Bankless - Is Crypto Still in a Bull Run? | RSA+DH

Episode Date: June 26, 2024

Is the crypto bull market over? The crypto sentiment has suddenly flipped bearish. The skeptics are saying that the ETH ETF will amount to nothing. Gox will dump on you. There are no new crypto use cases. There’s too much token supply. The bearish list goes on. So what gives? Is this just summertime slowness or is the bull market over? ------ ✨ Mint the episode on Zora ✨ https://zora.co/collect/zora:0x0c294913a7596b427add7dcbd6d7bbfc7338d53f/21 ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🐙KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://k.xyz/bankless-pod-q2    ⁠ 🌐 TRANSPORTER | CROSS CHAINS WITH CONFIDENCE https://transporter.io/ 🔗CELO | CEL2 COMING SOON https://bankless.cc/Celo 🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle ⚡️ CARTESI | LINUX-POWERED ROLLUPS https://bankless.cc/CartesiGovernance    ⚖️ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM ⁠https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum  ------ TIMESTAMPS & RESOURCES 0:00 Intro 1:15 Current Market Sentiment https://x.com/splitcapital/status/1805346083981201775  https://x.com/biancoresearch/status/1805341535967527200  https://x.com/SplitCapital/status/1805349168229367936  https://x.com/cryptobran_/status/1805331025905729983  https://x.com/mrjasonchoi/status/1804107651854594071  https://x.com/tmnxeq/status/1804913082571071679 12:49 ETH ETF is Bearish https://x.com/Rewkang/status/1804735595111211104 16:26 Gox will Dump on You  https://x.com/WatcherGuru/status/1805168222645244311  https://x.com/RyanSAdams/status/1804138577204289900 19:20 No New Crypto Use Cases https://x.com/0xCygaar/status/1801667353207521364  https://x.com/divine_economy/status/1802510497633198565  https://x.com/milesdeutscher/status/1800190273517211699 26:09 Any Bulls Left?  https://x.com/econoar/status/1805447135141544280  https://x.com/milesdeutscher/status/1805249025643581761  https://x.com/fejau_inc/status/1805242741494005780      https://x.com/intangiblecoins/status/1805244957252284916  https://x.com/intangiblecoins/status/1805244973261914582  https://x.com/pythianism/status/1805608579422208061  https://x.com/pythianism/status/1804987849059787113  https://x.com/iamDCinvestor/status/1804998114090389795  https://x.com/cburniske/status/1805308535611502763  https://imgur.com/DXcyjMS 43:27  Closing & Disclosures ------ Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures 

Bankless Nation question for you today on bankless takes is the bull market over David I was scanning crypto Twitter Catching up on the weekend and it certainly seemed like it by the sentiment everyone's bearish Yeah why when why why did crypto sentiment flip bearish it was like it was like four things it was the eatth ETF will be nothing was a take gawks mount gox is going to dump on you it was there's no new crypto use cases this cycle uh it's not like 2021 there's too much token supply no new retail yeah No new retail. All the flood is compounded. Germany's dumping on us.

A entire country. Yeah, what the heck? Come on, Germany. Get with it. So I guess the question for today, is this just summertime slowness or is the, the bull market over? Did we hit all time high? Yeah, was that it? Yeah, was that it?

I mean, so the last bull market, 2021, I think everyone said, like, ended really abruptly and kind of like prematurely. So, like, are we getting that twice? Is that just like what crypto is? Maybe crypto is all just like we're destined to be sub five trillion. million dollar market cap. That's what we are. I think that's the topic for today, right? We want to gauge the sentiment. We want to talk about the bear case for a while. And then maybe the other side of that, maybe the bull case and what we actually think towards the end of this. David, as we're going to this episode, prices were down, actually significantly, like a fair amount, but they kind of popped

before this episode. So no idea what prices will be by the time you were listening. But like we got a little bit of a, should we call it a dead cap bounce? Can I call it that? So Bitcoin dropped down below $60,000 to $59.5. We are currently almost back up to $62,000. Ether did something pretty similar. Ether's at $3,400. We've seen these prices recently. We've seen these prices, what was it?

Like before the ETH ETF was approved, Ether got down to $2,900. Its bottom was $3,300. So, like, we are at a higher or low, but sentiment is at a lower low. Like, sent him to me, it's just like, you know why I'm jumping. All right, guys, so that's the episode today. We're going to give you the diagnosis here on what's going on in Bearville. Is the Bull Market over? And what do these things mean?

