XRP Rally Continues! Which Coin Will Follow Next? | Crypto Town Hall

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Wolf Of All Streets Episode: XRP Rally Continues! Which Coin Will Follow Next? | Crypto Town Hall
Release Date: December 4, 2024
Host: Scott Melker

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Introduction and Market Context

In this engaging episode of The Wolf Of All Streets, host Scott Melker dives deep into the current bullish trends in the cryptocurrency market, particularly focusing on the ongoing rally of XRP and other long-standing cryptocurrencies. The discussion is enriched by contributions from industry experts Lou Kerner, Fred Wilson, Dave Garrity, and Mikkel, who provide diverse perspectives on market movements, investment strategies, and the future of crypto.

XRP Rally and "Dinosaur" Coins

Scott Melker opens the conversation by highlighting the resurgence of so-called "dinosaur coins" such as XRP, TRX (Tron), and BNB, which have recently reached new all-time highs. He remarks, “[00:00] ... we have TRX making a new all-time high... and BNB making a new all-time high. We've seen a lot of these older coins going absolutely nuts...” This observation sets the stage for a broader discussion on the cyclical nature of cryptocurrency markets, where older, established coins often lead the charge before newer altcoins follow suit.

Lou Kerner concurs with Scott's assessment, stating at [01:32], “Yeah, very much so. I think we're on our way to 200,000, 250,000 bitcoin for bitcoin and everything else is going to follow...” Kerner emphasizes the strength of Bitcoin as the primary mover in the market, with other coins poised to capitalize on its upward momentum.

Market Cycles and Future Narratives

The panel explores emerging narratives within the crypto space, with a particular focus on the intersection of cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence (AI). At [02:07], Lou Kerner shares his enthusiasm: “... intersection of crypto and AI and projects like Bittensor and Fetch and Render, you know, are three of the, you know, biggest ones.” This fusion is identified as a significant trend that could drive future growth and innovation in the crypto ecosystem.

Investment Strategies in a Bull Market

Scott Melker shifts the discussion towards investment strategies, particularly the importance of profit-taking in a bullish market. He advises listeners, “[07:01] ... it's never a bad time to take some profit... selling 10, 20%, locking in some gains...” This pragmatic approach is echoed by co-hosts, underscoring the psychological challenges of managing investments during market highs.

Dave Garrity adds depth to this topic, discussing the importance of disciplined trading and security measures during market rallies. He notes at [06:13], “...do not want to be ending up in a token or on a wallet or an exchange that gets itself hacked...” emphasizing the need for caution even amidst optimistic market conditions.

In-depth on XRP: Use Cases and Value

A substantial portion of the episode is dedicated to dissecting XRP's role and potential in the crypto landscape. Fred Wilson passionately defends XRP’s utility, stating at [05:22]: “...XRP is incredibly fast and it's incredibly cheap... for moving money, moving transactions and moving a lot of value almost instantly and incredibly cheap...” He elaborates on Ripple’s unique consensus mechanism and XRP’s role in facilitating cross-border payments, highlighting its efficiency compared to traditional banking systems.

Simon brings attention to Ripple Labs' significant holdings of XRP, mentioning at [30:36], “...Ripple Labs, the company, is valued at a $10 billion valuation pre IPO, and yet it has access to approximately $36 billion worth of tokens...” This points to the intricate relationship between Ripple’s corporate actions and XRP's market performance.

Regulatory and Institutional Factors

The conversation delves into the regulatory landscape, particularly the impact of the SEC lawsuit on Ripple and XRP’s market dynamics. Fred Wilson explains the strategic selling and escrow mechanisms Ripple employs to manage its token supply, mitigating potential market dumping. Additionally, Dave Garrity discusses upcoming regulatory meetings, “[19:26] ...discussions around what's going to happen in the first hundred days of the new Congress...” highlighting the imminent influence of legislative decisions on crypto adoption and regulation.

Tax Implications

Tax considerations emerge as a crucial topic, with Dave Garrity addressing the implications of profit-taking and tax-loss harvesting. At [20:47], he advises, “...tax planning is going to be something that comes more into people's minds... use crypto gains to offset losses not just in crypto but elsewhere in terms of your accounts...” This segment underscores the importance of strategic financial planning for crypto investors, especially in anticipation of tightening IRS reporting requirements.

Future Predictions and What’s Next

The panel anticipates which cryptocurrencies might follow XRP’s upward trajectory. Thanos contributes at [16:06], “...every cycle. You see these older coins run... and then the money moves into smaller caps and then to micro caps...” suggesting that after established coins lead the market, the next phase will see liquidity flow into smaller, possibly higher-risk altcoins.

Fred Wilson emphasizes the sustained utility and network usage as key drivers for XRP's continued growth, reinforcing the idea that practical use cases underpin long-term value. He states at [05:22], “...the more your network is getting used, more transactions are running through it, that increases the entire value of the ecosystem and your native token is going to go up.”

Discussions on Tax Implications

Dave Garrity further elaborates on the minimal impact of tax-loss harvesting this cycle due to fewer significant losses, stating at [22:07], “...especially the reporting requirements out of the IRS are starting to tighten up... it's a consideration that people bear in mind.” This reinforces the notion that tax strategy remains a vital component of crypto investment, even amidst bullish market conditions.

Additional Technology Discussions: Dream Channel AI

Towards the episode’s conclusion, the conversation broadens to encompass innovations at the intersection of AI and the Metaverse. The guest, representing Dream Channel AI, introduces a new project focusing on AI-generated avatars within a metaverse environment. While this segment diverges from the primary discussion on XRP, it highlights the diverse interests and forward-thinking approaches within the crypto community.

Conclusion

Scott Melker wraps up the episode by reiterating the importance of strategic profit-taking and maintaining disciplined investment practices in a bullish market. The panel’s comprehensive analysis of XRP’s rally, coupled with insights into market cycles, regulatory impacts, and emerging technological trends, provides listeners with a well-rounded understanding of the current crypto landscape and future prospects.

Notable Quotes:

• Scott Melker [00:00]: “...we have TRX making a new all-time high... and BNB making a new all-time high.”
• Lou Kerner [01:32]: “I think we're on our way to 200,000, 250,000 bitcoin for bitcoin and everything else is going to follow...”
• Lou Kerner [02:07]: “Most excited about the intersection of crypto and AI and projects like Bittensor and Fetch and Render...”
• Fred Wilson [05:22]: “If your network is getting used... native token is going to go up.”
• Scott Melker [07:01]: “...it's never a bad time to take some profit...”
• Thanos [16:06]: “Every cycle... older coins run... the money moves into smaller caps and then to micro caps...”
• Dave Garrity [20:47]: “Tax planning is going to be something that comes more into people's minds...”

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This detailed summary captures the essence of the Crypto Town Hall episode, providing a comprehensive overview of the discussions on XRP’s rally, market dynamics, investment strategies, regulatory impacts, and emerging trends in the crypto and AI sectors. Whether you're a seasoned investor or new to the crypto space, this episode offers valuable insights to navigate the evolving landscape.

