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- [00:02]
Scott Melker
Will Bitcoin drop below $100,000 in 2025? Poly Market Traders are betting slightly that this will happen. We're also seeing a bearish tilt in options and a lot of indicators that at least some people believe it's time to take some bearish bets before the end of the year on bitcoin price action. That's just one of many topics I'm going to dig into with one of your favorites, Peter Cheer, who's here to join us today. Of course, we have Christopher Inks of Texas West Capital on the back half to break down what he's seeing in the charts. Let's go. Let's do. Good morning, Wolfpack, and happy Wednesday to all of you. I'm going to mention it later, but sponsored by Aptos today here on Wednesdays. As always, the main topic of the day today is bitcoin price action. Starting to see some evidence at least that many traders believe we're going to see much lower prices. To discuss that today with Peter Cheer going to bring him on right now. Good morning, Peter. How are you?
- [01:20]
Peter Cheer
Not too bad. Yourself, Scott?
- [01:22]
Scott Melker
I am doing great. So listen, the crypto market's been chopping around, right? I think everybody knows we had a bit of a dip over the weekend after all of the job revisions. Currently trading, let's see, about $114,000 Ethereum, seeing a bit more downside than bitcoin in the last weeks, trading at 35.88. But clearly we have a bit of bearish sentiment in the market. This could have just been profit taking, but chopping sideways in a range. First your broad thoughts and then I'll show you some of what's leaning bearish, at least from what we're seeing.
- [01:58]
Peter Cheer
You know, I think part of this is natural, right? There was a lot of good news that came out for the crypto community. I think the crypto community was well ahead of that. You know, there were some early adopters who figured this out. And now I think, though, there's that slippage. Right. Okay, where are we next? Who's the next adopter? I think it's going to take a bit of time. Certainly we're having conversations with people trying to figure out what, what does all this deregulation mean? What is the fact that we should see a slew of new stablecoin products come out? So I think this is kind of that natural pullback as you've kind of had the profit takers and you haven't yet had that real new wave. Who fully understands maybe the impetus of where we're headed. And also people I think, are trying to figure out, is it Bitcoin, is it Ethereum, is it altcoins? Who's going to really be the big winner of this?
- [02:40]
Scott Melker
Yeah, that's become a bit more muddled, I think, in the past few months, as Ethereum has started to outperform. I mean, Ethereum. Listen, it's a bit misleading to measure something off of the lows, obviously, because you have that reactionary bounce and reversion to the mean. But since Ethereum bottomed against Bitcoin, it's up roughly 80%. I mean, I could show the chart right here. So you had it way down here on that ratio at 0.017. I mean, currently at 0.031, it had almost doubled here at the highs. It's making a higher high, it's breaking above the 50. Matt, there's clearly a lot of interest, renewed interest, I would say, in Ethereum, which spent years as the most hated asset, I would say, in the crypto space. Right. We had this narrative that it would never be another Bitcoin. I 100% agree with that, by the way. I don't even view them as the same asset class, but we can get into that another time. But that Solana was basically eating Ethereum's lunch, Right. Faster, cheaper, and Ethereum was sort of caught in the middle. But Ethereum looking pretty good still here from a technical and I think fundamental perspective, especially once we got the Tom Lee treatment.
- [03:44]
Peter Cheer
Yeah. And I think, honestly, you're quite right that I don't see Ethereum and Bitcoin really as competitors at all. They're kind of two different spaces. And what I think you're seeing is a little bit more interest, possibly from institutional investors on the Ethereum east side. I think they view it as a little bit more modular, a little bit more controllable, potentially to use than what you're seeing maybe in Solana. So I think you're seeing maybe an institutional gravitation towards Ethereum. And ultimately, just yesterday, I think the SEC passed some information rules that should make it easier to pass the staking that you can get. I think that's been one of the big problems with these things that actually provide staking revenue. It's only so far really sophisticated people who get that staking, and we probably need some access products to let that really grow.