The Mount Gocks news, if you haven't heard about that, we'll get into it. ETH ETF flows. Maybe they're not what people will hope. We'll get into all of these topics and more. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible, including Bear or Bull. the number one place to go. No, no, David.

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24. So that was, I guess, on yesterday. It was Monday. We're recording the 25th. Today marks the largest drawdown on Bitcoin in more than a year. We felt the knock-on effects of a slow bleed down from 70K, but really hard to put to words how strong today's selling was relative to the last few months. We got an 8% sell-off of Bitcoin, candle down. In a one day, in a one-day candle. That's a lot. Okay. Like, no wonder people are failing bearish after this. What's going on here? Well, there's a bunch of of different things, all putting it together. I think the big news that we're going to talk about is the Mount Cox distributions. That is kind of the new thing that's in the meta. And if you've

been around in crypto before, you know that Mount Cox always comes back. There's been this supply of Mount Gox of Bitcoins that is perceived to be going to be sold by the market as soon as Mount Gox creditors get their Bitcoins. Mount Cox, the of course infamous crypto exchange that got hacked 15% of the bitcoins were recovered and over the last like 11 years creditors of mount gotx have been squabbling over like the distribution details and it seems to be like that those arguments those debates have finally come to a head and they have finally determined a release date for the mount gox coins and this has created just the bearish action like the price action perceived to be the reason behind the bearish price action but i would call it like it's not just mount

Gox, it's just like Mount Gox is like the next sucker punch out of just like a seemingly lack of ability to get some momentum. Like we, we crossed all time highs in Bitcoin and that was it. And then we went down below them. Like we haven't, we haven't had the bull market that we wanted. And so I think Mount Cox is just like another sucker punch to the gut. And people are tired of just like, why am I getting punched? I thought I was getting a bull market.

Yeah, they're saying this wasn't the bull market. We were promised and we hoped for. So what's going on here? is that kind of the end? This is Jim Bianco commenting on that 8% down, like the largest Bitcoin candle down in a year. If this holds, it will be Bitcoin's worst day since March 2023. You know what happened in March 2023? Not only were we still kind of in the bear market, it was the Silicon Valley Bank panic. Remember all that? That chaos? That's what precipitated it last time in 8% down. And like I guess maybe Mount Gox and other just bearish sentiment.

precipitated at this time. How about this? To give you an image of how much net delta was sold today across futures and spot Bitcoin major exchanges on Bitcoin alone, we sold more than 57,000 Bitcoin or 3.4 billion net. That's how much dollars was sold into the market. So implying that there's also that much buying. But like, yeah, so like $3.4 billion, like what hit the market in a sell pressure. Here's a colorful chart.

What are you shown here? This is a chart of Bitcoin as well as like a bunch of column art alt coins, just random alt coins, like light coin, Cardano, Doge, XRP, YFI. And Bitcoin is down worse than all of them. Bitcoin in this chart is down like 2.3% while most of these things are down like 1% or less. And this is uncharacteristic where like Bitcoin is usually the safe haven. It's the blue chip. And as you go down the market cap stack as things get more illiquid. they usually just get absolutely wrecked when Bitcoin goes down 2%.

Like Bitcoin going down 2%, that means other things are going down 6% or greater. But this is kind of the inverse. And so like what's up with these uncharacteristic, like decreasing Bitcoin price? Usually not what happens. Also saw this tweet thread that kind of summed it up from Jason Choi. He says he titles the whole thread. It's kind of a long one. Welcome to Beartown.

I'm not going to read it at all. But he goes through all of these different metrics that he's seeing that makes it feel kind of like crypto feel topy, let's say. And I'll point at this one, a qualitative observation. He talks about large VC funds and kind of like LPs being more reluctant to kind of like invest. So LP capital in private crypto funds kind of drying up. And he also says this, celebrity coins usually signal an increasingly frothy market. While these once hailed as crypto Twitter's heroes, they're now castigated as the scapegoat for the campaigns of the market, all reliable signs of late cycle. the TLDR is the qualitative signals that he, Jason, observed in late 2021, have reared their heads in alternative forms today.

