The Wolf Of All Streets - Are ANY Crypto Bulls Out There or is This the End?#CryptoTownHall

Episode Date: July 1, 2026

In this episode, hosts and guests explore the stark contrast between widespread bearish crypto sentiment and their own bullish conviction, noting how prediction markets and AI equities are thriving while crypto feels sidelined. They break down the major stablecoin consortium announcement involving Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, Coinbase, BlackRock and banks, which redirects Treasury yields away from issuers like Circle and triggered sharp stock moves. The discussion covers why a 2022-style leverage implosion is unlikely this cycle due to improved lending models, proof of reserves, and better risk management, alongside MicroStrategy’s dynamics and why it isn’t a near-term forced seller. They also examine traditional finance’s push to adopt stablecoin rails—including potential disruption from X Money—regulatory shifts like the Clarity Act, and why Bitcoin remains undervalued long-term as a digitally native asset amid institutional adoption and cycle patterns. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Well, good morning, everyone. Are there anybody out there who believes in crypto anymore? Because watching the news from Las Vegas, all I could see is literally every single person that I saw talking about prices have to fall because there's no buy interest anymore. And generally when I see that, I always go the other way. It makes me feel better about being lonely. And, you know, it feels lonely, you know, being bullish here. thinking that that we are close to the end of this the these doldrums but you know what the hell curious of am i alone or am i just a complete moron i don't know gary what do you think

am i am i you know never never seen it more bearish i mean if people are making shit up as it goes now it's like really crazy i mean i i just think it's funny all i could tell you is i'm back in jersey uh you know i spent eight days at the horseshoe and Horseshoe in Paris playing at the World Series of poker every day they were setting records a number of people

willing to, you know, try to, you know, win these big poker tournaments, even the medium poker tournaments. The last one that I put in set a record. It's one of those, they have a nightly deep stack. It's like 400 buck, you know,

tournament. And the prize pool was a record. I mean, you know, the first prize, I didn't get first prize. I got 10th, which was still not bad. First prize was 40,000. for one of these suckers. So, you know, it's, you know, there's just so many people throwing money. And I mean from everywhere all over the world is, it was crazy. But, you know, whatever. I guess,

you know, prediction markets are doing really well and crypto is just out of favor. And, you know, the stock market, you know, the reason SpaceX is holding up in here is because there are a lot of people who are speculating. So meanwhile, you know, I'm not totally up on the crypto news, but it looks like somehow someone woke up over the last couple days and decided, wait a minute, you mean you're not going to be able to make, you know, tether-sized margins on stable coins? Hmm, maybe we shouldn't value your companies if you can. I mean, what's going on there, Carlo? I mean, yeah, this was a, this was a big announcement yesterday.

And it's definitely drawn a lot of attention from the space because at its core, what is doing is the purpose of the audience. Why don't you just repeat what the announcement was? Sorry. Yeah, yeah, I'll set the table. So yesterday we had a huge announcement come out of a consortium of businesses that all appear to be supporting the release of OUSD. 140 of finances, biggest names joined in the support and endorsement of this, including Visa MasterCard, Stripe, American Express, Coinbase, BlackRock, a lot of. a lot of banks, a lot of fintechs, a lot of crypto platforms. And it tanked the price of Circle yesterday because what this announcement essentially did is it basically reshaped how the revenue goes to the stablecoin issuer, because what they're proposing in their announcement, and I'm going to put

the article that I put out today on the stablecoin strategist up there for anyone who wants to dig deeper in this is, they're basically saying that we're not going to take the Treasury return as the issuer and use that as our profit margin anymore. For a small transactional fee, we're going to pass all of that directly on to the businesses that are part of this consortium. And this really impacted the price of Circle stock yesterday, it dropped like 17% because it basically turns the entire revenue model at Circle. And frankly, every stable coin issuer, including.

potentially Tether, have built their business model on. So Jeremy Aller responded back yesterday in a long post and basically said, look, consortiums like this have not typically been successful because it's like hurting cats. And in this case, it's hurting cats that are competitive in the same industry. And look, the bottom line is Circle still enjoys huge network effects, huge advantage as a leader, because this particular OUSD token is not, even live yet. So the stock is rebounded today about 5%. I'm not surprised by that, but Circle definitely has some challenges going forward because they're not going to be able to

depend exclusively on the revenue they make on custody and treasuries anymore. And there are some regulatory wrinkles that I talk about in my article that I'm curious to see how the businesses that get these rewards through this program spend those rewards if they pay. pushed them back to the consumer. That could be a regulatory trap that I'm looking at right now as the rules are currently being written for Genius Act regulation. But this is not by any means the death of circle, in my opinion. It is a challenge. But there's also a challenge for this OUSD, Dave, because it's not a proven product yet. Of course, of course. But there's a lot of interesting things going on. Lou, I see your hand up. Yeah, I just want to add to what Carlos said.

