The Wolf Of All Streets - A.I. COMEBACK | Is China Taking Over Crypto? | Crypto Town Hall With Scott Melker, Ran Neuner & Mario Nawfal

Episode Date: May 31, 2023

Crypto Town Hall is a new daily Twitter Spaces hosted Scott Melker, Ran Neuner & Mario Nawfal. Every day we discuss the latest news in crypto and bring the biggest names in the crypto space to share their opinions. ►►OKX Sign up for an OKX Trading Account then deposit & trade to unlock mystery box rewards of up to $10,000!  👉 https://www.okx.com/join/SCOTTMELKER ►►THE DAILY CLOSE BRAND NEW NEWSLETTER! INSTITUTIONAL GRADE INDICATORS AND DATA DELIVERED DIRECTLY TO YOUR INBOX, EVERY DAY AT THE DAILY CLOSE. TRADE LIKE THE BIG BOYS. 👉 https://www.thedailyclose.io/   ►►BITGET GET UP TO A $8,000 BONUS IN USDT AND GET MASSIVE DISCOUNTS ON TRADING FEES! 👉 https://thewolfofallstreets.info/bitget    ►►NORD VPN  GET EXCLUSIVE NORDVPN DEAL - 40% DISCOUNT! IT’S RISK-FREE WITH NORD’S 30-DAY MONEY-BACK GUARANTEE. PROTECT YOUR PRIVACY! 👉 https://nordvpn.com/WolfOfAllStreets   ►►COINROUTES TRADE SPOT & DERIVATIVES ACROSS CEFI AND DEFI USING YOUR OWN ACCOUNTS WITH THIS ADVANCED ALGORITHMIC PLATFORM. SAVE TONS OF MONEY ON TRADING FEES LIKE THE PROS! 👉 http://bit.ly/3ZXeYKd  ►► JOIN THE FREE WOLF DEN NEWSLETTER, DELIVERED EVERY WEEK DAY! 👉https://thewolfden.substack.com/   Follow Scott Melker: Twitter: https://twitter.com/scottmelker   Web: https://www.thewolfofallstreets.io   Spotify: https://spoti.fi/30N5FDe   Apple podcast: https://apple.co/3FASB2c   #Bitcoin #Crypto #Trading The views and opinions expressed here are solely my own and should in no way be interpreted as financial advice. This video was created for entertainment. Every investment and trading move involves risk. You should conduct your own research when making a decision. I am not a financial advisor. Nothing contained in this video constitutes or shall be construed as an offering of financial instruments or as investment advice or recommendations of an investment strategy or whether or not to "Buy," "Sell," or "Hold" an investment.

All right, so let's kick it off with maybe Ryan, you can kick it off with what led us here? Like, how did we end up doing this? Whose idea was it? How long have we been talking together about this? And maybe also a bit of an idea, a lot of people don't know you outside the crypto space that will be joining because obviously we're running it from my account. Who the hell are you, man? What makes you the biggest media guy in crypto? Let's start off with the beginning. I think Mario, you know that i've been following your journey for a long time uh i've been a big fan i think even when you know the spaces were very very small and you just started you and i met up quite a few times i flew to dubai to meet with you

um and i said to you guy look i love what you're doing i think you need to have multiple streams of which one of them should be crypto and I want to partner up with you on crypto. And the reason I wanted to partner up with you on crypto is because I thought that we are specialists in crypto. We are building a 24-7, 365. Am I on? Someone says it's reconnecting. We can hear you, man. We can hear you.

Okay. So we are building a 24 7 365 crypto streaming platform because we believe that the world needs a 24 7 365 crypto streaming platform we have 60 people working for us 65 people working for us researchers analysts etc and we believe that we can use this to not only power what we are powering on youtube but actually to pivot it much more towards spaces we want to work with you. And I think one of the reasons why we really wanted to move is because we just think that space, that YouTube is not a healthy media platform because of all the censorship and what you can talk about and can't talk about and copyright

strikes and stuff like that. And we believe that Twitter Spaces is the way. So that's the first part of the puzzle. Second part of the puzzle is that Scott Malka and I have been friends for a really long time. And we've always spoken about doing something together. We kept saying, we love each other. We just want to find a way to work together and to do a lot more exciting stuff together. I think that Scott is, to be honest,

the best Sp spaces host in the world second to you mario i think sorry you're second to him i think that scott is the best ouch yeah i see i know i said i said scott is number one and mario's number two i think i like that man i like that yeah i think scott's the really the best crypto guy in the world and i said look i think what we can do is we can we can support him we can bring our research team we can bring all of our communities and we can bring it all to one platform and i think that was the beginning of what we started talking about which was crypto town hall and i think we've all agreed now that

we're going to have a daily stream here and that we're going to use this platform to be the one single-minded crypto streaming town hall platform for citizen journalism. And I think we've all joined forces here. And I think I'm very, very, very excited about what this means for all of us. Scott, I'll give you the mic. But before that, I just want to thank Ran

because Ran was helping out in the early days. For anyone that doesn't know, I started this space in crypto before blowing up and covering politics and news, which I've always been passionate about, but never thought I'd end up being a kind of a journalist type person. And then FTX blew up.

And then Ran was one of the few people that reached out to me. He's like, hey man, you're going to face a lot of hate, a lot of targeting because now you blew out of nowhere. He was right. And they gave me advice along the way. And then here we are are he came with the idea of doing a 24-7 crypto show

because we're looking at doing a 24-7 show as well and we're working towards it crypto and non-crypto you know we have the finance show that's got uh co-hosts with uh dr danish the host um and then we have the news show that i do in a few hours that most of you most of you join so between these three shows and the ai one that's launching very soon we're almost going to be 24 7 but the goal is to do 24 7 crypto between youtube which is ran's home um uh youtube is youtube is also scott's home and twitter spaces which me and scott do and ran does occasionally and we know we're getting there but ran has been supporting since the early days and scott a quick intro about you man and how how you came into the

picture other than being Ran's friend yeah I think we collectively were all having separate conversations as he hinted on and it just made sense for the three of us to join forces I think Mario interestingly during this months and months of building your presence here has just become astounding and and I think after the obviously six million people watching you live for DeSantis, I know the kind of conversations happening in the background. I think this really just highlights the opportunity here for us to have very honest conversations with industry leaders. I mean, I've obviously had my podcast and my YouTube channel and all these things. But it feels like, at least for me, that it's all sort of funneled towards this moment and this platform. We're seeing, I think, the citizen journalism movement led by you, but also obviously led by Elon Musk and Twitter as a platform. And I think we all agree

that there's going to be endless features and opportunities coming to Twitter as a result of this sort of distrust in mainstream media. And listen, we call it citizen journalism. I don't view myself as a journalist, but what I view our ability here is to gather the brightest minds and get in real time, live opinions on what's actually happening in the market and try to distill out some of the bullshit, to be quite frank. And that's always been sort of my goal. And that's what I'm looking to do here. And you can see the amazing panel here. But guys, I can't even tell you like how incredible these groups are going to be moving forward. We're doing this every day.

There's only Elon. Elon is the only one missing. And then when crypto recovers, I'm sure he'll put his face on his first crypto show. And I'm sure it's going to be this one yeah i got a lot of guests and really really big names coming up for the next couple of weeks i mean the somc show which is happening i think on the 14th is like i've never seen a guest lineup like that it starts off with muriel rubini but i mean i've never seen a guest lineup like that on any on any channel ever and i think the other thing that really really really excites me about this is when we're on youtube we are the content when we're on youtube it takes hours and hours and hours of research for us to be able to to be the content we the people that speak we are the content etc when we are on twitter we're not the content we're the moderators this is where we learn this is where we come to learn from amazing minds in the space. And I think that that's the part that excites me the most.

Mario, I know to you, it's like, you know, you host a whole lot of spaces, but you don't speak a lot in the spaces because you're just the moderator and you're getting from other people. This is a great opportunity for us to do the same and to actually get the brightest minds in the industry using our networks to help drive this. Yeah, now that the circle jerk is over like the two couple of things um first is that you

know twitter is uncensored it's raw and you saw that in ftx like we i got a lot of you know a lot of backlash for for breaking news that you know and and have and and platforming people that leak that might harm the industry by offering more transparency. Obviously, it turned out really well afterwards. One thing we'll promise you, this will be raw, this will be uncensored. Me, Ran, and Scott,

we're friends behind the scenes, but we will argue, we will debate. We're not going to sugarcoat things for you and ask the panelists to do the same. And we'll remind panelists in every space until everyone gets used to it. Don't sugarcoat things.

Disagree with each other. Just keep it direct. Keep it honest for the audience. Because think that's what the the the space needs but look we're done with the intro we're done with complimenting each other and blowing smoke up each other so scott maybe you can kick it off with a quick market overview um where are we at now and obviously keep it simple for the non-crypto guys and and then we'll go to the panel for the panelists just unmute your mic and jump in whenever you want. Don't worry about interrupting.