It's been kind of a weird cycle for that too, right? Like, we already got the celebrity involvement, Iggy Azalea and like Andrew Tate, like watching their own points. Yeah, really? And it's like these tokens have pumped and then sold off. So Jason is saying, hey, there's these qualitative metrics too that make this feel a little topy and like falling off the top, including celebrity involvement and celebrity endorsement. There's another take I saw my timeline that I thought was just like emblematic of the times. In quotes, crypto trading close to all time high arguments are logically flawed as they lack

timing and benchmark decisions. Yes, crypto is still trading below 2021 highs. That's a problem. It's a sign of weakness, not a strength. And so I think I've said this. Maybe we have said this. It's just like, yo, like ether still below all time highs. Bitcoin crossed all time highs, but fell back down below.

still plenty of like upside left in this market. And this individual is giving the opposite side of the account. Like the SPY is massively at all time highs. Like many equities are at huge all time highs and crypto is not. That is a sign of weakness, not strength. And so just like another bullet or bearish take that has been like circling around like my feed these last weeks. And I'm kind of reminded of the episode we did with Chris Berniske not too long ago, the last episode we did where bearish takes go viral when everyone is bearish.

And of course, vice versa. Bullish takes also go viral when when like the market is like looking for for bullishness. And like bearish takes were going viral over the last like three days, four days. Yeah, sentiment is reflexive. But I do think there's something to this underlying tweet is like people are looking over at the S&P and like stock market. And they're seeing all time highs over there. And they're looking at crypto and they're seeing like no all time highs, nothing close. And so like there's almost a question of like what happened.

maybe this, the glass half full interpretation of that is like, wow, this is a sign of weakness. Is there something structurally wrong with crypto? The reason we have all-time highs in the stock market, but we don't have them in crypto. One interpretation of this is, has the whole market liquidity kind of pivoted to AI. And Vida is like sucking in all of these gains and it's like smoking things, whereas crypto is stagnant and off all-time highs. So that's kind of the sentiment right now that we're looking at. So I think we should dissect these one by one, kind of like the fud.

And then we'll talk about the bull case too. The ETH ETF will be nothing. Gox is going to dump on you. There's no new use cases in crypto. There's too much token supplies. Let's take some of these one by one. David, there was a thread that went somewhat viral on the impact of the Ethereum ETF, an analysis. So many folks had been saying, including, like, you know, our take, bankless take, is that

Ethereum ETF is going to be absolutely massive. Not necessarily... Godfye is going to love the ETHETF. Yes, and not necessarily immediately, but inflows will steadily come in, and we'll get, like, 20% of the inflows or so of the Bitcoin ETF, and maybe that's a conservative estimate,

and those flows will be good for Ethereum because there's not very much ETH supply on the market. This take, this analysis from Andrew King, does the exact opposite. So his analysis is that the ETFs will be basically nothing. What's some of the summary of Andrew's take on this? Yeah, he says, personally, I believe the expectations of crypto natives are overinflated and disconnected from the true preferences of tradfai allocators. So I think that's kind of the main punchline here is that

the true preferences of tradfai allocators is actually just not on the radar of crypto natives. We just aren't tuned to what they actually want. And he goes in and says some of the things that we actually have frequently said about Ether and why TradFi might like it. Like, Ether, it's a cash flowing asset. It does a buyback and burn. Like, you can model this out. You can put it in DCF. This is something that TradFi can reason about. It's a tech asset. But then Andrew Kangan goes into some of the actual metrics with, you know, $1.5 billion 30-day annualized revenue gives Ethereum Ether a 300x price of sales ratio, which is like very expensive, with negative earnings to PE ratio after inflation. He says that how, like, if we, it's a tech asset, these metrics are dog shit.

It's a dog shit tech asset in the ground scheme of things. And then he also goes to say that, like, well, we got net Bitcoin inflows at around $5 billion, $5 billion of buy pressure. There's $15 billion of net inflows into the Bitcoin ETFs, but some of that is doing a bunch of a delta neutral stuff. So some of that Bitcoin ETF inflows is also selling on some different exchange. So net inflows are $5 billion. That's Andrew King's math. And then he thinks when you, you know, do the how the correlation with how much is going to go into ether, he's thinking 0.5 to 1.5 billion, which is a much lower number. That's not a, that's not a very high number at all. He says this in a conclusion. Before the ETF launch, I expect ETH to trade from 3K to 3,800. So that's

within range of where we are now. After the ETF launch, my expectation is 2,400 to 3,000. 300. So David, a price point lower than we are now after the Ethereum ETF products go live, right? It's like I think a lot of the bull case would be like obviously new inflows we're going to go up. And he's saying we go down because the inflows will actually disappoint crypto investors and the market in total. He also in another tweet like on the back of this compared Ethereum charts and the eth Bitcoin ratio to Intel actually. He shows like kind of Intel, sorry, it hit an all-time high and then just like never fully recovered in terms of all-time highs against some sort of indecy.

