does, by the way. He's a great guy and I hope his ecosystem recovers, but I mean, these are body blows to these names. You know, I could go through a whole list of names with you and I could say to you, okay, which ones do I like? I, I think Ton does recover. I mean, Ton got hit by the, the French government abduction of the founder. When Durav got sent to away for a few days during the summer two years ago by the French government, I think people said, okay, there's now a back door into Telegram, but there's billion users on there. Could that token have utility? I believe it could, you know, will Solana have utility? I believe it does. But having said all that, this has been a bone crushing situation for people. You know, I mean, this is, you know, you're back to April lows for a lot of these things. And again, I think it's going to be answered by the binary question, is this useful or not useful?
- [33:58]
A
Yeah, I agree with that. So, no, throw a dart and your altcoin goes up kind of alt seasons anymore in the future.
- [34:07]
B
I don't see that now. I mean, if you're telling me we get a new Fed share, we're moving 400 basis points down the curve, which I think would be again, a disaster for us given inflation numbers. But then I would say, okay, you may get a big bounce. There may be a liquidity bounce here.
- [34:25]
A
With all that in mind, how do you look at positioning into 2026? I know that there's a lot of different ways now to approach this market if you're going to play altcoins. Many argue that go to the ones that have an ETF. Right. Because there's some guaranteed flows. We've seen Solana ETFs be popular even during this basically slaughter of altcoins in the market in general. And maybe we should talk about digital asset treasury companies because those were in vogue for about 12 minutes before that bubble popped. Didn't last too long. But I think that there's a lot of promise there when we see some phoenixes rise from the ashes as well.
- [35:00]
B
I mean, listen, I mean, you have to tell me. I'm guessing it's about 6.97% staking yield on Solana right now. And so to me, Avalanche has a staking yield, Solana has a staking yield. Ethereum does as well. There's pretty good tokenomics on some of these larger scale layer ones which I think drive the commitment that people have to these. And so this is a big regulatory improvement. Gary Gensler tried to give the industry the middle finger by saying, hey, you, you can put your cash into Bitcoin and then you got to take cash out of the Bitcoin etf. I'm going to force you to have realizable gains or losses. Now you can put Bitcoin into the ETF and you can take Bitcoin out of the etf. Moreover, he was trying to prohibit in the Ethereum ETF the staking component, the yield. And now you have that B SOL has that. So to me that's lifeblood right there, you know, and I think it's a good segue into the dat. So I would bet with Lee right now, Lee's got good staking yield. He's going to create an accretive situation there. He's got a good management team, a good independent board. I did bet with Kyle on forward. These guys know what they're doing. If you believe in those things long term, could there be an enhancement from a wrapped public company that can use some financial engineering and use the yield to create accretive acquisitions income accretive acquisitions in those ecosystems. I believe they can do that. So I wouldn't be doubting these things right here. You know, I, I own Avalanche. I've got a, I've got exposure to the Avax one and you know, I, I took the position on dats, I would pick two or three of them that are great layer ones and of people I knew well and let's see if I can work together with them and use my network to improve their ability to enhance value for people. But Anthony, you got it wrong. A lot of these are down 50%. Well, guess what? You're in crypto, okay? If you're not taking a five year position on a DAT and treating it like private equity, you're not looking at it the right way.
- [37:20]
A
Yeah, it's like the dad in south park, you know, getting beat up. He said, I ain't hear no bell. It's not over for these things yet. It's not like they've been delisted and they're trading at zero. But I would say that to your point, maybe you have to pick the right ones and maybe only one for each token. For example, I've noticed Tom Lee's still buying Ethereum, whatever they did.
- [37:44]
B
I bought every one of these things. You're making me laugh because you're coming up with the memes. The best meme I saw this week was Vin Diesel. It was like a clip from One of the Fast and furious, where it's at the top of the meme, said, so this is what you're going to sound like when you convinced your fan this is what you're going to sound like on Thanksgiving dinner when you convinced your family and friends and loved ones to buy Bitcoin at 126. And he's got the beer in his hand, he's stumbling and bumbling over his words. You know, I mean, look, I mean we're, you know, we've got. The Winklevoss is sending out memes of themselves serving McDonald's french fries. I've had the meme of me serving McDonald's french fries. And I mean, look, we're in a volatile, adapting industry and so expect to get your ass handed to you in this industry.
