The Wolf Of All Streets - A Discussion w/ @Rock34XOfficial | Crypto Town Hall

Episode Date: May 23, 2025

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Welcome everyone to Crypto Town Hall. It's Friday, May 23rd, was at 10.19 a.m. And after a tariff tantrum, it looks like Bitcoin is heading back towards 110,000 and markets are starting to relax again. Always fun with with this administration. But there's a lot of news today, other than the markets, a lot of things going on that we want to cover. I see Austin up here, you did a great interview with Unchained yesterday on the Genius Act, and you and I have been kind of harping on how important that is.

I mean, we can start with that. There's also the Kraken news of what they're trying to do in terms of equities on blockchain, which I think is fascinating and a very big story. And of course, there's the markets. So from a market's perspective, my perspective is that we are in a rally that people love to hate. There's stories all over my timeline about how MSTR is this cycles GBTC, which coming from some pretty smart people, but that's ridiculous in many respects.

I mean, sure, if he's copied by 15 or 20 companies and people do things irresponsibly with leverage, the more leverage that builds up in the system is gonna create risk, but literally, the trade itself is the exact opposite of GBTC. And we could get into that as well. So there's a lot to talk about, and we can go on from there. I mean, Austin, why don't we start though

with your perspective and the feedback you're getting and what you're hearing about stables, because I do think it matters quite a bit to the ecosystem. Scottie Yeah, so, first of all, thank you for the kind words on the interview. I appreciate it. Every now and then I try to add at least a little to the discourse. But what I'm hearing on genius right now is essentially after voting to bring it to the floor, it seems like the Senate probably has the votes to pass the bill, which is unsurprisingly freaking out some of what I'm gently going to call the less informed bank lobby sub thing.

And the reason I say less informed is we're kind of at a point where we're experiencing genuine financial markets transformation in the United States for the first time in a while. And this sort of thing is a trend that will be very damaging for the kinds of banks that have just been sitting around, not evolving, taking deposits, lending it below market rates locally and assuming that business model will last forever. On the other hand, the banks that have been innovating, building, scaling are likely to increasingly win in this kind of environment. And so it's producing a very weird dynamic in Washington where the community bank associations

are freaking out, even though some of their members may be the biggest winners. But the big banks have just sat this one out, as far as everybody can tell. And the normal alliances that you expect in the last four years between Republicans and Democrats are now breaking down. Like I saw a stat, I tweeted it out, that the average age of a Democrat who voted in favor of bringing genius to the floor was 56, and the average age of a Democrat voting against was roughly 68. So I think we're really seeing a generational divide of, you know, people who get the internet who understand markets transformation versus people who still

think PayPal is a scam, because you can't like open up your phone and see the money inside of it. Sorry. I mean, look, I know some of those people and it's not crazy. I mean, there's a lot of that going on. But I think the most important thing that I find fascinating about it is, you know, Carlo, who is often here and is a friend of the show, I don't see him in the audience, but he did a post this morning where he talked about the business transformation and what this will allow and the TLDR on it is that if you're a business and you move towards stable coins as your method of being paid that the people who in your supply chain are probably going to adopt it as well. And so what you end up with is significantly more dollar holders all around the world using stable coins throughout the supply chain,

which will make things 24 seven much quicker and much less cost. And that's undeniably why the administration is supporting it up and down the line. And it matters It also matters for adoption of crypto It just in general because you know one of the narratives that Elizabeth Warren has been banking on and I hear it all the time From people older than me is well, it's all a scam and there's no utility It doesn't do anything except for the instant this goes, this starts, you can't say that anymore.

It's like when Krugman made his idiotic comment about the internet as a fax machine, people at the time were like, well, maybe he's right, whatever, guess we'll see. And then five, 10 years later, of course, he looks like one of the world's, certainly the Nobel Prize winning biggest idiot. And I suspect that history is going to repeat.

I mean, Dave, to pile on there, I have direct confirmation as it had been in one of the conversations where some of the Elizabeth Warren aligned people are saying, guys, there's going to be another huge crypto crash within two years, and the whole market is just going to go away. Like Like all of this will be gone. Don't regulate it. Don't legitimize and it's all going away. And it very much is, you know, we've seen this in many points and you raised Paul, that's one such prediction. You know, the classic people standing in front of the freight train of progress and screaming stop, but like history would tell you that doesn't end well for the people standing on the trade tracks.