- [04:28]
Scott Melker
Yeah, we're going to dive into treasury companies and what that means for them in a minute. But I want to stick sort of here with Bitcoin. Price action. First, we have this story here. The block options data show traders hedging for Bitcoin drop below 100k and Ethereum below 3k. Rarely do we see pun puts outweighing calls. And by the way, that doesn't mean it's going to happen. This is just obviously one gauge of sentiment and how people are trading it. But this is generally bigger money and we're seeing a 10% more puts than calls. Very rare that we see that bearish tilt for crypto products. The heaviest clusters for Ethereum, around 3200, 3000 and even 2200 strikes. And these are for August 29th, by the way. A lot of these. And so for Bitcoin, seeing 100,000 and below as a heavily betting on a painful move back below $100,000. That's what the options flow is telling us. We know that August is historically the worst month actually for crypto seasonally. Doesn't mean that that will happen again. But clearly a lot of betting on lower prices. Here you go. Poly market, 53% chance that Bitcoin will dip below 100k before 2026. Listen, that's not the most compelling stat, but if we were in that FOMO complete insanity phase, that would be 10%.
- [05:42]
Peter Cheer
Yeah. You know, kind of as a contrarian, I actually like this. I think, right. You're. You've kind of lost some of that fomo. It's giving time for a base to build. I do think some of the policies that were scaring people, that, you know, de globalization, a little bit of that's reverting back to the mean and, you know, everyone's a little bit more comfortable with where the President's policies are heading. But I, I think the end, I think there's been maybe a little bit disappointment in terms of, you know, setting up the sovereign wealth fund and crypto being a big asset in that, you know, that seems to be slow moving. I think in general though, this is all headed the right direction. It's going to take time for institutional institutions to develop products in and around this. I think that's where people kind of forget it.
- [06:20]
Scott Melker
Right.
- [06:20]
Peter Cheer
The crypto community can move almost at light speed. You know, the large corporations are going to have to go through this. They're going to be careful. They're going to make sure they're not, you know, doing anything at risk. So I think we're forming a pretty nice base. Maybe we get to 100,000. I doubt it.
- [06:34]
Scott Melker
Yeah, that'd be a pretty sizable dip from here. But listen, I mean, that could be a day of price action for Bitcoin. Right. We could go to bed, it could hit 99 and we could wake up and it could be back at the same price and we wouldn't even know it because that's what happens in this market. But clearly people are willing to make relatively big bets. I would imagine most of those are hedging against a larger spot position. I don't think people are naked shorting bitcoin with a bet below 100 with a specific time frame attached. I just very seriously doubt that.
- [07:03]
Peter Cheer
Yeah, that makes sense to me. And also like you say, anything can happen on a weekend. In particular, it feels like, it feels like more and more the trading and price discoveries occurring during U.S. trading hours with the advent of the, you know, and the buy the dip mentality that seems to be pervasive.
- [07:17]
Scott Melker
Yeah. And all the stupidity happens on the weekends when Wall Street's in the Hamptons. It is summer after all. Right, so listen. And some more evidence sort of leading to what we're talking about here with Bitcoin versus Ethereum. Bitcoin ETFs bleed millions for fourth straight day as US stagflation fears weigh on Bitcoin stocks. We can talk about if that's actually because of stagflation. But the interesting topic here is once again we had 196 million withdrawn from Bitcoin ETFs yesterday at the same time as Ether ETFs even in this bearishness saw 73.22 million increase. So Bitcoin still getting outflows. Clearly some of that is flowing into Ethereum. The narrative that they're given giving, by the way, is because of this. And this is actually relatively big news. US SEC says certain liquid staking activities fall outside of securities law. You might remember that during the last administration Kraken got charged for this and others. Jesse Powell, the ex CEO of Kraken and the founder actually had a hilarious tweet about this. He said, cool, can I get a $30 million refund? Because I think that's what it cost him to fight the SEC on something that's now clearly not a secure security. But yeah, this should give it a bump, right, because this is on that path, as you said, to getting staking in the ETFs and people understanding even what staking and liquid staking and all these things are.