And the question is, has Ethereum lost at Steam too? Will the ETH-EETF flows disappoint? Anyway, we got to get, we got to get the bare cases out before we get to the bull case. But that is the bear case on the ETH ETH. And we talk about Mount Gox again. How many times are we talked about Mount Cox in this podcast? All right, Mount Gox. This was actually breaking news.

After how many years has it been, David? 11 years? Is the Mount Gox? Is all of that supply finally going to become unleashed on the market? What are we looking at here? Not all of it, but yes. We actually are getting a date that is going to be early July is what they said, which is, you know, that's like two weeks.

So the rumor is that $9 billion of Bitcoin is going to become available and distributed to creditors of Mount Gox. It is perceived by the market, the classic like Mount Gawks flood is that, well, these creditors have had their capital locked up in these like Mount Gawks distribution court cases for 11 years. And Bitcoin has, you know, what's 11 years of price action? It's like really, really good. A lot. It's a lot. And so they're going to sell.

Clearly they're going to sell. They're like forced holders for 11 years. That's going to be selling pressure. And so it's been perceived by the market that when these Mount Gox coins finally get put into the hands of their owners per. the distribution of the courts, then all of those people are going to sell. And that's why, like, this Mount Cox flat has been, like, overhanging the market as long as I've been in crypto. Oh, yeah. In 2017, it's just been this, like, meme that has just been passed down through the generations. Yeah, it's like one of those, like, China's banning crypto type recurring, like

cycles. Mount Cox, like, supply is going to become released. But this time, it actually looks like it's going to be true. And we're talking about a substantial amount of Bitcoin, $9 billion worth of Bitcoin. Earlier in this podcast, we just talked about how $3.4 billion was net sold on Monday. That was the big red candle day. Yeah. And so the market is like, we got nine more billion to get sold. Yeah.

So maybe like obviously part of the Monday price jump was, your price drop was front running some of that activity. But like we actually haven't seen the pressure. So when is that happening? Am I reading July? Early July. Yeah. And does it all come in a lump sum? All nine billion is available right away?

No. we'll talk about that but does the market know that i'm not so sure interesting and to add insult to injury david do you know that germany the country of germany is actually dumping on us where did where did germany get bitcoin yeah they they got it in a seizure so there was i don't know it's like i'm just not the pirate bay but it's some sort of you know like yeah a black market gray market type of thing they seized three billion yeah german government sees three billion dollars worth of bitcoin They've started to sell, and they're continuing to sell. You can see their transactions on chain.

The entire country of Germany. Arkham is doing this. So, yeah, they're paper handing. I don't know. Maybe they have to, by law. It feels like maybe they should kind of, they're going to regret that in 10 years. They should change that.

Anyway, they're dumping on us too. It's not just Mount Gawks. And that's not all. The FUD kind of continues. So how about this, we have no new use cases in Crypto Take? Like, the best we can do are these cheap, celebrity meme coins we got nothing new what's uh what take are we looking at here yeah this is uh who i wouldn't say that this take is uh this take is actually old this is june 14th so like a little

bit over a week ago but it's a take that has been like brewing and a lot of the recent like i'm saying a lot of the recent sucker punches that we've got just recently the the mount gox the germany selling all this kind of stuff is like layering on like this previously like nihilist sentiment about the current state of crypto. And so all of these like current events that's happening this week just feel way worse because we have these like there's no new use cases for crypto this cycle. So Saigar, he tweets out 2017, we had ICOs. 2020, we had DFI summer.

2021. We had NFTs. 2024. What the hell do we have? He says the real mania begins when a new paradigm comes around and brings in new entrance to crypto. My guest to the innovation this time around will evolve around consumer friendly apps that are unlocked by better tooling.

but where is the apps? Where are the apps? And so we have these ideas about where the apps are. But like right now we have celebrity meme coins. And Jason Drillo is coming back to launch his like fourth or fifth like rug that he's been in crypto. Oh, he's done this before? He's done this like four times before. Jason Zerlo.

Zach XPT is like in his mentions and his replies like every type of tweet saying like just FYI, this guy's a scammer. He actually got community noted by the Twitter app saying like, hey, by the way, this guy has done this before. this is like his fourth time. Like don't buy his bullshit. And so like, no, you don't get to put like celebrity meme coins as like the, the mania that is bringing people in in 2024. Am I right that he usually does this like near cycle tops too? He doesn't do it in bare markets, that's for sure.