I mean, my favorite speech on this was from Isaac Asimov, and you can look this up. It's a great speech, but my favorite quote in there is he talks about how technology has always been resisted by people and always they say it's for your own good why we should resist it. The example he used, which is really funny actually, is the barge operators were against horse-drawn carriages delivering people. People should be able to go by barges at like five miles an hour. The argument was that Bernoulli's principle meant that the air whipping past their face will deprive them of oxygen as they kind of clomp along at 15 miles an hour.

And it's a very funny speech, but history repeats and it constantly repeats. I mean, I just think that's a large part of it. A large part of what's going on with Bitcoin is that we've reached critical mass of people who realize and understand what's going on there. So anyway, that's the stable coin stuff. The you know, I see we have, you know, Gary, you're up here, you made a point and I actually

think there's a very real shot. You'll be right that Bitcoin can end up up on the day. It's definitely possible we're knocking it back at the door at 110 again already. You know, after this morning's freak out, I mean, how are you feeling? And what are you hearing this morning? Yeah. I mean, it just looks to me like, uh, the coins, the winner here, if you're into anything else and it's just holding so firm, you know, if you're sitting

in meta-planet and I'm not trying to poopoo on anybody's trades, but. Meta-planet is, you know, it's it six dollars and forty cents in the United States 564 in in Germany. I don't know how you bloody trade that thing Yeah, it's been down to 560 today and now it's trading at 660 off of yesterday It was almost 20 bucks. I mean wow Off of yesterday. It was almost 20 bucks. I mean wow It just to me. Yeah, I don't I don't see big like if we hit if we get past this 50-day moving average I I see us back at 110 111 112 113 this weekend Yeah seems seems about right. I mean look it feels like this feels much more like a grind higher

Climb a wallow or a rally to me. I mean, you know, I don this feels much more like a grind higher climb a wallowary rally to me. I mean, I don't know anybody else have thoughts on that. And I see Mike McGlone in the audience. I mean, he's not, he's not up here. Let me see if I can invite him. We got to get the bear case somehow. Yeah. I don't, I don't know.

I was going to say, well, I don't know where any percent retracement has come from right now. I was going to say, if you want me to pile in on the bear case, you're basically... Okay, so let's talk about global back row for a second. We're basically in a space where there remains uncertainty about tariffs, there remains uncertainty about global trade flows, there remains uncertainty essentially about total economic allocation. Some of this might be aggregate slowdown, but a lot of it's an allocation problem. You see Trump fighting with, as he calls him, Tim Apple today about where they're going

to be building their cell phones. All of this to me, unfortunately, does kind of put a floor under Bitcoin. I don't think the bear case is a nominal price of Bitcoin. We have a regime where inflation picks up and there's not enough inflows into Bitcoin that make it a good investment in real terms. Maybe, right? But again, leverage is low. Funding rates are not overheated. Bitcoin is an asset that structurally benefits. I guess the one thing you could say to really be bearish is if we're thinking TradFi investors

in this regime, is gold going to start ripping again instead of Bitcoin? I think they both rip, to be honest. I mean, you know, that's what it feels like. You know, it's one of those things where it's almost impossible to quantify in people's minds the amount of money supply that has to happen. Now, whether you use M2, which is a flawed metric because it doesn't take into account money market funds, which will get more flawed, by the way, with stable coins because you'll see tokenized money market funds appearing pretty quickly and will attract balances very

fast. But that's a different story. That's next year's issue. This year's issue is a question of the nine, you know, you have nine trillion that has to be refinanced and another two trillion that's going to be in the deficit this year. So of the 11 trillion, how much of it will be, you know, actual debt as opposed to QE? I don't know that number, but the number is, there's certainly gonna be a fair amount of both, right? I mean, David Toewheel, you're up here. Well, what do you think?