If you're out of line, we'll tell you about 99% of the time you won't be. Or just put your hand up if you want to speak, if you haven't used Twitter spaces before. But again, it's a pleasure to have you all. Thank you for joining the first show ever. And lastly, shout out to Romy, Fred, and of course, Gora for all playing a role in connecting us or making the show happen. But Scott, market update. Let's do this. Yeah, I mean, very quickly looking at stocks somewhat flat, S&P at about 4,178, down about 0.64, NASDAQ roughly the same, Dow Jones 32,763. But I think, obviously, we want to talk a bit more about crypto. And we've seen a drawdown down roughly

3% on Bitcoin at 26,925, Ethereum at1,857. So effectively here, what we're seeing is a drawdown, which of course means that we need a narrative, right guys? I mean, you can't have price action without a narrative. That's a joke for anyone who doesn't know my sarcasm. I think that this crypto market has effectively been chopping sideways for weeks, if not months here, and that we search for narrative on a daily basis when it's not really there and it's just traders trading. But we do have a few things that people are sort of highlighting as the reason that we might have this Asian session volatility, a CME gap below. Of course, some large Coinbase sells. Yesterday was the fifth largest selling day and we saw actual whale inflows into Coinbase.

And the narrative there being that Coinbase is where institutions trade. Therefore, we should always be watching if we have inflows. And of course, for anyone looking at the macro, we have renewed talk of another hike, right? Just a few weeks ago, 0% chance that the Fed was going to raise. Now we're seeing a 65% chance priced in of a 0.25 rate hike. A lot there, and I can't tell you that I believe that that's moving price dramatically. McGlone, I'm going to go to you first because I missed you on a Monday when we were going to do macro Mondays. You and I talk about signal versus noise a lot. So maybe you can sort of paint the picture here.

Well, thank you. I'm honored to be on and particularly because I do not have anything bullish to say about virtually any risk assets. It just happens that cryptos are the riskiest assets and Bitcoin's the least risky of them. I look at this as the beginning of a classic trend versus trade. We've had a massive pump in all assets this year. Anything that went down has gone up. Crypto has gone up twice as much as the NASDAQ, that's what they're supposed to do. And as you pointed out earlier, any inch that the NASDAQ goes higher, we price it more Fed tightening. It's just you don't want to fight the Fed. The fact that we're still saying that a year from now we've had a massive bounce,

the market looks to me as I just look at this as a trade. And the trade is a risk reward as you're supposed to be probably short. Look for the market to go down and do what it normally does in recession. So our chief economist, Anna Wong, expects the second half of the year is, quote unquote, going to be ugly. And I fully stick with that. And the fact that the Fed's still tightening and kind of being egged by the stock market to me makes, makes this look like this is the markets ready to roll over. And I just look at it as Bitcoin and cryptos are leading in the case. So cryptos, Bitcoin down 3% today. What's falling?

NASDAQ is down. S&P is down about a percent. Now, it's the end of the month. Yeah, we're supposed to get volatility, but that's the key thing to point out, where this market's really about liquidity, and liquidity is still being pulled, and we had a decent bounce. So I like to ask myself and ourselves is, yeah, are we all hoping that the worst is over or are we expecting that might not be? And to me,

I have to point out the facts of recessions. Recesses go down, recession hasn't even started and the fact that we're still tightening in this environment means we're probably going to have a pretty decent decline to risk assets. So I still am bullish gold and bullish bonds and just can't beat bullish cryptos until I see a good sign of divergent strength from the stock market. They all just went up this year together. I think the risk is they all go back down. Mike, hey, it's Ron. How's it going, Mike? Good. How are you? I mean, I do. mean, I do want to bring up a couple of things that we are seeing. It does seem like it's a tale of two cities here or a tale of two parts of the world. So in the West, certainly liquidity is going down, not only in crypto, but in everything else.

The West is certainly tightening. But if you look at the East and you look at Asia, the Nikkei is at an all-time high. Japanese stimulus, for lack of a better word, it's not exactly stimulus, but you know what I mean. It's Japan increasing liquidity. Hong Kong opening up applications for crypto exchanges tomorrow on the 1st of June. So kind of slightly, slightly opening up. So to me, it does look like it's actually like two sides. So the US is against crypto. The US is tightening. Asia is not tightening anymore. China is actually trying to stimulate as much as possible. We did have the manufacturing numbers out from China this morning, which were shockingly bad. And that is,

I think, because people are expecting and seeing slightly less US consumption, but maybe that's not the case in asia so let me let me um first of all that is so important to point that out that is so important that we have good open discourse because you don't get that in in china particularly it's actually getting worse and worse that's why this program what you guys doing is so important and happy to be on it so just to point out facts, I was in the trading pits when the Nikkei made an all-time high around 40,000 in 1989. And it's at 30,000 now, still below that level. That's a key thing to point out is it's made a new high, but we have to be careful with this technical strategy that says if it goes up, it's going to go up.

It's actually the opposite now. The fact that the CSI, the Chinese Shanghai Index actually made a new low in the year after it bounced is showing why the Chinese are pumping the system with it, and why they are actually easing and Japan are actually easing. These are the most significant exporting countries in the world, and the most significant importing country in the world is going to recession by its own admission. And it's just a matter of time. So I like to say, like for the crude oil bulls last year around at 100, they turned out to be wrong. And now they're all still looking for that demand to pick up. And I'm like, it's irrational to expect any kind of demand in crude oil big picture when the world's largest economy is tilting over to recession. So as far

as liquidity, the number one thing that matters is the Fed. The Fed's still tightening. But the key thing I also want to point out is we have seen this, what I view China right now as in early days is this similar to what happened in Japan when it peaked in 1989, that's the Nikkei, and what happened when the Soviet Union peaked. That's all happening in China right now. I mean, they're going to a completely autocratic environment, particularly for a firm like mine. We have to be very careful now when we write anything about China. I had a colleague of mine who was particularly for a firm like mine. We have to be very careful now when we write anything about China. I had a colleague of mine who was detained for a year because she wrote something negative. It's only getting worse.

So this is why I see that's going to be great in the long term for Bitcoin. But to me, the point macro is the tide is ebbing. We've had a decent bounce. And I like to say is if we can expect the rise in equity tide to lift all boats, that's great. But it's typically not how it works because the rise in equity tide is actually pulling liquidity from the system. It's making people have false hope as it makes the Fed tighten more. I would like to add a sort of slightly alternate think about this. So it's James from CoinShares.

I think we must look at things from a macro lens here. And Bitcoin fundamentally is this store of value. We understand that to many people. It also has a tech element to it as well. But I think its identity has changed over the years. And the identity that it's really sort of gathered pace over the last two years or last year and a half has been it's a risk asset and it's highly correlated to equities. And if you look at the equities correlation to Bitcoin, it exactly the time when the fed started making noises in january 2021 when they're sorry 2022 when they're going to start hiking rates um it is because it's a store of value it's an interest rate sensitive asset um but i don't

necessarily think if you think equities are going to go down now because macro is deteriorating i don't think you can necessarily bother the same thing is going to happen to bitcoin we're already seeing that correlation really deteriorate now the correlation now between equities and between msi world and bitcoin is now eight percent it's declined dramatically from that seven to two percent peak yeah and james we've also seen an increase in that correlation with the gold between bitcoin which i think, and Mike McGlone and I and Dave Weisberger talk about this quite frequently on Monday. And the only place we generally have disagreement about the market is whether in this next cycle, Bitcoin is going to

correlate more to gold or if it's going to remain somewhat correlated to the risk assets. And after you finish up, I want to ask Francis, Francis, your opinion on the macro, obviously, since that's your specialty, but go ahead and finish quickly, James. Yeah. So just why is Bitcoin correlated to gold now? It's because people see that the Fed is making a mistake. A June rate hike would be a mistake. That's why it's decorrelating from equities and correlating with gold, another safe haven,

essentially. I think gold, and our clients are expressing this, for the first time ever, I've seen clients say Bitcoin is a safe haven. Perfect. Frances, I would love your thoughts on the macro picture here, since obviously that's your specialty. Well, interestingly, I just come from a presentation in which they're arguing that the long-term trend for the whole world is declining growth, which I guess over the longer term could possibly be better in environments where growth is low and central banks are keeping interest rates low and doing all manner of easing to try and increase growth and inflation. That's not where we are now, but that could be the longer-term trend.

Right now, though, central banks are still fighting inflation. We are actually seeing monetary conditions tighten really fast. The money supply in the US and indeed in Europe as well is coming down very, very quickly. And there are people already predicting that you that we're going to see a recession in the western world because central banks have over tightened francis i've just got a question for you scott and and before just for the audience if you ask your questions do so in the comments bottom right corner that purple circle if it's not glitching click on it and put comments there i'm going to start going through them but scott i want to move

to china because everyone's waiting for the ai you know ai is blowing up i was listening to the to the oland podcast they're talking about how vc funding is drying up except ai is bubbling up um and we're seeing the same thing in crypto as well crypto ai projects are blowing up so that's going to be discussed after the concerning point which is china i've heard a couple of speakers mention it and my team was talking about it earlier today. What's going on there? Why is there all that concern around China? I would love actually for one of the guests to jump in. So first, I think he's being specific to what Ran mentioned earlier, which is the manufacturing data and the economy slowing. Effectively, China being in a recession because then we're going to flip after that after someone addresses that to talk about the bullish case for crypto in China because it's sort of the the opposite i i i mean actually get into it yeah and you know you know what i can get

it get into this let's let's get into the crypto let's get into the crypto case in china because i think we need to clarify exactly what's going on here so hong kong which is not really part of china but kind of part of china as of as of more recently is opening up crypto trading to retail investors on the 1st of June. And everyone thinks that tomorrow, being the 1st of June, we're going to get this huge inflow of money into the market because all of a sudden, the narrative that has been created is that China is opening up to crypto. So let's just quickly put the cards on the table so that everyone's aware of what to expect tomorrow. First of all, China is not opening up to crypto. So let's just quickly put the cards on the table so that everyone's aware of what to expect tomorrow. First of all, China is not opening up to crypto. China has always been open to blockchain. In fact, we have a lot of statistics, and I spoke about them all earlier

on my show today, showing how China is very, very, very bullish on blockchain. China is still 20% of the mining hash power, even after they kicked out the miners from China. So they've always been bullish on blockchain. Where they're not bullish is they're not bullish on crypto. And the fact that Hong Kong is opening up shouldn't be mistaken for the fact that this is not China coming

into crypto. It's Hong Kong. It's a small territory. The crypto bros on YouTube and here on Twitter have created this narrative that China is testing the market using Hong Kong. That's a narrative that has been created because we want to create that narrative. What's opening up tomorrow is Hong Kong taking licensed applications for companies that want to be trading a bunch of cryptos. And it comes with a whole big set of caveats as to what people can trade.

