The Wolf Of All Streets - Altcoins Rally! All Time Highs Before Halving? | Crypto Town Hall

Episode Date: February 26, 2024

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Testing. One, two, one, two. Come in, Mario. Come in. I feel you're leaning that we'll hit all-time highs before the halving. You seem to be leaning there every day that passes. It's based on you. You haven't said it.

You said you're not sure, but based on your tone and your energy. Mario, I'm quite impressed that you actually watch every single one of my shots. I do. I watch you and Scott because, unfortunately, you're the two best sources of information on the web. That's how behind crypto is, unfortunately. But who's better, me or Scott? It depends on my mood. If I'm in a good mood, I listen to you.

If I'm in a bad mood, your energy pisses me off, so I listen to Scott more. That's very interesting. My energy pisses me off so i listen to scott more that's that's a very interesting my energy yeah so today today today yeah well maybe today you're talking to a new wife money it was that is that what you're talking about it's called the wife changing money wife changing money i just so I had to fast forward a few parts today man I have to admit but it was a good film you don't like

the wife changing money I don't mind I'm not married so I'm chill Scott's wife also hated when I used that Amy Scott's wife

she hated when I talked about Amy would kill you if he said that she I mean she hates me when I say that has she tweeted has she tweeted

about husband changing money or not yet no but you see so if you read Andrew Tate I don't know if you saw on my show I referenced it I did I did yeah

an Andrew Tate tweet which says something I'm going to try to find the tweet again it says I love you baby you're irreplaceable and then in brackets

it says at my current income you know what i mean so that then you need life-changing money you know what i mean then that's you need to make life-changing money so so when the when the market peaks there's a lot of divorces because people are just replacing wives upgrading and then when the market dumps is what he's saying is when the market dumps people divorce because they have to downgrade again correct so i would say probably 50 i'd say 50 of all divorces are market dependent either too too high or too low i know this is not true but it'd be it'd be funny if like you were on wife number six as you're saying this is the third third bull market wife number six

um but yeah i'll let you i'll let you kick off the show man i actually enjoyed today so you I'm going to watch another one. I'm going to watch another one. Congrats. But yeah, I'll let you kick off the show, man. I actually enjoyed today's show. You're going through exploring the possibility that this will be a shorter bull market and will be peaking a lot sooner than previous bull markets. We're going to skip a few steps. I'd be curious, Tim, I'm not sure if you discussed it and you tried and watched the whole thing

on why you think that's the case. So there's a whole lot of signs that are telling us that this is a much more vicious cycle. Things are happening much earlier in the cycle, much quicker. Like the pre-harving rally came, you know, starting to come very early in the thing. There's a lot of other signs. I covered them on my show today. But I think the one thing we should all be prepared for is that we should be prepared for a shorter bull market

because everyone's like thinking, oh, you know, one year after the halving and this is how it's always going to happen. But what if it doesn't actually work out like that and it's actually a much shorter bull market? And if you look at the charts, we have had the break up, which we usually have, you know,

slightly later in the cycle. We've had that very early. And from that point, the rally actually starts to get really aggressive. And what I spoke about mainly on my show was I spoke about people that are sitting on the sidelines and waiting to buy the dip. And I kind of said, yeah, look, that's a good strategy. The problem is at this point in the bull market, if we are in the aggressive part of the bull market,

waiting for the dip is a really bad strategy because the token goes up 50% and then you get a 10% dip or 20% dip. You still missed out on the 50% upside. And chances are at this part of the rally, at this part of the cycle, you ain't getting another chance to get back in. So my advice to people was to say,

if you're not in, get in. Don't go all in, but get in quickly so at least you've got some skin in the game. And then DCA quite quickly. You've got to accelerate

your DCA. And then if you want to top up, top up along the way, but make sure that you're in the game because if you're sitting here waiting for the dip

and the dip doesn't come, you've got a big problem. Then you're in the game because if you're sitting here waiting for the dip and the dip doesn't come you've got a big problem then you're the indicator i look at one other indicator that i look at is just the the kind of looking at the altcoin market it's looking at new token launches they're generally another one of one of many indicators to show how frothy the market is and at at the peak of the bull market, you got tokens launching every day. You got a couple launching it over 10X every single day. And that's at the peak, at the frothiest stage of the last bull market.

Now we're sitting, and I was going through the different token launches, and we're invested in a bunch of them. So we're pretty involved in that space. And I think Ryan, you're pretty involved as well. But you're sitting at, you know, in the last, we had a 10X on the 23rd of Feb. What are we today? So three days ago, there was a 10X.

Then there was a 20X called Forgotten Playland at 21st of Feb. And then you've got, obviously you have Pixels that did over 100X. That was last week. We got Octavia that did on 19th of Feb, did about a 10X and 9X on IDO above 10x for private seed. And you've just got a portal coming in in a few days, which we'll be talking a lot about. And for me, that shows an indicator. There's one coming up now, which I'm very excited about.

It's called Beoble.io. And what they do is they're a chat app between wallets. So if you want to chat to someone else who holds a wallet, you can actually chat to another wallet holder. You're part of that one? No, we are invested in it. Very excited about it. I think it's going to be one of the main ones.