I mean, it feels to me like monetary inflation is baked into the cake here. Look, I think Besson is now talking about, and it seems like everybody in Washington is on the we're going to grow out of this party line. There is no, the cutting is over. That's not happening. The responsibility or fiscal responsibility is not happening. Responsibility or fiscal responsibility is not happening. And now we've put all our eggs alternatively into the basket of we've got to grow out of

this. I think that's a tall task in a market where folks around the world are at best our frenemy, if not others, our full blown enemies, although that can change, certainly. Trump knows how to go ahead and put on the charm when he needs to, but our rates are high and it doesn't seem like they're going lower. As a matter of fact, new home sales just came out,

I was terribly wrong. New home sales surprised massively to the upside, and therefore gives the Fed protection, additional piece of protection in terms of cutting rates. The Fed is not going to cut rates, and we're going to hang out here, and rates are pretty high. Oh, by the way, if tariffs don't work out very well and there's inflation on top of that, I think that this is going to be an economy that is not growing.

As a matter of fact, I think it'll be decelerating. And so we're in a tough spot. At least that's the way I do the math. If people disagree with me on the math, please go ahead and let me know. Well, I mean, yeah. I mean, the interesting thing about growing, so growing requires two things. One is deregulation, which is they have done nothing on, and in fact, they're going to have to, it's also at the state and local level. So, you know, in terms of factories and whatnot, you know, whatever, and we'll see whether they post, I can't believe we keep calling this the big

beautiful bill, but whatever, post the budget, we'll see if Congress actually gets serious on deregulation and agencies are, or will the courts basically, you know, stop them from doing anything without a congressional act? I mean, this is courts basically, you know, stop them from doing anything without a congressional act? I mean, this is literally the the of the battleground and it's almost crazy that I'm saying that But really when you look at it from a Bitcoin point of view Bitcoin doesn't need growth. It needs growth in money. It doesn't need growth in money But that's certainly the biggest trigger for it Whereas if you want to see, you wanna see the stock market go up,

there needs to be cash flow of some sort, or at least nominal cash flow or earnings. So that's the biggest difference. That's why Gary and I, and by the way, your cartoon picture of you, Gary, I have to admit, it's pretty complimentary. Maybe I should be looking at a new cartoon avatar. But that's the biggest difference here on a crypto show.

Meanwhile, the other big story, and I'm curious if anybody cares about this, is something that I was on a space with you, Gary, earlier this week. And I remember, Joe's not up here, Carlos, or he told me I was crazy. Well, I find it amusing. I said that the big banks would get together and do a consortium to launch their own stablecoin. And it just felt obvious to me, having lived through the big banks in the internet,

how, I don't know if people remember markets.com, but basically what you had was all the big banks get together and say, okay, we're gonna use this internet to do all of our, this as a this as a utility and we're going to create this consortium. It felt pretty obvious to me that they were going to do the same thing. And in fact, they've announced that, you know, I don't know if anyone has any opinions on that one.

The story out of the journal, we talked about a little bit earlier today, the story out of the journal doesn't give much by way of detail. We ended up with, if it's just, and this was Simon Dixon's words, which I respect, if it's just an intranet as opposed to an internet, then really, I mean, it's going to rip the heart and soul out of cryptocurrency. On the one hand, on the other hand, these big banks, if given, and that's a big if, if given the permission to do this on a monopolistic basis to all banking customers in the United States and force upon them this cryptocurrency or this stablecoin that they go ahead and manufacture, they're going to do some damage, not from the purists' perspective, but generally to the

industry, to people like Tether and Circle. So exactly what this ends up being, if in fact it's real, is there plan B where every bank is doing this alone? Is there really, this is not about perpetuating fractional reserve banking, but it's more in the vein of one-to-one backing. It's really unclear. So I don't know how to really react to it at this point, Dave.

I actually have an exceedingly strong opinion on this one, but before I give it awesome you have your hand up So why don't we why don't you talk? I have a feeling we're gonna agree Well, the first thing I want to say is that the Article that we saw is one of those classic press ex to doubt sort of things By which I mean it's almost certain the very senior people at these banks who actually make the decisions are not having this discussion. This sounds like as usual, the blockchain tech teams getting together and brainstorming stuff and not really knowing what they're doing. And if we're going to be charitable here, having been involved in a number of these

efforts in the past, right, having thought about them, it's going to be incredibly hard for the banks to mutually find something they agree upon. And even more so, once they agree upon that thing, it's going to be even harder to get consumers to use it. Because exactly as we just said, and this is a key point, if this is purely a tool to get the banks together together to make, that's good to find a point on it, a slightly better Zelle replacement. Nobody cares. You don't need a blockchain for that. Nobody cares.