Like, for example, there is a list of coins that can be traded. And according to the regulation, any coin that is listed that can be purchased by retail investors needs to be included in two major indices, which is a minimum requirement. And they list the coins, which is bitcoin ethereum litecoin bitcoin cash polkadot solana cardano avalanche polygon chainlink um those are the ones that are listed on any of the two um uh indices now why do i say this because we're getting this china narrative that china's opening up and a whole lot of chinese shit coins that haven't had no activity since 2017 are the ones that are actually blowing up because China is opening up to crypto. So I think we've got to be quite measured about what we say and what we do here around this whole China narrative.

On the flip side of that, I just want to point out that we ran another statistic. And again, all of this was covered on the show today. I looked at the exchange volume a year ago versus the exchange volume today. And I compared Asia to North America, South America, and Europe. A year ago, 64% of the exchange volume came from Asia, 27.2% came from North America, and 0.8% came from Asia, 27.2 came from North America, and 0.8 came from Europe. Today, 82.5% is in Asia, 10.3% is in the US, and 4.1% is in Europe. Now, we've been speaking about the US and Operation Chokepoint and the SEC and the US not getting their ducks in a row. And I think now we've actually really, really, really started to see it in real numbers.

You're talking about 82% versus 64% in terms of Asia trading volume. That's a massive increase. And who's it at the expense of? North America, which was 27.5% of the volume a year ago, and is only 10.3% of the volume today. So there is a move to Asia. I do think that Asia is adopting crypto a hell of a lot more. I think Asia and I think Middle East, Dubai, etc.,

Abu Dhabi, are really attaining the US when it comes to crypto because of the lack of regulatory clarity. But I mean, I don't think we should celebrate today that tomorrow's this big thing and China's going to open up

and we're all of a sudden going to get like this crazy, massive inflow of money tomorrow. We've got to be very measured in our approach here. Hasib, I see you have your hand up. I'd love to go to you and then to Julian as well. Yeah, so let me jump in. So I'm a managing partner of a multi-billion dollar venture fund. We've got

a big presence in Asia. So we have a pretty good line of sight into what's actually going off on the ground there. And I mostly agree with you, Ran, that the story is a little bit unsophisticated in how the West is portraying what's going on. One thing to understand is that it is true that China is behind what's happening in Hong Kong. One thing to understand is that it is true that China is behind what's happening in Hong Kong. We know that there are people from Beijing who are basically giving the marching orders in Hong Kong. When China said, crypto trading is done, Hong Kong followed in lockstep. And basically, it's Beijing kind of in the back room that's pulling the string saying, hey, let's open this stuff back up again and see what happens on a

sort of small scale experiment. Now, one thing to understand, Hong Kong is, like you said, not China. China is like, what, 1.3 billion people. Hong Kong is like a couple million. Hong Kong is tiny in terms of people. But in terms of capital, Hong Kong is enormous. Hong Kong is where a lot of the wealth that is in China basically escapes China to go invest into global markets. If you're in China, there's very strong capital controls. It's very difficult to get money out of the country. That's one of the reasons why Bitcoin was so attractive, especially Bitcoin mining was so attractive. It was one of the only ways that you could at scale take RMB, invest it into a domestic mining operation and get out Bitcoin.

Normally, if you want to get US dollars or you want to get anything outside of China, it is extremely difficult if you're inside mainland China. But in Hong Kong, Hong Kong is sort of the global capital market outflow place. The thing though, is that if you're in China and you're sophisticated and you have a lot of capital, there's a good chance you already have money in Hong Kong. And so it does mean that basically opening things up in Hong Kong is kind of a soft way of opening things up to high net worths. Like, yeah, there's the whatever 1.5 million Hong Kongers or however many they are, but they're kind of around here. There's like a single city. The main thing is that high net worths in China are now going to have access to crypto trading. Now, that being said, it's important to understand that a lot of those people already had access to crypto trading. Now, that being said, it's important to understand that a

lot of those people already had access to crypto trading. Crypto was basically a gray market in China for like five years. And then it sort of became legal, and then it sort of became illegal in fairly quick order. So what that means is that a lot of the reason why this isn't quite as groundbreaking as one might otherwise think is that the people in Hong Kong who really wanted to own crypto already could. Like, yeah, it wasn't legal technically, but they'd been doing that kind of... That's just sort of the thing that you do. And so a lot of Binance's volume still comes from China. And it's people who know how to use VPNs. They know how to figure out how to get around various restrictions. Because if you want to own stuff that's international and

you're in Hong Kong, that's why you're there, is to own things that are international. So I don't think for that reason, it's a big deal. I do think in the long run, it is significant that Beijing has not shut the door on crypto. That's what Hong Kong means that's most important. It doesn't mean that tomorrow we're going to see massive inflows into Bitcoin or whatever, but it does mean that, hey, the world's second largest economy is paying attention and they are not shutting the door on this technology. They're saying, hey, let's get a controlled way to experiment with it. Let the grownups, the sophisticated players play around with it. And if we see something that we like, we might engage more deeply. Asif, what do you think this means for for the u.s like like do you think that the u.s

really don't want crypto because i mean like i know we're all into crypto and we spend the majority of our days in crypto and then i've got to be honest last night i spent a lot of time i've been spending a lot of time on ai yesterday i did a show on ai which was i think one of our better shows um and it was around nvidia and you NVIDIA getting to a trillion dollar market cap. And I then went home and experimented with a little bit of AI. And I just want to quickly just walk you through my experience. A friend of mine sent me a link. I uploaded one of my YouTube streams to AI.

Within 20 minutes, I had the same YouTube video translated with lip sync and facial expression sync into Russian, Spanish, Hebrew, and a local language here called Afrikaans. And then I kind of thought to myself, you know, like blockchain is full of ponzi's and it's full of holes where people can transfer money to terrorist organizations and drug dealers and smugglers around the world. Whereas you look at AI and like AI is this great technology, which is adding value immediately right now today in, I would say, a much cleaner way, if you want to call it that. And I kind of put myself in the minds of minds of a u.s regulator to almost say look it's not one or the other but you know do we really need to win with blockchain and crypto or are we willing to say you know the risks of blockchain and crypto which these um which

disintermediate governments which allow our citizens to move money across in a way that we don't really like. Maybe we don't want this in the US. And you know what? Asia can actually have it. We want to win in places like EV and AI and stuff like that. How do you feel about how Washington really, really, really feels about this discussion? Not what the crypto bros want to hear, but what is Washington really thinking?

And Dr. Haseeb, you could answer that also, if you could touch on Operation Chokepoint for the audience, a lot of people might not know. We'd love you to answer that and also we'll go to Dr. Julian right after. Go ahead, Haseeb. Yeah, I'm happy to. So the first thing I'll say, the longer that I've been doing this, the more that I've come to appreciate that you should never model Washington, quote unquote, as a single brain. The more you do that, the more mistakes you're going to make, the more you're going to get things wrong, the worse you're going to be at predicting what the US government does. It is useful to think of China that way. China is actually a sort of monolithic brain that makes fairly reasonable decisions if you're ignoring the local governments and all that.

But in the US, you are just going to get things wrong. The reality is that if you look at the executive branch versus the legislature versus the judiciary, you get different answers for how people feel about blockchain. And if we have another election in a year and a half and a different party comes in, you're going to get another totally different set of actors. They're going to have different views on what to do about blockchain. We know very clearly the executive branch fucking hates crypto. They do not like crypto at all. And now their views on crypto have really evolved over the last six months. Surprise, surprise, there was a giant scam that I think all of us have spent a lot of time talking about that embarrassed a lot of people, particularly in the executive branch, right? SPF was Biden's second largest donor. Tons of people, mostly

Democrats, have all these photo ops shaking his hand. He's like the Jeffrey Epstein of our time. And so naturally, there's going to be some headbanging. There's going to be a lot of aggression from specifically the executive branch. So a lot of what you're referring to, so Mario, you touched on Operation Chokepoint. Operation Chokepoint 2.0 is this basically kind of backdoor pressure that the executive branch, basically Biden's administration, has been pushing on banks through their oversight of bank regulators to basically say, without passing any laws, without any constitutional interpretation that says, yes, this is legal for us to do, basically saying, look, let's find a way to debank this industry because we don't like it.