Yeah, he doesn't do it in bare markets. This is a David Phillips take, which is related. This has to be the strangest era in crypto I can remember. The tech is finally ready to be used at scale, but almost nothing useful is being built. This is nearly the exact opposite of how it was in 2017 and 2021. 2017 we just discovered programmable money and smart contracts and some early use cases like ICOs as a result of that that was a magical time 2021 it was the world waking up to defy and what do we have this time david that's a good question what do we have this time

yeah we don't that's why all the apps that i'm using are the apps that i've been using that's why it's a weird market cycle um this is uh miles making the case that uh you know like crypto media is suffering as well crypto youtube views are disparate proportionally lagging the Bitcoin price. I don't know if these are his YouTube views. Oh, it's a whole bunch of... So even we're in there. I thought that's what kind of why I included in this.

So this is just all crypto, like YouTube views. So like we're on there. Altcoin Daily is here. Bitboy crypto is there. Just like Data Dash. A bunch of just like YouTuber, crypto YouTubers. And the Bitcoin price is up, epic at all time highs, but just like views on YouTube have not followed.

Like we had our like Mark Cuban interview in the middle of 2021 that got like literally at one million views. And we don't, we don't have anything like that this cycle. Like the people searching crypto terms on YouTube just aren't the same as it was in 2021. Yeah, again, it's retail. It's not here.

We don't have any tweets on this, but we could add to the, like, there's a feeling of too much supply. The number of tokens out there are at all-time highs. There's a lot of VC unlocks that have been coming. And people are like, you know, people are getting sick of the air drop meta. People are getting sick of the, you know, high,

low float, high FD. TV like tokens. WorldCoin is getting its first unlock in like four weeks coming up soon. So like that's going to be fine to watch. Like if you're a WorldCorn investor like you're selling. That's what you're doing. You're up a Bajillion X. Well, I don't know what it is now.

But I remember seeing like a close to a hundred billion dollar market cap for this thing. At least from, sorry, not market cap. Fully diluted valuation at least, which is absolutely crazy. All right. So that's the bare case. I feel like we've established that enough. David, give me some hope, man. where's the hope coming from?

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The views are down, man. The views are down. Here's some hope, maybe, from Eric.eath. Once crypto Twitter is bearish, you're too late. rest in peace. This is something that I definitely learned pretty like early in my, well,

late in my first cycle, but like relatively early in my crypto career is like if everyone around you is bearish, that's because the price, the bearish price action has already happened. Yeah.

If everyone is around you is bearish, like you can't sell, but you can't sell on that bearish. You can sell for whatever reason. You can sell whatever you want. But you can't sell because like, oh, everyone's bearish. Now I'm going to sell.

Everyone's bearish because the price went down. And so like, and being bearish is like, bearish and it's being price. waste in. And so, like, you are not like, oh, everyone around us mean bearish. Maybe I should sell. I don't think that's like a valid statement. And so this is why you always have like the line of be greedy when everyone's fearful and be fearful when everyone's greedy. Right now everyone's fearful. Everyone's scared right now. Everyone's in dire straits. Yeah. By the way, on this, because it's

bearish, you got to focus on the bearish. But the inverse is also true. It's like once crypto Twitter gets really bullish, uh, you better think about your sell plan like in particular. start executing on that. Yeah, I think I remember talking about this take, and I generally agree when there's retail here, but I think all of crypto Twitter was extremely bullish, like the end of 2020. I'm talking, I'm talking drunk, stupid, exuberant, like super cycle, that type of bullish. Yeah, we hadn't uttered the word super cycle. Yeah.

I'm talking about that level of bullishness, not the kind that we see, which was like relatively tame bullishness. But anyway, so Eric says, like, you know, once people are already bearish, it's, it's, it's too late. And there's like nothing. Don't do anything, basically. We need to sell when everyone's bullish. A tweet from Miles here who says, it's equally as easy to make a bull case too.

And this is in response to Andrew King, who elicited like all the reasons to be bearish. So Michael just responds. It's also easy to be bullish. We have the election in November, which people think is going to, A, put eyes on crypto and just be, Donald Trump's going to be the pro-crypto president. That's, that's, he's going to put attention around it. Shift in regular story stance towards crypto. That's definitely true.

ETH, ETH, ETF, imminent. Equities rotate their profits into crypto. And also, the market's oversold. The sentiment is Max Barish. And so basically saying, like, hey, bearish takes go viral when everyone's feeling bearish. But that doesn't mean, like, bullish takes aren't valid. And so he just lifts off a bunch of, in my opinion, valid bullish takes.