- [38:38]
A
I mean, bitcoin treasury companies I was extremely skeptical about from day one. It really, really had my spidey senses tingling when I went to bitcoin Vegas and got pitched like 20 of them in the first 12 minutes I was there. And that was obviously when there was Strategy, Nakamoto and 21.
- [38:54]
B
Right.
- [38:54]
A
And we really hadn't seen the other ones. And they were all launching there because with bitcoin, there's no way to natively earn a yield on bitcoin. You have to do something. You have to take some sort of risk, in my opinion, to beat Bitcoin. It actually intellectually made a lot more sense to me, not maybe as treasury assets. Like, I'm not sure if, you know, Avax or one of these is a 50 year digital gold that you want to replace your cash. But if the goal is I can beat this asset, you can literally just beat those assets by staking them and you can buy them OTC at a discount with lockups, there's a, there's a number of ways that you can beat those assets. If you're admitting that you're just financially engineering to beat the asset.
- [39:38]
B
Yeah, I mean, I will, you know, there's no disagreement here. I agree with you. But listen, gotta ask yourself three questions. Question number one, long term, it's five years from now, am I going to be higher or lower? That's question number one. And I think the answer that's higher. You say higher. Okay. And by the way, if we asked ourselves that question five years ago, in 2020, at this time, the answer was higher. Look at what we've done, okay. And look at the growth. And then question number two, is the rate going to grow exponentially? And let me give you my best Example of this. Let's say you and I were back in 1998 and we did the hot tub time machine. Well, I'd be on a fat box computer. You're on a fat box computer. We have aol, we have a digital modem burping as this beep beep beep trying to get us onto the Internet. And if I buy a Pez gun from ebay or a book from Amazon, I think this is the brave new world. But nobody saw the prowess. Let's say I came to you from a time travel and I said, hey, I'm coming to you from 2025. And you see this rinky dink set up here. Someday in 2025 you're gonna have a George Jetson call with Scott Melker over zoom and you're going to have trillions of dollars traded, trillions of dollars traded on the Internet. There's going to be E commerce, there's going to be social media activity, there's going to be an explosion of economics on the Internet. Oh, by the way, there'll be billions of people downloading and streaming 4K videos on this rinky dink transactional thing that we're looking at here in 1998. And so I just want you to think about where we're going to be in five years, where we're going to be in 10 years. I'm sure my phone is going to have tokenized stocks, stablecoins. I'm going to have a wallet on my phone where I can go to Starbucks and if they're having a share repurchase and I own Starbucks shares, maybe they'll give me a discount, the barista will give me a discount for my beverage or my pastry and they'll lift my Starbucks shares out of my smart wallet. It's possible, you know, maybe every corporation in the world will have their own loyalty stablecoin, where you buy into their stable coin in their ecosystem, you get a 20% discount on the goods and services that they're producing. I don't know what it's going to be, Scott, but it's going to be very different than it is today. And it's going to be exponential and I don't want to miss it. And so I'm not gonna, I'm here. And if we, if we go to zero because you're a popular guy, you'll have a really good podcast. I'll be in a barrel with suspenders. Okay? And I'll be talking to you from a remote location because my clients at that point will probably want to kill me.
- [42:38]
A
I'm going to have like a longevity and health podcast or something with Mario. It's certainly not going to be about this stuff exactly.
- [42:43]
B
Because we both will have aged like in bitcoin years, like dogs, you know.
- [42:50]
A
Yeah. So stablecoins, as you mentioned, and you kind of just proposed a vision of the future for private stablecoins. They've been the undisputed champion of crypto so far, outside of bitcoin, obviously. Right. We had the genius act. Everybody's developing a stablecoin. How do you see that working? Do you think that that value will accrue to the tethers and the USDC of the world? I guess we'll call them decentralized ish. Or we can't even call them public blockchains. Or do you think that it's going to largely just be, you know, JP Morgan has their chain, Stripe has their chain, circle themselves have their chain. And how will those be interoperable? Because we know that there's going to be a stablecoin future, but I think there's a lot of dispute as to what that's going to look like.