Transcript

[Scott Melker]

Good morning. How's everybody doing? It is Wednesday, December 4, 10:22am, another installment here of Crypto Town Hall. And this show is a hell of a lot more fun when the market is actually bullish. We obviously suffered collectively together through years and years of conjecture and what would likely happen. And we could have frankly skipped every single show, just looked at the four year cycle and ignored each other entirely. And here we would be six to eight months after the having with bitcoin skyrocketing and altcoins following as it consolidates. You'll love to see it. David, you have a hot mic if you could mute that please. And so here we are, we have the title here. XRP Rally continues. It's actually somewhat, somewhat muted over the past few days. But what we do have when looking at sort of this dinosaur coin rally, as me many have dubbed it, we have TRX making a new all time high. Crazy. I guess that's how Justin sun can buy bananas for $6 million and eat them and can afford whatever medicine he needs to eat a four year old banana and survive. And of course BNB making a new all time high. We've seen a lot of these older coins going absolutely nuts, which once again is sort of what you would expect at this point in the cycle if you had fallen on your head and woken up today. Bitcoin makes a move. Large caps and older coins make their move and then the money starts to trickle down. Lou, how are you looking at this cycle so far? Is it kind of aligned with what I'm saying or you have a different view?

[Lou Kerner]

Yeah, very much so. I think we're on our way to 200,000, 250,000 bitcoin for bitcoin and everything else is going to follow and the stuff with the higher beta is going to just crush it.

[Scott Melker]

And so what are the narratives that you're excited about right now? Obviously you look at almost every project, you're all over the world, you see everything. What's kind of exciting, we have these new narratives, the DSI and obviously memes, AI, things like that that have been bubbling and then the old ones gaming Metaverse, Defi. What do you think we're going see sort of cyclically working in the coming months?

[Lou Kerner]

Sure. I think there are so many things that are going to work. For me personally, I'm most excited about the intersection of crypto and AI and projects like Bittensor and Fetch and Render, you know, are three of the, you know, biggest ones.

[Scott Melker]

So you think that that's kind of that AI area is where people should be focused. We did see a huge move there earlier in the year, kind of, and.

[Lou Kerner]

It'S, it's still, you know, it's underperformed relative to other sectors. And I think AI is the biggest thing to happen in, you know, the history of the world. And so the combination of AI and crypto and I think that narrative is just going to become bigger and bigger and bigger all through 2025 and beyond.

[Scott Melker]

Fred, how are you looking at it? We only, we're trying to get a bunch more guests up on stage, by the way, as usually we're having the glitch. So the few of us here will have this conversation for now.

[Fred Wilson]

Well, good morning. I just all of a sudden suddenly care about getting back into my Binance account because I can only remember that it was loaded with Tron and I just forgot about it for forever. So that's on the top of my list. But no, I'm feeling great. I, you know, as many people might know, I'm not a maximalist in any way, shape or form. I like a lot of coins, but I've always been a big believer in xrp. And just when I thought I was the biggest chump ever for continually loading up my bags. My life has been very, very good the last couple of days. You know, I am a little worried because on the, you know, the XRP didn't really get to play in the last cycle because of the lawsuit, but in the first run it actually ran up after everything had died and cooled off. Bitcoin was going down from its 17k high. And so this one's a little different this cycle. And you know, I'm also, now, because I'm just like that, a little worried is, is this the run for xrp? Is it really going to keep going up all the way? They do have a ripple has their stable coin coming out. It should either be coming out today or very soon. It's gotten approval from the New York licensing and, you know, I'm starting to realize that I think stable coins, you know, whether you like it or not, are just going to be such a huge factor and hopefully that's not where it ends. You know, all the other coins can kind of still play off that, but I think, you know, you see it with Tron. Hopefully there's going to be another leg up for XRP ledger. But if you've got a lot of movement of money on stable coins on your, on your network, I think you're going to be very happy with your coin.

[Scott Melker]

I mean, Tron it's kind of a hated rally, but it's, we've been talking about it here for ages. It makes perfect sense. I mean the more than 50% of tether is on Tron, right? It doesn't matter what you think of it. That's what people around the world are using to send, you know, dollars fast and cheap is trx. So that, that should be making a new all time high. It makes perfect sense. I mean BNB makes a lot of sense actually to make be making new highs considering they've had sort of settled all their issues. We have more regulatory clarity and I think exchange volumes are higher than they've ever been since 2021.

[David Weisberger]

I mean. Agreed.

[Fred Wilson]

I just want everybody to realize because you see a lot of FUD and people attacking other coins that are running when their coin's not working. And you know, the bottom line is if your network or the network you like is getting used, more and more people are using it, more and more transactions are running through it. That increases the entire value of the ecosystem and your native token is going to go up. So however it's used, if it's meme made, if it's stable coins, if it's whatever your network goes up, you know, it's going to be good for the coin. And you know, all you have to look at even for the maxi bitcoin Maxis out there is look at the hash rate chart with and compare overlay with the price. As the hash rate goes up, the price goes up. I mean it's just the way it is.

[Scott Melker]

David, what do you think? How are you viewing all this right now?

[Dave Garrity]

Hey, from our standpoint, things are actually really encouraging because actually post election with all these ecosystems doing as well, you know, they've got money to pay for the things that they should be paying for around doing security work to make sure that they're safe. You know, obviously when the market's running like this and everybody wants to get in, people try to cut a lot of corners but you know, you don't want to be ending up in a token or on a wallet or an exchange that gets itself hacked. So you know, from that standpoint, we're close to a number of projects and you know, ripple amongst them. Sure, happy to see our peep up by 5x in less than a month. But you know, people got to go back and make sure that they're dotting their eyes, crossing their T's and making sure people are going to attack. That's where we are.

[Scott Melker]

I'm not saying the time is now. I'm making no financial predictions, but in context of that and what Fred said about the XRP rallies and such, I would just like to remind people that it's never a bad time to take some profit. If you feel like you've made a significant amount of money on anything, no matter how long you've been holding, no matter how passionate of a community, there's nothing wrong with even if you're a passion holder. Selling 10, 20%, locking in some gains, making sure you don't round trip and bettering your life. That goes for every asset. It's non specific to anything that's pumped so far. But if you're holding something and you made a 5 or 6x, you should be taking something off the table. Even if you think it's going to cure cancer. You just should, in my humble opinion. So Fred, that's not financial advice to you, but hey man, it wouldn't be the worst thing to get a little of it out if you've ridden a huge pop, right?

[Fred Wilson]

So hard to follow that advice.

[Scott Melker]

Scott Bull markets are harder than bear markets. I've said this repeatedly. We've talked about it here in a bear market, as depressing and sad as it is. And by the way, I see people raising their hand who are showing as listeners to me. So I guess I'm in a glitch and don't know who's a speaker. So jump in if you guys are speakers. But the bul market is much harder in my opinion because you act have to actively make decisions. In a bear market you're just like, I'm not going to sell now. I'm just going to hold through it. You check the news, you look at your portfolio, you're slightly depressed and move on. But the stress comes with deciding when to sell. It's much harder than deciding when to buy, in my opinion. Dave Weisberger, can you actually speak? You're showing as a listener for me?

[Mikkel]

Yes, I can. Can you hear me like, why do.

[Scott Melker]

I only have like three or four guests? Okay, yeah, go ahead.

[Mikkel]

Yeah, I mean, look, I, you, you know, I agree with you as far as profit taking is concerned, as long as it's pursuant to a strategy. I mean the, the real issue with most people's trading is a lack of discipline. You have an idea, you have a concept, you have price targets, you have, you know all when, when you make a purchase, then when it gets there, people are like, well, oh, I guess I should continue to write it. At the end of the day if you get to your price target. Take profit if you. Unless something has changed. So, like for example, when we were. You were talking, you know, Fred mentioned the bitcoin hash rate chart. I love that chart, but it doesn't show what he said. Sure, the hash rate is one of the best up into the right charts. The only thing that may look better than that is the S P post 2009 for the next 10 years. Right. You know, into the pandemic, you know, almost complete. Up into the right with all. With very few pauses. But what you'll notice is if you go back to 2021, the Bitcoin network was one fifth the size that it is today. When it hit 60, when Bitcoin hit 60, 1000. So my theory, which was very simple, was Bitcoin would get to that level of euphoria in this run, except the network keeps it growing. So adjust your price targets. Understand the same thing on any coin. Whether it's xrp, whether it's egld, which has gone crazy overnight, whether it's Tron, et cetera. Have a price target, have thoughts of where you're going to be, and then act that way. As long as you have discipline, you're in better shape. And really that's what it's about. Because if all of a sudden you say, well, it's going to keep going, and then you watch then that that's when you get the Scott Milker round trip. And that's really the one piece of. I won't call that.