I think another thing that's actually quite negative for Circle is that is Coinbase's involvement in this. I mean, Coinbase is their main partner. Now all of a sudden, Coinbase is doing other sense. I think that that's not good well for circle. Their arrangement comes up for renewal in August, so that's what I'm looking at too. You're right. I mean, look, if you're Coinbase, what are you going to do? Coinbase wants to broaden and be, I mean, Coinbase is looking to compete not with, you know, crypto firms. They want to compete with Robin Hood, Morgan Stanley, et cetera, et cetera, you know, Bank of America. I mean, they want to be a, the Nouveau, neo, less expensive back-end financial services companies.

So, of course, they're going to be a lot of credit. Sure, agree. Coinbase is no longer the revolution. Well, well, it depends. I mean, revolutions are interesting, right? you know, I'm always reminded of animal farm, you know, the last scene, you know, they look from pig to man and man to pig and realized, you know, whatever, anyone who's read the book understands what I'm saying. That is one way of looking at. Another way of looking at it is the way I

looked at it from the inside over years is that, you know, electronic trading, you know, when it first came in, changed Wall Street dramatically. It didn't replace it. It changed it. And those changes were very, very meaningful for many, many people, but, you know, including retail, right? You know, retail investors today have a completely different scenario than they had, you know, 40 years ago. 40 years ago, you paid 100 bucks to do a trade and you, your commissions were huge, the ability to trade in and out, the ability to build your own portfolios. If you want to be a diversified, you paid one or two percent, you know, per year to managers minimum, if not more. You know, it was not very investor friendly.

Today, it's dramatically more investor friendly. But, you know, was that a revolution? No, it wasn't a revolution. It was, you know, a technological evolution. Is crypto a revolution or will it be a technological evolution? For the plumbing, it will be an evolution. The revolution will be when the world basically eventually figures out that there's a, this, these fiat currencies are just completely.

you know, unraveling. But I don't think that happens in my lifetime, to be fair. Anyway, Reed, I see a new hand-up, so I don't want to cut you off. Yeah, yeah. But I mean, I think we have to also think about, like, the idea that USDC or Tether or sort of even PYUSD, that those stable coins were going to fill sort of like, you know, internal cash flows for businesses, that was never on the table. So I think you have to look at it from like, you know, what is the use case for the stable coin? And, Similarly, on the Coinbase side of it, Coinbase also supports PayPal, USDT, and other stable coins. So I don't know that it's, you know, if you think about it in the context of, you know,

OUSD is, you know, this corporate sort of internal cash flow stable coin, that maybe there isn't a whole lot to it. And it's just going to be one other asset that, you know, they want to support. Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, look, why people, why listeners should matter or care is because, the more stable coins become the core payment rails for, you know, for investing, the more investments that are tokenized will be, you know, made mainstream and be easier and people will get experience with them. And that does matter. It also opens people's minds. I mean, you know, look, I used to be, I used to love reading Jeremy Grantham's monthly newsletter back

in the 90s and in the early 2000s, because he really understood a lot of what was going on in terms of investor psychology, but he started to kind of fail because he didn't understand a lot about what was going on in the technology side. And, you know, Grant the Mayor Von Adelieu, his firm, was a great firm. They were a great customer of mine

when I was on the program trading side at Solomon Brothers, et cetera, and I was in their offices, you know, twice a year. You know, reading him what he wrote about Bitcoin, displaying literally overpowering ignorance is problematic. And yet the part of the justification, the justification is that, you know, is a lack of understanding of what's going on with the gentic commerce, with digital commerce and the need for being natively digital. So I think that you're right.