It's the same thing that happened in the Obama era with payday lending, with guns, with marijuana, with other industries that were disfavored, but not illegal. So crypto is not illegal in the US. And that's why we're now seeing a lot of pushback, especially in the press, against all this kind of shadow debanking that's going on within the crypto industry. But this is all coming from the executive branch. And what you're seeing is that the judiciary is not in lockstep with the executive. When these things get challenged, judges are like, what the fuck are you guys doing? When the legislature is, when you go in front of Congress, Congress is split. People have different opinions about this. It's only really the executive. And that basically means like,

look, a lot of people are very bearish on the US because of the fact that, hey, Biden's president, president has a lot of latitude, a lot of control, and that power's only been gone up over the last 30, 40 years. So crypto's screwed, right? Okay. Right now, it's basically a point toss in a year and a half, who's president? Even if you end up getting Biden reelected, which is probably 30, 40% chanceiden gets re-elected um even in that case very good chance that genza rolls over because genza is very unpopular both left and right he is not a popular uh winner on on the sec uh second ftx is gonna have been two and a half years ago by the time the next administration rolls around there will be other shit to worry about right now ftx is six old. It is still top of mind and people do not feel like the story is over. But eventually, it'll roll out of the news cycle. There'll be other stuff to talk about. And especially when

it comes to election time, I don't think banging on crypto bros plays. The reality, when you have to win votes, you become a populist. Right now, people are playing to their bases because it's primary and the election is so far out, nobody really cares. But once election rolls around, enough people in America own crypto that being an asshole to crypto is not a winning strategy to win over independence. So I actually think you're going to see the discourse on this change quite a lot about a year from now. But right now, for the next three to six months, it's going to be more of this in the US. But I wouldn't extrapolate from that to say, ah, America hates crypto. I don't think that's right.

Yeah. I don't think many people are jumping to join Elizabeth Warren's anti-crypto army. Guys, I see you have your hands up. Julian, go ahead, but then guests, feel free to jump in and continue the discourse. Yeah. So for me, I'm not the expert on the US. Our company is based in Singapore. We've been here for eight years. So for us, the Asian market is where we have the best view on. We have several parts in the business in the CATE group. One is the retail side of things, where we have about 2 million customers, mainly in Asia. And I just wanted to add on that Hong Kong, China stuff. Obviously, for us, we're also looking closely into the Hong Kong side of things. And I really agree with Ren that, yeah, there's some excitement around Hong Kong and potentially

later on being in China, but we don't see any increased interest now from, I don't know, local retail investors when it comes to crypto. Now, there's a flip side, and I think that is a very interesting part. We have a custody business as well, B2B. And here, the interest from especially now Hong Kong with eyeing China has spiked dramatically over the past couple of weeks. So personally, I feel the angle here that could be is really that maybe Hong Kong is just the initial stage and then it opens up China later on as more of an experiment. So that is just something that we see on the ground here. And I just wanted to share that because I felt that that dissociation between retail and the business

side of things is quite interesting right now. Yeah. And Brian Armstrong, I mean, made the case that I think a lot of people are making. There's a geopolitical side to this and, of course, the national security risk. Listen, China was very anti-crypto until the United States became anti-crypto. And now China is taking the other side of that. So could this be that China's viewing this as an opportunity to become more pro-crypto because they see us cracking down in the United States and they can effectively take a stranglehold on this market? Oh, for sure. Hong Kong is typically the testing ground. I mean, this is historically known. I mean, I think it makes a lot of sense. One other question, and Bill, maybe I'll go to you on this one.

A bit of context for the audience. China banned crypto in 2013. At least phase one was in 2013. The latest phase was in late 2021. That was a pretty big ban there. So my question to you, Bill, if this is a testing ground in Hong Kong and then China follows suit, what does that mean for crypto and how has the market responded in the short term? Yeah. Can you hear me okay, Mario? Perfect. Yes. All right. So I have maybe a slightly different view is I actually think that

it really doesn't mean much of anything. I think that people who want to buy crypto, even people in China, for the most part, are able to buy crypto, especially the folks that would move the market, whether it's institutional money, high net worth, family offices, banks, funds like SEBS or Abras, whatever. They're able to buy crypto today. I don't know anyone who complains to me that, oh, I want to put a million dollars in crypto and I just can't do it. I honestly have never heard that. Now, the regulatory environment is certainly hostile, but for people who are savvy and want to buy, they're able to buy. I think the bigger issue is that we're in this, we probably troughed in terms of where the global liquidity markets were in October,

November of last year. And that's going to matter way more than what's happening in Hong Kong or with the Warren faction of crypto or anti-crypto or the Biden administration. And I think liquidity globally has actually been improving since November. So I'm going to maybe disagree with Mike a little bit here. I think the economy is now in recession in the US and Europe. We saw the Germany print, PMI plummeted with huge downside risk, which probably creates a floor on global liquidity shorts if you look at it from a contrarian perspective, because I think liquidity is actually going to start increasing. Even from these levels, we might see some short term downside risk on US based risk on assets,

because I think the dollar on a relative basis may strengthen. But I think it's going to be short-lived and I think it's going to be game on very soon. I think interest rates have peaked or very close to peaking. This reminds me of the early to mid-90s when everything was doom and gloom, when interest rates were rising and all of a sudden the internet came storming in. And now in the same environment, when interest rates are probably peaked, we've got AI investments storming in at the same time. So all of this, to me, points to an environment where I actually think a lot of people are going to be very, very surprised to the upside over the next 24 months. Certainly going probably more so next year than this year, but I would not be surprised

if there was upside surprises this year in most risk on assets. Bill, quick question to you before going to other panelists. And first, I like your bullishness. I like a bit of contrarian here on the panel to balance it out. My question to you, though,

is you said that making the legalizing crypto in China won't make much of a difference. I don't understand how when the punishment, if someone breaks the laws, I'll read out, there's up to 10 years imprisonment if someone in China trades or mines crypto, provides services related to crypto trading or mining,

advertises or promotes crypto, holds crypto or uses crypto to pay for goods and services. I don't get how people would break the law. It's very simple. And I think Julian can probably comment on this as well. My take is that if you look at the amount of money movement by the wealthy who are able to get their money out via Hong Kong,

who are able to move money into family offices, we have family office clients based in Hong Kong. We're sure a lot of that money originated in the mainland. And they're able to do what they want to do. Now, I think to your point, the lower middle class, middle class who in the aggregate probably represent a lot of money may have trouble because they can't easily use their everyday bank accounts via an exchange may be shut out. But I think that it's currently dwarfed by two things. One, the wealthy are able to do what they want to do. And two, global liquidity has been sucked out of

the system anyway. So I think that as liquidity is being pushed and pumped into the system over the next 18 months, yes, that may actually help the mainland Chinese retail to some degree if it turns out that they actually turn that back on, which they're not even claiming to be doing here. That's just focused on Hong Kong. So I do think that for the most part, this is a liquidity driven issue, not a US regulatory issue, Chinese regulatory issue, et cetera, et cetera. And I think that we're going to basically be claiming that, oh, everything is great again because of all these regulatory overhangs that have been clarified in the next 24 months. And I can assure you that's not what it's going to be. It's going to be massive amounts of money being pumped into the system

because of recession and other issues and bank failures and God knows what else that now that the debt ceiling has been raised that are going to basically create game on again for risk on assets. One more question to Jeremy on this one. Jeremy, and then I want to talk about the macro economy one more time before moving to whenever Scott is ready, we'll move to AI. But Jeremy, crypto corrected heavily when China cracked down. And if my memory is incorrect, please let me know. So I don't understand, shouldn't crypto pump considering China's shifting and opening up more to crypto, assuming Hong Kong is an experiment

for the rest of China? That's actually not correct, by the way. I'm happy to jump in, but- Yeah, please, please. Yeah, correct. Correct. No, no, correct me, Bill, and then we'll go to Jerry. The timing may look correctly on a calendar, but if you actually look to overall global liquidity indices, I think maybe Bitcoin would have peaked at like 85s had China not cracked down. But the way liquidity was starting to be pumped out of the system, we all, and I raised my hand as the first one, grossly underestimated the degree to which liquidity was going to be pumped out of the global system early, late 21 going into last year and through the mid-year for sure. And that was not about the Chinese crackdown. And by the way, look at the amount of mining still happening in China for a country that's banned mining. I just don't buy it. That makes perfect sense. Really quickly, I just want to say, yeah, we will go to Jeremy right now, but that Bill's not the only person who's bullish on the rest of the year here. That's been a pretty actually popular narrative. I mean, two weeks ago was headline news that Paul Tudor Jones said that he believes the Fed is done raising rates. Stocks will finish the year higher from here and thought the same about the crypto market. into what we've been discussing here, I think we're at one of those places in the market where we have really split sentiment 50-50

about what's going to happen moving forward. Jeremy, go ahead and share your thoughts. And Francis, I see your hand up as well. Jeremy, are you there? You've got to unmute. Bottom left corner, Jeremy. Hey, this is Jeremy Kaufman, the CEO of Library. This is Jeremy Kaufman, the CEO of Library. We were one of the companies that

got hit by the federal government as much as anyone. But this conversation, I feel like an alien a little bit listening to this conversation. I got into cryptocurrency. Actually, I was motivated by the original Operation Chokepoint, the first one under the Obama administration, where he put extra legal pressure on the credit card companies to cause them to stop doing business with gun manufacturers, drug paraphernalia, pornography, you know, sort of gray, gray areas, but it was legal, and they put extra legal pressure and stopped those companies from being able to do business. And that to me, what it was, and I at least to me still is the most fundamental value proposition of cryptocurrency.