The glasses half full. You can look at it from the opposite person. perspective as well. Let's get it to some details, though, on some of these actual bear cases. Let's start with maybe Mount Gawks. When you get into the details, I'm not sure how bearish it actually is. What's this tweet? This is the take that insiders who knew that this Mount Cox disbursement announcement was coming, front ran that announcement because we know that Gox, like, disbursement fud has moved the market, frequently moved the market in the past. And so the real one, which this is the one we got, we got the actual real one of like

the tokens are coming, the bitcoins are getting distributed. Insiders are front run around that by just selling the bitcoins, which made the price go down. And then the announcement was made, which means that this was already priced in. Kind of another side to the same coin of Eric Conner's take of like, if everyone's bearish, then it's too late. And then he continues to say after, in my opinion, this probably means the nuke on the announcement was the final pricing in. I continue to view the macro front as quite bullish. So I've been confused about crypto's weakness lately. This may all make sense now because of the announcement. Based on all this view as the final pricing in, it's time to deploy a bit of cash today.

I like how he said deploy, David. Yeah, so he's basically saying the market's reaction list all already happened. When you saw that 8% drop on Bitcoin, that was the candle down that just now priced all of that selling in. And it's like we don't have to worry about it from here on now. Alex Thorne, who works at Galaxy, who understands how these markets work, they do just, and they do a bunch of market analysis, market structure stuff. He says that it's, there's a chance, that people are overshooting the bearishness. He says, creditors have been stuck in Mount Gawks bankruptcy for 10 plus years. Finally, trustee says in-kind distribution of Bitcoin will begin in July.

We think we as Galaxy will think that fewer coins will be distributed than people think and it will cause less Bitcoin cell pressure than the market expects here's why. And then basically it goes to a bunch of analysis that says the real number of distributed Bitcoin is 65,000 bitcoins, not the 142,000 that's frequently reported, which means that $4 billion is distributed, not $8 billion. Also, the people that are being distributed to the bitcoins aren't necessarily like these long-term holders because you can sell your claims on Mount Cox. Now, Gox claims have been like... Was already super liquid? A decently liquid market since this, like for many, many times.

And so people have bought claims. And the people that have bought claims are like hedge funds, people that are trying to buy Bitcoin at a discount, like long-term holders. And so a lot of that cell pressure has actually already been expressed in the private markets. And so of the bitcoins that are actually going to go to these long-term holders, the people that have been identified as like, I'm a long-term holder of these Mount Gawks claims are by definition long-term holders. They had the option to leave. And so they could have left.

Alex brought the full analysis here. And I'm going to say plus one for Alex, like he was dead on right. Do you remember we had him on the podcast? We were talking about the Bitcoin ETF and kind of like vloat. and the analysis there. And he nailed that. Like, he totally killed it. Yeah.

So, you know, in this type of case, like, he might be more informed than the general market about this. You know, like one other tidbit, David, is not just the Bitcoin that unlocks from Mount Cox. It's all the Bitcoin Cash. Okay. That is bearish. That part is very bearish.

That's very bearish for Bitcoin Cash. It's going to zero. Oh, my God. Imagine all of that liquidity of Bitcoin Cash. Like, people are going to. All that, the infancy of liquidity for Bitcoin Cash is. going to be a race to hit the sell button on that one. So maybe don't be in Bitcoin cash would be some advice that holds. Okay, how about the ETH-ETF FUD? Does that hold? Perhaps. I mean,

we're not going to know until after the fact, but there's plenty of reasons to be bullish in addition to the perceived bearishness that people are giving takes of. I mean, the real question is, does the ETH-E-TF attract a meaningful amount of capital? That's always been the question. Some people are saying it's not going to. Some people are saying it is going to now just the loudness of the bears are getting louder because this is it's bear's time. Bear's taste go viral during bear times. However, this is another tweet from Zahir. ETH CME open interest in ETH terms has officially hit an all-time high. And so this is the ETH EA, the CME open interest for ether futures because you don't have the actual ETH, but the ether futures is at all-time high

interest and that just means like buying pressure basically. And so well I mean that's a pretty clear sentiment of just like demand. Maybe there's some trading going on here. Maybe they're going to try and do some arbitrage but just like you can't say it's bearish if future's interest is that. It's very very tradfai. I mean it's the freaking CME right? So open interest all time high is is kind of bullish. Additionally, ETH supply on centralized exchanges are at all time lows. This is also I think a lot of people are missed the fact that like this is also because exchanges are staking the ETH. So there is supply on exchanges, but they have put it away. The supply is off the order books, but ether is being staked by exchanges.

