The Wolf Of All Streets - $500 Billion For Bitcoin | Ethereum On The Cusp Of A Massive Pump

Starting point is 00:00:00 Donald Trump had some interesting words about Bitcoin. John Deaton is running against Elizabeth Warren. The SEC is under fire. Ethereum is pumping. We have a lot to talk about today. It's myself and NLW, and this is The Friday Five. Let's go. the music play having one of those days right now but hopefully it's working because to me i look like max headroom and i'm bouncing all around the screen and i don't know i'm gonna try to bring nlw on right now uh i think it's gonna work i hit add to the stage can you hear me i can did i look glitchy did i look like i was dancing or is it just you you look normal just just on your end well i apologize that you're gonna have to now edit this for uh your show did a really good job here but listen so we we have to audible we had a we have a bunch of stories obviously lined up for the friday five we have

Starting point is 00:01:14 you know uh texas companies doing the sec john deaton and elizabeth usdc on tron but i think we first have to just pivot here and audible and talk about the fact that Donald Trump is talking about Bitcoin again. He said it's taken on a life of its own. He says he's not a fan, obviously, of cryptocurrencies in the past, that he prefers the dollar. But he said, you probably have to do some regulation, but many people are embracing it. More and more, I'm seeing people wanting to pay Bitcoin. I can live with it one way or the other. He said, you know, we once again have someone saying that people are doing Bitcoin. And he's saying that he sees people wanting to pay Bitcoin, which I highly doubt. But hey, let's talk about it.

Starting point is 00:01:56 So let's put it in context of the only other time that he's spoken about this. He tweeted very famously, I'm no fan of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. A couple of things about that. One, it was right after Facebook announced Libra, and it was very clearly a shot across the bow of Libra wanting to do this sort of non-sovereign Mark Zuckerberg coin much more than it was about crypto. People widely assumed at the time that the tweet had been written, at least in large concept by Steve Mnuchin, then Treasury Secretary, who obviously did have a gripe with the industry. It never really felt like Trump had super conviction around this, which was sort of affirmed by the fact that he's put out a couple of NFT collections

Starting point is 00:02:40 in the meantime. And so I think that this was always going to be an interesting question on how that position would evolve now that Mnuchin's nowhere near them. It's a few years on. This is definitely a softening. It's a sort of a walk back of the harshness of that stance without a full embrace. It could be a political determination based on the fact that so many of the other Republicans in the field have been more proactive and sort of excited about it. I actually think that the positioning of, I'm noticing people want more of it, is a pretty smart one politically, frankly, in the sense that it doesn't really, it allows the politician saying that to look like they're responding to the will of the people, which obviously makes it very different, you know, from a kind of flip flopping position.

Starting point is 00:03:30 But it's notable, you know, it's an errant comment in some way. But the fact that, you know, it was chosen to be a topic of conversation, I think, is pretty significant. Yeah, I think that this is probably some of the influence of a fake Ramaswamy, obviously, who's been very pro Bitcoin and is one of the potential vice presidential candidates for Trump. Like you said, I think that he's not really giving anything away here, but he's saying whatever. And honestly, whatever is as pro Bitcoin a platform as you could expect to get from either of the guys running and sets him massively apart from the Biden administration's platform of being aggressively anti-Bitcoin. So this is actually probably a pretty well-planned tactical move to just say nothing as opposed to I'm against it, because that makes you, without having to endorse it, without having to go out on a limb,

Starting point is 00:04:23 you're basically making yourself the more pro- candidates, all the sliding scale and relative to your opponent. Yeah, well, and the other thing is, too, you know, not to get too deep into the American political weeds, but for a fairly long time at this point, you know, Trump has dictated the norms and shapes of the of the GOP and sort of, you know, he is the party line. And what this does is it basically gives cloud cover for Republicans who care about this issue to continue caring about it and being loud about it without it interfering with or contradicting, you know, the effective party leader. So, you know, if you're a Tom Emmer or someone like that, who, by the way, has not necessarily had a great relationship with Trump historically, his whole candidacy for a speaker