I think it's a very important bit. Dave, we can't have this conversation without talking about the Clarity Act, which too bet Scott's not here because I think he might be able to take a dance on its grave, the odds of it passing have plummeted tremendously. And that's what's critical for the tokenization of assets. No, that's not true. I mean, it's an interesting question. I mean, the Clarity Act, what it does more than anything is it makes it that it will make it harder for, it would make it impossible under the new Chevron doctrine. I forgot, I'm Loper Bright. Under Loper Bright, it would make it impossible for a future SEC and CFTC to unravel what this CFTC and SEC are doing.

But understand, it is not easy. If Paul Atkins and Mike Sealing do put together a regulatory structure cooperatively, it's going to be really hard to undo anyway. And so what you will see is Wall Street firms going in. The difference is the Clarity Act makes regulation by enforcement quite literally illegal. And I don't know, you know, if it's sort of like, you know, Democrats are going to win this election. Are they really going to risk 2008 by effectively going back to what, what cost them potentially 2000, you know, the last election? I don't think so. I mean, why? What's the purpose? The motivation? It depends on who runs the party. I mean, if you, if the wing of the party that wants to break up

Apple because they raise prices runs the party, then that's anything's on the table. Sure. But though that wing of the party, actually, why do they care about crypto? They care about crypto for one reason. And let's, let's face it. It's one of the possible titles we did. It's because last year, Trump made a, Trump and his family made a shit ton of money in crypto.

That's why they care. But what, but crypto is more threatening to the, the, their normal targets of the power base out there. So, I mean, look, we'll see how it all unravels. I think the clarity, I think something will happen because it just makes sense for it to happen. We'll see how it goes. It'll be after the midterms, though. I think that part seems pretty obvious.

But even without that, you know, tokenization is something that gives you, is, it's consumer-centric, it's little-guy-centric. And most of these people, that's what they want to do. They want to support the little guy. So just keep in mind, you know, that. I mean, they certainly don't want to see the coin bases of the world dominate. That's for sure. And there could be knock-on effects for sure. And certainly, if innovation is crushed and we go full-on socialist for a while,

I mean, I don't want to go down that road now because then it'll turn into economics town hall. And I don't want to do that. But just to go back, unfortunately, Gary left. I was going to, I want to try to get his opinion on this, you know, on the, on what it means for credit card issuers, but we're seeing, the stable coin stuff matters because what we're seeing is businesses like, you know, we're down in South Jersey.

Down here, I would say it's about 60 to 70% of businesses are now charging people 3% to use credit cards. Now that goes away if you can use the stable coin rails as opposed to just pure processing fees. But it's a very interesting thing. I, I, my wife has been complaining to me about it, you know, telling me stories she doesn't want to go to because she's mad at them. And I'm like, well, it's most of them now. So I don't know what you're going to do.

But whatever. Anyway, on Monday, Maricio, are you behind the mic before I, I launch into a new topic? Are you there? Is that a yes? I didn't know. Well, on Monday, you know, one of the things that Peter Schiff was saying, which I said was complete bullshit, was that this whole cycle. will cause, you know, all the Bitcoin lenders and everything will have another catastrophic implosion like 2022. And that's why we're going to see yet another massive leg down. And my opinion is that

there's nowhere near that level of leverage in the system. Certainly, micro strategy doesn't have to sell. And then he started going on about Bitcoin lenders. And I made the point, Mauritio, that, you know, we have a guest on the show quite often that talks about the TVLs and what it would take. But his, his thesis is if Bitcoin drops down, continues to fall towards 50, that it will be a self-reinforcing cycle down into, I mean, he said below 20,000 or whatever, because the people are so, are so levered. I'm curious, you know, what your thoughts are on this?

I'm fairly confident you would disagree with that. Can anybody hear Marito, or is it just me? You can hear me, though. Okay. Well, Carlo and I can hear each other. We'll just have our own conversation. Yeah. You know, Reed, is that?

a new hand or an old hand that keeps flashing at me. This is this, this, this is, this is, this is the, the perils of this app. No, what? Can you hear me now? There you go. I can, I can hear now, yes. Okay, I came back out and back in. I don't know if you've already moved on, but no, I've not moved on.

I think, I think it's an important topic. I think that's one of the things that, that the audience really wants to understand is, you know, what is the real risk from a, a massive de-leveraging, you know, at this point? Are we set up for that? because there's all sorts of rumors and stuff. Generally, when people think something's going to happen, it doesn't, and when people are totally unexpecting it, that's when it does. But I'm curious.