So that's why this like this, uh, eth supply on exchanges at all time low. I don't know how much signal there is in that, but nonetheless, like, it's not on the order books. It's crazy all time low too. I guess it's staking explains a portion of this, but probably not all of it, right? Yeah. It's definitely not all of it. Here's a retort from a DC investor, which is like kind of like, striking the balance here.

He says a few things. Yeah, some people are saying, by the way, that Ethereum Metaf getting launched in the summer is like Max Berish because, you know, Tradfai is selling May and then go away. Everyone's on summer vacations. D.C. is like, yeah, it probably would have been more bullish if they launched in fall rather than the summer, but it's better early than never. At least we have it. And so what if it starts out a little bit slow? It can kind of like catch up. He also says, I don't expect fireworks out of the gate.

And there could be some initial sell the news, just like with Bitcoin. But it's more about the slow type meltup. So even if we don't see fireworks out of the gate, it's like all of the inflows getting tracked on a weekly basis. You see these ETFs that are like 25% ETH and 75% Bitcoin. Those will start moving into Tradfai circles. And also he said, you know the comment we were reading earlier from Andrew Kang about Heath being sort of a cash flow asset?

D.C. says that's just the cherry on top. I don't think Wall Street will analyze ETH on a cash flow. as this is not the value prop of ETH. Instead, he says, ETH will be pitched as a tech platform with financial and other apps built on top of it, right? So it's not necessarily about P.E. Certainly, Bitcoin is not being rated on a, on a P.E. ratio perspective. And so Tradfai will take a broader take on the whole asset class. So that's a take that maybe balances the difference between the bear and the bull. And I think is, you know, pretty rational. Yeah. Yeah, that's right.

All right. So we talked about Gox. We talked about the ETH ETF. What about this, hey, there's no new use cases thing. And I mean, there's truth to that. We haven't seen any breakout use cases this cycle. Do you have a silver lining on that, David? Not like a global silver lining for the entire market, but I will say polymarket at the prediction market platform. They have open interest in all-time highs in activity. So I don't know if they measure it in TVL, but just like the most amount of like gambling bets, money being placed on polymarket bets is at all-time highs. And so that's pretty cool. Like it's great to actually have like prediction market. taking off in a very big way. Yeah. So that's, we got one. We got one. Yeah, I'll actually plus one

that because like, you know, prediction markets were an old use case for, for crypto. And I think like, we don't need new use cases because the old use cases were pretty damn awesome. We have ideas in crypto. Let's just dig some up from the grave. Exactly. Like, DFI hasn't been fully realized. Uniswap is now doing trillions in value. Stable coins are just continuing to rise. That's going to be transformational on its own. When you look at some of the DFI blue chip, like Maker and Ave collateralized lending, that's all like all time highs in terms of profit as well. Defive revenues are at all time highs in like a very big way. Yeah.

So the old use cases, I'm actually more bullish on than some like net new thing that we haven't discovered. Let's just finish up the old use cases because like we're talking about a global financial system for the world. That's huge. That's absolutely massive. And we haven't been able to realize that because we've needed better onboarding. We've needed better UX.

And now we have cheap block space. We have easy wallets. they're kind of getting there. We have exchanges in the game, like base is going to onboard so many people from crypto exchanges on chain for the first time. We have Tradfai liquidity getting to Stable Coins, on chain treasuries. BlackRock is on chain right now. We have a solve for fragmentation, I think.

Vitalik put a tweet out, and he's just like, we don't need full synchronous composability. The internet runs on asynchronous composability. What we kind of need is some adoption of U.S. standards, basically, right? and he goes through a few short-term gains and how we can get there. So the building blocks are in place for user experience, and I feel like we are closer than ever to tying all of that together to realizing the old use cases. We don't need new use cases.

Crypto is a use case in itself. We will definitely take some new use cases. Take what we can get at this time. I will say just like a lot of the conversation that you and I have on this show, and especially when we talk about market and stuff. that like we do, is like the market, the crypto market is so short term. It is so short term focused. Oh, yeah. We think of things maybe 10 days in advance. Some drama will happen and we will forget about it like a week later. And I think you and me like we are just long term people.