- [08:34]
Peter Cheer
Yeah, no, I think that's all right. And you know, you kind of. Look, one of my views has often been that you kind of have the People who invest in disruptive stocks. So whether it's the Arkk, you know, Cathie Wood etf, you've seen kind of similar patterns and price action stuff. So I think, you know, people have a. There's a concentration of wealth in crypto disruption. People tend to own the same thing. They often work in those industries. So I think it's kind of natural that it kind of moves almost like student body left. Student body, right, right. You've got to protect yourself. And if you're seeing losses or concerns in one part of your portfolio, okay, you know, the typical reaction is, well, something else is now down 5%. This hasn't really moved. Why don't I hedge against the thing that hasn't moved rather than sell what's already down? So I think it's kind of a natural portfolio allocation. And I do believe that since we've had the crypto ETFs, it's tied much more to stocks than it was in the past. There's obviously variations of things, but people just see the crypto moves show up in their 401k or whatever their portfolio is that has these ETFs, and they react accordingly.
- [09:31]
Scott Melker
Yeah, I agree with that. And just one final thing, as you kind of mentioned, people liking to take on these sort of esoteric products like Arkk and finding different ways to take risk. Well, one of the biggest ways you could take that risk is with the leverage bearish strategy etf, which is basically microstrategy short. Right. And that's actually been performing exceptionally well. And many pointing to that as another signal that we're in a bit of a bearish bet environment.
- [10:02]
Peter Cheer
You just look at MSTR stock and I think it barely recovered back to the highs it had was it last November. So it's been underperforming crypto itself. And I think some of these treasury companies at one time they provided access. I think MSDR does a lot of interesting things that create different sorts of access. But as you get more and more ease into the average person being able to get exposure to crypto, something like that, I think these treasury companies, the premium they trade at is at risk. Right. Where is the value add? And again, I think MSDR is light years ahead of others in terms of they've issued all these other securities, letting them capture different parts of the market. But again, it feels like this value add is slowly dissipating and it will get priced into market. So, you know, I think that's one thing I read sometimes on Twitter. It feels like people view a negative bet on some of these treasury companies as a negative bet on Bitcoin or the underlying. To me, it's just the opposite. I think a lot of those people actually own the underlying cryptocurrency and. And they're short the new carry trade. Right. And you're hoping for that compression between the. Here's the underlying value, here's the nav. Where do they compress? And I think that's the trade, not outright bets.
- [11:14]
Scott Melker
Yeah. So I think we're trading at about a 1.7, 1.8 premium to nav on MicroStrategy right now, it seems to have been floating between 1.7 and 1.9. I keep saying this, I'm sorry to be repetitive with every guest, but these are the topics of the day and it's my show and I want to talk about them anyways because it's interesting to me and I love getting opinions because I'm sort of obsessed with the treasury companies. MicroStrategy's premium to nav is entirely justified in my mind. Dave Weisberger puts it well, he says, hey, J.P. morgan stock trades at a premium to their net asset value and to the assets they hold because people are pricing in the suite of financial services and their lead and the strength and the safety, all those things obviously justify it. We know that Saylor intends to be a Bitcoin bank and offer a full breadth of financial services. That premium is justified. We also know that he has very creative and relatively safe ways to raise debt and that he has a path to buying more bitcoin that people seem very comfortable with. To your point, like a Treasury company that launches at a 10x to nav and hasn't even bought Bitcoin yet. That's the easiest short ever. If you're also long Bitcoin, because that's just a yield strategy, much like shorting a future and buying that's in contango and buying the underlying asset in any market. I mean, that's literally free money for hedge funds if it goes certainly the way that you want. So I think that you're right. I think that those are easy shorts, even if you believe in them, because you're just arbing away that premium. Like, why. Why would you own one of these at a 9x if you can buy MicroStrategy at a 1.7.
- [12:49]
Peter Cheer
Right. I think one of the things you will see is you. You probably see outflows out of some of the ETFs, for example, whenever those premiums dissipate. Right. Because that's when people take off the trade, they cover their short in whatever the underlying treasury company is and they cover their long in the underlying currency to the extent that they were just playing a pure arbitrage. So I think that's a natural. I think that's one thing people are going to have to get used to. As you see more and more strategies in real time play out. Right. It used to be really hard to figure out what are the flows. And now we can all quickly look at the ETF flows, how accurate they are. They're very accurate for what the ETFs do, how much they represent as the global who the heck knows. But you can see these flows and I think you see kind of this repositioning going on, but also some of it's going to be people who are buying this against shorting those. And if that premium disappears at all, you'll see a bit of a reversal and that will put some pressure on the underlying cryptocurrency but not major. And I think you can bounce from there. And that might well be what we're seeing in the last few weeks too.