Not as, as some alternate reserve currency, you know, to end the fed, although let me be clear, I think it'd be great if that happens, but like that, the fundamental thing that's interesting here and the fundamental thing that needs to exist for the whole thing to work is the ability to transact it

freely, to, to have a world where if the credit card companies do say you can't do business, or if your government says you're not allowed to have that protest, and we're going to take away your banking services, that cryptocurrency will make that kind of thing impossible. And 10 years later, it doesn't actually feel to me that that's true. And listening to this whole conversation, it doesn't even feel like people think that that's necessary anymore, that that's not even required and all we care about is,

you know, can rich people buy and hold Bitcoin? And maybe that's a path to ending, you know, fiat currency and all these things. So I'm not like trying to say that I'm wholly against that as a thing, but are we just done with the idea that you need to be able to transact and the average person needs to be able to use it for this whole thing to work? Are we just done with the idea that you need to be able to to transact and the average person needs to be able to use it for for this whole thing to work are we just done with that idea

that's kind of what i'd like to put out there to you know to everyone else james go ahead please no i i mean first of all i i agree with and that's a good point jeremy um no i think think we do need the crypto Bitcoin narrative. It's been US centric in our little bubble here for a while. But the reality is that places like Lebanon and Venezuela and Argentina and places that are experiencing terrible inflation, super high inflation, even if the books don't say it's hyperinflation yet. They need a place to store their hard-earned money without it melting away overnight. So that's number one, and they need to be able to transact. There's a billion people on this planet who are not banked, who are completely unbanked. And this is where Bitcoin in particular is important for them. But going back to what Bill was saying, look, I think that exactly what you're saying, Scott, is that we're kind of split

down the middle here between what people believe is going to happen in the next few months. We are bearing down on a recession. There's just no way around it. I do believe that AI is super important. It's going to create a lot of productivity. Some people will be displaced and some people will take advantage of the fact that they can do jobs of five or 10 people when you should take all those 10 people to produce certain things that AI will help them do. So we'll be a boost to the economy eventually, not quite yet. It will get there though. But in the meantime, the Fed is bearing down on some conflicting data, right? So we've got jobs numbers that came in, a lot of job openings, 10 million job openings this morning. And then you've got the inflation has been so sticky that

they're continuing with the Fed narrative of they've got to reduce inflation and they're going to keep raising rates to do that. So now we're seeing that the market's expecting another rate raise. And if we do that, look, you cannot raise rates over 500 basis points in less than a year without some sort of impact to the economy. And the economy is going to be impacted a lot harder than people realize, in my opinion, because this is such lagging data. We have not seen the effects of these rate raises yet. We've seen some effects on interest rate risks that the banks took that they've gotten absolutely spanked on. But I do believe that there are a few things that could happen. Number one, we could have a credit event. And Bill, you were kind of hinting at that. And I do believe that that is a distinct possibility and some sort of credit event that requires the Fed to step in and inject tremendous liquidity into the system. But look, we have this debt ceiling so-called deal that now we're going to turn around. The Treasury is going to float a trillion dollars worth of bonds.

And if they move that out to a longer end, then it's going to be difficult to keep liquidity in the system. If they issue shorter bills and T-bills, then maybe they can suck some money out of the reverse repo. But if they don't do that, liquidity is coming out of the system. It could be a little bit of a shock to the system. I mean, I do believe we're headed toward a recession and it's going to require long-term some sort of QE and super easing of rates rather quickly into next year in order to come out of that and we have a V-type recovery.

So I too am super bullish long-term, but in the meantime, it's dicey. James, I want to just maybe dig into that point because I think a lot of people aren't talking about it. And that is the fact that the treasury is effectively out of cash. The treasury general account is hovering between zero and $50 billion, which is very, very low. It's like you had $32,000 worth of credit card debt and you've

got 50 bucks in the bank. That's literally what's happening right now in the US. Exactly. And I mean, today when they potentially pass the debt ceiling deal, that gives them a license to start replenishing the account. And if they do start replenishing the account, that money is effectively going to suck out up to a trillion dollars of liquidity out of the market. Why is no one talking about this? This is a trillion dollars potentially out of the market. And maybe if they don't go for a trillion, they may go for half a trillion. But there is money going to be... Yeah. Yeah. There's going to be money that's sucked out of the system right and and so maybe bitcoin

and gold is kind of sniffing that out and it's backing off a little bit here maybe it's also because the rates are uh are going to likely be hyped because of the this data that's contrarian to the fed being able to pause here um you know that's also money coming out of the system. When you tighten and you raise rates, it makes it more expensive and profitability goes down, which means that companies are earning less. They can pay out less. They have to lay off workers. Look, every single time we hear Powell come out and say, yeah, but the job numbers are great. They're very strong. We still haven't seen any signs of a recession. People don't lose their jobs until the recession is already upon them. You look at the job, the unemployment numbers, and they spike after

a recession begins every single time we have a recession. Go look back at the chart. I've got a couple of them in my threads, but that's one of the issues that we're looking at. It happens super fast. So why are they not talking about it? That's a good question. I don't know why they're not talking about it. Sorry, Bill, I think I interrupted you. Bill, are you there? Yeah, sorry. So a couple of things. One, I think the denominator in the Fed's employment numbers are based upon a 90s model of full employment versus the service, part-time workers, seasonality-based workers. And I don't think they're anywhere close to in tune with the times. And if you look at the people that are on the Fed and the people that are on

this panel, no offense to anyone, we're probably all indicative of the same problem, right? I just don't think they're in touch with reality in any way whatsoever, right? Certainly not in tech, not in part-time employment, service industries, large box retail, et cetera, et cetera, down the line. And I really, really believe that regardless of how much they raise in treasury sales, it's going to be short-lived. And like I said, the liquidity is going to be pumped back into the system at an insane rate over the next 24 months. We may have blips down if the dollar strengthens, which I think is in sync with James's point. But I think you'd be crazy to try to trade in that environment and just accept the fact that whether it's six months or 18 months, the amount of M1 and M2 is going to go in

one direction. Yeah, I agree. And that's why I think that it's important to, like you just said, not to try to time this. If you go back to March 2020, if you tried to time that trade, that was extremely difficult. That was extraordinarily difficult. We were picking off the bottom a little bit and we were buying on the way down, but it was painful on the way down.

But to wait for the bottom, that's going to be difficult because of what you just said, Bill, is I think they're going to inject a tremendous amount of liquidity very quickly in order to shore up the markets. Let me jump in, guys, and I'll give you the mic right after Francis. First, a quick update. So Patrick from Binance responded to rumors from a couple of hours ago. So the rumor was, I'll read it out. According to multiple sources who confirmed to Woo Blockchain, Binance has started layoffs and the proportion is still uncertain. The total number of Binance employees and the list continues about how many employees.

I think it says 20%. So Patrick responds a few minutes ago. Let me provide some additional clarity via a thread. I won't read the thread, just the first tweet. You can check the thread yourself. I'll pin it above. Binance is not cutting 20% of employees as a cost-cutting measure. Binance experienced true exponential growth these past five years

and grew its staff accordingly. This was a historic operational challenge to overcome. And then the thread continues. I'll pin it above. I want to ask Waheed a question. And I see James dropped off. James, we'll bring you back up. Please do request and we'll bring you up. Waheed, a quick question for you. And I want the audience to give me their thoughts as well. We used to argue me and you. Now, I'm not arguing with you as much. But you're,

I would say, pessimistic, if you don't mind me saying, about the global economy and risk assets. I'm not sure if that will change if the Fed pivots i want to get your take and kind of a country you know balance it out with you and bill um why are you so concerned and and for the audience i want you to listen to waheed which is faith tribe i want you to listen to bill and other panelists as well and let me know what your thoughts are are you bullish as some of the panelists are and i'd say i am bullish or bearish and if he doesn't mind me characterize himizing him as such, as he is. Wahid? Hold on one second, Mario.

Can you explain to the audience why I turned bearish suddenly? Liquidity. Okay. So, okay, there's context here, right? I mean, I've been on your show, and for everyone to know that I've been quite constructive because I really did believe in the narrative that there's just too much debt around

and the liquidity spigots will not be turned off because they need to manage the leveraging. And I always felt that the Fed put would always make sure that any accident a la SBB or anything that we explained in the last two months would be met with a big liquidity push. And if you really

think about it, that huge spurt that we saw in tech stocks and growth stocks in the last two, three months is very correlated to the expansion of the balance sheet given the bailout funds for the banks and regional banks. So notwithstanding QT. But I'm just going to give anecdotal evidence now

of why I'm nervous. And I was DMing Mario because I'm working on a specific project with Mario and I'm kind of bewildered by what I'm seeing. And I texted him and he was like, come on the show right now. So I apologize to the audience. Don't really know what was being discussed,

but I assume it's the macro. And that is, it just feels like no one has got money. Okay? I know that sounds crazy. They're big funds. They're people who I know are short of liquidity. There is very little liquidity. There are, okay, we are all in a food chain.

I'm a certain size fund. Under a billion. Okay? In i'm a certain sized fund under a billion okay in the hundreds of millions but under a billion i depend on the multi-billion dollar funds to help fund my co-investments i i move i i measure up to those guys and these guys are trying to scramble for liquidity from us so i'm getting calls from people that frankly i would not have dreamt of getting calls from in the last few years okay and and and the call is very simple everyone's scrambling for liquidity in technology outside ai there is no liquidity. In VC, there is no liquidity. There are no secondary bids. And so... And in crypto, just wait, Fik, focusing more on crypto,

you would say the same for crypto? Are you seeing the same thing in crypto? Obviously, Faith Tribe is on the blockchain. That liquidity dried up six months ago, my friend. And short of like a few silly things like meme coins or whatever, that liquidity did not come back. Bill, hold on, hold on. Bill, you gave him a thumbs down. Why? Because it's not the absolute value of liquidity of the system that matters right now. Liquidity has been improving globally since November. I understand that banks by and large are not lending. That's not the pivotal issue here.