Yeah, I saw it in our groups. When is it launching? 28, I think, if I'm not mistaken. Yeah, I'm just checking our group for today. But yeah, so just another indicator that things are moving a lot faster than expected. But I never thought of the other side of this argument. Yeah, but that also means that the market could be a lot shorter than previous war markets. I think in one of the spaces, I don't know who mentioned it,

but it's usually the market peaks about, what, a year and a half after the halving or am I way off? About a year, about 500 days after halving, you're right. Yeah, sorry, I'm just checking about the B-B-L. How do you spell it again? I just want to check it in the group. B-E-O-B-L-E-B-I-O

B-B-L. Okay, cool. I'm just going to check now with the guys. But yeah, so that's Duran's argument. I'd love to go to the panel to see, guys. There's another term you mentioned, Duran, that kind of scared me. On the flip side, you did say you used the word supercycle, which was overused in the last bull market,

with another meaning that the bull market will last a lot longer. And obviously, that backfired pretty badly. Everyone went broke. I think Three Arrows Capital were the ones to initially coin that term. And then you used it again in your show today. That kind of gave me the shivers a bit. Yeah. I mean, I don't think we're in a super cycle.

I do think, though, that we're in a market that is moving much quicker than we expected. I'm always very scared of markets that move much quicker than we expect. Generally, that means that the blow-off top comes sooner. And so I'm playing this as if it's going to be a very, very, very short cycle. And then if I'm wrong, then it's fine because the way that I look at it, whether I don't catch the top on the way up

or on the way down makes no difference. I'd rather not catch the top on the way up or on the way down, makes no difference. I'd rather not catch the top on the way up and miss some upside than not catch the top on the way down and get wrecked. Mike, you were making a very different argument in previous shows and you were a lot more bearish on the markets. Has that sentiment changed seeing what you're seeing now with the ETF? And just so for anyone keeping up with the ETF numbers, the inflows are over 200 million, I think $226 million worth of inflows today.

So the numbers are still looking good. I think we only had one day of outflows in the last couple of weeks. So more and more positive indicators. Mike, your thoughts? I, in the big picture, obviously, it's hard to be bearish. Bitcoin with the money defining, defined, diminishing supply, increasing demand and adoption. But it's look like we have to look forward to now compared to last year. At this time last year, the S&P 500 was about a 20% discount from its all time highs and Bitcoin

was hovering pretty cheap around around $20,000. Now, we have pretty extreme, you know, highest prices ever in the stock market, pretty extreme levels, lots of bullishness, and we've passed the point of something to look forward to. Now, all we have is a halving, and that's over in April. So those two key factors of what to look forward to, discounted prices in beta um look forward to that the etfs which came and produced a great return in in gbtc now it's just okay well maybe we'll

make a new high before the happening what's think about the hangover after the happening you have to kind of hope and expect beta continue higher and this is one thing that really struck me about what ran said we saw each other um early on i think it was last year at the Bitcoin conference. How the Nikkei was heading towards a new high. Now, that's the key thing to remember here is we still are looking at a high beta, highly speculative asset. And I like to look at it compared to the S&P 500. People are getting really bullish on Bitcoin. But you look at right now, the volatility in Bitcoin is around 2.5 times that

S&P 500. In the past, it's been closer to 6 or 7. We have to tilt over towards what's happening here. This is a maturing asset. We should not expect performance like we have in the past. I look at it as if we can see some divergence strength with the stock market going down, that would be a major paradigm shift. But right now, it's just all risk assets are going up and Bitcoin's among the riskiest and it's going up. But you got to be careful, though. I kind of take a little more of a 30,000 foot view of the space. And just as an ex-trader, you look at it like, OK, I see extreme bullishness versus a year

ago's extreme bearishness. So just have to insert that caution in the space. Talk about the asset class maturing. There was an argument made, and we're kind of seeing that materializing now, is that TradFi is just as degen as the crypto community is. They're going to want to be part of these, potentially these token launches. They'd want to be part of pumps. They'd want to be part of these potentially these token launches. They'd want to be part of pumps. They'd want to be part of the ecosystem.

And they're not as conservative or level minded. They're going to be FOMOing like the rest of us. And I've kind of seen that in the last bull market. I remember a lot of people from Tractify would reach out to me, say, Mario, how can we get involved? And I'm seeing it even more in this bull market, even though it's only been a few weeks of complete out frothiness. Mike? I think you have to be a little careful of that, because one thing I do point out was end of 2023, I heard

some trad-fi hot money people speak to me about X kind of distressed debt people looked at GBTC as just an ideal distressed debt trade. at GBTC as just an ideal distressed debt trade. That whole area is gone. And then you look at any of the alts. Okay, Ethereum has something to look forward to. ETH is still at a decent discount. And at some point, there'll be ETFs. And sometime, there'll be ETFs tracking the whole space.