What do you think? Yeah, I echo that sentiment entirely, and you're not a lonely bull, Dave. I'm there with you. I'm another bull, given the despair we're seeing in the market. On a personal side, right, I do think that market sentiment, at least from what I've seen in the past, signals to me that we should be hopefully towards the tail end of this. to touch on the collapse of the lenders, just for the sake of adding a bit more context to the chat as to what happened last time around, the collapse of the lenders last in the 2021-2020 cycle was largely due to their unsecured loans for their yield business,

not because of their Bitcoin-back loans or their collateralized loans. The majority of the losses on those books were because of the unsecured loans. loans done to Three Arrows and others, largely on the back of the need to generate yield that these companies had. They were paying yield on things like basic attention token and Dogecoin and all these other things that didn't have an institutional market. So what they were doing is they were taking these deposits, turning around, trading them for other assets that did have demand on the institutional side, and then lending those assets

to institutions unsecured without ever seeing balance sheets, without any type of due diligence. So, lo and behold, when some of the Ponzi started collapsing, like Terra Luna, people started withdrawing acids out of Terraluna. People saw on chain that Celsius was withdrawing acids from Terraluna. They assumed Celsius could have losses, started withdrawing acids from Celsius. Celsius that starts withdrawing from three arrows. Three arrows was also in Terraluna. And so basically the whole Ponzi unravels because people are insolvent. Since then, what's happened is a lot of the lenders,

have adopted Lenin's model, which Lenin was really the only lender at scale that navigated the previous wave of stress without any issues. And so other lenders started adopting our model saying maybe we shouldn't be re-hypothicating Bitcoin. Maybe we should have proof of reserves, right? And the lending models that are out there today are much more robust. We hold about a 30% market share of retail Bitcoin back loans. So we see how people are, you know, we have a great vantage point on how people are using these loans.

Are people, have people taken loans? Yes. Like, there are people with Bitcoin back loans out there. And the way leverage or loans work is as the price goes down, if you do not have more collateral, your Bitcoin gets liquidated and the price, that pressure is price lower. That said, like, are loans taken? Are there loans in the system? Yes, there are. But I believe they are completely or categorically in a different position than where the leverage market was in 2021, 2022.

I do not see a risk of... But here's the question that Peter said, because I basically said that. And he kind of sort of backed down a little. He never really backs down. But his point was that a lot of your customers are over leveraged. And what he's talking about are the people who own Bitcoin. from, you know, to use Gary's terms, the $300 crowd or a $1,000 crowd, who owned Bitcoin, who never sold, who have borrowed against it to buy the shit that they need to buy,

might be panicking that they need to sell now. That's his point. And I have no way of addressing that. But that's really the question. And that's harder for you to talk about, obviously. But it doesn't feel that's very highly leveraged. That's the thing. No, and I'm happy to share also some data that might be helpful, right?

Like what we've seen this time around. So I'll give you another example of why I don't believe, you know, again, just client behavior doesn't support that view, right? Over the, like yesterday we made a new low, barely, right? But what I'm trying to say is we have not seen, like our book has not, like our book has actually grown from the February drop. And people's LTVs have gotten much healthier over these last few months. So people have protected their loans. I think what Peter is missing the other side of the equation, which is that when these loans first came out, these loans are eight years old.

A lot of people didn't know how long it would take to react to a margin call or how fast that could get there or how quickly your company would accept a partial repayment on dollars or how quickly they could rebalance Bitcoin out of one loan so you could top up another loan. All of those things have gotten better over the last. the last five years. We are incredibly fast whenever anybody needs anything. And the clients have gotten a lot better at protecting their loans. We've also built tools like auto top up to help people react. So people have learned to use these products a lot more. They've gotten a lot more familiar with them.

And they are sizing them a lot more responsibly. So I don't see this risk. The bigger risk, in my opinion was in some of the lenders that had, for example, block fills, if you recall, they went under earlier this year or filed for bankruptcy earlier this year. And they were doing, you know, they were not just a lender. They were a lender that did, you know, option structures and tried to hedge loans to the downside. They didn't hedge those loans properly. Surprise, surprise, you know, that creates a whole. And so it's the kind of lenders that act responsibly, not surprisingly, don't have preferversely.

reserves, don't show you how they put on these hedges or do things on the back end. Yeah, I'm less worried about the companies. It's really the holders. That's the real issue. The real issue is, look, people need to understand that, you know, liquidate, like, the reason 1010 happened was because people pyramid went in the middle of, in bull market. So when a market goes higher, what happens? Generally, especially when. and it's in a market like crypto, which is so perpetual swap dominated. And people always forget the fact that the five times more volume in perpetual swaps has been a structure of crypto, there's a lot of speculation. So when that happens, you have people pyramid.