It's not crypto. Right? Congratulations. You've been slightly creative with your back end. Collect your bonus and go home as a bank tech person. If you want to disrupt the industry, you've got to move to an open access platform. And I just don't think the banks have the agility or capability to do that as a group. So what I would expect is in these discussions, either it's not going to do anything, and it's a slight technology backend upgrade, and who

cares? Or one of the large banks will realize, wow, okay, all my competitors are idiots and go rogue and do the real thing with a stable coin and then things are gonna get very wild. Right, now let's be really clear about this. To answer, I mean, look, Simon, as a Bitcoiner, I have respect for him. I have many things that he says that I violently disagree with.

This is one of them. This notion of monolithic corporate, you know, performance that he always talks about, you know, he personifies black rock or whatever. I mean, he's just, I mean, it's, I think it's crazy town. Having worked inside these organizations, I understand that you can't, it is hard enough to get people inside these organizations even come close to agreement. Austin is right. When it comes to this sort of thing, it's really a question of one simple question.

Will the stablecoin be allowed to be exchanged cheaply on, you know, whether it's centralized exchanges, DEXs, whatever, will it be open access for people to exchange it for other tokenized assets? Yes or no. If the answer is yes, then the genie's out of the bottle and Wells and Citi and Bank of America could create a really good competitor circle, but it's just a competitor circle. Coinbase and Kraken and Bitstamp and Binance and whatever will be able to trade it. If that happens, it could be very successful, but it doesn't create anything monopolistic or oligopolistic. On the other hand, they could say, well, we're going to create this stable coin and the only people who can trade it for free are us and everyone else is

going to have to pay a tax or a tariff or whatnot, in which case the market's going to go tell them they're going to give them the Heisman, as we would say in America, which is the statue where you put the hand out and you say, okay, listen, guys, we're not going to use it. And Circle will continue to whatever. None of this is going to impact tether outside the United States. None, unless it's fully exchangeable or tether in the United States. And so to me that that's, that's, that's the nice edge. I mean, do you agree with that Austin?

Yeah, I mean, I'll say two things. So one, for people who don't know on this call, I was the co-head of digital assets and global rates at Citi. And let me tell you, we couldn't even agree with each other internally, much less having like a consortium going on with all the other banks. That's not a thing, right? Like I've lived that life. It's not a thing. But two, Dave, I think the area where the first large bank to realize this will have a gigantic competitive advantage is the fact that if you create a stable coin that's freely transferable and you run it as the bank, you have now created fudgability between the traditional banking products and

the stable coin, because here's the super app. Say like, let's take Bank of America since you mentioned that. Bank of America launches a stable coin that you could deposit it in the Bank of America since you mentioned that. Bank of America launches a stablecoin that you could deposit it in the Bank of America that it just works normally with your bank account, right? Like it can go through your credit card, it can go through your debit card, you can move it to your investment account, or you can pull it out, you can bring it to an exchange, use it to trade crypto, pay people peer to peer. That becomes best of rails and that's terrified everybody else because the reality is the crypto companies have done a great job on chain. They do not have good real world connectivity to like banking and payments rails. If somebody is smart enough to put

one leg in both, everybody else has a big problem. Right. Well, I think that will happen. Right. Don't you think so? Don't you think that, you know, PayPal, Venmo will adopt it? Basically, the need for a checking account will go poof. Potentially, I think, look, I'm gonna say this. It's actually much harder for PayPal and Venmo. Like, I respect the PayPal team, they're great. But the reality is the breadth of services that one of the global megabanks can bring

with like FX, lending, securities, trading trading, etc. compared to PayPal is dramatic. Oh, sure. No, I don't disagree with that. I just think that the speeding up the payment rails will be a big deal. Look, the act has to pass and we'll see how it all goes. It's just to me, you know, everybody who thinks that everything is oligopolies or monopolies, I mean, it is when the governmenties or monopolies, I mean it is when the government steps in. As long as the government is willing to step out then the market will actually do things that are different. I think that's really the biggest difference here. So Alex, I saw you came up, I'm sure you care about