- [13:44]
Scott Melker
Yeah, this has obviously become one of the main topics when you're talking about treasury companies on Bloomberg. But Galaxy's Mike Novogratz says crypto treasury rush has peaked. Sort of the three key takeaways is he says the rush to create companies that hold cryptocurrencies on their balance sheets has likely peaked. I disagree with that because I'm seeing the deals. I think that there's. We're still seeing a massive increase there. The people that will try doesn't even mean they'll launch, but that that will try. He says he expects existing crypto treasury companies such as those holding Ethereum to keep expanding while new entrants may have a harder time getting oxygen. That's more in line with kind of what I'm thinking. And he thinks there a way for hedge funds to gain exposure to crypto and predicts traditional financial firms will move toward a blockchain based market structure over time. I mean do you think that these things are peaking?
- [14:32]
Peter Cheer
You know I think just the generic ones where it's clearly a me too type strategy, those are probably peaking. People will stop paying for that. And I think people want to look. Right. If I could find one that was going to pass on say the staking revenue of an interesting thing or someone where I really believe that the people as opposed to maybe the Bitcoin Maximus strategy said okay, we are actually very good at, you know, Just discerning value within the crypto space. We're going to allocate where we're in the crypto space based on our readings or, you know, something where there's a catch and it gives you access to something that isn't just one single, you know, crypto and without the staking. So I think people are going to be. Have to be more inventive. And again, if you can create something that really is access, where someone like myself, who doesn't necessarily have the time to do this and, you know, we've got compliance issues, potentially can just access it easily, I think there's still a lot of room for that both here and across the globe. So it won't just be a domestic thing.
- [15:29]
Scott Melker
Yeah, we talked about this before the show. So MicroStrategy clearly got the lead because they were ahead of the ETFs. They were a proxy for buying Bitcoin on the United States Stock Exchange and there was only them and basically GBTC at the time. Right.
- [15:44]
Peter Cheer
And so obviously GPTC was killing it, despite being in many ways a very inferior product. Right, right. So it shows. I think if you can capture that moment, there's still opportunity and we've seen that.
- [15:58]
Scott Melker
To your point with Meta Planet, Right, So Meta Planet went into Japan. There's no ETFs for Bitcoin Japan, no companies that offered Bitcoin exposure. And, and as an added bonus, if you buy Meta Planet for Bitcoin exposure in Japan, you Pay, I think, 20% capital gains instead of 50% on actual spot bitcoin. So there's this massive tax arbitrage on top of the fact that if you want to buy bitcoin, not spot, this was the only way. So the new wave of treasury companies, as we've discussed, and I got this directly from the mouth of people that are deeply in this, is go find a market that has no institutional bitcoin exposure and launch a Bitcoin treasury company to give that to them.
- [16:39]
Peter Cheer
Yeah. And I think for the final point, I think that Novograss was making. I think we've just scratched the surface on what's going to become from the stablecoin law. Like, people are just exploring this, right? People are tossing out ideas. We're going to see immense product innovation in the next three, six months, year, and it's going to start here and other countries are probably going to have to chase it a bit if there is success. So I think that will all be very interesting. And, and I see incredible potential growth there and not just in stablecoins but how stable coins are used, what products people can use it for. The only thing I would say that I have a bit of a disagreement with, I think people view this as a potential new buyer of T bills and that's going to be one of the ways that we really help our debt. I think a lot of this money will get shifted out of money market funds. Right? I think a lot of people have money in savings accounts, but you need your savings accounts or your checking account because that's what you use for your daily inflows. It's the money that's been tucked into money market funds that I think some of that will find its way into these various stablecoin products if they become. Especially if they can offer a yield. Right. If they can do something that competes with the money market yield side, which I think over time we will see products that kind of capture that. That's where the growth will be. It'll come out of money markets who tend to buy T bills and commercial paper. So I think it's going to be more of a zero sum game on the treasury market, but it's still going to be a successful product launch as these new things come in.
- [17:50]
Scott Melker
Yeah, I mean, I said to you before, I've said it here a million times, the taking leverage to buy Bitcoin seems risky to me because Bitcoin is hard to beat with Bitcoin. But staking and using defi to beat any other coin is much easier. Like Solana. You can just gather up Solana as a Solana treasury company, literally stake it and make more than 9% and there's your premium to nav. Good job.