And it's very hard to know how much is pyramid. Pyramitting for those who don't understand it is the idea that you put 100,000 in. You're now double. Now you have 200,000. but you continue to, you know, push. And so you may instead of, because of leverage, so let's say you put $100,000 in, it's now worth $200,000.

When you're at $100,000, you're at whatever leverage you were at. When you're at $200,000, you keep that leverage. So now you have $400,000, right? Or whatever the number is. And so it goes higher and you continue to repush your position. That makes you very vulnerable to a downside move. And so when you get these de-leveraging events,

it wipes people out. So people who are, if you're not leveraged, you know, it doesn't really affect you. But that leverage happens. And so the, that is much more likely, a liquidation cascade is much more likely post bull run than in the middle of a bear run. But it could still happen if people put, if people, you know, are over leveraged. That's the issue. Yeah.

And listen, I'm not, I'm not suggesting that people have not taken out loans and there is, you know, the risk of liquidation doesn't exist. If any people that have loans, they know they have to top up their loans, and if the price drops efficiently, their loan might face a liquidation. What I will say in terms of what I did see on the run-up in this whole pyramiding setup that you're discussing, David, is that a lot of this leverage in the Bitcoin markets was being done with treasury companies. So a lot of this recursive leverage place where some clients were borrowing against their

Bitcoin to buy things like MSDR or SCRC and others. A lot of those trays have unwound. But in the spot markets, like what I'm seeing on the spot leg looks very healthy. What I look at when I see the MSDR chart and the SCRC chart is literally cascating liquidation, you know, breadcrumbs. And so I think a lot of that happened, but it happened on other venues, not necessarily spot. You went quiet. Can people still hear me?

Oh. Did you guys hear what I said? Yeah, I think I heard most of it. Reed, is that an old hand or a new hand? No, it's new. So I spent six years at blockchain.com. I built their credit business. So I was front row at the last kind of credit cycle there.

And I think there's two kind of important differences versus what we're seeing now. First is leverage being expressed in sort of your brokerage firms, which have a totally different sort of liquidation mechanism that isn't the same as sort of activity on chain. And I think we also operates a crypto-back lending business. But I think those borrowers, and I'm sure they're similar to Mauritios, those borrowers are not sort of like the incremental movement of leverage in the market. And you can see that just by looking at interest rates on.

chain, right? So you're still able to finance assets below Sover on chain, you know, and the last time interest rates were high was, what, six, seven, eight months ago. So I, you know, quite strongly don't believe there is any meaningful amount of leverage relative to past cycles at this moment. Yeah, I think that, well, obviously, you've seen a lot of the experience. I mean, I was running a company and I knew what Blockfills was doing. And they started with a trading business. And they started, it's very typical what businesses do is when you reach, when you start reaching and reaching, you end up taking more risk.

And people in crypto have historically underappreciated where the risks are. So, you know, Mauritio calls it irresponsible. Okay, that's probably one way of saying it. I would just say, you know, having spent, you know, nine days playing poker, I watch people who, you know, where early chip leaders, you know, bleed out because, you know, and you expect it unless you get really, really lucky. Because a lot of these people are just taking ridiculous risks at times when they don't really need to. Now, sometimes you have to, but, you know, there are all, they were a lot. This space was downloaded via spaces down.com. Visit to download your spaces today. A lot of businesses in crypto, a lot of people who didn't have.