So that's what's going there. Bitcoin doesn't have that anymore. It has a digital gold version. But one thing we have to be careful about, I think, is tradifying anything other than Bitcoin and Ethereum, which does have a yield, which is very attractive to your traditional equity people, is the massive amount of speculative excesses you see in all the alts. I like to say, first of all, there was Bitcoin in 10,000 wannabes, and then there was 20,000 wannabes. Now there's 30,000 wannabes. Okay was 20 000 wannabes now there's 30 000 wannabes okay maybe there's 10 that really matter and those are great for the traders the hot funny hot money if you consider

hedge funds tradify i don't really i think they're just hot money looking for anything that goes up and can make 10 long or short let's just be careful there but for the key thing also remember about here is for now we're in the early days we have the um you know we have the the having to look forward to and just put yourselves like into june when we start focusing on um will we ever see the effects of these right hikes picking in the market here's one thing i want to point out i like to point out in commodities they were their own worst enemy particularly you look at crude oil and copper and corn and all that now we're seeing a little bit of an own worst enemy. Particularly, you look at crude oil and copper and corn and all that. Now, we're seeing a little bit of an own worst enemy in the stock market. Every time the stock

market goes up, all the easing that was priced in the market goes away. So, if it keeps marching and staying here, there's no reason to expect that liquidity pump to come from the Fed, which is something you really have to be cognizant in things like Bitcoin and speculative assets. So, I'm very careful. Long term, obviously bullish, but just have to submit.izant in things like Bitcoin and speculative assets. So I'm very careful. Long term, obviously bullish, but just have to submit very circumspect, very careful at these levels, because what we're seeing is that high price cure is not really the case in Bitcoin, but it certainly is in the stock market because of Fed elite. Dave?

Dave, go ahead oh sorry i couldn't tell um yeah the last line that mike said was is actually the thesis uh i think that you have to i don't i don't want to be go all bitcoin maxi on people but the fact is you have to look at what's going on with bitcoin differently i mean normally in the cycle we would be heavily into all season right now, right? You know, Bitcoin, you know, stalls out after a rally and kind of gently falls as the hot money rotates into everything else. But that's actually not happening. Now, why isn't it happening? Well, it's not happening because the narrative has changed.

You know, we keep talking about Bitcoin and we look at the volatility. We look at a lot of other measures. But remember, you know, the fact is, is, you know, you talk about, you know, Mark Yusko does this much more eloquently than I would. But the fact is the supply demand dynamic. And if you just look at a simple stat, the easiest one to understand, look at the the all time high, the price of Bitcoin divided by the, you know, exa hashes of the of the of the Bitcoin hash rate. Right now, we are at least 75% by any measure below the all-time high, 75%, because the network is that much stronger. And at the same time, we literally are seeing the initial stages of opening up the investment of Bitcoin to the rest of the world's money, you know, for lack of a better world. Now, it takes a lot of time. And we have the marketing departments of some of the biggest asset managers in the world pounding the table on this story. To make the argument that, you know, we have to look at past cycles to see where it could go in

this cycle is, you know, it's problematic. I mean, you know, as a quant, when I look at something that's happened three times, we have three observations of cycles. You know, that's just not statistically significant. So I'm not 100% sure what's going to happen. I think that the one thing we can depend upon is what Mike was saying, is you're going to see hot money speculation in waves, which overgoes, overdoes it on the upside, and then overdoes it on the downside on a lot of assets. Bitcoin is in a very interesting situation because the truth of the matter is the upside for Bitcoin is literally at a minimum gold, and that's like a 10x from here. So when you're basically shorting Bitcoin at this point, it feels like picking up pennies

in front of a steamroller. It doesn't necessarily mean it's going to happen. But there's one thing you're saying is that you're not seeing that rotation that happened in previous bull markets. Again, I'm not a person that watches the markets, watches the charts, especially not the last market. Just looking at the market now, and we've got the agenda here, and the team's writing Bitcoin is consolidating. And on the other hand, we can see the alt enjoying a massive bull run. I'm looking at banter bubbles. No, no. Mario, you got it wrong. You quoted me wrong. We are seeing the rotation of the hot money, but at the same time, new money is coming in. And that's why Bitcoin is doing what it's doing. That's what I'm saying. I'm not saying we aren't seeing the rotation.

Okay. Makes sense. So it says what we're it says we're seeing a rotation of the crypto. Hunter seems to agree. A rotation of the crypto money from Bitcoin to ALT. But then we're seeing traditional money still coming to Bitcoin, which makes it different to previous bull markets, correct? Exactly. Hunter, I'd love your take

on this. Seems you agree with Dave. And maybe Hunter, you can expand on what does that really mean for the market? Does that mean that we'll see both Bitcoin and ALT do well together? If we continue seeing that rotation as well as new money coming into Bitcoin. And do we expect that new money to also rotate, Hunter?

Great, great, great question. And it's awesome to be with you all and agree with you. Working? Otherwise, I'll go to Sean or Dave again. Can you hear me all right? All right, Hunter, your mic isn't working. Dave, since you've got to make that point. Mario, we can all hear him.

You can't hear him. Oh, okay. My bad. Okay. All right, cool. Great. Well, it's great to be with you all. I agree with Dave and Mike and fantastic to be with this group.