- [18:15]
Peter Cheer
Right.
- [18:15]
Scott Melker
And I just understand, I don't think they're treasury assets. I hate the name. They should just be crypto hedge funds or something. But if your goal is to beat a benchmark as the underlying asset, ways you're to do in altcoins and Bitcoin.
- [18:28]
Peter Cheer
Right. And I'm assuming you can actually develop a real skill in that and outperform a generic market. I think there's some indices. I know one of the people we work with has created the CAESAR index, which is kind of measuring gas prices or whatever or gas yields. But I think you'll be able to like say, here's my expertise. We do this, we do this very well. We're nimble. And you know what, if Salon is giving 9% and ETH is only maybe 5%, we'll be heavily weighed, the Solana. But as those yields change, we can do that. I think that's where you'll see real opportunity to create companies that are really more like hedge funds or mutual funds in disguise, but they're not just this buy and hold sort of, you know, treasury company. They're really trying to use the asset to generate additional returns that people will pay up for if they're successful.
- [19:07]
Scott Melker
Yeah. So listen, I want to pivot to something really interesting that you sent me. Obviously, maybe you can give the TLDR and Academy Securities. I take it for granted that everybody knows who you are since you been on the show so many times, but maybe you should just give a breakdown on what that is, because I want to talk about what the Genius act means for crypto security and how governments will approach that. And you've looked into this relatively deeply.
- [19:29]
Peter Cheer
Perfect. Yeah. So Academy securities, we're a small broker dealer. We're about 170 people now. It's 50% veterans, or very close to 50% veterans. That's been kind of our mission. The entire C suite are veterans. And if you're a New York Giants football fan, Phil McConkeys are chairman. So he's been a great part of our growth. But we also have 30 retired generals, admirals, two CIA people that you can never quite tell with the CIA people. And so a lot of expertise across a variety of products. And also, Chris Perkins serves on our advisory board, also a Naval Academy grad who is the president of COIN Fund. So we've been thinking about ways to look at this, and I think what originally for me started much more looking at just cyber in general. Why do we have so much trouble defending cyber? And I think part of it is, you know, in a normal world, right, criminals are afraid of two things. One, are they going to get caught? The higher likelihood of getting caught, the less likely they are to do something. But even more importantly, will they get punished if caught? And if you don't think you're going to get punished if you're caught, you're going to go ahead and do that crime. And I think you've seen a lot of that just in generic cyber, where we have this kind of name and shame attitude. We will point out people in China who've been doing something bad to us or people in Iran. There's absolutely nothing we can do about it. There's been a lot of talk about trying to do something kinetic in response and kinetics alert. I am not a veteran, but I'd have to learn. So a kinetic response means actually a physical attack against someone. So if you identify a site, say in Iran that looks like it was responsible for a cyber attack. And we can have a very high degree of confidence, what would we do? And in a physical world, right, if we saw them shooting off drones, we would attack that site. In the cyber world, there's so much concern still in D.C. about, hey, maybe we don't have it right? Maybe it's someone else, maybe it's someone, you know, spoofing us into believing this. So we don't do much. And I think that's been a big problem that's applying now to crypto threat where we don't do enough to defend it quickly.
- [21:23]
Scott Melker
So talk about this paper, specifically what you put out here. Could the US license privateers to combat crypto theft?