[Scott Melker]

I don't need it to be forever linked with my name.

[Mikkel]

Yeah, but you're right.

[Scott Melker]

Scott Belker's idea of other people's round trips. Can we do that one instead of me being the one who. Round trips, I'd like to avoid that.

[Mikkel]

Well, I always give you credit for your. My favorite Valkyrism, which is humans are going to human.

[Scott Melker]

And the round trip is that the round trip to the bear market is the most human thing you can possibly do as a human.

[Dave Garrity]

There you go.

[Mikkel]

Okay.

[Scott Melker]

Yeah. Besides show your wife your portfolio at the top, that's the other most human thing that you can possibly do.

[Mikkel]

Nobody do that. That's almost.

[Scott Melker]

Fred already did it. Fred already did it. That's why the market had like a one hour dip a couple weeks ago. It was Fred's fault.

[Mikkel]

Bad, bad, bad Fred. Bad Fred. I mean, it's almost as bad as Kramer touting, you know, your asset.

[Fred Wilson]

It's.

[Scott Melker]

Yeah. Anyone show. If you show your wife or a loved one your portfolio, it's Time to sell most of it. I got David here. Go ahead, David.

[Dave Garrity]

Yeah, all we can really say is. What Hope is not a strategy. I mean, certainly from a Treasury standpoint, our manager funds here and you know, if you get a 10, 15% move, take money out of the market or at least roll it into something bigger and better. You know, don't be hunting so much on the fringe because you don't know what you're going to step on. Sorry. It's a family broad podcast.

[Scott Melker]

This is not a family show. You can. You can say as much as you want. We refer to like 90% of the market here. Shitcoin. So you're safe.

[Dave Garrity]

Exactly. Thank you.

[Scott Melker]

Generally and all. I'm not sure if anyone's speaking. I got kicked completely. I'm going to be mid co host again. Hopefully that will solve it. I don't know how long it's been silent. I have not been here. Can you guys hear me at least?

[Dave Garrity]

Loud and clear.

[Mikkel]

Yep. Couldn't hear.

[Scott Melker]

How long did you guys just awkwardly remain silent without anyone taking any initiative?

[Simon]

I went down and came back up.

[Mikkel]

I. I did the same as Simon.

[Dave Garrity]

Worried it was just me not hearing.

[Scott Melker]

People, so I just sat there. Yeah, I. I just wanted like. It's like a. It's a study in group think to see, you know. Exactly. Every person thought that they were in the glitch and each one detached and nobody wanted to speak. It's really fun. I love spaces.

[Fred Wilson]

Yeah.

[Simon]

Have you watched that film Compliance? It's like that.

[Dave Garrity]

I thought it was more like the film Alien. No one could hear you scream in space.

[Scott Melker]

There you go. Exactly. Thanos, did you speak? Because I tried to ask you a question and then I was completely gone. Dave. And he doesn't now. He doesn't even know that we're here. Lawyer, what's your opinion on whatever we may have been talking about before I got cut off? In theory, potentially. Yeah.

[Dave Garrity]

I think it might have been something about like selling a bit when you make some profits and not. And if you show your spouse selling it all somewhere. I think I agree with a lot of that. But I think that it's like if you haven't been through a few cycles and been burned in all the possible ways, then you just have to imagine that happening so that you can then just be disciplined and take some profits because all the things will happen.

[Scott Melker]

Yeah, totally agree. So is there anyone who has a view on what comes next? Sort of the title here, but obviously we've seen this move. Some say they saw it coming I think most people pretty surprised by the coins that have moved and why they've moved so much. Do we see this trickle down into newer shinier things or just smaller caps as people get bored with the larger ones? Panos, go ahead if you can hear you got your hand up. Panos, can you hear me? I love spaces. Dave, go ahead.

[Mikkel]

Yeah, I mean look, I think that if I were doing the title for today it would be you know, the Jurassic park or the, the dinosaur rally. But what's, what, what's. Because literally that's, you know I was on a space yesterday or two days ago where people talk about litecoin and why it's primed to go back to make its all time high. I asked the question of everyone in the space. Okay, so what's going on with the network? Why do you think this is true? What's its use case? And you get crickets. Then there are other dinosaur coins.

[Simon]

Dave, is silver. Is silver to bitcoin's gold.

[Mikkel]

Yeah, yeah, okay Simon, by now I appreciate your sarcasm. I mean seriously, I mean it might very well do it and maybe that's enough. But you know there is a lot of, a lot of teams however went into hibernation, not in hibernation in the bear market, kept building and you find those projects and I think there's probably some very good reasons there. And so I think there's a lot of alpha to be made in this kind of a market where there are projects that had a good war chest, that put their horns in, that survived and are actually building things and they're well below 75, 80% below their all time high after this rally and there are a bunch of those and you know you go, you went through them this morning with Chris Scott. There are, you know you could throw basically if you throw a dart at the dartboard of a coin market cap listing of the top, you know, 300 coins you're going to find, you're going to probably hit one that's well below its all time high that's had a big move lately. And so it really, this is a, you know, a token picker market. And yes it will probably move more on animal spirits and telegram groups and touting but ultimately the big single secular change and we gotta keep this in our heads is over the next two years, not two days, two years. There is the time for actual utility is coming. You will no longer face a regime that is hostile to it and that matters. And so people are just trying to get ahead of that. And that's why? We're seeing what we're seeing.

[Scott Melker]

Thanos, if you can, or. I'm gonna give you round three. Yeah, I see your mic going up.

[Thanos]

I'm back, I'm back. Sorry, I had bad reception there. Yeah, I mean, anyone in here that's been through multiple cycles will remember that every cycle. You see these older coins run, these blue chips, wherever people call them that, litecoins, bitcoin cash, and they always, typically are the first ones to run out of the altcoins.

[Dream Channel]

Right.

[Thanos]

And then the money moves into smaller caps and then to micro caps and so on. So this happens every year. I don't think that there's any more innovation happening in things like litecoin or bitcoin cash. It's just how the money moves, I guess. And with the xrp, xlm, Hedron. Hedron, whatever it's called, I think those ones are making these big moves right now because. Yeah, Hedera, that's it. Because Trump has said that he's going to remove capital gains tax on us crypto companies, which is xrp, XLM and the others mentioned. So I think a lot of people are putting their money into those to try and avoid tax, if that is what Trump actually does. I know he said it, but we don't know if he's.

[Scott Melker]

He didn't know. But just to be clear, it was wildly reported and everybody is saying that he didn't actually say it. It was a Twitter account that reported it. It went wildly viral. But I don't think anyone's actually heard Trump say that he would remove. It was like, kind of conjecture. But, yes, I do agree that that is a narrative that's compelling here, I think another interesting one, and I was talking to David Young, the head of institutional research at Coinbase, this morning about it, and I can say anecdotally, I think there's some truth to this. A lot of people, you know, like, Fred, Fred, didn't you say I need to log into Binance? I had some Tron.

[Dave W.]

Right.