I would say a mental model that I find useful for the Bitcoin ETFs is a little bit like Bitcoin IPOing. You know, if you think about private companies, Facebook back in the day, or Uber back in the day, you know, it's only a subset of the market that was able to get access to buy shares of those companies. And then when they IPO, the gross tonnage of investors that can suddenly participate and vote on the right way of valuing those things just completely changes. And, you know, so when Dave said we've had three cycles, but the market structure here has kind of changed. And I think Mike touched on this too. I think that that's what's now happened for Bitcoin, which is that the market participants that typically express the views that move to the price in prior cycles are now just a subset of the much broader

capital market that is able to access it. So I think that we, everyone has to sort of be on their, their toes and open to the possibility that the way Bitcoin will move going forward is going to, going to be different here. I'll give, I'll give you an example of a dynamic that will likely be new. In the U S the wealth management segment manages over $20 trillion. And by and large, 88% in our survey, we run a survey every year, we put out our most recent one in January, 88% said they were waiting for a Bitcoin ETF to allocate to the space. So this audience, you know, on the heels of Bitcoin's IPO, so to speak, the launch of Bitcoin ETFs can now participate for the first time. This audience does rebalancing in a pretty disciplined fashion. And what that means is that if Bitcoin drops 30%, they'll buy more to rebalance to their target allocation level. So if their target allocation level is 2%, Bitcoin's down, they'll

buy more to bring it back up. And conversely, if Bitcoin runs a ways they may take some money off the table. That is a very large capital base that is going to treat market moves differently, and will either have a small or medium or large impact on how the price of Bitcoin evolves, but is new and different than prior cycles where that segment was not participating. So I think that that's an example of how people should be open-minded to forgetting what we know from prior cycles and the possibility that with the much broader set of capital markets that is Axis now, things will move a bit differently. I'm incredibly constructive on Bitcoin this year. I think our CIO's price target or prediction was $80,000 by the end of the year. I think last week, Bitcoin ETFs bought over $11,000 Bitcoin and miners mined about 6,000. And that's pre-having. Of course, it's only a component of the market. But I think that

just the access, the size of the capital markets that can now access Bitcoin are very significant. And the uptake that we've seen of these Bitcoin ETFs is historic. People may be already aware of this, but $5.5 billion in net inflows in six or seven weeks is historic relative to the 30-year history of ETFs. Investors don't sort of clear their schedules. They'll be working in over the course of many months. Last week, people may have seen the headline in Bloomberg that a large wealth management platform called Carson Group approved the Bitwise ETF and three others. And that's just happening now in February. And that approval means that advisors over the next few months can put in exposure. And that's

an early mover in the wealth management side. So I think that you're going to have this drumbeat of wealth management firms engaging with the space over the course of this year. And then zooming out, I think, again, the much broader set of capital market participants means that the patterns may change a bit. And of course, I would also add to that, you know, there are a number of players that got wiped out in 2022, be it platforms or hedge funds that, you know, contributed to the patterns of prior cycles are not present for this cycle. So I think we all just have to be open minded to how the patterns will emerge. I don't know if that addresses your, your question, but I hope that's, that's some

helpful commentary. I think the idea that that, you know, you started your part of the conversation with is, you know, Bitcoin as an IPO. That's a really constructive way to look at it. While at the same time, it's almost as if a Bitcoin IPO is almost rolling out in stages. For example, you just mentioned Carson and the scale of his RIA as it relates to giving access to their clients and their platform of the Bitcoin ETFs. Same thing with Edelman, who I think is right at around $30 billion. Those are enormously progressive RIAs who are looking to stay ahead of the curve of the rest of the wealth management industry and generally do things like that. While at the same time, the larger part, I'd say at this point, you're talking about 50% to 60% of wealth management organizations have done one of two things. They either haven't

made a decision, so it's still not available, or the decision that they have made is that it's basically a bit of a restricted product where it can't be actively marketed by advisors right now. They get, you know, customers can still buy the Bitcoin ETFs in some places within wealth management, but it has to be marked as unsolicited and it can't be actively marketed. That will change, right? So Carson and Edelman being ahead of the curve is kind of that's expected within wealth management, because those are guys that have stayed on the cutting edge for years and why their organizations are so big and they're thought leaders, while at the same time, wealth management moves at a slower pace. That slower pace, though, will continue to serve Bitcoin as an asset because every week and every month and every quarter, there will be a new entry of a totality of assets that now will have access to Bitcoin ETFs.