Starting point is 00:05:10 was basically destroyed by Trump. This at least sort of signals that you can continue to do the thing that you're doing. So it's a good thing for pro-Bitcoin GOPers as well. Yeah, that makes perfect sense. Let's dig in now to some anti-SEC sentiment, something that we love here. Now, this company is not huge. Texas crypto company sues SEC for overreach on digital assets, but it is nice to see that we have companies continuing to take the fight to the SEC, which is something that would have probably been unheard of a year or two ago. This is Fort Worth-based company Legilex and lobbying group Crypto Freedom Alliance of Texas claiming the SEC has asserted jurisdiction over the industry

Starting point is 00:05:49 without a clear statutory mandate. They're trying to launch a cryptocurrency platform called Legit.Exchange. And this goes back to the question of what the hell can and cannot we list on this exchange? Yeah. So I think the way to think about this is as the inverse Promethean. So Promethean in the crypto industry's estimation was effectively a plant exchange, not a real thing that the SEC has used to try to argue that their stance of you can just come in and register is legitimate, right? They held them up as an example of you can get these special broker licenses and they put them in front of Congress. Well, it turns out that they actually couldn't offer any of these assets under the license that they got. And so

Starting point is 00:06:34 that's created a whole kerfuffle. But by and large, obviously the Promethean people say this isn't the truth, but the crypto industry has been pretty consolidatedly believing that they are effectively just a plant. This is almost the reverse. This is a legal tactic organization. I mean, it's right there in the name. It's called Legit Exchange. This is a company that was created to make this challenge and to demonstrate a point. That doesn't make it not legit, by the way. This is a thing that happens in lots of different different places when there are uncredited regulations, or there are regulations that want to be challenged. This is a tactic for getting a, you know, a decision that potentially can rise up the ranks of all the way to the Supreme Court. It looks like looks to many people like this is an attempt to

Starting point is 00:07:21 get a major questions doctrine conversation in front of the Supreme Court. Major questions doctrine is a sort of relatively novel or new legal theory that basically says that when it comes to matters of economic importance, significant economic importance, agencies can't just assume that they have authority. They have to be specifically mandated from Congress. So crypto companies have tried to argue in numerous cases that the SEC doesn't have authority unless Congress explicitly gives it to them. This is an attempt to kind of get that issue in front of judges, and particularly in front of favorable judges. The judge that will hear this case initially in Fort Worth does not like government overreach. Let's put it that way. So it's a tactic. This is the crypto

Starting point is 00:08:06 industry using and availing itself of the legal system to the fullest extent possible in order to try to force the issue. And so that's what makes it significant. It's not significant because it's a big exchange. I mean, it's literally, tongue in cheek, it's called legit.exchange. I know, it's so funny. It is a legal strategy and probably a smart one, honestly. Yeah, and I think we should give honorable mentions, obviously, for both Coinbase and Kraken pushing back against the SEC once again this week, too. We didn't really have it in our list, but they're looking to get cases dismissed. It just seems that the SEC continues to be under fire. And it's amazing how much of a 180 reversal that is from the past when you just assume the SEC could do whatever they want and was always going to win. It used to win 99% of their cases.

Starting point is 00:08:53 They've bitten off a lot. I mean, you're going after an entire industry all at once that's still well-funded. Even in the depths of the bear market, it adds some money. So they really decided to test the limits of how many battles they could fight on how many fronts. And this is the result. This is a big story. USDC stablecoin issuer Circle dumps Tron Network TRX steady. Circle cited its risk management framework as part of the decision, among other factors. If you read into all of Circle's comments on this and USDC's comments, it's word salad for regulatory compliance and risk management