this and also the market. What are you thinking? Yeah, I mean I think you're definitely, I think Austin, well, number one knows more about this than I do. But I think I generally agree with a lot of what he's thinking. I think people are absolutely going to try setting by people, starting in the big banks. I think you definitely see a couple of them, at least try and upgrade the backend infrastructure using it because it's easier. But they also have just an

entirely different risk management approach to things. And so, you're not going to be able to walk in, even if someone, they create their own, you're not going to be able to walk in and ship a million dollars in this stable coin to anyone you want with no checks. Think about again, how much you can ship on Zelle or anything like that. That's both a combination of regulatory, but also just general risk management approach. I do think it gets very interesting if you can in your Chase account, one click and flip between stables and fiat the same way you can in your Coinbase account today.

But how long it takes us to actually get there. And I think as you guys are pointing out, especially that interoperability question, can I actually just take this coin, flip it right over onto an exchange, go seamless between digital assets and Fiat in that way and trade it for other assets. If they're not going to do that, it is just going to become a slightly better, cheaper backend for them and not actually let them work in the space. Unless anyone has any other questions on or talking about the stables, the other topic that I think is fascinating and it's too bad we don't have our normal cadre of

lawyers up here is the cracking announcement that they are going to go way back into offering US stocks on Solana interestingly enough, which given my belief in Solana as an ecosystem is probably a good thing. But offering US stocks trading through their platform, I think this is a potentially huge deal and it's not getting a whole lot of air coverage. And I'm not sure why. I mean, just to understand, right now, if you're overseas and you wanna trade US stocks,

you pay a lot, it's not cheap. There's company, there's like the GDR business, the global depository receipts way of trading it, which is kind of the opposite of the ADR way. Gary was talking about MetaPlanet and the ADRs, which can trade out of line, which can have arbitrages, which have wider spreads, and the banks take their cut, et cetera.

Tokenization, and what Kraken is looking to do could very well have dramatically tighter spreads, easier arbitrages, etc., especially as the technology around trading gets better. And I know because, you know, I operate a trading platform that I'm able to trade this stuff on day one, and it could be a very big deal.. I'm curious what people think about that. I didn't see who was first, we didn't David and Alex, so I'll go I'll pick David because you know Alex was just talking more recently. Thank you Alex for letting me go first. So I think a couple of things. First of all, Kraken is anticipating an IPO at some point. So I think this is just good for the storyline. I don't think there's any moat left in this

business. Robinhood is a more acceptable both stock platform and crypto platform. know, acceptable, both stock platform and crypto platform. And I get it that this will, you know, this move by Kraken necessarily panders to the international audience. But I don't think you're going to get any institutional flows on Kraken. It'll be retail flows entirely. And, you know, I don't know if the average retail international, you know, investor is really all that interested in saving the money versus, you know, they'd have to be very crypto native to go and trade their stocks on crack in versus, you know, use their online brokerage account and yes, pay the money, but trade the ADR or the equivalent in their country. Again, I don't know how important this is. I think more than anything, it's probably a bunch of... I mean, I know a little

bit about the inner workings of Kraken. They're trying to do a ton of window dressing, you know, to get ready for their IPO. This may be just be part of it. Alex. Yeah, totally agree with that. Like the, I don't really see who actually needs this or benefits it. You know, the, the U S stock market isn't exactly suffering from a lack of liquidity and needing the flows from retail international traders.

I think they tried to downplay slightly. I think I noticed it in a bunch of the people who were sharing it, especially online. They left off the part that it's international only. And I think that goes to what David was saying about like they're putting a bunch of window dressing up and prep for an IPO on it. And I think it's an interesting thing. There's actually a similar move by the Chian network right now, where they're actually running actual S1s in the US to tokenize equity off of some of especially like the largest stocks, Apple, Microsoft, that kind of thing, and actually be able to sell them to US investors

because they're going through a full registration scheme for it. The difficulty there is you have to go stock by stock on it as opposed to cracking, just being able to do whatever they, tokenize whatever they want because they're going outside the US. But I don't see it being a particularly big thing because I just don't think the market

doesn't need the liquidity. And the people outside the US already have plenty of options and if they're total degens who want everything on chain, they're going to be playing with more esoteric stuff anyways. I think you guys underestimate the Asian in particular demand for trading, you know, Tesla, Nvidia, etc. at a much lower cost at being able to do it in their hours, etc.