And in a lot of ways, we've seen that in the price stability over the past month, month and a half. Right. seen that in the price stability over the past month, month and a half, right? Generally speaking, when Bitcoin would make a move from 40k to 52 or 53, there would be these snapbacks or these overnight Asian markets would dump or whatever would happen. So much of that has gone, has vanished. And it's pretty remarkable to watch the kind of getting out of the adolescent stage of Bitcoin and moving into, you know, adulthood in the financial markets is pretty remarkable to watch. I think that's a great a great point. And just to build on that for one second, I think when we think about catalysts in Bitcoin and other assets, for all of us who've been in this space for a long time, we tend to look at the sort of crypto native ecosystem. So, you know, the Bitcoin halving or some upgrade or soft fork or this or that. I think that our CIO calls this cycle the mainstream cycle. And to your point,

Andrew, what might be as important as a catalyst is when one of the wire house banks approves unrestricted access as any development amongst the exchanges, which historically would have been the important sort of area to look. So I think that your mental model that there will sort of be a drumbeat of access expanding over the course of the years is really salient. Think about it this way. You know, UBS as an organization is the largest wealth manager on the globe, right? Now, that's a little bit nuanced, right? From an asset standpoint, they're talking about assets that are managed from a wealth management standpoint, not assets that are in a money market account. But they are the biggest money manager on the planet.

And they've yet to approve the Bitcoin ETFs. At some point, they will. the fact that they're the largest global wealth manager will find its way into sizable portfolios inside of that organization, inside the United States, and more importantly, outside the United States. Their private wealth management platform is filled with incredible amount of assets, an incredible amount of, you know, huge accounts, 10 million, 50 million, 200 million. You know, my TradFi background, I know inside of their private wealth portion of their business, you know, they have, you know, hundreds of people working in family office type of setups to when somebody does has a portfolio review and they've got 100 million long with the firm. There's 17 people inside of that conference room looking at that,

you know, one family's account, right, contributing to how are they going to allocate capital. So once, you know, the Bitcoin ETFs are available on those types of platforms. Again, we're talking about, you know, asset injections that are going to be substantial, like really substantial. And yeah, I'd like to say, I want to chime in because I've got a slightly different take, I guess, than Andrew and previous speakers a little bit. And that, you know, I still think we're not at the mainstream cycle, I don't think. I think we're still at the very, very, very beginning. To me, crypto, Bitcoin is still like the Internet was before we got the browser. The internet had been around 25 years, but the number of people who actually used it was really small until we got the browser and it became much easier to use. And then every day now for 30 years, the number of websites has been growing dramatically. So just on that question before you continue are you referring to adoption

mainstream adoption from a utility perspective or i'm referring to mainstream adoption you can you can walk down the street you know in any major city and you can run into dozens of people before you find somebody you know say maybe going to vietnam you know i'm in denver today i bet you i can you know walk into 20 people and none of them own Bitcoin because it's too hard. None of them understand it. So to me, we're still in the very, very, very early stages of all of crypto. And we'll look back at this. And I was a former Wall Street analyst. I've only put out two price targets in 20 plus years. But I put out a 10 year price target of a million dollars on Bitcoin for 2021. And so that's all I'm doing is kind of looking around, seeing everything that's going on.

We know the institutions are going to come today, tomorrow. You know, they're coming. We all know this. You know, and as they come, as more people come, you know, pretty sure that more people are going to come, whether they're individuals or institutions, tomorrow than today. And so I think anybody who takes a long-term perspective on this is going to crush it. And if you're trading, take some chips off the table as it goes up. Two questions, because remember, I missed most of what Hunter said because my connection was playing up. So I think what Hunter has said, if you have a question, you're welcome to jump in and answer it after Lou again as well. But the first question is, do you think as mainstream starts to enter the market,

will we move away from crypto narratives such as the halving, for example, the pre-halving dump, pre-halving rally, post-halving rally? Could we see a shift away from that? And then the second question is, with where you think we're at now, what do you think that means for Bitcoin? What do you think that means for alts as well? Yeah, I think, you know, alts are going to skyrocket. I think every bubble that we get is bigger than the previous bubble. I have a word that I use to describe the tendency of markets to swing between bubbles and crash and bubble again. I call that capitalism. That's what it does. And that's all it does.

And the weird thing about it is there's no signal to it. It's like the sun going up and down. There's no signal to the sun going up and down. It's just what it does. You can't really make money off of it. You know, and so if you're going to play the alts, you know, to me alts are like playing craps. You know, with certainty, every crap game ends with a seven.

You know every bubble ends with a crap. So if you're playing alts, you just have to take, you know, money off the table, you know, as they're going up and up. Yeah, and I want to go to Andrew. I think you just cut out. Hunter, I want to go to you and then Andrew and Terrence. I missed a lot of what you said earlier, which is a shame. But I'm not sure if you gave an overview as well on the ETF performance.

It's always good to have someone from Bitwise. It's been almost every space over the last couple of weeks, someone from Bitwise is on stage. We really appreciate that transparency, that communication. But how's the ETF performance so far? Because obviously people are not talking about it as much, but it's still probably

the most important thing in the ecosystem right now. Yeah, absolutely. You know, we try to be present members of the community. It's always fun to be on with this group. The Bitcoin ETFs have raised 5.5 billion in net inflows.