experience in financial services. I don't think that's what the business is like today. I think that there are consumers and speculators who always are out there. And that's really the question. The reason that we're having this topic, and it sounds very dry, except for the bare case for Bitcoin to drop for this cycle to mirror past cycles to use the expression and drop down into the 40s or the 30s

or whatever, it needs this as, fuel and if this fuel doesn't exist, you know, you can't have a forest fire without brush, you know, and that's why this is so important. So if you're trying to ask yourself, if you're speculating on the short side and people are pressing their shorts, and I think that there is some of that going on, I think you're going to be disappointed. And that to me is what it feels like. I could be, look, I thought we would float higher. I did. And maybe I'll still end up being right, because we're still at the same freaking levels. But, you know,

know, it's, it's very hard to speculate on the short side and the basis of what's happened before if the things that were happening under the covers aren't happening now. I mean, so, you know, I see you agree, Mauritio. I mean, Reed, you're in a pretty good position to see a lot of this stuff. I mean, I mean, am I, am I crazy here? Or is it, I don't want to say this time is different. I just want to say that the actual things going on structurally in the market feels different this time and probably is different this time than it was at the end of the last cycle. 100%. I mean, you know, our client base at blockchain.com, that doesn't exist anymore. I don't believe broadly in the market, meaning like large funds who, you know, start off as market neutral,

and then, you know, they have market risk, right? I just, I don't think that that cohort exists and is expressing leverage the way that historically it has, because it's not profitable, especially in these time periods. Yeah. And everyone thinking in all these, I don't want to call them, you know, I don't want to use adjectives, all the people who think that micro strategy or strategy is, you know, they're going to be forced to sell Bitcoin, you know, in the near term, I think they're delusional.

I mean, they don't have to. And so I don't understand where that's coming from. Now, that said, look, I have not a fan, have not been a fan, and think that people like David Bailey have done massive structural damage to, you know, to the investor sentiment in Bitcoin. I think a lot of the Bitcoin treasury companies were a grift, you know, just simple, simple, full-on grift. And that grift is, you know, when that gets exposed, it takes time for that to get cleaned up.

I think I underestimated just how much of it was there. But, I mean, there's certainly some of it. And it's between that and the meme coin stuff, I mean, all I'll say is this, waking up to headlines about how the Trump family made so much money in crypto in 2025 as being relevant here on July 1st of 2026, they made that money when the market went, went ballistic on the positive side. You know, it is always. news and it's the kind of thing, you know, people always talk about, by the, by the,

by, you know, whatever, buy the rumor, sell the news. It's the same thing in reverse, you know, sell the rumor, buy the news, you know, if it's bad news. But I think that's what's going on. And, you know, I don't know what else to say about that. Anybody else care? So other than that, from a bullish bearish, lawyer, we haven't heard you talk today. I mean, you know, what are the topics that you care about? You know, I mean, like, I, I'm not a. professional trader. So, but what I do is, you know, I'm trying to figure out when I, how heavily I should DCA and when,

because I'm still a believer in Bitcoin. You know, now's a good time as any, but I think we might see it a little bit lower. You know, what I do is I have a six-year-old daughter and an 11-year-old daughter, and I think about, okay, what's university going to, what's college going to cost when they're ready for it? And somehow when I put myself in that mindset, Bitcoin's a lot higher. And I know that just seems vague, but it seems real to me. Yeah. And that, you know, the other topic, you know, people talk about it.

The other topic that I've seen a lot of, of, I'm going to almost call it spam, is there, I can't remember which, you know, dinosaur made the point, you know, tried to bring up the old Bitcoin is dead because they can infinitely fork it. And they were looking at the BIP, you know, 110, you know, debate and talking about, well, it's going to fork, it's going to this, it's going to that. you know, I'm just curious, why is it always seem, I mean, Panos, you've been involved in this for a while. I mean, why is it always seem that when markets are soft or feel like they're, they're towards the bottom, that we see more of this chatter? Yeah, it's kind of how things work, right?

If you look at the tops, it's like super bullish news constantly and then the market tops. And then when you look at bottoms, it's like super bearish news before the market's bottom. It's just kind of how it's always been. I think that's not just for Bitcoin. I think it's for a lot of markets. But yeah, the more fud about micro strategy and all these other things I see, the more I want to DCA into Bitcoin. I do think it is probably going to go a little bit lower.

I know a lot of people don't like to reference the four-year cycles, but I mean so far it's been pretty spot on from when it topped. And if it is going to continue that way, we're likely to see it bottom in the coming months and, you know, September, October time probably a reversal. Now, I mean, things could change. It could reverse before. It could reverse after. But the trend is your friend until it's not, right?