- [21:31]
Peter Cheer
And I kind of want to call it Trump Buccaneers, but, you know, our legal made us be a little bit more conservative when we published this, so we called it licensing privateers. But, you know, I think a lot of people forget that it's an article, one of the Constitution, these letters of mark, where you can actually, you know, become a privateer. That was typically bonded. It was something that Congress had to do. It wasn't in the president's authority, but it was crucial to the Revolutionary War, right? It was really, yes, we did okay on land, but the reason I think Britain eventually backed down was all these privateers were disrupting trade with England to a point that the English economy was hurting. You saw a little bit of that get in the word 1812. So this is something that's still on the books. And, you know, much of Europe actually banned or decided not to use privateers going in the 1800s. The US actually continued to keep this on. And when I look at the problem, right, it's how would you encourage the government to go after, you know, the crypto thieves? A we tend to be a little bit slow moving, right? There's all sorts of rules our US Government is really set up to be. You know, we'd rather have 99 guilty people go free than one innocent person get punished. And also, how would you attract the talent or the people to want to do this, right? Can they get paid enough? Is it interesting enough? You know, do people actually want to work for the government who love crypto? And there's probably some, you know, Venn diagram that includes that. But I think there's a pretty good outliers of those who would rather, you know, do crypto and not work for the government. And yet, so they've got the skills. How would you finance building this up? So I think this becomes a really interesting way where you could get some of the people who are very passionate, very skillful to go after the Lazarus groups, these other countries. And a lot of the theft is really state sponsored by our enemies. You know, it's North Korea makes a small fortune in, you know, cyber theft as a whole. Why do we let that occur? And I think this could be a really neat way to kind of unleash this powerful community. I think you'd have to go and apply to get the letter of Marth. There'd be responsibility. And I don't know that it's a cut and dry solution, but it seems to me we should be exploring something like this that could move very quickly and solve a lot of the problem very quickly.
- [23:33]
Scott Melker
Right. So could this be existing crypto security companies, the chainalysis of the world and people like that, or is this, you know, the government sort of hires individuals? How would that be structured? I mean, it's a great idea because clearly the United States government itself does not go after crypto criminals unless it's the FBI going after a hack in the United States. But we've seen Lazarus Group in North Korea just get away with everything.
- [23:57]
Peter Cheer
And seemingly, and I think it would be, you know, existing companies could say, hey, we, you know, you'd have to probably come up with a proposal. Here's how we do, here's how we'd set it up, here's we're looking to do. And they'd have to lay out some ground rules and you'd apply to get these letters of mark and you know, some of the money you would get to keep some would get returned to the government. Again, that could be one way you start building up a crypto reserve. Right. That we've talked about. Right. If you, the government gets some portion of this as their kind of fee for issuing the letter of mark and whoever was stolen from would probably get some portion. So I would suspect a lot of it would be existing companies. There might be some new companies formed specifically around that. And ironically, hopefully the companies wouldn't be too successful. You almost want something that as you get the slew of letters of Mark issued, you'd have all these counterattacks very quickly on the crypto thieves and it would slow down that entire industry so that this would become far less of an issue. Right. I think you kind of have this really neat peak. And that's why again, to me it feels it's the existing companies, they've got the skills or they certainly have the resources and knowledge. They could Build out that platform, I think in a relatively short period of time. And to me, that's what's essential here, right? We have something that's, you know, evolving, you know, at light speed. And we have a very plodding legal system that's not keeping up to that. You know, the regulatory frameworks finally may be attempting to catch up and it's probably still far behind, if you ask some of the deep dive crypto experts, because I'm not. But this sort of thing, right, I think it almost, it's probably the most efficient way to fund quickly a response to a known crime.
- [25:24]
Scott Melker
I mean, the government isn't going to do it, right? If the government's not going to do it well, the government's not going to do it fast, the government's not going to do it cheap. I mean, we have a long history of, I guess hiring, as you said, privateers or private industry to do things better than the government, depending on who's present or who moment.
- [25:42]
Peter Cheer
And there would be a responsibility to the government, there would be oversight, so there would be something. But that's the sort of thing I think the government's pretty good at doing, right? Controlling, call it 10 privateers, following what they're doing, tracking them, responding. Right. That tends to be much more of a legal issue rather than a technology issue. So they can do that. So it's kind of like the privateers to me are working on behalf of the US government. This is all something we just have to explore. But I think it's worked so successfully in the past for a similar sort of problem, you know, applied maybe to an old world technology. I do kind of like, to me it's kind of, you know, completely circular. You go back to pirates or whatever and you know, we could have a Rene Mar a lago torture or something like that. But you know, to me, I don't know how else we solve this problem in the next year to two or three years. The way we move politically versus and.
- [26:30]
Scott Melker
Actually it's not even accounted for in the legislation. As I think about it, like you, you, you get these incredible things like the genius act and market structure, but we all know that anything, especially online. First of all, hackers and scammers are always one step ahead of the white hats, right? So you create a security protocol and a hacker is already working to break it. You don't really know what they're going to do to break it until they do it, in which point you're reactive. So security ends up being reactive. You know, they try to get ahead of these things. And the bigger this gets, the more attractive it's going to become to the hackers.