It's funny, I mean, I only spent five years of my career overseas in London and traveled a lot around Asia. I think that there's a lot of people underestimate the potential demand and how liquid it could be. I mean, I would be really, really surprised, for example, if Tesla tokenized and Nvidia tokenized weren't more liquid than coin number 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, you know, in coin market cap. I mean, you could end up with significant liquidity there,

and I'll be stunned if Tegraken is successful at getting any volume if Binance doesn't jump in. And frankly, Robinhood with Bitstamp has the platform to jump in immediately, and if they wanted to expand overseas, that's the best way to do it. So I think it's a bigger deal than you guys do, but I guess we'll see.

Anybody else think? Whoops, hold on a minute, I was trying to bring Donnish up. So you were asking, let's see. Can you hear us, Doctor? Or do you just get knocked down again, are we glitching? I can hear you loud and clear, Dave, so I don't think we're glitching too much. Okay, well I was just curious, so okay, so you can hear you loud and clear Dave, so I don't think we're glitching too much. Okay, well I was just curious.

So okay, so you can hear me. So anyway, doctor, you know, you're always following the markets and have an interesting opinion of me. What's on your mind right now? Europe, Europe is on my mind. It's the 50% tariffs that go live on June 1st, or at least the threat of it seems like it's real. I felt like he was going to do a move on Europe after they broke his heart last week when they shared internal information around Russia. If you all didn't see that, that's actually what's going on here. I put it up in the nest. So last week, or yesterday, it came out that Trump

tells European leaders in private that Putin isn't ready to end the war and the European officials leaked it to the Wall Street Journal. And surprise, today comes out and he says, they're not working with us, they're not being a good partner, we're going to give them a 50% tariff. And again, if you don't think those two things are connected, I don't know what to tell you. It's very clear that a guy that loves loyalty doesn't like betrayal. And that was 100% betrayal. You don't talk about these things and leak them to the press. And so they have to pay now. And not just them, but people that import goods from Europe are going to have to pay as well. That's what's on my mind right now.

Yeah, no, that that all makes sense. So how do you game theory this out, you know, from an asset perspective, right? You know, it's who are the winners, who are the losers? Or is it just a zero sum? Everybody loses in your view. Everybody loses. If you are expecting the Fed to move, Goldsby came out this last hour and said, hey, all this trade uncertainty is going to lead to a lack of decision

making from the Fed. So if you're hoping that the short end of the curve is going to be manipulated for your benefit, that will not be done. They are incredibly worried about inflation as they should be because there are if we if

you know and by the way the EU has already come out Volvo has already come out, and they said that they're going to push the effect of these tariffs onto the consumer. So Volvo is just going to increase their prices to account for this. There will be demand destruction, but in

the short term before demand destruction, there will also be some increase in prices. And so, you know, go out and buy your Bima today instead of June 1st, I guess. And ultimately, these are real issues. He is just like we weaponize sanctions for a long time. We're now weaponizing trade wars. And it's a really stupid thing to do.

It makes absolutely no... It was stupid when the left did it with sanctions, it was stupid when the left did it, where it sanctions and it's stupid when the right does it with trade wars. It's just stupid. We shouldn't be doing this. Trade uncertainty is not necessary. There are better ways to do this.

They are also one of our allies, even though they sometimes don't act like it. And I think that this type of behavior is a little bit. I don't like seeing my president doing having tantrums. It just doesn't make sense. But I will say that what the Europeans did was absolutely unacceptable as well. You don't talk about internal conversations and leak it to the press. So I guess at some level, this one might be more justified than others. But this is real for people that don't see it. Like gold is surging, silver is dropping.

We're seeing Bitcoin take a, like be again uncorrelated in some ways, but markets are down. So we expect this to continue to put pressure on demand. And I think, again, no matter what anybody says, I don't care. Like it's like people are now putting caveats out there. Inflation is coming. I mean, demand destruction is happening. Inflation is coming.