[Scott Melker]

Well, think about people who haven't been around crypto for a long time or seeing it go and they log into their Coinbase account. Those people remember XRP and they remember xlm and they remember Cardano and all these things that have pumped in previous cycles and they don't even realize there's a whole new world of crypto. I have friends like this who literally just called and were like, okay, I'm thinking about getting back into crypto. Like, what are we buying? Cardano? Like, whatever, you know, Just because those were the ones they remembered from the past. I think there's a lot of that going on, people. So it's not new money necessarily, but old money that didn't pay attention for years. Coming back and seeing things they're familiar with, pumping and buying them 100%.

[Thanos]

I personally had four phone calls just today from friends asking if it's a good time to get into xrp, which is quite concerning.

[Scott Melker]

Well, if, listen, if I, if, if I had a huge amount of XRP right now, especially if I had bought it 5x below here, I would sell some. But that's me, that's just my taking profit. That's non, non specific to xrp. Right. But like there's a lot of, there's a lot of top type signals for these tokens that are moving and I do think the liquidity will find a new home that it finds more exciting.

[Thanos]

For sure, for sure. I mean I, I bought XRP and XLM like 3 years ago after the SEC went after them and it dumped. I think I've got XRP at like 20 cents and I've been holding it for three years. I just left in my Binance account and I've recently started trimming it. Like I've sold about 50 of it and if it goes higher, great. But I think most people that have been holding it since back in those days are probably going to start exiting very soon.

[Scott Melker]

Yeah, David, go ahead.

[Dave Garrity]

Yeah, I was just getting, you know, trading basically is something we look forward to around events. We've had the event of the election, obviously the run up in the market after that. I was at a meeting last night at the Federal Reserve bank here in Boston. Boston Blockchain association was hosting representative Patrick McHenry. He is the chair of the House Financial Services Committee. A lot of discussion here around what's going to happen in the first hundred days of the new Congress. So everything right now in terms of this run up into the end of the year where obviously we'll see print profit taking I think is going to hinge upon January 21st. And what do we actually see in terms of whether the rubber is going to hit the road, in terms of having positive regulations coming out, positive laws coming out to support the adoption of digital assets in the U.S. it's enough to hear Trump go on, but we know him, he can change his mind and it's really important to look down at the institution and to see who's actually going to move things forward and how quickly.

[David Weisberger]

Dave, I know that you've talked A lot about, I mean, not only just profit taking at the end of the year, but you're actually thinking that there's not going to be as much tax loss harvesting this year just because there aren't that many losses. Like, are you still thinking that profit taking is going to not, not outweigh that lack of tax loss harvesting?

[Dave Garrity]

I think that, you know, people may have had some losses from earlier in the year that they'll want to try to offset. So I think, yeah, tax planning is going to be something that comes more into people's minds, especially to the extent that the reporting requirements out of the IRS are starting to tighten up. I mean, it's going to be a bigger deal for 2025 than for 2024. But still, you know, it's a consideration that people bear in mind. And you know, to the extent that you can take crypto gains and use them to offset losses not just in crypto but elsewhere in terms of your accounts, yeah, I think it's something to bear in mind.

[David Weisberger]

Dave W. I wanted to get, get your take on that and more of an update of what you're kind of seeing now in December versus the couple weeks ago when we spoke about that too.

[Mikkel]

Well, I mean, I don't have a whole lot of opinion on tax loss harvesting this year. I think that the next time that we will see an issue will be in the March timeframe when people have to pay capital gains taxes. When you've had a big year, that tends to be the case. So what you end up being that, you know, that's actually a large part of why we had the double top in 21, which got derailed by all the things that we know got derailed by. But the double top was top and there was still leverage. And then people were caught by surprise by those who had to sell assets to pay taxes, followed by a rally back to slightly higher all time highs. I would not be remotely surprised to see that trend, but we're months away from that. And given the news flow that could come out of the new administration, it might get dwarfed this year. As of now, what we have is a very interesting pattern. You always hear buy the rumor, sell the news. Well, so we had this particular case, it was 50 50. Polymarket basically had people in crypto position. But this was a buy the rumor, buy the news. And now we're consolidating the news. Which by the way, consolidating news like this is incredibly bullish. And so I don't really see a whole lot of anything Other than the hot money who made money in bitcoin, taking some off the table in order to try to do the get rich quick stuff and look for 5x's and 10x's instead of a 2x. Right now I'm not going to talk about whether that's a good strategy or a bad strategy. The data basically says the people who pursue that if you're non professional don't tend to do well in the aggregate. Although obviously there's winners and there's obviously losers. But from a tax point of view at the end of this year it feels like a non event because there's not a whole lot of beaten down stuff to talk about. It feels like most of the stuff that has been beaten down earlier in the year is now no longer beaten down. So I haven't done a full screen to look at it, but I don't think it's going to be a big factor.

[David Weisberger]

I'm interested because you talked about people really just kind of going into these next coins looking for that 5, 10x rally and also news being priced in, but people also kind of buying the news. And this is a kind of an open question for the panel, but is XRP really the same case there too? People are really just buying the news. Are we fully priced in on xrp? How much higher could this really go?

[Mikkel]

I mean look, there's 57 billion of them, not 21 million. So I actually posted a tweet, you know, earlier in the week kind of, you know, just lambasting some of these idiotic predictions which would have XRP being worth more than the entire world's financial system.

[David Weisberger]

That's the. What is it? 586 is the number that they cling to.

[Mikkel]

Whatever. Whatever the number is. Look, the fact is there's value in a token that's powering a network that has the inside track to be the bank approved network for, you know, for financial transactions. Is it fully pricing in? I've asked people and I've not gotten a good answer. I wish Mikkel were up here because I would love to hear his answer. You know, for some reason he wasn't invited up to a panel I was on earlier this week. But I would like to understand what's the value to XRP if it literally replaces Swift, which I think is possible, but certainly not certain. So you know, understanding that value will let. You could answer that question, but I am not the expert to answer that question.

[David Weisberger]

I'm interested to see if we actually do have any XRP bulls in this panel because I don't like speaking ill of anyone who's not really present. But last time I did a deep dive on xrp. I mean sure there's a non zero chance that it could take over Swift, but as far as I know the XRP token is not actually used for any settlement. So I find it hard to believe that narrative that if, if it does take over Swift, that XRP is crucial to cross border payments.

[Fred Wilson]

I'm here. I can stand in for Mikkel. I love xrp.

[David Weisberger]

There it is. We got our resident XRP defender. I love it, Fred.

[Fred Wilson]

So you know what I tell everybody again, I'm not a maximalist. I can tell you the weaknesses in xrp, but I also like telling people what the weaknesses are in Bitcoin. And it's funny to hear people when they just fall apart when you call out, you know the, they love it when you call out the strengths, they hate you when they call it the weaknesses. But the bottom line with, with XRP is that it is one of the fat. Now, I'm not fully in the weeds of every single new coin or chain that's come out, you know, especially all the layer twos. But as a layer one, XRP is incredibly fast and it's incredibly cheap. And it has a very different consensus mechanism than proof of work or proof of stake. And so there are a lot of pros to that. And you know, some people could also point out the cons. It depends on what your viewpoint is and what some of your priorities are. But for moving money, moving transactions and moving a lot of value almost instantly and incredibly cheap, we're talking like for, you know, they're called drops and those are fractions of XRP for drops you can just move enormous amounts of money. And the theory is, is that if you have to move enormous amounts of money, which is tens of billions if not trillions of dollars a day, because there are many trillions of dollars a day that move all over the place in various types of asset classes. But then you'd need a higher native token to help facilitate that transaction. That's why the limit is 100 billion XRP as opposed to the 21 million cap for Bitcoin. And you know, and then one of the reasons that Ripple has so much money and is so successful is they have, they control an escrowed amount of xrp. It started out very high many years ago which was 55 billion. So 55% of the whole supply that's come down a bit. And they have somewhere between in that escrow, 33 billion to 36 billion. And that's only released on a set timetable. So you know there's, there's good and bad for that too. But you know, that's kind of.