Starting point is 00:09:27 and assessing risk and all these things. This is a really big deal. Now, given USDC has a very small presence on Tron, a fraction of what's on Ethereum, but USDT, 51 billion of the 101 billion USDT is on the Tron network. As we've talked about before, it is the most popular network for people to make quick and cheap transactions on USDT all over the world using stable coins. And it makes you question what Tether is going to do. They've said they won't confirm or deny if it's dropping USDT on Tron. But if they did, it would be huge. Also, you can't help but put on your tinfoil hat and start to think that this has something to do with a crackdown coming for Tron and Justin Sun. Yeah. I mean, so first

Starting point is 00:10:15 of all, I don't think anyone saw this news and thought to themselves, wow, really? Tron, they're dropping Tron? Like, it's not surprising, right? This is open questions. There's always been open questions. The sort of, you know, the questions that surround the Sun Empire are, you know, legendary and numerous at this point. The question, I think, is how much is this circle positioning, positioning relative to a future upcoming IPO, positioning relative to just trying to differentiate themselves as the clean stable coin, as they're trying to kind of jockey for position of regulatory

Starting point is 00:10:50 favor, versus they know something specific. And I think that it's obviously totally possible that they've heard something specific, but it makes just as much sense that especially as such an insignificant part of the overall USDC network, that it looks like an easy way for them to clip off potentially a hanging Chad that could create questions in the future, as well as just sort of bolster their bona fides as sort of the clean one. Now, something we've talked about over the past, I don't know, month or so, is how Tether has made this sort of interesting, not full pivot, but slight shift towards the US government in terms of, you know, approachability and sort of interest in engagement. And perhaps this is a response to that from Circle of, again, trying to reinforce a difference between them, given exactly what you pointed out,

Starting point is 00:11:41 Scott, that 51% of Tether is issued on Tron. Yeah. I mean, the take I think that I've seen the most is one that you mentioned, obviously, it says it right here in the article, it could be part of a long-time realignment, separating compliant and gray market crypto, right? If they're trying to be publicly listed, if they want to get in line with the United States government, the best way effectively for them to do that is just to differentiate from USDT. So it doesn't mean that USDT is doing anything wrong. It just means that they're basically losing nothing here to gain a political advantage or a regulatory advantage. I think that that's the correct take that you offered. Yep. Well, now I think we have the story of the week, in my opinion. Crypto attorney launches

Starting point is 00:12:25 Senate bid against Elizabeth Warren. Listen, I've been talking to John Deaton about this for quite a while. I was really excited that he was going to do it. He moved his address from Rhode Island to Massachusetts just to get that done, which irked Elizabeth Warren to no end, who called him a MAGA Republican who's backed by the political machine and the RNC when anyone with a brain knows he's literally the opposite. Nobody saw this guy coming. He's doing this of his own free will. He is doing it because he believes it's right, not because he wants to be a politician. He's doing it because he believes in term limits, which would be against his personal interest if he actually won. And the crypto industry is coming in hard behind him. And what's really incredible

Starting point is 00:13:07 as you dig into it is she is shaking in her shoes. Eleanor Tarrant has been reporting on this pretty widely. She is going nuts asking for campaign donations, saying that they finally have a credible threat, trying to already discredit him. She's really seemingly very scared because this is not something she's ever done when there's a Republican opponent coming him. She's really seemingly very scared because this is not something she's ever done when there's a Republican opponent coming in. She's basically shrugged them off. Yeah. So it's weird. Long and short of it to me is it's very weird, her response. I think that there are two possible interpretations. One is the she's scared interpretation, which is reasonable just from a sheer money standpoint.

Starting point is 00:13:47 You know, the reality is, is that, again, crypto punches above its weight class when it comes to political advocacy and issues, in part because it's got more capital than most industries to push around when it matters. So, you know, there is a realistic possibility that it is genuinely her being scared. The other possibility, I suppose, is that she's expounded so much narrative capital on making crypto the boogeyman, that this creates an opportunity for her to kind of complete that narrative for her followers, that she is that, you know, she's pretty entrenched at this point with the group of people that support her through thick and thin. And so maybe this is just playing to her base.