We're going to see additional layoffs, uh, this year. Um, and I expect if we keep doing these kinds of stupid things, we'll see a stack inflation environment sooner than we think. I mean, maybe. I mean, it does. I do find it funny, surprising actually that the euro, if anything, is slightly stronger, you know, post this. I mean, it seems like it should be the opposite. No, they're betting on isolationism. That's why. They betting that they're going to have to produce become consumers themselves. That's the worst case scenario for America. We want buyers of our products. This is like absolutely again, you know, isolationism makes sense in like the 20th century, not in this current one that we happen to live in. Yeah, well, hard to argue with that often. Yeah, well, hard to argue with that often. Yeah, I want to say don't misread the market reaction here either.

Euro up is not a good sign here. Exactly. Remember, like think about this from a plus one minus one standpoint. If the United States says we're going to significantly raise tariffs on people and increase the cost of doing business with us. That means less people are going to be doing business in dollar terms. It means foreign capital that was invested in the United States now doesn't have dollars to do that. It's going to go elsewhere. So like, you know, look at the market performance, for instance,

of Brazil and Mexico over the past handful of months. Those are significantly up, right? Despite the trade war. what is actually going on here is the de-globalization isolation trade, which counter-intuitively probably bad for the dollar, good for local currencies in some way. And that's purely a factor of repatriation flows. And seeing just for people and getting some messages, but it's hard to tell because the DMs aren't working.

Isolation. But I'm getting some, I don't know what that was, but I was going to say I'm getting some DMs about this. Why is the 10-year going down? That's a good question to ask. If inflation is such a worry, why is the 10-year going down? First of all, the 10-year is still at 4.46, right? So like it's still higher than what you would expect given all the craziness if you don't believe that they're inflationary it would not have been going up before like that you know leading up to this as you remember last

week it was leading up to this so there must have been some insight from the bond market but to it's because now is trying to balance it a short term inflationary environment. That's why we're seeing the ten-year and the 30-year take a little bit of a hit,

but also some long-term recessionary fears. So, you know, this is, again, it's bad policy. It just doesn't make sense. Why would we do a 50% tariff on companies that import products from Europe? Like, it makes no sense. Yeah, I find the Apple one even more bewildering. Yeah. Apple for people that don't know 25 percent.

He's by the way, I don't even know if this is I'm not a constitutional lawyer, but like you can't pick winners and losers like that. You can't say this company pays this tariff if they don't do what I want. It's like, I don't even know if anybody, I mean, we have lawyers up here. If anybody can explain to me if this is even legal, David? He took the plane. He took the plane.

I don't think it's about shoot first and aim later. I mean, it'll happen. They'll be able to order. But David, how is it legal to call out one company. Isn't that picking winners? Yeah. Same thing with Harvard University. I mean, it's just, you know, we're not no international students for you down the Harvard path because I'm just saying, I'm just saying, I'm picking winners and losers. Yeah. Yeah. Not only is it picking winners and losers, he also has, let's, let's be frank.

He has, he doesn't have any respect good or bad respect for systems law Process it's all out the window like enough enough. I don't want to get into a trump not trump, but He's gonna do this In particular is because his the reasoning was, the words he said were, I don't want them manufacturing iPhones in India, which a week ago I thought

India was our best ally, we're negotiating a trade deal with them and everything is great there. So to me, that to me sounded crazy. I don't know if you woke up on the wrong side of the bed today. Like isn't that a crazy thought? But I swear to to God like the Melania say something mean to him today Yeah, I mean seriously. I mean it it seemed that that that one I didn't understand at all I mean, I was wondering if it was just me like I'm happy, you know Like does he need a little Xanny like doesn't he a little love?

Zanny? Like, does he need a little love? A little kiss on the cheek? Like, what does he need? Tom F. Kennedy Yeah, I'll hop in here to say purely, let's leave aside Harvard because immigration is something where the executive has large discretion and there are non-economic considerations there. So that's a different thing. And as a general statement, you're not going to be able to target individual legal persons with laws. That is a constitutional issue in the United States. So the Apple thing, one, I agree, it's really bizarre behavior, because from a corporate perspective, that communicates even if you thought you were good before, he's just going to change his mind and target us anyways. This is a good way for Donald Trump to alienate many of the allies that the right just made in the tech community by whiplashing them constantly with this behavior. And two, I agree this will become a legal