And from what I've seen... There's no question about that. We were, like, I just remember 2017 was weird, right? Remember, there was a rally in the early summer, and then there was a pretty bad August, and then September, you know, it reversed, and then we all know what happened in October, November. So, you know, not saying it's going to happen again,

but it certainly could. I mean, God knows. Yeah, I mean, my experience is that it really needs to feel like it's over for it to not be over. I don't know that we're there yet. But on the other hand, you know, it's amazing how most. people can look at, you know, 120K and say, damn, that's on, that's on fire.

I should buy it. And then when it's down to 60, it's like, well, it's fucking over. And, you know, anyone who's been through a couple cycles, it was way more over all the other times than it is now for Bitcoin. I can say that with certainty. Well, it's funny. I was on, I was doing some research this morning. Yes, there were more in the, if you count the number of Bitcoin obituaries in 2022, it was more than today, but not by as much as you think, you know, like 25, 30% more.

And that was with FtX and people thinking literally the entire asset class was going to completely unravel. Well, I'm not analyzing the extent to which people think it's over. I'm talking about when Bitcoin was put, it was around 20 grand and it could go to zero conceivably, that was a real thing that happened in our recent memories. Right now it could go to 40, but zero is not on the radar because it's how it now, has institutions holding it. And so I think that's such a different paradigm

than what I was looking at when I was like, should I buy it a 20 versus, you know, when should I DCA? Now I'm certain it's going nowhere. That is a very big, incredibly important sentiment because to the extent that that is the case that really makes a very big difference in terms of where it goes long term.

There are a lot of people out there who keep making the statement, well, there's no money. There's no money on the sidelines. And all I can tell you is if you think there's no money on the sidelines, about any asset, I don't care what it is, you are not paying attention. Governments are printing shit tons of money. There's lots of money sloshing around the system.

I mean, there's spectra. Yeah, you just have the wrong friends. It's just more concentrated than you're used to. Well, that's true. I mean, there's no doubt that that's true. See, this is crazy. Sorry, I'm trying to make the site work. I'm getting requests from people that I thought were already up here.

So like Carlo, I guess, dropped and had to come back. But yeah, you always need to understand, you know, where things are. And cycles are interesting. I mean, the four-year cycle started because of the having cycle. And then it's just kind of been perpetuated. part of the reason it gets perpetuated is because people's greed on the upside let let it happen right you know we got very it was there was a absolute ton of leverage that was not as obvious in October last October right it wasn't as obvious because the previous cycle when there was a ton

of leverage people were paying enormous amounts to fund positions and so you could see it in the funding rates you did that wasn't there didn't mean leverage wasn't there just meant it wasn't as expensive so I that's why I always obsess about about understanding how much leverage is out there. Right? Panos, I see you lifted your mic. I don't know if you're... Oh, no, sorry, I just left it on.

I do have a question, though, because I missed the first part of it, so you may have covered this. It's just about micro strategy because I'm no expert on how those things works. I know you know a lot more than me. But, I mean, correct me if I'm wrong. From what I understand,

it's not so much the price point of Bitcoin go into, but how long it stays up. under there, right? Is that correct? It's like a time period. Well, yeah, it sort of. I mean, look, right now they have n number of months and being integers and not immediate of dividend coverage sitting in cap. The worst case scenario is if micro strategy, the stock price falls to the point where they can't sell stock. And so the only thing they can sell is Bitcoin. that has not happened yet. They have been able to sell stock to keep themselves afloat.

If Bitcoin stays here or drops to 20,000 in the next three months, they have no need to sell Bitcoin. They won't be the one selling Bitcoin to make it drop to 20,000, which is not going to happen, right? Microstrategie is, it's really a simple, really simply, people are just wrong about it. Micro Strategy stock itself is a leverage play on Bitcoin with time decay. If Bitcoin does nothing for the next five years,

Micro Strategy is going to underperform Bitcoin. If Bitcoin is $60,000 in 20131, Micro Strategy is probably to be half the price that it is today with Bitcoin at this price, because they're going to have been forced to sell Bitcoin, or forced to sell stock in order to keep themselves afloat, be paying the interest that they've taken out. They're levered. They're not leveraged, huge, but they're levered.

STRC is like a high-yield debt instrument. And it's a high-yield debt instrument where there's also, where the risk is more that the dividend will be suspended than it won't be get repaid. Because there's just not that much leverage on the balance sheet. But it still is going to trade like high yield. And the sole question is, will Bitcoin rise enough to pay that dividend? And so that's how you have to value it.