Starting point is 00:14:29 I don't know enough about, you know, the specifics of the political situation to know, but it does surprise me how much she's tried to make this. I mean, she certainly turned him into a credible threat, whatever the reason is for it. And she did it in a matter of minutes. These emails were going out hours after he announced his bid. It really gave him a lot of fodder. It gave the news a lot of fodder. It seems like her best approach would have been just to lay silent and pretend that he was completely irrelevant. I don't know if it's fear or just an opportunity to raise more money. I mean, it feels like maybe her war chest is not as deep as it might once have been. He told me she had 4 million coming into when he filed that, and I thought it was going to be much,

Starting point is 00:15:20 much more than that. That's nothing. Yeah. And there's also I can't vet that. But that was from his mouth when I spoke to him on Monday. And also, you know, people have this, I think, sentiment that Massachusetts would always remain blue. There's literally no way that she could lose. She's so deeply entrenched in the system. But Massachusetts has had multiple Republican governors in the past years. And one of them, now I can't remember his name, but they've been attempting to put him up against Elizabeth Warren for years. And he was projected to win every single time, but he works for like major league baseball or the NBA or something

Starting point is 00:15:54 and loves his job and has no intention of switching over. But I do think she's more vulnerable than people are believing. And that even if this just riles up people who wouldn't have voted at all, assuming that she can't lose, I think this is a huge win. And just one, it was Charlie Baker. Yeah. As someone saying in the contest, he works for the NCAA. See, I butchered that, but I knew the context. But just the very fact that now we're going to have the narrative against Elizabeth Warren being constantly reiterated over and over and over on the news and pro-crypto, I think, is a win regardless of what happens in the campaign. Yeah. I mean, there is nothing that the news loves more than a real fight story. And they just,

Starting point is 00:16:37 I mean, this becomes the perfect psychodrama for them to focus on. So it's a weird tactic. I agree with you, by the way, Massachusetts blue profile is very different than I think some people would think. It's a kind of classic liberal stronghold, but in a sense of like, you can imagine Kennedy running as a moderate Republican kind of a thing. So it's really just, it's not magatory territory by any stretch of the imagination, but it's certainly, uh, you know, the, the thing is a good expenditure of my money. The next one, man, this is taking the world by storm. I actually interviewed Guy Young yesterday, who is the founder of ETH just to figure out what the hell was going on with this platform.

Starting point is 00:17:36 DeFi platform earning yield by shorting Ether attracts 300 million. ETH offers 27% annualized rewards to holders of its USD stable coins, a yield that generates mostly by shorting Ether futures. I believe they main netted four or five days ago or test that either way they launched quickly over 300 million. The yields are exceptionally high, but it should be noted that those are rolling. They're based on the eight hour funding rates. So it's not always going to be that way. But obviously the minute that the crypto community hears 27% annualized rewards, or algorithmic stablecoin, which they will argue that perhaps it isn't, they freak out and

Starting point is 00:18:12 rightfully panic and start asking big questions. So I guess the first question here, and I have some insight, obviously, my first question for you, does this reek of Luna? Or is that just an unfair comparison because of the general similarity? I mean, both is the short answer, right? It reeks of Luna only insofar as seeing eye-popping numbers that are, even if they're, listen, this team has tried to make it clear that these numbers aren't guaranteed and there's lots of variability here and they're likely to come down over time. It doesn't matter. You see those numbers and it's an absolute trigger

Starting point is 00:18:50 for the same sort of behavior that got people in a lot of problems last time. The flip side is that the dynamics of it, the actual sort of mechanism is totally different, right? I think the most recent thing that I've seen is they're trying to push back on this sort of stablecoin moniker. I mean, this is a tokenized basis trade right i'll get a synthetic dollar to be yeah so angry at the stable coin i asked him about that synthetic yeah and this this seems like semantics but it's actually not right stable coin has a specific connotation and we talked about this a lot when it came to last cycle like that algorithmic stable coins probably shouldn't be called the same thing as the one-to-one back reserved.