[David Weisberger]

Fred, Fred, I just want to interject there with a question that, that timetable, my understanding is that without fail, same day every month, it's 1 billion tokens that they, they put into the market. Is that, is that correct?

[Fred Wilson]

Yeah, the smart contract. And there's. So XRP2 LLC is who actually controls that. They have, they release a billion every month into the market. And what usually happens though is nobody buys a billion. And so pretty consistently and it changes, but pretty consistently 800 million goes back into escrow within 24 hours. And that's set on a 55 month timetable, I want to believe. So it's locked up again for another 55 months. And so they only, they're usually selling about 200 million XRP every month.

[David Weisberger]

So what is the mechanism for their selling, how they're selling it via this smart contract? Is it almost like an auction? Like if there's an OTC deal to be made, then it gets sold? So my understanding, and I'm not that deep into XRP is actually that they were just basically market dumping it on an open exchange. But it sounds like that's not the case.

[Fred Wilson]

Yeah, I mean there's some, I mean I wouldn't say it's dumping. They're definitely trying to sell strategically, but what they do, and a lot of this came out in the lawsuit with the SEC because they had to release some contracts that ended up being publicly known. A lot of it's still wrapped up under steel, so you don't exactly know what they're doing. But what came out publicly is they would give or they would sell the money or they would sell the XRP to market makers. That was one example. They would sell to other companies, institutions, whomever, at a discount so below the actual market price of what XRP was. And you know, and sometimes they would just sell it to Ripple and Ripple would buy it as well. So they were, then, you know, who knows what they're doing now. They've got a lot of, they've got a lot of things going out all over the place with a lot of different institutions. And you know, a lot of it's under lock and key, but it's, they're, they're trying to expand the ecosystem as much as they can. And you know, the thing that you need to know about Ripple is they make a Lot of money from xrp. And so they really want XRP to do well and to be a very well used asset. And so, you know, they're, they're tied, you know, they're not going to, they're not going to want to dump at any given point because it only hurts the company.

[David Weisberger]

Simon, I saw that you had your hand up there that seemingly sparked your interest. Maybe you had a comment on that.

[Simon]

No, I just wanted to say, you know, everyone knows for disclosure. Many, many years ago, I bought shares in Ripple Labs, the company, but I don't own xrp. But the, you know, that's why Ripple Labs, the company is valued at a $10 billion valuation pre IPO, and yet it has access to approximately $36 billion worth of tokens. So, you know, that's kind of the arbitrage between, I think, the values accruing to the company. The company is the one that owns the vast majority of the tokens in terms of a single issuer and all the technology and the technology that works without xrp.

[David Weisberger]

Yeah, it's good context there. I didn't actually know that their balance sheet was so high on xrp. I mean, you assume that it's high, but I didn't realize there was that much of a equity versus token value arbitrage there. David Garrity, you had your hand on it.

[Simon]

Is their number one source of revenue is selling tokens?

[David Weisberger]

I question the sustainability with that. But hey, if there's money to be made, who am I to act a fool, right? But David.

[Simon]

Well, as long as the token holders know, and that's the whole point, right? And that comes into this whole regulatory regime of how do you disclose a token that's so deeply connected to a company when the programmatic sales, as per the SEC ruling on the secondary market, require no securities level disclosure? And I do genuinely think, even though that SEC case is over, that whether it's a market driven solution or a regulator driven solution, how do people actually, how are people actually able to figure out what the hell they're buying? Because no one in xrp, I think, knows what they're buying.

[Fred Wilson]

Yeah, I just want to jump in real quick.

[David Weisberger]

Go ahead.

[Fred Wilson]

And so what Simon said, and you know, I'm a big pro XRP guy, but what Simon said is 100% accurate. You know, that is there's risks and downsides to every single chain and asset and there's positives, you got to know what they are. But everything he said is 100% accurate. Now you can explain all those things. In a good positive way that it'll help XRP holders in the future. Or you can look at it from a negative perspective but the point is factually accurate. Everything that he said.

[Mikkel]

Hey Fred, could I ask. I'll ask the question the way very specifically. So forget the Ripple Labs, what they're doing and forget the fact that Ripple's products, some of their software doesn't require the use of xrp. Obviously they want it to be used. Let's just make the rosiest of rosy assumptions. Let's assume that Ripple Labs ends up replacing Swift and they end up putting XRP because it is so, as you say, cheap inside of it. Well, we know swift process about 50 million transactions a day. We, you know, so we have that number. Assuming XRP was used to trade 50 million transactions a day, given the fact that it's incredibly cheap, roughly speaking, what would that gas, you know, value accrual to the XRP token be? To me, that's the question and I still have yet to be able to get my head around it. I'm curious if you know anyone who's done that.

[Fred Wilson]

So I will fully admit that that is a question that I think about all the time too. And I'm not quite. I've seen people tell me financial calculations and what that would have to mean for the price of XRP and this, that and the other. And I also have trouble wrapping my head around it. I can only, you know, because at the end of the day it is like fractions of a fraction of a penny to move value on the XRPL network. And so why the bottom line, the only thing I can come up with is that I see it in every other network is that the more use, the more value it has, the more your native token increases. And so I, that's the best I can come up with because you know, the only thing that I can understand in my head and I'm not a math guy, is that if you're moving, if you only have 100 billion XRP and you have to move constant amounts of money in the trillions of dollars, it intuitively seems like you can't have, you know, a 40 cent XRP, a two dollar XRP, but the math behind everything. I'm not the person to ask on that.

[Mikkel]

Yeah, I mean, look, I admit, I freely admit to overthinking but I see Mickle. Oh yeah, good. Mickle. Maybe you can answer.

[David Weisberger]

Is, is Mickle. Do we gotta bring him up? Let me try to search for him and Simon or David. I saw that you had your hand up. So while I'm trying to maybe get Mikkel up here, feel free to jump in.

[Simon]

Yeah, yeah, I just wanted to. Welcome to.

[Scott Melker]

Pardon me.

[Dave Garrity]

Pardon me.

[Simon]

Can you hear me?

[Dave Garrity]

Can you hear me?

[Simon]

Okay, go for it.

[Dave Garrity]

Fine. I was just going to say, you know, this discussion around XRP adoption for Rails is obviously has to go through validation because you have a lot of existing financial institutions that are out there who are operating those Rails. Just put yourself in Jamie Dimon's shoes and you're looking at this transition that's now going to be enabled because of better regulatory clarity. Are you really going to go to an existing solution? I know that Dimon himself is, despite what he had to say about crypto a long time ago, has thousands of people working inside JP Morgan on something called the JPM Token, which they're using internally with their own clients. Why wouldn't they want, given that the fact that they control these Rails in their own presence, want to be using their solution as opposed to an xrp?

[David Weisberger]

We. We did. We did get Mickle up. So. So Mikkel, you, You. You've been summoned into the speaker with many people requesting you.

[Dave W.]