We've been here for we I got you out in in 2016. I got in 2017. We read the whole content editorial policy of bank lists is like thinking long term long time frames. So like we don't really do well in like short term markets. So because like why? Why would you care about the short term? Just like, just let things cook. And there's like so many things that I just want to let things cook. Coinbase fixing like the leading the charge on like fixing UX with like the base and the integrated wallet. And then getting base up to a gig of gas and like onboarding a bunch of people.

Circles marketing campaigns, BitWise's marketing campaigns. Coinbase's ads. These are all like phenomenal like marketing campaigns for the industry. Stable coin growth is slowly grinding up. revenue and yield of defy apps, like I said, has been up. BlackRock tokenizing Biddle and like they're not stopping there. Like all like Larry Fink is bullish on tokenization. Just like a lot of things, you just need to let cook.

Give it a minute. Give it a minute, guys. The Bitcoin ETF, which has like a pause and flows. That includes the ETH ETF once we get it. Like everything just needs to cook. But like time is on our side with all of these things. And I think like with the Bitcoin price, going hitting all time highs, but not discovering price action.

and ether's not there. It's just like, just let things go. Just let things go. Yeah, I totally agree. And if this is your first cycle or your second cycle and you're kind of like panicking, this is this asking yourself, is this the end of the bull market?

Just realize everyone always asked themselves this question in the midst of a bull market. Like, it happens every single time. And also, this bull market has been just so mellow and not crazy. It has been. The only place is it's been crazy is in like illiquid salon and meme coins.

but like that's not it's not like the whole entire market has not been crazy so like my mind is like it's a bear bull market over and like it kind of hasn't started we have not started like we've just been slowly cooking this entire time this is chris brininski he's retweeting something he tweeted in the depths of the bear market november 12th 22 right after ftx he says bullish from near the bottom hope to see y'all at 10 trillion he's talking about the total market cap of of crypto we're at about two trillion 2.3 trillion, 2.5 trillion, something like that. He thinks we'll go to 10 trillion. And he says this. He repost that and he said, unwaveringly, 10 trillion remains the target. We're still on target. Like, that is like around the estimates of what we've been talking about as well. In fact,

I think that might be the base case estimate, sort of a conservative estimate, but he thinks we're still on target too. Yeah, on target for 10 trillion stable coins. David, should we end with some charts here? What's this? I feel like this could still be in the... Two charts that I pulled out from my trader friend who does this way better than I. And he posted these charts on June 22nd, 21st, 22nd, right before the crash. And he goes, I feel like this could still be in the cards.

And he is showing the Bitcoin price falling down to literally exactly where it fell, $59,000. And same thing with the ETH price, both the Bitcoin and the ETH price falling. down to exactly where they fell and then bouncing back up. So I'm just kind of shouting out him that he kind of called that. For the next part for him to be right, we have to go up. But there are traders out there who are saying like, yeah, first we're going to go down and then we're going to go up. And we've actually just did the down part.

Yeah. Hopefully we do the up part. So that was the hard. But like before up, we could be like in stasis for a while. We could be back to no man's land. We could be in like what we sell, call the crab market. Like this could be a slow summer. Like what, March?

Yeah, and I'm totally fine with a slow summer. And maybe we could kind of like summarize and close this out, right? My take here, David, is the crypto gods have blessed us yet again. We get another mid-bull cycle accumulation opportunity this summer. And it's like, obviously you have to buy with a long-term in mind. So think in years, not months when you're buying crypto asset. And if it's not worth holding for the long term, like, don't buy it. And if you're scared, dollar cost average in.

And if you're terrified, buy more lump sum, right? But be prepared to wait. This could take a while. Be prepared to wait years, right? So that you can like every single month not be like, oh, is price going up yet? Is price going up yet? And overall, I would say just like for as long as I've been in crypto, I'm the least worried that I've ever been about my positions and about this bull market. It feels pretty secure.

Like building more than ever, we've solved some fundamental problems. we've got regulatory tailwinds that are starting to move in our direction. Things that actually matter, yeah. Yeah, the biggest risk, I think, is being off sides and getting shaken out by these markets, right? And so, like, not people lose more money in crypto by actually not having exposure to crypto, right? Or selling at the wrong times. And I would not want to be offside in this market either. But that's what we always say.

That is what we always say. And I'll end with something else we always say. of course you know crypto is risky you could lose what you put in but we're headed west this is the frontier not for everyone but we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey thanks a lot hope to see you all at 10 sorry for murphy hold on is his birthday but he's being an ass