- [43:29]
B
So I'm in the AOL Ask Jeeves AltaVista category. So hear me out for a second, okay. If we were searching the Internet in 96, 97, we used Yahoo, AOL, AltaVista, SGIFs and then Google came in and bigfooted all of those people. They had a much better technology. Now ChatGPT and Grok 4.1 and all these other things are competing with Google for our search for knowledge over the Internet. And so I'm going to tell you that I think Coinbase, possibly even Tether, even though Tether has a much bigger market capitalization, could get bought and absorbed by a commercial bank. I think it's possible. And if tether's too big for now, there'll be competition for Tether from Bank of New York, JP Morgan, BNP Paribas. Why couldn't we have Solana based, Ethereum based, avalanche based, stable coins that are interoperable and the same way that the dollars in our wallets are fungible. Do you follow what I'm saying?
- [44:44]
A
Yeah.
- [44:45]
B
So to me, I think that that's coming, you know, and I think it's, I think it's important for people to know that, you know, and anyway, we'll see. I mean, I'm the type of bro, I look at something and I see a linear move and I say, well, wait a minute, life doesn't happen that Way circles here, and I'm a big Circle investor, fully disclosed Tether. I'm a big fan of Tether. They'll be in existence, but it would be foolish to think that they're going to be in existence without competition.
- [45:22]
A
I agree with that. And the big question I have about those particular stablecoin issuers and the successful companies in that space in general is what happens when we go back to a ZIRP environment and all the money they've been making passively on 4 and 5% yields on treasuries goes away? Maybe that's why Circle's talking about their own blockchain. Although I think that's more about being able to roll things back and deal with fraud and things like that that you can't do on the public blockchains. But when you're making 4 billion on something that goes to 1 billion or a half a billion, what does that look like?
- [45:58]
B
Yeah, again, I think it's going to be hard. I think it's going to be hard for these companies. They're going to have to make a major adjustment. They'll probably have personnel losses. They'll probably be using lots of AI to replace labor to save costs. I mean, it'll be different, you know. But here's the thing I would say to you. The ones that are going to embrace the change more quickly are going to do better. You know, I'll never forget this because it left such a big impact on me, because I thought it was crazy, but it was absolutely the right thing to do. Steve Jobs ended the ipod. The ipod, you and I are old enough to remember, resurged Apple. And then he came out with a smartphone, and I guess it was by like iPhone 3 or 4. He shot the ipod. He said, the ipod's dead. And we put the app into the phone. And I remember him in an interview, I was like, why did he kill the ipod? It was such a cute little thing and everybody was buying it and using it. But he was like, no, no, no, that's going to get eaten. The software is going to eat that. It's going to end up in the phone. And if I don't kill it, somebody else is going to kill it. And I thought it was a brilliant move in hindsight that I didn't like in the beginning, you know, and this is what happens to people. They're like, I got the business. It's working for me. I'm not going to change it. Right. Jerry Yang, Stanford grad, created Yahoo, tells a great story. He's Meeting with the Pacific Bell executives and he says, I got this great idea. I call it Yahoo. You know, it's a cute nickname. You don't need 41 1. You're old enough to remember 41 1. I'm gonna turn on this computer. You're gonna give me the name of the place, I'm gonna give you the phone number. And these two Pac Bell executives, Pacific Bell, they look at them and say, well, that's stupid. What we do is we kill 4 million trees and then we make these 4 pound books dyed yellow and we ship them. And we've been doing that for the last 95 years to our consumers. Why do we need you? You see what I mean?
- [48:02]
A
Yeah.
- [48:04]
B
And the people that can embrace it and see it are going to do better. So if you're telling me, yeah, that change is coming and those companies can cut costs. Delayer, embrace it, they're going to do way better.
- [48:17]
A
Yeah. It's no mystery why the MasterCards and the visas and the banks and everybody's talking about stablecoins right now. Because nobody wants to go Kodak and Blockbuster.
- [48:26]
B
Yeah, no, exactly.
- [48:28]
A
So looking forward, we've always had hyperbolic price predictions about where things go. I assume that none of that has really changed for you.
- [48:36]
B
Not for me. I mean, listen, I got. I'll embarrass myself on your program.
- [48:41]
A
I said, hey, that's my job.
- [48:44]
B
Okay. I said, we're getting to 100,000. Bitcoin was 69,000. It was November of 2021. I said, we're going to be 100,000 by March.
- [48:54]
A
I did that.