The key issue is what's happening at the margin. Is liquidity getting worse? Is it staying the same or getting better? Most measures right now say that over the last six months, liquidity has, or eight months actually, liquidity is actually globally has been improving. So does that mean that it's still bad in all the pockets? And I apologize, I don't know the gentleman's name, is talking about. Absolutely, right? I mean, we're a lender. So we know what's happening firsthand in the lending markets. But on the margin, which is what matters in terms of the value of assets on a relative

basis, liquidity is actually improving. And I expect these recessionary numbers, particularly the PMI that we just saw, are going to create a floor on the quitting numbers as everyone is forced to pivot and support the system. But I'm confused. So both of you are smart. Bill, you've been on the stage many times. Wahid, we have a personal relationship. Andy, you've spoken on stage many times with Bill sometimes. So why is different information for both you guys? Is it liquidity in some areas? It's not different information.

Can I just say in the last few months, we had a monstrous growth, $400 to $500 billion in the Fed balance sheet owing to the regional bank crisis. Sure. You saw a lot of that money flow to the stock market. You saw a lot of that go to NVIDIA. You see a lot of growth bubbles. That, to me, is not the economy. You've got a trillion-two in student debt that's no longer being delayed, okay, in terms of interest payments. You've got, you know, Rand talked about, I caught that part of the discussion, the huge flood of liquidity.

You look at 2011, look at all the other debt-stealing, 2012, all the all the debt ceiling episodes, you had six to nine months of liquidity drain. And I'm just telling you, in the real economy, be it housing, commercial back, we know that, but the, you know, home, affordability, metrics, all going down. There's no more liquidity in housing. Francis, let me go to Francis. Francis, kind of focusing on crypto, where do you stand on this? You saw different takes from Bill and Wahida, you know, with some overlap.

Where do you stand on this? I think we have to look at where we've come from because, you know, I keep hearing people saying there has been this giant kind of sucking sound as central banks generally have been taking liquidity out of the system, particularly when not exclusively the Fed. and so we would expect that things would be getting tighter everywhere and that had a lot to do with the crypto crashes last year and it's and the intention is that conditions will continue

to be tight even if the fed pauses interest rates you will still have tightness in liquidity because that was the point and it is still running off its balance sheet um i expect though we have got the debt ceiling raise coming up and as well as looking back to the last time this happened which was actually 20 september 2019 when we had a combination of events one of which was the debt ceiling raise which um created a liquidity event in the markets where and the fed had to step in and provide liquidity and i expect that if we have the sudden liquidity drain to fill up the tga as we did in september 2019 that's exactly what the fed will do i'm really good go ahead it's james here yeah i would add that yeah i was quite baffled when i

was looking on bloom Bloomberg the other day. I saw liquidity conditions improving. It just doesn't feel like that. And there's some really interesting work done by the American Bankers Association. So if you look at credit conditions, they are the worst since 2008. I think that's really important. That really shows you what's going on in the real economy, essentially. And, you know, when you raise rates this

quickly this aggressively things start breaking and credit to francis she's done some brilliant work on on banking on the banking sector and we're seeing quite a lot of malaise in the banking sector in the us and in europe i mean we've got big names like bank of new york with the cds a credit default swap of 150 basis points right now. Wells Fargo is super high as well. I'm really amazed by that. It's not just the regional banks. And I'm not sure actually the banking problems are over. And particularly if the Fed's going to raise rates in June, that will be a further policy mistake in my view. If you look at inflation, it takes 18 months following the first rate hike

to really start it filtering through into the economy. So we've got some time yet before we see it in the inflation numbers. Let me bring it to Haseeb. I want to ask you a question. Are you there, Haseeb? Yep. There's a lot of money flowing into AI within crypto and outside of crypto.

A bunch of people are sending me projects. The performance is mind-boggling considering the condition in the crypto space and the macro economy as well. Are we in a bubble yet? Because people like to say, hey, we're in a bubble, even in the early, early, early stages when the market just begins to start frothing up. Are we in a bubble? Are you worried? Are you guys deploying more capital in that space? I don't think anyone isn't. And should people in the audience, should they get excited about AI? Should they get involved?

Should they work for AI companies? Should they invest? Okay. Well, so first of all, I'll say, I guess we are the only one who is not investing in AI. I think we made a single AI investment. That said, we are a pure play crypto fund. So unlike Paradigm or some of the other guys

who are going further afield, we only invest in the crypto startups. Now there's a lot of crypto startups we've seen that are trying to make some kind of AI meets crypto type play. So far, I've been pretty skeptical of almost everything that I've seen. Now, you asked the question, are we in a bubble? The answer unequivocally is yes. Is AI real? The answer is also unequivocally yes. 100%. 1,000%.

What is NVIDIA trading at in terms of earnings? Anything like 80x earnings or something like that? We are absolutely in a bubble. And usually when bubbles happen, it's because people realize that some very important technology just arrived on the scene and is going to change everything. It's very clear. That's where we are with AI.

How are you bubbling? Why so quickly? Hold on. Why are you so quickly in a bubble? I feel like it just started unless I'm late. I mean, I think we're all caught flat-footed with how quickly

AI has been accelerating. So it's clearly true. Look, with the advent of both stable diffusion and with GPT-4, everything has changed. It's very clear now. A lot of stuff that we thought like, oh, maybe five to 10 years from now, you're going to have AIs that can basically do your math homework or AIs that can basically do your analyst work and displace an analyst. We're there already.

Basically, it's just a function of how you integrate these things into your workflows. And it's here. It's unevenly distributed. I mean, look, I talked to a lot of founders who are basically in NYC, in sort of these accelerators, founder circles. Two years ago, if you were a founder that you had a basically impressive person with a good network and you wanted to make some quick money, hire a team, do the fun startup thing, right? A lot of people are just not quite cynical, but it's kind of like, look, I want to have an interesting experience. So I want to raise money and do something. Two years ago, it was crypto. You find some fucking half-assed NFT, something, something, something, and you could raise money from somebody. You could always make it work.

If you were young, hungry, you had a good background, you could raise some money. Now it's AI. It's very clear. I talked to a lot of founders who are floundering. The question they're always asking is, should I pivot into AI? Two years ago, should I pivot into crypto? We're in that bubble, right? People- 100%. Huge amounts of money on zero go-to-market, zero traction, zero revenue, zero anything. And to be clear, there's going to be huge winners from this generation of AI, but we're also very clearly in a bubble dynamic.

Yeah, I agree 1,000% with that assessment. We're seeing people call things that are just basically wrapped chat GPT new companies, right? And counting them at the market cap of AI. I pinned a chart above. There's something I was talking about earlier. Everyone's obviously talking about NVIDIA. They seem to forget that NVIDIA has

ridden basically every hype wave, including the crypto one previously. I mean, you look at the chart up there that I pinned of NVIDIA next to Bitcoin. They peaked at exactly the same time when the top of NVIDIA stock was 69,000 for Bitcoin. They rode the entire wave down and have been effectively correlated in lockstep right until the last few weeks when we've seen that major bump. That is a sign that this is riding yet another bubble. It's now obviously decorrelating and going into the AI space. But I mean, Asif, to your point, most VCs who were passionate, quote unquote, crypto VCs are now passionate AI VCs, right? This is just the money chasing a trend. Now, I don't think necessarily that bubble is a bad thing because with the internet bubble in the late 1990s, we saw the biggest companies in the world emerge from it. And I

think that's what happens with each of these technological bubbles. But we're at that, in my opinion, we're already at that Long Island blockchain iced tea phase where people just start selling their AI companies and they aren't and get massive pumps as a result. I mean, doesn't it feel that way? I totally, look, here's the thing. I actually love bubbles and I know that bubble has kind of become a bad word. I think bubbles are great because what bubbles do is one, they make everybody stand up and pay attention to this new technology and try to understand what do I do with it? Without a bubble, things just kind of happen in the background. It's like, oh, IoT is happening. Oh, my dentist's office is

gradually getting better software. They don't really have the ability to dream big about how things can change in a really dramatic way, and especially have social conversations. It's very clear AI is one of these technologies that we really need to talk about as a society, about what this means and what to do about it. And if AI is just sort of trudging along and things are gradually getting better, then that conversation never quite happens at the right time. So there are a lot of really great things. One of the obvious things that so much of the innovation happening in AI, regardless of all the money that's getting thrown around into NVIDIA, all these different random startups that are spinning up trying to do, oh, I'm AI for law

firms, AI for dentists, AI for radiology, whatever. The reality is the vast majority of the actual innovation happening in AI is happening in two places. One is open AI, and the number two is basically open source. And open AI doesn't, I mean, obviously they need money, but they can raise that money, no problem. That's a tiny fraction of all the money going into AI is going into open AI itself. And the second, open source is basically free. These people aren't getting paid anything. They just play around with all the stuff. But in a way, they are the externalities. They are the outgrowths, especially all the open source stuff.

So much of it is basically getting subsidized by this giant AI bubble. And that's awesome. That's amazing. It wouldn't happen otherwise. Yeah, and I think it's also important to note that just because we use the term bubble doesn't mean we're saying it's the top, right? Oh, 100%. To be clear, I think it's going to get crazier from here.