And I think we're in the seventh week now. Somebody could correct me on that. Last week, raised over $500 million in net inflows, bought over 11,000 Bitcoin, which compares to 6,000 that were newly mined. So I think we're seeing very, very strong uptake. Andrew kind of hit on this, but a fascinating element, you know, Mario, I provided this analogy of Bitcoin IPOing and in prior cycles, it being hard to get access as an investor. And now suddenly, you know, any investor can participate. I think a point that Andrew made that we're seeing is there is a lot of work being done

by traditional investors sort of quietly that will come in at sort of what appears to be random moments. You know, Carson Group announced approving access last week. People may or may not have known. I sometimes try to try to tweet things out when we see things, but people may or may not have known that that that was in the works. There's a very large bank that is working on approving solicited access.

That'll happen sometime in the coming weeks and months. There's a very large mutual fund complex that is now doing homework on if they can put the Bitcoin ETFs into their mutual funds. So I think that there's this drumbeat of adoption that will play out now because of the access that the Bitcoin ETFs are creating. Already, the inflows have been quite substantial relative to ETFs. And I think that these things have legs. Again, I mentioned before, but we do a survey of advisors every year. And at the beginning of this year, we published the most recent 88% said that they were waiting for a Bitcoin ETF to allocate to the space. And maybe just as surprising or not surprising to people, I think something like 60% did not expect it to get approved this year.

So I think... Yeah, that's the report by Juan, who's been on stage a few times talking about it. Yeah, Juan is a research analyst. He's fantastic. And so we put out this survey every year. And that stat was fascinating to me. So what that means is a lot of traditional investors who are interested in the space just didn't even think it would happen in January. And what does that mean?

It means that it's just going to take some time for people to get around to doing something with these Bitcoin ETFs. But definitely what we're seeing is that there's demand. And I think there's very long legs. And I think we're in the early innings of adoption through the Bitcoin ETFs. If you look at gold, just to add one other new thought. So, Mario, that's some of what I had mentioned before. Just to add one other new thought on this front. The first gold ETF in the US launched in 2004. That was GLD. And prior to that, gold had chopped around a bit. And Mike might be one of the most knowledgeable people on the planet about the history of gold and other commodity assets. So Mike, you can correct me on any of this, but gold chopped around a fair amount.

And after the introduction of the gold ETF, it was up for 10 years. And the gold ETF, similar, I think, to the Bitcoin ETF, made it possible for a much broader set of market participants to invest in gold and put it in portfolios. And it just takes some time for that to play out. And so I think that the Bitcoin ETFs similarly are a very durable and will take a fair amount of time, but be a significant new market participant that is helping us discover the right price for Bitcoin and buying into the space. I can piggyback. Andrew, Mike. Just to confirm. Yeah, you're right.

One thing that's notable about gold ETFs. Mario, you're very robotic. You've gone robotic. One thing that's notable about gold ETFs is we've never seen a period since the first gold ETFs were launched in 2004, which is 20 years ago, of gold ETF outflows and the price going up. So there is clear evidence that some of those gold ETF outflows are tilting towards Bitcoin ETF inflows. I mean, it's hard to argue that. So I don't see that as being anything but bullish for Bitcoin at the moment. In the big picture, I just want to see um what gold has looked forward to is at some point

um we'll see some pivot from the fed and we're not getting that but it also has the deepest deepest pockets on the planet buying and that's central banks most notably china and i do like to point out that safe indeed amas did point out in his book the bitcoin standard at some point central banks will be buying that bitcoin we'll see, but it's all tilting that way at some point. Terrence? Andrew? Yeah, real quick. So I think if you look at the price of Bitcoin and the volatility and the spot price, it's damp. Number one, the price has been grinding up pretty aggressively, but it's been a grind.

It's not like going up 20% in a day, like in the good old days. And then number two, the volatility has dampened. Separately, if you look at derivatives, at least on the CME listed, futures and options for Bitcoin, just week over week, the volume's gone down some, although open interest is mostly flatter up. I'm going to go to you then.

I want to ask Ruder a question, just asking about an update on the Solana ecosystem and L2s in general, especially with the ETF narrative. So I'd love your thoughts on this, Ruder and Sean. Maybe I'd love you to jump in on that one as well. Go ahead, Andrew. A phrase that Hunter used

a couple minutes ago that went by quickly and probably a lot of people don't understand. The phrase is solicited access. And I guarantee you that Hunter and his team and every other Bitcoin ETF team is very, very focused on solicited access. And here's why. When you're a financial advisor, it's like being a lawyer. If you break even the smallest and tiniest of rule, you can immediately get fired and your career is over. Okay. So the idea that, for example, Bitcoin ETFs are in some way, shape or form available on Merrill Lynch's platform in an

unsolicited way, they might as well not be available at all. Because what you're doing, if you have a client that buys something like that in an unsolicited way, and it goes wrong, they can immediately file a complaint against you. And the default mechanism for organizations like Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, or UBS, or Morgan Stanley is, we're going to fire this advisor and get rid of him and we'll deal with the complaint after the fact and send some to pay out and deal with it. Solicited versus unsolicited access is a major, major, major point when it comes to wealth management. The other thing I wanted to say just about Bitcoin in general. It is very, very difficult to be anything but bullish short term, medium term, and long term. Short term is the halving. Medium term is consistent opening

of the wealth management trad fi world to these Bitcoin ETFs. In other words, scale of Bitcoin purchases. And then long term, you're now talking about hard money and what is the next black swan event that could prove, you know, Bitcoin's thesis on a longer-term basis associated with supply and demand. Are you watching the Bitcoin ETF inflows while we're talking about this? Correct. There's been a billion dollars today. Correct. I mean, the day is two hours old. There's been a billion dollars today. Correct.