Starting point is 00:19:27 It's, you know, it's, if we understood that there were different types of instruments with different risk profiles, we wouldn't have had perhaps the same amount of trouble. Although I think Luna was always going to implode at some point. There are real risks here. Anytime you have the appeal of big yield matched on the other side by significant risk, no matter how much you try to caveat and condition, there's always going to be some challenge. I think that the response to this, the way that the team is handling it shows that this cycle is different than last cycle. There's instantly more skepticism. There's instantly more deep analysis of what's going on here. And I think that that's a positive indicator of where we've come completely outside of anything sort of specific to Athena itself. I seem to have lost my camera angle for the moment,

Starting point is 00:20:24 but I'm hoping you can still hear me talking. We're having a lot of glitches today. As you can see, as you said, there's been a lot of skepticism, obvious reasons. A lot of them even are just counterparty risk, right? If they're going to have to be shorting ETH on a centralized exchange, what happens on that exchange? If you have to be staked, what happens if something happens with that protocol? I asked him these questions and many other. Just so people understand, I see people making comments, shorting ETH at the beginning of a bull market. There's a delta neutral strategy.

Starting point is 00:20:53 They are buying and staking ETH in the protocol to earn a yield there and then shorting to hedge. So they're not shorting ETH per se, as these articles would imply. It's part of the strategy. But that cash and carry trade has been largely and hugely problematic in the past. I mean, that was to some degree what was happening with GBTC when people were taking advantage of the premium. And when it quickly went to a discount, that's when we saw 3AC and BlockFi at all collapsing. Hugely problematic, but they do make the argument. This is different.

Starting point is 00:21:25 They're disclosing the risks. There are tremendous risks and people should be aware of that. It will only be DeFi natives who understand what they're doing that will try this. But to your point, when you say 27%, a lot of unsophisticated people are probably going to rush in. We can leave the judgment as to whether that's the fault of the company or the protocol or not for allowing it, or that's up to the individual, but there is some risk. Yeah. I mean, listen, one of the things that was always interesting to me is that part of why DeFi, despite hacks and vulnerabilities and all these sort of things, was never really that problematic is that the barrier to entry was so high that it

Starting point is 00:22:06 was only like hyper-enfranchised people who were taking on the risk. It actually was sort of risk mediated and people knew what they were getting into. The problem with Luna is that people got exposure simply by holding this Luna asset, right? It didn't take them actually being involved with the DeFi side of things to be exposed to DeFi risk. And that's what ended up washing out so many regular people. So as we look at DeFi this cycle, I think one thing that I would keep an eye on is the extent to which there really are those barriers to entry that are keeping it just for DeFi degens and DeFi natives versus some mechanism that gets it out into the broader public, which could create kind of a challenge.

Starting point is 00:22:53 Yeah, totally agree. As you can see, now my head is stretched. We're doing really good over here, but trying to get the camera going right. I think that this is going to be one of those interesting experiments that is TBD. And I think that it's great news that there's so many alerts flying and people are looking at it so that people actually dig in before they use it. Hopefully, it just doesn't grow as fast as Luna did, which was really the problem, right? Luna became, instead of a cool $1 billion experiment, it became a $20 or $30 billion market cap monster that offered systemic risks to the entire market.

Starting point is 00:23:29 Just so you guys know, the biggest centralized exchanges in the world invested in this long ago. So this is the only protocol like this where you've had, with OKEx and Binance, a number of them have invested. Dragonfly Capital, Hasid Qureshi, who I've had on here, who I think is one of the most respected and intelligent VCs in the game, behind it. Dragonfly Capital, Hasid Qureshi, who I've had on here, who I think is one of the most respected and intelligent VCs in the game behind it, and Arthur Hayes. All of this is based on an article written by Arthur Hayes on his blog a year ago about creating a coin like this. I asked Guy