Yeah, no, just want to jump on a couple things. One, I did agree with some of what Simon said, but the idea that XRP holders don't know what they hold. I mean, a couple months ago, Simon didn't even know XRP was used as a transaction fee on the network. If you listen to the XRP community talk about this, they've had a deep knowledge of everything going on in the XRP community for an extremely long time. And I can tell you there are absolutely no secrets about what Ripple holds, what XRP is in the equation and how everything functions. It's a very, very educated group of people who have been watching this play out for such a long time. And that's why you saw so many people stick around through the entire Ripple SEC case, because they see the true potential of what's being built out here. There has been calculations done on what Swift like volume can do. Dave, it's actually a very good question. And it was actually done by Robby Michnick, who is now the head of digital assets at BlackRock. So he's actually a former, former Ripple employee and they actually built a calculator with another woman named Susan Athey and put in Swift like volumes into this calculator. They created that, weirdly enough, since has been taken down very recently once it started gaining a lot of traction and essentially they were able to put in the transaction volume and there was assumptions made and how many daily movements would happen, total volume of each transaction. And it came out to something like somewhere between a 35 to $100 XRP capturing somewhere between 8 to 10% of current Swift volume. So there's actually been some really good studies and calculations done in an actual calculator where you can plug in different transaction volumes to do this. It's since been taken down, but I'm sure there's replicas of it out there as well as a lot of videos and posts about people submitting their actual numbers to that calculator to try to replicate it. And then the last thing I want to quickly mention here is because it was also brought up is this idea that Ripple has products that don't use xrp. Absolutely. Like Ripple is turning into one of the largest custodians in the industry for all digital assets. The entire idea is Ripple can't go to a client, especially a very conservative bank, and say, okay, you absolutely need to use XRP or we're not going to work with you. Well, Ripple wants to do is slowly onboard these large institutional participants into the XRP ecosystem. So they start with something like custody, just custody in digital assets and obviously have downstream products to get them into more advanced products directly using the XRP ledger, like cross border payments, using XRP loans, using XRP and all kinds of other more advanced financial vehicles. But it's all about building trust with these institutions before you jump directly into using xrp, the underlying network.

[David Weisberger]

Mikkel, my naivety with XRP as well, you mentioned that it actually is using the XRP token and it's cross border payments mechanism. Can you dive a little bit deeper in that? Because I remember when I dug into it in 2017, I thought it wasn't. So I'd love for you to explain.

[Dave W.]

Yeah, absolutely. So xrp, right. Like fundamentally when Bitcoin was created, the original creators of bitcoin, a lot of them decided, okay, this is absolutely fantastic, it's revolutionary, but can we make this faster and more efficient for more institutional, widespread scalable solutions? And they created the XRP ledger. You can do absolutely anything you want with the XRP ledger. And there's tons of products and projects doing their same own thing. But Ripple specifically uses it to increase settlement speeds and efficiencies. So rather than doing an international wire, and if you've ever done an international wire, you know that it's, it's just terrible. It's a horrible experience. Everyone hates doing wire transfers. Ripple Created a product where rather than relying on the outdated rails of our financial system, what if we just take USD, send it through XRP and the other currency pops out on the other side to whatever jurisdiction they need that currency conversion to do. So rather than relying on those outdated rails where essentially banks are arbitraging fees in the middle, you have nostro vostro accounts trapping capital, you just use XRP as that digital asset in the middle to settle transactions. And that product is growing very, very rapidly. They're doing billions of dollars growing hundreds of percent year over year because it's essentially taking out a lot of the inefficiencies with the traditional financial system. Just using XRP as that settlement layer.

[David Weisberger]

Guys, any other questions for Mikkel here? Mikkel, I didn't mean to put you on the spot with the XRP ama, but we do have a sponsor as well who's going to be joining us for an AMA after your impromptu XRP AMA here.

[Dave W.]

No, no problem. I just like to help educate people like on the thing because there's a lot of misinformation put out there about XRP and I think people need to take away. One of the most important things here is like just because xrp, right, is looking to do something more actually utility driven by using this blockchain to settle transactions, it doesn't mean it like destroys thesis of bitcoin. Like it doesn't necessarily have to be one or another. I'm a huge bitcoin guy. Bitcoin is absolutely great as being a store of value protecting against inflation. And it's always going to be a top blockchain in terms of institutional adoption with people getting access to this decentralized neutral inflation hedge that no one can control. But in that same note, I'm a former surgical robotics engineer. Like I focus on the actual technology, cryptocurrency, distributed ledger technology, that actual blockchain that underpins it is going to be dramatically useful in updating the financial system and updating the architecture to how money moves, how money is routed and how future financial products are built. Listen to any major banking institution, listen to any major investment firm talk about things like tokenization, they see it's coming. And that's not all going to happen on bitcoin, as many of us understand. So investing in those core public protocols that are going to be critical in building that transformation and building this next generation financial system, that's what I believe one of the core thesis of XRP is. And I don't think that necessarily has to rival Bitcoin or anything like that. It's more of like a complement to the system we're building.

[David Weisberger]

Thanks, Michael. No, I appreciate you you jumping up. It was almost like you heard yourself being summoned here. So that was a perfect synopsis there. I'd love to actually dive much, much deeper into it because you're probably the person that I've spoken to with the deepest knowledge on XRP and there is a lot of seemingly misinformation out there. But we are doing a bit of a swift transition here to our.

[Simon]

Sorry, could I do a quick closing comment on that and then you move to the sponsor.

[David Weisberger]

Of course. Go ahead, Simon.

[Simon]

I just wanted to say, look, with the excitement of the Trump administration was clearly like the Bitcoin strategic reserve, a pro sec crypto friendly environment and a bunch of an administration that a bunch of them have Bitcoin and embrace this industry, which is an exciting time. But you can see where this is going. So welcome to what the future of America in crypto is going. You will, over the next year or so I'm pretty sure Ripple Labs will be a public company with public company level disclosure. You will have a probably XRP ETF which will have the level of public company disclosure for an etf. And you'll have a virtual asset service provider regulatory regime either under the CFTC.

[David Weisberger]

Dream Channel. I see you up here now. How are you?

[Dream Channel]

Yeah, I'm good. Great to make it back in here again. Yeah. Awesome. Yeah, things are cranking in the whole crypto AI crossover world, which is where we sit.

[David Weisberger]

Yeah, I'm just going to jump right back into it as some others are joining in here. But I know that you and I have spoken a few times. So for listeners who are kind of just coming into the space right now, maybe give the the 101 on AI Dreams and just what the elevator pitch is before we get started into an AMA here.

[Dream Channel]