- [48:55]
B
And we imploded. Okay. And then I said, okay, we're going to be back at 100,000. Then we didn't get there. And because of the regulatory headwinds, so now we're sitting here at 85,000. I'm going to maintain my $150,000 price target. Are we going to get there in six weeks, by the end of the year? I would say, no, we're probably not going to get there. I got that wrong again. But bitcoin's not what you love about bitcoin. What I love about bitcoin, it's on nobody's schedule. And bitcoin doesn't care about your price prediction and doesn't care about what you and I think. And it's certainly not tied to the calendar. So if Bitcoin got to 150 by March as opposed to December, okay, you could say that I was wrong on my price prediction. But you're not really, I'm not really wrong on my trajectory. And if you said to me that bitcoin's gonna be 200 at the end of three years, which I think is a very likely scenario given everything that I'm going on. You know what I mean?
- [49:51]
A
Yeah. What about the 1 million, 5 million, 10 million, 20 million, 30 million predictions?
- [49:56]
B
Exactly. So I mean, listen, I'm not in sailor's camp. I'm not a $13 million a coin predictor, but is this a 500 to a million dollar coin? Yes.
- [50:07]
A
And do you think that the notable altcoins can still follow in that trajectory? You got Tom Lee. Tom Lee's talking about $10,000 ETH by the end of the year. Right. I mean now we're 4xing eth by the end of the year. Obviously that was before the collapse, but once again, time based predictions are stupid. Right. Nobody knows when these things are going to happen. It's directionally Right.
- [50:27]
B
That matters. Don't know. Don't know.
- [50:29]
A
Yeah, but you believe that they can go there still?
- [50:32]
B
I do believe that they can go there and I believe those big ones like Ethereum and Solana, even the smaller ones like Avalanche I think will have lots of promise, you know, so I agree.
- [50:44]
A
Anything else on your radar I missed before I let you go?
- [50:48]
B
No, I mean, if you don't mind me publicizing it a little bit, I just published this book and I'll send you a copy. Scott, this is on Solana.
- [50:55]
A
Oh nice.
- [50:56]
B
I wrote like a 200 page book on Solana. If you're in New York, I'll invite you to the book party.
- [51:00]
A
I'll come.
- [51:02]
B
And it's basically just about everything from my odyssey with Sam Bankman Fried to meeting Anatoly to understanding the capabilities Solana and why I think Solana is going to be one of the winners. You know, I had Kyle Samani from multicoin write the forward. I interviewed everybody, you know from the foundation members, Anatoly, Raj, a whole use of lots of developers that use Solana. And so, you know, I wrote this as a trade book really for my clients and friends, but I'm a big believer in it. And that that's the sister book to this one from last year, a little book of bitcoin. So to me I feel like I'm a trade fi guy. I've got to write and I've got to educate old fogies like me while these technologies are going to be useful, available and growing. And so that's part of my mantra over the next you know, you tell me the next three to five years.
- [51:57]
A
Where are people gonna be able to get the book? Or can they get the book?
- [52:00]
B
Well, they can. Mostly Amazon. I mean, yeah, most Barnesandnoble.com but mostly Amazon. It'll be in some of the bookstores that, you know, I've done a decent job of selling these books, so some bookstores in the New York area will probably pick it up.
- [52:14]
A
And that's awesome that you wrote that book. Somebody needs to educate these old fogies.
- [52:19]
B
Well, it takes an old fogey to educate an old fogey.
- [52:22]
A
Welcome to the party. You look great, though. You still look at least 15, 20 years younger than you should.
- [52:28]
B
Thank God I got my hair as an Italian Chia Pet, man. Thank God. Lucky with that.
- [52:32]
A
Godspeed, man. Thank you so much as always for your time, man. Have a great night.
- [52:36]
B
It's great to be on with you, man. Thanks for including me today.
- [52:39]
A
Of course. Let me know when the book is so I can get an autographed copy.
- [52:42]
B
All right, I'm going to send it to you, by the way. Just text me your address, by the way. Let me send it to you. You're not in New York, though, are you?
- [52:48]
A
No, I'm in Florida, but I'll come.
- [52:50]
B
All right, December 3rd. I'll text. I'll text you the invite if you want to come up. You know, let me know. I got all the OGs coming.
- [52:56]
A
We can do a salon, a Solana panel.
- [52:59]
B
All right, I'm gonna do it right now. I'm gonna text it to you.
- [53:01]
A
Perfect.
- [53:02]
B
All right.
- [53:02]
A
All right, man. Thank you so much. Let's do.