Starting point is 00:23:57 about it and he said, listen, I read Arthur's article. I reached out to Arthur. So Arthur is kind of the main consultant on this. It's really interesting. It could be really successful, but damn, it is a bit scary to see this happening. The last thing I'll say is that this, I think, has another power of indicating where we are in the cycle. If you kind of look at some of the patterns, one of the things that happened last time is you have sort of this Bitcoin narrative lead, institutional Bitcoin narrative lead, followed by something new for the degen sort of natives. 2020, that was DeFi summer, right? And you got sort of that explosion and that flowering. And I think in some ways, you could argue that DeFi summer even was the real kickoff

Starting point is 00:24:43 of last bull market. It was just sort of like slightly underwhelmed in the news, because we had sailor buying in August and September, and then, you know, Elon followed. And so Bitcoin kind of continued to lead the narrative. But DeFi was what the internal crypto people are doing. This is the first thing that I've seen, that's a new kind of explosion of what the crypto people are doing since we've had these sort of, you know, big, big pop in interest in Bitcoin. So I think we're clearly getting deeper and deeper into this bull cycle based on that history. Yeah. Obviously, that means we need to talk about Ethereum and Ethereum price action

Starting point is 00:25:17 been somewhat outperforming Bitcoin as of late. Many saying that Ethereum's fundamentals look better. You guys might not realize, but since the merge, Ethereum has actually been deflationary. Bitcoin reduces its inflation. So it's at 1.4, 1.7%, whatever it is now. ETH has actually been deflationary. There's been more Ethereum burned than there has been minted. So a lot of people pointing at that as a reason that Ethereum is doing quite well. We have Ethereum obviously hitting 3,000 for the first time in nearly two years. Some saying that that's because of the Ethereum ETF hype. Others saying it's because of the Dancun upgrade that's coming. We could talk about this. What do you think is driving

Starting point is 00:26:00 this interest in Ethereum at the moment? Occam's razor answer is that it's the next thing to be excited about now that Bitcoin's sort of locked in in this institutional bid narrative. I mean, I think it's probably a lot of things. It is one of the things that has sort of seemed kind of obvious to me when you think about this new buyer set who's kind of coming in through the ETF world, is that if Bitcoin represents the sort of sound money, safe kind of side of the crypto equation, Ethereum becomes a proxy for all the interesting stuff that you can do on crypto. And so if you're someone who is just interested in the sort of hedge

Starting point is 00:26:45 exposure in your portfolio and sort of says at this point, look, crypto has been around for 15 years. It keeps not dying when everyone thinks it's dying. I'd like some exposure to that. Bitcoin and Ethereum alone represent kind of two big parts of two big sides of the market, the safe haven asset side and all the weird stuff side. And so I think that to some extent, it's just people starting to position for what feels like an inevitable Ethereum spot ETF, even if it gets denied this next time around. And then when people start digging in, obviously, there's all these things going on. And so if you sort of come in the door of, well, it's obviously the next thing, there's a lot to be excited about too. So I don't think it's particularly

Starting point is 00:27:28 complicated. I think it's sort of just following on as it does and for completely rational reasons. Yeah. And we saw it the second that the Bitcoin spot ETF got approved. And in fact, we saw it the second that the fake news of the Bitcoin spot ETF approved was released by the SEC, the money immediately flowed into Ethereum. So the next best thing argument is so obvious. Yep. Sometimes it's not complicated. Yeah. I guess we don't need to complicate it.

Starting point is 00:27:56 But man, there are a lot of takes as to why it's happening. And kind of finally here, we've got a series of stories, but we'll talk about Coinbase drops native Bitcoin payments for merchants platform. This is an eye-opener for a lot of people, but effectively just saying, man, we can't be fast and cheap on a layer one. Yeah. It's a de minimis part of their platform currently. And it seems like this is as simple as a business decision to that the that the cost of supporting this totally different type of ecosystem wasn't worth, you know, the juice wasn't worth the squeeze, basically. And, you know, they knew that it would provoke a response, Brian Armstrong commented on it directly. But you know, the as some question, you know, the Bitcoiners are