Yeah, no problem at all. Yeah. So Dream Channel is a Web3AI Metaverse engine. I like to refer to it as a Metaverse TV channel because it's a multi channel metaverse environment. And what it does initially is it powers AI generative avatars to actually go out and do a whole lot of generate content. Now what they actually, how it actually works is that the avatars are generated by users. So the idea is that each of the Dream Channel is divided initially into 2016 channels. Okay. And the idea is you pick a channel that kind of, you know, aligns a little bit with where what your interests are. So it could Be a dating channel, it could be an action sports channel, it could be a fighting channel that kind of gives you a particular kind of look like an avatar. You can kind of pick and say, okay, like, you know, this, this is my kind of look. You can craft it later. And the idea is that you scan your face or. And you generate this avatar which basically has a personality, right? Using a personality matrix to craft that personality. So the general idea is we're trying to make it like an alter ego of yourself to start the ball rolling. But people will change that. It doesn't have to look like you, but it just gives you those tools at the beginning. And also it gives you a little bit of a look and a vibe of the style of Dream Channel in terms of the avatars that you can kind of like embody. Okay. And the idea is that use this personality matrix and you can make yourself bashful, you can make yourself outgoing, you can make yourself like aggressive or romantic or whatever you want. But it's a very complex personality matrix which you use and it generates this character, okay? And then what happens is you kind of like test the character out to see what it's going to do. You inject it into this multi channel environment, which is all the channels I talked about before. And what it does is it goes off and it bounces off other avatars in different scenarios and generates content. And it does all this in this, you know, this persistent world. So it's actually, you don't have to do it. You don't have to do anything. You don't have to be there. It doesn't. It's Dream Channel. The concept is it happens at night while you go to sleep. So the avatar heads off at night and it dates, mates, procreates, base jumps, you know, steals cars, all kinds of stuff. And it kind of does all these random things based on its personality and you're the one that made it happen. And then. And also based on the context of what's going on in any particular zone. So in other words, like if you inject your avatar into kind of the, you know, the DJ party zone, you know, you're going to get, you're going to get a whole bunch of videos back that the next morning, because it sends you a highlights reel the next morning of what it got up to, right? And then you can then look at that highlights reel, see the avatars that it came across and follow up those connections, right? So getting back to the DJ thing, if you inject your avatar into the DJ party zone, you're going to get a whole bunch of videos the next morning of its night out, right. Of meeting girls dancing on dance floors, you know, who knows what else. Like you know, going on adventures in that sector. Whereas if you injected it into kind of like a sort of UFC MMA fighting zone, it's going to come back with a bunch of fight, fight wins, losses, et cetera. So and, and you know, and then you're going to have to train it by adding, giving it more traits to get better, to go back in there again and maybe win some tokens for you. So this is the kind of idea. So it's a multi channel entertainment network generate where all the content is generated by AI generative avatars that you, you craft. Right now I think the biggest drivers. This all sounds like it's kind of like pie in the sky, right? But it is. And I've actually posted a bunch of videos in the, in the. Well, I posted it in the, in the group before, but I'll post a few more in this one now which shows you some of the action that we've been, we've been generating already in our, in our, in our zone. So I'll just keep talking while I'm doing that. But yeah, so the cool part about this is it generates content that's funny. Like it's what I was showing some of my friends yesterday, some of the things my avatar has been doing and they're just like, it just brings the house down. It's going to be the most amazing viral campaign possibly for your profile, which is maybe an extension of you. So you can imagine these videos circulating and they're all quite outrageous.

[David Weisberger]

Yeah, I'll give you a breather there to maybe, yeah, post some of the pin posts so that you got some time to breathe and also post those videos because I've seen them before, they're quite entertaining. And the reason why I think this is such a unique and interesting idea is back when I heard about the metaverse and was going into some of these metaverses, back when it was a huge narrative in the last cycle is that you go in and then it's like, okay, now what do I do? Like there's, there's people maybe like running around like it kind of looks like a very rudimentary Roblox. I actually attended a conference in, I think it was 20. It would have been peak Covid. A friend of mine is the founder of ETH Toronto, the largest crypto conference in Canada. And during COVID they, they put the conference on and they actually had it in a, in a Metaverse environment, which I thought was very cool, that that was definitely the best implementation that I had seen. But, but other metaverses, you go in and it's like, okay, well what's going on? And there's kind of promises of like advertisers are going to come in, they're going to build things, they're going to want to monetize on the attention economy. But it's all about users and activity and keeping people entertained. So I thought this is a very unique idea because it can use AI to actually create that entertainment and really be a viral loop to draw in more users and whatnot. And because we've, we've spoken a couple times now on this show, there's probably some users in here who have overlapped a little bit. Maybe heard of AI dreams before. Like, I'd love to dive in because it's not just a concept like you said, how has the user adoption been? Like, how many people are using it and maybe give us some update metrics there?

[Dream Channel]

Yeah, no problem at all. Yeah. So there's two parts to how we're launching this. Right. And right now we have a focus group. It hasn't been released publicly. I'm just showing you videos now of what we've been doing. You can see those in the chat. But we haven't actually released it on nas. It's basically still a controlled environment in terms of getting it right. I think the reason for that is that Metaverse has been a constant source of disappointment for people for quite a long time. And I want to make sure that we're going to get this right and that people start engage with it and it works really well from the get go. So, yeah. So in terms of user numbers, it's very much best based around a control group which I'll send a link for before this is over. And you could join that and request to join and you can test it, testing the environment. Right, so that's where it's at the moment. Yeah. So, but the starting point is going to be is two parts. It's one is you're generating your avatar and it's doing, you know, things that you can, you know, it can win you tokens as well. Right. So it actually can. Fighting is going to be an interesting, interesting starting point here. Right. So. So I think the two starting points for this are fighting and dating. That's where we're really going to get most people because otherwise it gets too many things all at once. Right. So. So as too Many things to try and launch all at once. Right. So fighting is an interesting one. You literally go. And that's probably the most evolved part of what we, what we started, we started building that a couple years ago actually before we, the AI part even was added in. Right. But that's relatively simple. It's more about going and training your avatar up in different fight styles. Karate, Taekwondo, boxing, you know, MMA moves, even things like, like we've even got like moves that we're adding to the moves library there that are things like dump tackles and you know, big hits and stuff like that. So you can actually defeat another avatar through, through literally charging at them and things like that. So it's kind of like a next generation street fighter. So that's, that's the kind of design that we think that the, we're going to get, you know, that we've actually evolved more than the other ones in terms of the actual business model and the depth of the dojos that you would actually go to get the moves you need to train your avatar to win. And that's kind of an interesting way to every morning. Imagine waking up every morning and you look at the five or six or seven fights your avatar got in and their replays, right. And you can see how it went and it won you coins or it didn't and then what you need to do to get it to go back and do that. So that's an interesting, you know, almost example unto itself. Dating is the other part. I think that's actually going to be probably even bigger on the dating front. You know, it's really about, about your avatar going and find you craft an avatar. But what we're doing at the moment is we're crafting an avatar that kind of like, you know, I crafted me, but it's a better looking version of me, you know what I mean? And, and, and, and the idea is that then someone else crafts a girl that's that, you know, matches up in terms of what my avatar is looking for and what she's looking for. Right. And then they, they go off and they kind of hang out and we don't know what they're going to do. Right. So that's the cool part. Right. So the, so the engagement is going to come from on the fighting side. It's going to come from, oh, did I win? How do I train my avatar to do better on the dating side? It's going to be kind of almost like a psychological study of like, wonder what, what this character is going to do given his Personality and given her personality and where's this going to end up? You know what I mean? So it's kind of like. So there's different and there's different kind of ways this is going to evolve in different channels. So. So we're kind of like focusing on those two parts first. And that's where that, where the user groups are out at the moment.

[David Weisberger]

You got any big partnerships or anything, Anything lined up, maybe even for that dating element? Like, is there a way that some of these big public companies like Match.com or anything like that get involved and kind of do extensions within this area? I think that'd be pretty cool.