issue, but I just want to make the macro points that you will notice the courts have not unilaterally supported nor unilaterally defied Trump. So as you look at this under sort of the first level, the real question, which I think the point was made, and this is correct, is you're going to need to look at in each of these individual statements, what is the legal basis for going through with them or not, weighting them accordingly. So I am significantly more skeptical on the Apple thing than I am on the Harvard thing. But that's simply a statement about like legal precedent. I'd almost say, if you're trying to trade the market, if you're trying to think of the impact from a long-term,

what's going to stick basis, remove that Trump is involved at all, and just say, if a neutral president did this, would the courts eventually, eventually uphold or strike it down? out. So, I was trying to get to and I'm curious what Donnish thinks for this is we're going to have to wrap soon because we have a sponsor is, is the very, very muted market reaction to this? And it is very muted. I mean, you're talking, you know, 1% on the S&P and the NASDAQ and, you know, Bitcoin basically where it was. I mean, the only reaction that's significant is gold, but that's really just getting back

to where it was you know you know before uh is that because people think that yeah it's just you know sound and fury signifying nothing is is that what you think's going on it seems as though what we're what is happening is the market is waiting because there's a few big talks that like Goolsbee just came out. And he was saying that we're still within ranges that have been there before. I think ultimately the market is exactly, it's just shrugging it off.

It's Friday, half the people are already on vacation and the markets are just completely shrugging it off. I don't suspect that we're going to see. I will say, if you're somebody who has a lot of growth stocks and is growth heavy right now, what are you doing going into the long weekend with him throwing this bomb on a Friday? I think people will be a little bit hesitant. And so my bet is that we're going to see a little bit of a sell off at the end of the day.

Yeah. From a from a risk asset perspective, that sounds right. I really wonder about Bitcoin and for all the cross currents in a world where Bitcoin some days is schizophrenic and follows gold and some days follow stocks. Most of the buyers of Bitcoin are more in the gold camp and the intraday traders tend to be on the stock side. It'll be, to me, it'll be fascinating. But I guess we'll see on Monday morning.

It's a feature, not a bug, just to be clear. That's a feature. Yeah, I get that. Anybody else have any closing thoughts before I cut it over to Buzz? Okay, Buzz, take it away. Violency's power. Well, thank you, Dave.

That was a great discussion. We have a sponsor today called Rock 34X, but before we get started, just a disclaimer that Mario's company, IBC, does marketing, incubation, and investing, and sponsors on the show are working with him and IBC Not necessarily crypto town hall Dave or myself in particular And IBC is also hiring too

So if you're tuning in and you're looking for a new gig get into web 3 get into AI Which is DM either Mario's account or the crypto town hall accounts And there's people in there who are watching the DMs that can get you in touch with the right people. But we have Richa up here who is representing Rock 34X. I'm gonna pin a post from their main account too. So if you're tuning in, you can click on their account and check out their website. But Richa, as we get started, why don't you test your mic

and then give us a bit of an elevator pitch on what Rock 34X is. bit of an elevator pitch on what ROC 34X is. Hello, can you hear me? Yeah, yeah, loud and clear. So great, this is actually my first time on an X-Base. So, Richard, we are getting a little bit of background feedback. Sometimes that can happen maybe if there's another device in the same room that is connected to the space.

Is it better now? Yeah, that's actually much better. All right. Greetings, everyone. I'm excited to be on this X-Paces. We've been building Rock 34x for over a year now and really the genesis of Rock 34x is we wanted to build something that is innovation to the ICO and what we could do in the Middle East. So I'm Biza of Abu Dhabi and we've been very active in this region. What most of my friends used to ask is, which is the next alpha that we

need to that we can invest in? So that was last year. That's how this product really came about. But another problem that we faced while we were handling deal allocations or alphas, as we say, the token distribution was a big pain because we had to keep on pinging startup founders, ask them to send the tokens, and then remind the investors or the investors would ask us about vesting schedule and things like that. So I just thought it would be a good idea to handle this particular problem, especially in this region wherein you have a lot of investors also interested to allocate or deploy some of their budgets or investments in digital assets. So we thought that we will build Rock 34x, which is a

pre-TG platform and a token management where we are managing contribution.