Yeah, in a bubble doesn't mean that the bubble is popping or anywhere near the top. I think that we could see 2x moves certainly on these sort of high beta speculative altcoins that have AI in the title before all of this goes down. And eventually it'll just revert to the mean. But I just have to think that this hype around NVIDIA we've seen before, that will revert to the mean, especially if we believe that the market's going to drop. The thing that goes up the highest has the furthest to fall. You could see a 10x. I mean, you could see a 10x in these things. These kind of cycles with boom and bust are common. We get bubbles in pretty much every kind of technology going back to the automobile and the phone. And if you look at early adoption on these things, one of the more recent ones is the PC boom in the 80s and 90s there was something like 3 000 pc manufacturers and um you know it was it was just

like the it was exactly like crypto exactly like ai is now it was like the hype everybody's like oh my gosh we're gonna have a computer on every desk and in every home people are gonna have their recipes in their home they're gonna have a computer in their you know in their kitchen and uh so so you know and that was right that thesis was right um but you still had like thousands of companies that went under and there was only a handful that survived you know gateway and dell and you know those were like super unicorns that uh that came out of it so you'll probably see that i mean we could see like 10xs and 10xs you know i don't know what the market cap of all ai companies is but it's pretty tiny because there's so few that are publicly traded uh but if you look back at

like the dot com you know that was another bubble the dot com bubble you know you had hundreds of companies uh and they were public some of them like pets.com i think had hundreds of millions of market cap and it had like you know their idea was like we're gonna they were trying to be like chewy before chewy was was around so you could you could definitely see that you know with this ai hype but you know i i agree that that it's it's good for it's good for the economy it's good for markets it's a natural part of things i can tell you as a vc like in the early stages is where you're seeing the most ai right it's it's just it's it's striking to me how much basically two AI people who come from meta or something, and just a vague idea, pre-product, they have a deck, and they're able to raise at 60, 70,

even 100 million without anything. That kind of thing is what I'm talking about. And I think this will find its way into the public markets, but right now it's really just too early. All this stuff was basically created a few months ago, so there's no way for anything to be public yet. Sounds like crypto. Sounds like crypto. The valuations are insane, Masib. 1,000%.

What was that, James? Oh, this is Bill. Sorry, I was just saying the valuations are clearly insane. But on the other hand, I've seen a lot of these boom and bust cycles, but I'm not sure I've ever seen a technology become so useful

to so many so quickly. So it's possible that we have this kind of huge spurt of startups that just die for all the reasons that startups die over and over again in these cycles, but we still have an adoption of technology that's even faster than smartphones and potentially even crypto itself, right? And it'll'm more or less agree with that. Yeah, same. Sorry. But that goes back to the point of the bubble not being a bad thing. It's everybody rushes in, there's the gold rush, everybody gets rinsed, and then you

see who the winners are. We need that. We need that because it's the nature of those venture investments and university investments. Blockchain's different because university investments now happen to be tokens. But the nature of those investments is what creates the innovation. It's the desire to take part in something new and exciting and the riches that go along with that, that is what motivates a tremendous number of people and creates that groundswell of excitement.

Even if 90% of the money is lost, that 10% creates unholy questions. I must jump in here and say, as I said yesterday, I did a show on AI yesterday. And then afterwards, a friend sent me a tweet, which I'll quickly retweet it on my account and I'll pin it. But I used it. It was 20 AI tools to future-proof yourself. And I decided to jump in and use these future-proof tools. I probably played with four of them yesterday. And within four of them, the impact on my business was immediate. As I said, I translated videos into

multiple languages. I took one hour-long videos, plugged them into the system and gave me 10 clips, which I'm currently paying thousands of dollars for every single month. And one epiphany that hit me is that this technology is kind of ready now. It doesn't need private keys. There's no contract tax. There are no, the impact is almost immediate on AI. Now, did this happen immediately? No, it didn't happen immediately. AI has been around for a long time.

It's only now that the product is maturing. And I think that what's happening here is, I think blockchain is way behind AI because if you think about when blockchain started and when machine learning started and AI started, AI started a long time ago. Blockchain has probably had its V1 iteration. But I do believe that AI is now at the point

where it is making a difference immediately, and it is the biggest difference that this world has ever seen, ever, and being adopted quicker than anything. And the worst thing is that it's happening without shenanigans. It's happening without, yes, there is a need to regulate, and yes, there are. Hold on. I got to bring it back here. So look, I've spent the last six plus years in crypto. One of the things you learn in crypto is that as a project becomes more sophisticated, more integrated, things start breaking. Things start going wrong. Now, what is going to go wrong with AI?

One of the very obvious things, totally agree with you. People are fascinated by the amount of productivity they can get almost for free out of integrating these applications into their lives. Every single day I see somebody saying like, oh, here's a chat GPT, auto GPT type thing that you can integrate directly into your email, integrate directly into your laptop. It'll just start doing things for you. There's going to be an overwhelming desire for people to integrate these things deeper into their lives immediately before they are safe, before we actually understand their security properties. We know enough now about simple things like prompt injections that I can guarantee you within six months,

you're going to be reading stories about people who their entire life savings was drained out of their accounts because they connected an AI, like a chat GPT, auto GPT type system to their Gmail. And some attacker figured out some way to prompt inject something, take over that AI and completely fuck over their entire life to a degree that we've never seen with any other technology. This stuff is very powerful. It's also very scary. And we do not understand it at fucking all.

And I think we're going to come to terms with that very soon and i think we are already becoming aware of that because i don't know i don't know if you've been seeing the number of articles i've been seeing about the threat that it poses but it reminds me a little bit ever such ever so slightly of the storm that there was um if you remember this about facebook's libra and we had governments coordinating around the world to stamp on it i wouldn't be surprised to see such an initiative now. Yeah, but I think the genie's out of the bottle

here with AI. You did see Italy trying to ban it. There's no such thing as genie out of the bottle. Honestly, governments can and will stamp on things. That doesn't mean that they'll close it down completely, but I don't think... I was reacting to the without

shenanigans because that's clearly not the case um i i think though that it raises a more fundamental question and in fact this has been a question spirit was has been raised um repeatedly actually through the period of social media which actually i think has had a much more profound effect on the world than people realize um and that is how incredibly difficult it's being, becoming to tell what is real and what is fake. And maybe something that AI makes is worse. I was talking about this today. And, you know, when I did this,

one thing that really struck me was how well it managed to get the voice right and how well it managed to get the voice right and how well it managed to get the facial expressions right. And then I was thinking to myself, like, imagine banks. You know, up until now, banks have called you and done, I don't know, kind of, my bank does a voice recognition to, but now this voice is actually my voice. So how this AI works is you give it a voice and then it listens to your voice and it trains the voice to be your voice. So how this AI works is you give it a voice and then it listens to your voice and it trains the voice to be your voice. And I was just thinking, hold on a second, if this is my

verification to the bank that this is me, it's a matter of a week or two weeks before people are going to phone my bank, use the voice recognition. Don't get any ideas. I can see there's like 10,000 people that are recording my voice, but don't get any ideas. But I mean, this must be a nightmare for banks. This must also be a nightmare for like these crypto scams. I've seen people that take members of our staff here and create these crypto scams and people have fallen for them. And they said, well, you know, this guy phoned me and I was like, well, no, he didn't. He's like, yeah, I recorded the video call and they sent us an AI. It wasn't as good as AI for these deep fakes or whatever they call them. But I mean, this opens up a whole can of worms in terms of fakes, authenticity. And this is maybe for me where the blockchain comes in, where the way to confirm authenticity is through using some kind of private key mechanism or something like that. Digital identity. And then we already saw a week ago, sorry, Frances, just really quick, I'm going to go right back to you. But we did just see a week ago, an article in Cointelegraph

that said AI deepfakes are getting better at spoofing KYC verification from a Binance executive. So people are already surpassing KYC on major centralized crypto exchanges using deepfakes. I mean, imagine that in an election, but that's totally different conversation. Go ahead, Frances. Sorry. Yeah, I was about to say something similar. I think this will make it force us to reconsider what we consider safe. So the banks have been moving more towards digital identity, iris scans, fingerprinting, voice recognition. And I think that the advent of this might force them to reevaluate all of that. We know that all of those can be faked. I think there's two very separate problems here, though. One problem is how do you verify you are who you say you are? And the second is how do you verify that media is real? And I think the first

problem is a very serious one, which is almost everything in our society, no matter what country you're in, is based on outdated assumptions about technology, which is that it in our society and no matter what country you're in is based on outdated assumptions about technology which is that it's hard to replicate voice we we already know it's very easy to replicate images with photoshop that's been true for like 20 years or whatever uh but it's it's always been assumed and so many systems which are very entrenched are built under the assumption that either one, right now, the reality is that you can fly with a piece of plastic, right? You take this piece of plastic with you, and that is what the government uses to authenticate, ah, you really are who you say you are.

The reality is the systems on which we have built our assumptions around identity are pretty flimsy, and they're very outdated, and they're going to be forced to update very quickly from all the scams that are going to be enabled by AI. I think that's very clear. I used to work in anti-fraud before I got into crypto at Airbnb. And we saw, this was back in like 2014, 2015. Back then, it was already the case that it was possible to, you know, liveliness detection when you want to do some KYC to prove you are who you say you are. And it says, oh, look to the left, move your right arm up, that kind of thing. We already had algorithms that Chinese hacking rings were using in 2015 to generate these on the fly using an image of the

victim. So this has been around, but it was expensive. It was complicated, only pretty sophisticated people could do it. Now it's going to be super cheap and super easy. That's going to be a big problem for verifying people are who they say they are. Now, the second problem, which a lot of people talk about how blockchain is going to be useful for this, is how do you stop misinformation? How do you stop fake media? Okay, you've got these two politicians making out. How do I know this is real or not? Or this is some hit job by their... This is the part of AI, which Randall was talking about this, oh, what if somebody puts out something where I'm saying something I didn't really say

the reality is, I think, this is the part that's going to be solved all by itself I actually don't think this is a serious problem like, throughout history there's always been, with the advent of every new technology, a new way to basically make up bullshit and, you know, back in

the very, very olden days with printing presses, it was, oh, people printed a fake book and said it was written by this person when it really wasn't. And then with the advent of the internet and Photoshop, oh, now you can make these two people look like they're in the room together when they really want. And human beings are fine. Society does not fall apart because you can lie about who said what, because you can make fake images. We figure out that like, oh, hey, in order to understand if this image is real, I don't have to go and say, oh, I need – Well, let me finish my point and then I'd love to hear your counter argument. Like the reality is that every form of media, what we learn is that, okay, if I see this image, the only way I know it's real is through video because video can't be fake.