[Dream Channel]

Yeah. We actually have been talking to a number of different people about. About how it would work. It's interesting. You know, I think they're all looking at it too, and. But it's an interesting kind of looking at the. How tech works, you know, if you start. Yeah. In terms of like, marketing to a greater audience. Yeah. These are, these are the relationships we need. Right. And I think that the existing dating channels, you know, can get a lot from like this, this type of relationship in AI, but it does take things to another whole level. Like, a real date in the real world is something. Right. It's a unique thing unto itself. Right. A virtual date where your avatar, which kind of is a version of you, is going off and dating with some other avatar. It's kind of a whole different thing. It's like a scientific experiment to kind of see what you could have done or could be like, if you did this, that. So it's kind of like almost like an. So what I'm trying to say, it's an entertainment channel. That's what I'm seeing it as. It's not really dating. It's like entertainment. Like, check this out. If I, if I'm aggressive and I'm this and that, I get this kind of date and reaction. But if I'm, you know, romantic and this and this, I get this kind of date. So it's kind of a very social experiment, you know, orientated thing. But where it will get really interesting, and this is where we're. We're really strong, is we've been big in the VR component. What, how, how it monetizes itself really is. Well, when you get to the premium side is, is that I can, my. I can actually embody my avatar's experience. So in other words, the avatar goes and does what it does, and then I can say, hey, I want to do that. And so I can actually go into VR mode, embody the avatar and feel, see here, touch everything in the first person. That's when it becomes a whole different thing. So you know what I mean? So the virtual, the real date of a real dating site is what we know, that's dot com, etc. A virtual date, being watching what your avatar is doing and thinking what's interesting is another thing. But then embodying it, the virtual becomes real. So that's a whole other mind kind of warped kind of moment, which I think is. And if we can do that, we're delivering what the Metaverse always promised for.

[David Weisberger]

The tech, maybe in the audience. What stack is this all built on? Like which chain does it reside in?

[Dream Channel]

Yeah, sure, sure. We're very, very Unity based in terms of our development. So that's where we're developing all the. Although the worlds and the graphics, everything like that. So that's that part of it. We initially built out our payment system, which I'll get to in a bit on Ethereum. So it was an Ethereum based system, but we're actually about to gravitate over to Solana to make it quicker and faster. We looked at initially all the various scaling solutions for Ethereum. I mean, this is not a negative thing about Ethereum. I don't want it to go that way. But we were getting a great developer support when we were building on Ethereum, but not many users coming on board in terms of how we could actually execute it. And you know, you and I really see and feel that Solana has kind of like shown. So we haven't gravitated Solana yet. We're doing that now.

[Dave Garrity]

Right.

[Dream Channel]

And so out. And our token that we're going to, that we're releasing is going to be on Solana as well. So that's where that's going. And then on the AI front, we're actually building our own AI is interesting. Like there's a lot of people doing a lot of similar things. Like, you know, like, you know, if you look at like, you know, just here in Sydney, where I live in Sydney, Australia, by the way, you know, Leonardo, AI are really good down here. They've kind of like got a really great interface and they're building. They're doing what? But it's kind of the same thing as what everyone else is doing. Like, you know, you know, making videos better and quicker and getting avatars to speak and you know, creating virtual assistants and all that sort of stuff. That's all really great. The building blocks of AI are happening through all that. But what we're trying to do is kind of a step on from that. It's like creating like a, you know, an actual generative AI generative video that's, that's, that has a context and a story. Right. That hasn't really been done yet. Right. So not, not in this way. So we're actually pulling a bunch of different things together to make it work. We're using Ooga booga, which is like, I don't know if you know what that is, but it's a, it helps us create our own proprietary kind of, you know, approach. Yeah. So you look on the tech stack, so it's very, it's very on the, on the, on the user engagement front user interface. It's all very Unity driven. And on the, and on the. It has been Ethereum up until now in terms of like the actual payment system and things like that.

[David Weisberger]

Yeah, no, it's clear that you guys have done a lot of, a lot of work getting this, getting this operational and even despite our space getting, getting rugged before, we have 3, 800 people listening in right now and a ton of comments too. There's already been 36 comments that, that I'll certainly go through. But for people who are tuning in just as we're getting to the, the top of the hour and I know that the IBC team has another show coming up. Like, how can they get involved? Like how can they get started today even after this space to start using it?

[Dream Channel]

All right, cool. Look, the best way we have an app that's, that's live on the App Store right now, but it's the fighting app and it's just the beginning of everything. So Dream Channel AI, if you look for that on the App Store, you can download it and you can scan your face and you can generate an avatar and you can just get the ball rolling in terms of like joining. Right. So that's the best way at the moment to actually engage and be part of it and then from. But really the best, the best if you want to be part of the, you know, the test. Test group if you like, you know, on our Twitter, I'll put on the Twitter a link to that so you can, you can request to join that. That's probably the best place to become a tester because I think that's where the rule fun stuff is. But we've got a token sale that's cut this coming up as well. But look that we're going to do a major announcement about that next week about, about how that works because That's. That's coming onto Solana and it previously wasn't there. So that's just about to happen as well. But I don't want to jump the gun and start selling everyone a token before this thing's kind of really working. But just to let you know, there is a token. But the cool part about the token is one thing there is that we've tried to keep this thing very virtual world, right? And very gamey in terms of what it is, right? And I don't like saying the word token because it's actually. It is a token that you buy, but it's actually an energy drink that's. So basically, these avatars need to drink this lucid dreaming elixir to live in the Dream Channel, right? So Dream Channel. So this staying on, on point with the story here, right, is that there's a reason why Dream Channel exists, which comes out as. As we progress forward. There's a narrative that rolls forward in this. In this series that kind of like is a meta narrative, if you like, which starts to roll out as. As we roll out, right? So, so basically there's a. There's a. And the. And in that narrative, the avatars, these AI generative avatars, which is what the whole story is about, need this lucid dreaming licks. They need to drink it to get to remain in the Dream Channel. That's what they fight for. It's what they earn. It's what they die for. They'll die if they don't have. Right? So it's kind of like that. But that's a really important point because in AI, you need context, right? Having people, the AI is knowing that they need these things gives them a reason to go on a date because they want to make money. It gives them a reason to fight because they need to get this thing right? And so. And it gives them a focus in a certain scenario. So someone's saying something, there's a fight going on over there or whatever, they head for where they're gonna get the. Gonna get the elixir. You know what I mean? They do the thing that they need to do to get that, and it gives them a focus, which allows the CPU that we need to drive this thing. The decision. The decision model, the decision tree, if you like, for the AI is quicker because they go for what they need, right? So it's kind of like a. That's another. An important part of this whole thing is that the token, which actually, actually represents this elixir is the most valuable thing of this whole thing because it's the economy of fort drives in terms.

[David Weisberger]

Of people listening and if they do want to get involved, just searching on the App Store, Dream Channel AI is the best way to do it right now.

[Dream Channel]

Yeah, okay. Yeah, that's right. That's right. That's how you join. And then I'm going to post and follow on X. Right. And then that'll be all the give all the announcements about. So before the end of the year, we're going to launch the token sale and basically people can buy the elixir in advance of this whole thing. And the other thing we'll be doing before the end of the year is launching episode one and two of the meta narrative story.

[Dave W.]

Right.

[Dream Channel]

We've actually shot there's 26 episodes in the Dream Channel series, if you like. Right. Which stars the AI generative avatars in the series. Right. So the idea is that when you first join, the core characters of the world are in the series. Right. And you can be in it too. That's the idea. So there's this whole multi leveled level approach. So the first thing you'll be able to do is join, using the app and watch the series to get context on what this whole thing's all about, why the elixir is worth something and what it's all about. So that's the black mirror part.

[Dave Garrity]

Right.

[David Weisberger]

People tuning in website which is in your bio App store definitely search is it Dream Channel AI to check it out. And token sale end of the year. I like to kind of leave the audience with a couple very specific things that they can follow up with. But we're starting to get into kicked off here just due to the IBC team having another show. So I do want to appreciate you for joining us again and I love always getting the updates about this project because I do think that it's very needed and having entertainment in the metaverse sector here. So I want to appreciate you for joining and invite the audience to follow Dream Channel AI. You can click on their profile right here. And I do encourage you to send out some tweets after definitely with some of those videos for people to check it out. But I really hope that I get to host another AMA with you. These frequent updates are awesome. So thank you for joining again today.