- [27:01]
Peter Cheer
And we've seen, right, and often the hackers go for the weakest link as well. Right. So as you have a slew of products coming out, there are probably going to be some, not every product's going to get tested fully, right. There are going to be some flaws and then you're going to potentially have a whole bunch of new, less sophisticated users. Right. It's who again might be more vulnerable to these types of attacks. So I'd expect this to go up and I would say one parallel to me and what's worked very well is if you look at Ukraine, right, Ukraine didn't go letters of mark, but, but they kind of created this ad hoc group of white hat hackers to fight Russia on the cyber front. And it seems to be going pretty well, right? There has been no devastating attacks on Ukraine from the cyber front that we're aware of at least. And you know, there seems to be some evidence that the Ukraine has been able to, you know, initiate some attacks on Russian cyber. So to me, right, this was a collective of like minded people came together who had the skills to do it and wanted to do it. So slightly different, but I think the parallels somewhat similar. And we haven't seen the world blow up because these people are trying to help Ukraine. So why would the world blow up when we try and get a bunch of people to enrich themselves? Definitely. But it would help create a much better ecosystem.
- [28:05]
Scott Melker
This could be such a deeper conversation that maybe we'll have another day. But I mean, if you even look at the foreign wars or conflicts we've been in, it's Blackwater and all the contractors that are in there fighting for the United States, protecting embassies. It's always private armies at this point, for better or for worse.
- [28:22]
Peter Cheer
Yeah, I thought about it from that angle too, but yes, that's definitely prevalent too.
- [28:26]
Scott Melker
So yeah, I guess we would consider them private change. Peter, thank you as always for coming on. I know we're out of time here. Everybody give Peter a follow on X. It's down in the description and we'll have you back soon, man. Thank you.
- [28:39]
Peter Cheer
Thanks a lot. Take care.
- [28:40]
Scott Melker
Have a good one. All right, everybody, before we go to Chris, obviously we're going to tell you about the amazing Wednesday sponsor, which is Aptos. I was pointing up there, look, I got to put that back so I can point there and then I can pivot to the screen. But actually I want to bring up this tweet surpassing 700 million in RWAs, sitting in the top three chains in RWAs. So now if you take a look at Aptos for real world assets, the third largest chain for that, obviously, Incredible growth here. We've talked about aptos being the global trading engine. I have Avery on here all the time. We'll do that again soon. But it's incredible to see the growth of these and other blockchains as we get more regulatory and legislative clarity and they're able to continue building, obviously. Avery also on one of the committees in the government helping to build all this. You guys go ahead and check out aptos, and while you're checking things out, check this guy out. What's up, man? Oh, you got a glitch again. You've got the glitch again. We hear the drums going and we can't hear you guys. Remember this? This is Chris's beat. You can hear me. Okay. You're muted. It's going. Wow, that fell right in step with me doing that. Well, we're going to try again, but Chris's Internet hates us. It's just a fact. His Internet hates us. We never know what to do with his Internet. Maybe it's something on my end. You ever think it's us? We're. Yeah. So this is Chris's glitch. That's actually like Glitch Hop. It's giving me a new kind of music we got. It's kind of catchy, though. I agree. That's what I'm saying. Chris is a new dj. I agree with all that. Let's see what happens. Ready? We're gonna try again. I still have that sound thing way over here. I don't really. I can't even hear what comes out of it because it's not. Not attached. You guys can hear it. But I did. I think I did an air horn. Did I do an air horn? Did I do that? I think I did that. Anyways. Now you're mad. This guy. This guy always hates, like, I think my sounds being loud or quiet or whatever Valley says, call him and put it on the phone. Could do that. I don't know, man. Juan's writing a Juan solo. Cool. You're writing a name to it. I could sample that in a second in the old days and make a beat easy. I miss Benny Hill. Okay, first of all, I'm gonna get it. I can't. I would. I have a content warning already, so if I get another one, I'm gonna get a strike and they're gonna take me down. Or I would play some music for you guys, but since Chris obviously is not gonna make it. I'm sorry. Don't cry. We're gonna have to. We're gonna have to, you know, do the thing. Go. Be gone. Love you guys.