That's not what people do. People learn to understand, ah, I should be skeptical when I see something that doesn't make sense. If you see an image of Barack Obama making out with some random celebrity, your first thought is like, oh, I should find a video and that's how I'll know it's real. No, your first thought is like, oh, where did I see this? Where did this come from? Did this come from the New York Times? Did this come from some random troll on Twitter? And that is what we're going to extend to video, to audio, to all these other media, because human beings are smart and they can adapt. So I think the answer to this is not,

oh, we need some grand technological matrix that we're all going to see exactly where every single individual media was timestamped, because that's just incredibly hard. In reality, this stuff is going to move so fast, there is no way we're going to move the entire supply chain of media onto a totally different architecture in time for people to adapt. People will adapt first and just learn to trust their own judgment the way they do about every other form of media.

The media is perfectly capable of, the NY Times is perfectly capable of printing an AY-generated piece of bullshit. It's perfectly capable of, right now, of publishing things that are bullshit that's been published on social media, and it does from time to time. We have a problem with the way in which information is transmitted,

the role that the media does, and how we can know whether what we're being told is true or false. And the internet and the social media have very much contributed to that. I think AI will make it worse. Yeah, I think that is a very lively debate. Bill, I see you have your hand up. Go ahead. Sure, a couple of points.

I think in the short term, Francis is probably right that AI is going to basically exacerbate the issues of social media, confirmation bias, et cetera, et cetera. But on the other hand, I think the genie's out of the bottle. I know you don't think that the genie can be out of the bottle permanently, but I do think in this case, the genie's out of the bottle permanently. I don't think it's going back in the bottle. I think it's going to accelerate. I think the adoption is going to accelerate. I think the development of technologies is going to accelerate. I think Moore's law and Metcalfe's law as it relates to adoption is going to accelerate the adoption of these technologies. And there's nothing anyone can do about it. Actually, while I'm not taking any conspiracy theories, I do think that when I listen to Sam Altman and Elon talk

about initiatives to slow this down, I actually think it's all pipe smoke and bullshit. I actually don't think that they actually believe that. I actually think that they're afraid of having Congress and other governments come down on them like they did on Elon Musk when he was talking about Libra. And I think they believe what I just said, which is the genie's out of the bottle. Or in Elon's case, he actually wants to play catch up with his own system since he was investing in what he thought was an open system with open AI, which is now proprietary. And he needs time to do that. But I think in both cases, they probably think the genie's out of the bottle and nothing is going to be slowed down at this

point. But the more important point to me is that I actually think that the integration of crypto and AI is going to really accelerate in the second half of this year. And I expect to see many announcements of new projects that integrate both crypto and AI to really interesting ends. Okay, I've got a question on crypto and AI. Gaurav, I'm going to go to you. Before doing so, we forgot to mention it. So anyone that has an AI project or Web3 project, DM me, the team will attend to your DM. We work with projects in the crypto space,

in the AI space. We get paid in tokens or equity, build communities, incubation, et cetera. So we'll be doing this for many years. Do hit us up. We're going to start accepting sponsorships on the show as well. On this show, might start doing, I don't don't know scott ran i want to convince you guys to do shark tank like

segments like we do on on the other the other space around so it'll be only an idea if you tear them all to shreds you have to tear them down otherwise it's really boring so you have to tear them down now gorov i i would be very scared being torn to shreds by scott i've seen scott after a few a few was it tequilas or beers? What was it, Scott? It was a couple of Hendrix and tonics. And yeah, I got very negative. I'll play good cop.

For the audience, again, I'm looking at the comments. Do ask questions here for the panel. And if you have any project you want us to look into or anything really, we're going to go through the comments, all three of us. So put it in the bottom right bubble and the bottom right corner gorav crypto was hyped ai is hyped why why are we talking to about both uh both spaces together like what's what what does blockchain what value does blockchain bring to ai because usually when we see hype people just kind of squeeze it into crypto, even if it's through,

like they find a way to squeeze it into meme coins, which by the way, are pumping right now, but not something we talk about on the show. And that's something we're big fans of. But why AI, Gaurav? Because the use case is pretty interesting and very logical.

And keeping it, Gaurav, keep it simple for the audience because I know you go deep and deep and deep. Keep it very simple for the audience because a lot of people are new to crypto. And then also the fact that every time we are there publicly, we are available publicly, we are only answering this question. I don't know why does everyone wants to ask this when we are together, but I'll address it again in the same way I've done it in the past.

I think the current shape of AI with single handed control, and then it gets worse. So let me set the first example, which is right now you go to chat GPT, ask it, what's the best weight control method for you? And you are 83 kgs, this height, whatever, whatever. And it goes like, okay, you do these generic steps. Tomorrow there's a sponsor, a hindsight sponsor, which obviously it has to be because it's not profitable by far. And these API access and subscriptions are not doing any good to the overall revenue and profitability of the project. But nonetheless, so there'll be sponsors. And what happens if it starts telling you to go to a specific product and a specific doctor or whatever, right? There can be so many cases of vesting or inclination.

So no matter how much you want to, you can never trust a centralized authority. The only future I see for AI that can be trusted is democratic training models. These are all transformer models. I don't want to get deeper with tech, but transformer models and need trainability, trainability by humans, a set of humans, obviously not one. And the set of humans can obviously be, can obviously be democratically selected. DAO is a perfect example of democratic governance and democratic participation of multi-parties. I think this is the perfect blend, this is the the nirvana of AI, of distributed and democratic AI trained models that can be

trusted just because not a single entity was utilized to train them. Now if you want, if you would give me two more minutes if you allow me two more minutes i wouldn't do that i'll give you i'll give you before before i'll give you i'll give you the mic back because travis gave you 100 while you were speaking so i'm gonna get his thoughts on exactly what you just said and then we'll give you the mic to continue with with the with the rest of the points you wanted to make in the meantime there's two breaking news from walter bloomberg did point it did mention two things in the last few minutes. One of them is shares of major U.S. banks fall. FGIC reports bank deposits fell at a record pace in Q1.

And number two is NVIDIA CEO planned, that was just a few seconds ago, NVIDIA CEO plans a trip to meet China executives despite U.S. curbs. It's really interesting. We're seeing how big of an impact will politics play between China and the U.S. on the supply of chips but uh travis uh what did gorov say that got you to so excited to put your first emoji on spaces to be to be honest with you that was definitely a typo uh nothing against any of those comments but um i don't know how i how i managed to do that. Okay, Boomer. Yeah, I know, right?

Gaurav, why don't you finish what you were saying? I do have a couple of things. Travis, you ruined the flow, Travis, just because you had to press this accidentally. Travis. I'm sorry, buddy. Gaurav, go ahead. Also, I believe in myself that I'm saying something that others might agree to.

Yeah, no emojis. Actually, I saw a couple in the audience, but that's pretty much it. Let me go to. Yeah, no emojis. Actually, I saw a couple in the audience, but that's pretty much it. Let me go through the comments, see if anyone else likes it. But what's the other one? We'll give you another minute or so. Go ahead, Gaurav. Go deeper into this. Others might say, we'll still depend on the Microsoft and Azure's and AWS of the world to compute it, which is yet another influence, to shut it down when they want. And this is when decentralized computation comes into picture. There are already protocols like the StoreJay V4 that came out in 2019, I guess, talks about decentralized computing. Sean, the founder of StoreJay, which is no longer the CEO, also created a decentralized

computing project. I'm not here to shill anything, so I'm not going to tell the name. But Gaurav, if you decentralize it all, I just want to question, sorry to interrupt, but if you decentralize it, there's already a fee in Elon leading the charge or the movement around those concerns about AI getting out of control. Now, this isn't an AI space.

We won't go deep into that. We do AI shows as well that go a lot deeper, but I won't do this here. AGI's is... Maybe it's better because I'm pivoting away from crypto to that we do ai shows as well that go a lot deeper but i won't do this here um agis is uh maybe it's better because i'm going i'm pivoting away from crypto and scott won't be happy all right go back to crypto because my question for the audience and maybe the audience could you think about it is ai if you decentralize ai then this is how it goes out of control and which kind of links to another topic that we've discussed before and we should probably discuss

here maybe in another space if scott and ran like to discuss it but go right link it back to crypto i'm digressing no i'll also include what you said so truth crypto whether it comes from elon or whosoever is still um is still a centralized entity i still haven't seen plans of decentralization of the same he's anyways training it on the on the cards brought by tesla and Twitter together in the last six months that we have all seen. So what I'm talking about is decentralized computation, decentralized storage of data, as well as decentralized storage of those models. And guess what? How do you access all of these distributed components from computing to data to models? Every time you access any of these, you need private keys to unlock and private keys might demand for tokens

so that's where crypto plays an incredible role