I mean, the day is two hours old. There's been a billion dollars in inflows already today. That's the point about the short term. Is that net inflows? That's net inflows. There's a billion dollars. Trading volume. Inflows won't print until after the close of the market.

Okay, so trading volume. Okay, so I thought that was the first. Billion in two hours would be insane. I mean, like the numbers we'll be seeing recently are like 200, 100 and something, 200, maybe 300 and something million a day. So a billion is a bit of a shock. Yeah, there isn't a slowdown is the point. There is a continued measured movement up in inflows and volumes. And that is,

again, in the ETF space, this is remarkable stuff, right? We're seeing assets from other ETF classes are being reduced, gold. There is a constant increase in flows and volumes associated with Bitcoin ETFs. And again, the point needs to be made. This stuff is not readily available to probably the larger population that these products were created for, which is wealth management clients. It's not even readily available to them. So it really is a remarkable story. I put out a tweet late last week that we're getting to a point that the 2024 potential big story is not NVIDIA, but it's Bitcoin. It's Bitcoin ETFs. It's really remarkable to watch right now. Talking about NVIDIA, we will discuss AI in a bit. We've got Mohammed on stage. But just kind of talking about L2s and Solana as well. We haven't talked about discuss AI in a bit. We've got Mohamed on stage. But just kind of talking about L2s and

Solana as well. We haven't talked about Solana in a while. Rudos, good to have you, man. How are you? Hey, great to be here. Yeah, we'd love an update on the Solana ecosystem and L2s in general and the ETH narratives. You know, ETH has been doing pretty well over the last few days. Yeah, I mean, the Solano ecosystem continues to grow.

It continues to perform really well. I think last month there was like some issues, but generally in the last year there, there's been like really, really good uptime, you know, very different from the narrative that was spun out of things last year um actually it was quite interesting just recently uh avalanche went down i think last week and last week and all people could talk about was how solana used to go down um so i think people kind of won't let go of that um but yeah i think generally um the direction is kind of clear to me, at least, which is that more and more activity will move towards away from like Ethereum mainnet, more towards L2s and other L1s like Solana.

And even then, I think Solana is still like probably in the best position to take on a lot of those inflows, especially since like fees are actually really, really cheap there. And on L2s, they still cost like tens or even thirties of cents. But on Solana, they're still under one cent and super fast. Is there any L2s? I'm just looking at the top L2s based on TVL. We've got Arbitrum number one, Polygon, Optimism, and then you've got Manta. Oh, shit.

Manta's number four. And five is Base. Congrats to Manta. We're big supporters of Manta. I didn't know they got's number four. And five is base. Congrats to Manta. We're big supporters of Manta. I didn't know they got to number four. Any L2s that are of interest to you as well? And maybe talk about the L2 narrative and the ETH narratives with the ETH ETF potentially coming in this year.

Mario, I think more important than the ETH ETF is the Ethereum upgrade, the Dencoin upgrade, which is 4844, which is going to reduce L2 fees by 90%. L2 fees on Ethereum by 90%. And I think that's when you're going to get a real L2 rally.

What do you think that means for L1's... Oh, shit, cutting out. Alright, so... I can't mute him. Alright, so you've got to remove Rand from co-host, please. I can't mute him because he's co Nasser you gotta remove Ryan from co-host please I can't mute him because he's co-host it's a mistake co-hosting Ryan isn't it Nasser

alright he's not talking now Ruda Ryan when you're back I've got a question for you just talk whenever you're back and your connection is working Ruda what do you think that upgrade would mean and value that same question to you as well what do you think that upgrade would mean to Solana and other L1s well I mean first off for other l2s that are up and coming so blast just uh completed a hackathon there's a really big hackathon where they had like a ton of people uh submit projects and a really

big reason for that is because as you know they have like over a billion dollars in tvl from users farming points but they reserved half of the points for uh developers and they're giving out like a ton of those points to uh projects that build on top so yeah they just wrap that up and a lot of projects are just getting off the ground now so i think that's also one to watch out for their general narrative is like it's the uh l2 for nfts um and then sorry what was your question about like the the ethereum upgrade what that means you know with fees dropping by 90% for l2s what would that mean for other l1s solana and other l1s um i think like even with a 90% up uh drop in fees solana fees are kind of like 100 times lower.