Starting point is 00:28:44 obviously going to be sort be upset about everything. And I think on the one hand, that's just a conditioned behavior. On the other hand, it's reasonable. If you want Bitcoin to be able to be all the things that Bitcoin can be in the future, it's totally reasonable to shout when there's less rather than more access to it. But ultimately, I don't think that most Bitcoiners think that the payments are going to be on the base layer, nor do I think most Bitcoiners really think that merchant payment through Coinbase is a hugely important thing, at least at this stage. But it's always disappointing

Starting point is 00:29:17 to see, again, less rather than more access as time goes on. Yeah, I agree. We had Lauren Dowling, who is the product lead for Coinbase Commerce here explaining why it happened. Now we have to get into why we have this title as we're sort of talking about these things. This was honorable mention too, but Pantera Capital reveals $500 billion opportunity for Bitcoin. And this definitely speaks to that Ethereum versus Bitcoin direct competition that we're starting to actually have now, because this is about DeFi on Bitcoin. We know that the bulk of the TVL for DeFi has always been on Ethereum, remains there no matter how hyped Solana and other protocols get. But basically saying that we are seeing a tipping point now with things being built on Bitcoin. And as the strongest

Starting point is 00:30:00 base layer, we could really see a massive Cambrian explosion here of building and of monetary opportunity directly on Bitcoin. Yeah. Listen, I'm glad that this conversation is happening. I think it's reflective of larger shifts that are absolutely true. Franklin, the author of this piece from within Pantera, kind of calls out that there's this flowering of a Bitcoin builder ecosystem, which is absolutely true, that there's been more excitement around ordinals and BRC20s, absolutely true. I think that the leap from that sort of excited interest to this huge market that's going to ultimately have the same percentage of Bitcoin's market cap from DeFi as Ethereum's is a little loose. But I think that if you're trying to understand the sort of really relevant part of this,

Starting point is 00:30:57 it's absolutely just that this is now going into this cycle, a part of Bitcoin's conversation, whereas it never was in the past. So you kind of hold aside the specifics of the numbers, which are necessary for getting our attention. I mean, look, it worked, we're talking about it. Then the thing that I think is definitely true is just how much more rich this sort of builder ecosystem is around Bitcoin, how many people are thinking about talking about and trying to act upon DeFi on Bitcoin, whatever that is ultimately going to mean. And one last really quick honorable mention, we had the fact that Jack Dorsey and Square made a ton of money selling Bitcoin. Okay, cool. Reddit discloses Bitcoin and Ether holdings and IPO filing converting their treasury into crypto.

Starting point is 00:31:39 We should be here for this, right? Yeah. I mean, they so minimized it though. I mean, they're really trying to make this not a story, I think. And it seems like not that much of a story, but it is interesting how little this captured people's attention. We are very clearly not super convinced or captivated by the treasury narrative in the same way that we were before. If you would plop this story down in early 2021, it would have been the continuance of a massive trend. But at this point, it's sort of just like, whatever. I mean, that's it. We covered everything. I have to say, because I'm reading the comments and it's just cracking me up that people can't believe I would talk about Donald Trump favorably. Guys, we cover the news. If Donald Trump says something, we're going to give you the take on what it means. It doesn't mean I'm voting for him or Biden or anyone else.

Starting point is 00:32:30 I hate politics so much. It actually hurts, but I do love John Deaton. I do love John Deaton, so I'm going to push for him. But it's our job to cover the news and to tell you what it means when a presidential candidate has a comment on Bitcoin, especially in the context of him having been so anti-crypto and so anti-Bitcoin in the past. That was my little caveat for the end there. NLW, actually, I'm going to be away next week. I won't be here on Friday. So we'll be back in two weeks for this one, guys. Next week's going to be, I'm going to be spotty on showing up for YouTube and the newsletter will be happening. Guys, thank you so much for tuning in. Appreciate it. Nathaniel, have a great day, man. Later.

The Wolf Of All Streets - $500 Billion For Bitcoin | Ethereum On The Cusp Of A Massive Pump

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