So I think, you know, it would still be, it wouldn't change the Solana story too much. It's still a really great place to build apps and use apps on. But, you know, potentially it could help other L2s be, you know, more in the running. Value, I would love to get your thoughts on the discussion. We'll go to Sean afterwards, and then we'll dig into a few ai updates with muhammad value hey what's going on guys yeah i saw the title so i felt uh you know appalled to come in

i just wanted to uh reiterate uh the uh about the inflows right so you got about uh what 900 bitcoin being minted right now a day comes out rounding up to, let's just say, 50 million bucks. And then I think someone, I guess the guy from Bitwise said he got like, what, a couple billion, but at least every day it's been about like 500 million coming in every single day. But I think what, I don't know if you guys covered it or not, Mario, and thanks for having me up, is like, if you think about the actual supply of Bitcoin that's trading, it's really only about 10% of the entire supply because 80 of it has been dormant for uh give or take a year so eight months to a year so you got all these products these these new products that you guys know of being launched uh supporting all

these cash inflows into bitcoin but really only 10 10 of the supply of trading and then you know upcoming you got that turning into a half that's being minted into 450 bitcoin a day so i mean if you do the math i mean whether you're looking short term midterm long term i mean it's only going to continue to happen you know so uh all time high before uh before the halving i mean that's a push i mean i think we can see anywhere from like five trillion and up obviously like a lot of you guys do but i just wanted to put that out there if you guys didn't know i would love your thoughts on either the discussion with ruder or just talking about the the the market in general and the inflows that we're seeing from the etfs good to have you sean sean you there oh perfect hey there how are you thanks for having me

pleasure man sorry i missed the question question is know, your thoughts on the market in general. My initial question was going to be about the alt, you know, the rotation we're seeing into the alts right now and the L2s and L1s narrative, especially with the ETH ETF coming in and the ETH upgrade as well. And then value came in and talked about the inflows that we're seeing and the market in general. So we'd love your thoughts on both topics. Yeah, that's probably out of my realm of expertise, to be honest with you. Oh, good. Any thoughts on the market in general

or also that one's outside your realm of expertise? Probably outside my realm. Just to give you some background, my experience has been primarily with Ripple and XRP. So I'm mostly on the business side. I spent most of my career on the business side with Google and Amazon and Ripple. So I'm happy to answer any questions on that side of things. Yeah, we weren't planning to talk about Ripple today. We could do a Ripple specific space, but maybe an update on the Ripple ecosystem. You were

the talk of town with winning the case a few months ago. Maybe just an update on Ripple. I've been following it too closely, so I can't ask any specific questions. So a quick update there, and then we'll go to Mohamed to talk AI. Yeah, I think the biggest thing with Ripple right now is the ETP that was recently launched by Valor in Sweden. 18% increase there with over a half a billion inflows. That's an 18% increase since they launched. So $590 million into that ETP. So, you know news, Binance lawyers just mentioned that Gensler propositioned them to be on their team, which is interesting. So some very interesting news coming on. So can you explain the gensler commission who to be on whose team uh binance uh he he wanted to uh he wanted to be on uh binance as a as an advisor uh

that was a few years ago correct 2019 yeah Okay, that was confirmed by who? Finance lawyers. Oh, wow. Okay, because we were talking about this. We called it a rumor back then a few months ago. Didn't know that was confirmed by finance lawyers. Finance lawyers yesterday confirmed it. Oh, I missed that story. And definitely worth a tweet.

And let me go to Mohamed because I do have to wrap as well. And Scott is not here today. Be back tomorrow. Muhammad, you know, Nvidia kind of got the entire market to pump the, the, the decentralized AI ecosystem to, to completely blow up. Now,

Rand did talk about us potentially reaching the peak. I think 90% in, into the bull market. So probably a 10% left a few weeks or maybe a couple of months left in this AI bull run. We'd love to get your thoughts on the ecosystem in general and whether we are potentially reaching a peak.

Yeah, thanks so much for having me. Can you hear me? Can you guys hear Mohamed? Is it glitching for me again? Can anyone hear Mohamed? Dave, Mike? Can you hear me? Dave, Mike? Can you hear me? Cool, cool. Yeah, I'll go quiet. I can't hear you, Muhammad. So when it's done, Dave, just let us know when Muhammad's done because I can't hear him.

Yeah, thanks for having me. So with every bull market, there's usually like a narrative that brings a lot of new people into the space. Like the last bull run, we had NFTs, for instance. And in this one, I think AI is going to be one of the main narratives. And like you said, NVIDIA has been booming like crazy, which is really unique because now the thing that's booming in TradFi and one of the main narratives in crypto is the same thing, like has AI in it. And yeah, there have been a lot of new, exciting projects. Like if you've heard about like BitTensor, for instance, that have been very popular. But the mature projects have not materialized yet.

They're still all very early stage. So I think we're far from the peak of the AI pool market. But it might just not coincide with the other things that are happening in the space. It might not be the same at the Bitcoin peak, for instance. But the AI peak, I think, is a long time away. All right, you just finished talking. I appreciate it. Cool.

I didn't hear any of the updates. I'm going to listen to the recording, see what he has said, Mohamed. I hope it's, I'm guessing he's going to be bullish, but I'll listen to the recap. Otherwise, we'll see everyone tomorrow. I think we've covered the, this is not too much going on today

beyond just speculating on the market and the pre-harving rally. So Scott will be back tomorrow and hopefully we'll face less glitches then. Appreciate everyone else for joining. Thanks, everyone.