All these other statements about it are just, they're kind of wrong. And people don't really understand it. So if Bitcoin, for example, if the cycle ends and we get a new cycle and Bitcoin ends up in the new cycle trading it around 120, 130, there's micro strategy. None of these issues are real. They just go poof. So if that's what you think, if you think Bitcoin's going to go to 40 and then back to 150 in the next three years, then you can, you can.

could sleep like a baby, like a baby owning STRC, except for why would you? If you think it could kind of go to 140 in the next three years, why would you buy a yield product as opposed to buying Bitcoin? Right. So it really depends on what you actually think, how much risk you can take and why. And so I just think that all the people who think binary about this are wrong. I don't know if that explanation makes sense to you, Patterns. Yeah, no, that makes sense.

That makes a lot of sense. Because that's a situation. I mean, when when that was on here before, I don't see him anymore. You can go through the details. But the most interesting thing about strategy is, as Bitcoin rises, their leverage ratios fall and fall fast. As Bitcoin falls, their leverage ratios increase, but they don't increase nearly as fast because of the fact that they have cash reserves, et cetera. So that's the issue with micro strategy.

And anything else is FUD. I'm sorry. It's just it is. It doesn't mean, now that said, I am not going to be a fan of Sailor. That's the other story of people were talking about, these shareholder lawsuits. I have been very critical of his philosophical tweets and all the other stuff and the cheerleading. I think that's a bad idea. I think it's generally bad. But shareholder lawsuits generally are much closer to bottoms in stock prices than in tops, historically. the most obvious example being Tesla. Anyone who sold on the basis of the shareholder lawsuit there missed a 15X.

Now, I'm not saying my strategy is going to 15X, although it could. I am saying that historically selling because of a shareholder lawsuit, which is widely known and expected, is a bad idea. Mauritia. Hey, Dave, can you guys hear me okay? Yes. Okay. So I think one of the, just wanted to connect a few points on the explanation you just gave

strategy, which is this idea of forced sellers, right? Like the type of leverage that micro strategy has doesn't not convert micro strategy into a forced seller, if Bitcoin price goes lower, necessarily, right? They can choose not to sell. Nobody at these prices, and particularly my client base or our client base, wants to sell Bitcoin at 60K. None of these people are willing sellers. The dynamic around the short trade and how the whole can this thing go and what's

what's the juice for the people putting on that trade is they would be looking potentially to short Bitcoin expecting for a wave of cascading the quotations, i.e. four sellers drive the price slower so they can buy it back. And if their short fails to drive the price lower, then it can get run up and they take a loss, right? And so one of the things I look a lot to, or one of the things I pay a lot of attention to where we are in types of markets where very close to the lows is, what happens when Bitcoin makes a new low? Is it a shallow low? Is it a deep low?

The deeper the low, the more of a signal you have, that there's a lot of excessive leverage still in the system. Bitcoin made a new law yesterday. It was muted. I don't think it went past a couple hundred bucks beneath its previous law, which suggests to me that not that many people are teetering around the edge of it. Moreover, a lot of the... Many companies have different liquidations.

Some companies, equity you as soon as the LTV reaches a particular threshold. Some companies give you a period of time to cure that loan, sometimes 24 or 48 hours. So when you see Bitcoin sitting around the low for more than 48 hours and not make a new low, it also signals to me that a lot of those time-based liquidations are, there's not that many forced sellers in that bucket yet. So all this to say, I think Bitcoiners at this level are not willing sellers. they would be four sellers, and to do that, you would have to push the market lower. The risk of trying to push the market lower is that you don't find the wave of cascading liquidations,

and instead the price gets bid up and your short bleeds. And so I just wanted to highlight why I'm looking so closely to the dynamics around when we make new lows and what the anatomy of those lows is. Yeah, and that's exactly the way I was looking at it. So, I mean, which unfortunately for, I mean, I don't think that, I think we're in the minority, I mean, you know, maybe it's who, you know, maybe it's just the nature of us talking, but I think we're in the minority of investors. I mean, I virtually every single person I talked to starts their sentence like Panos did.

Like, I think it's with, I think it's going to probably go lower before it goes higher, but we're closer to the bottom and the top. You know, more or less, that's what that seems to be the, the sentiment among Bitcoiners, among institutional investors, the ones that have DCA to have a small percentage of their portfolio in it, don't care. They're not even watching it. They don't give a fuck. The ones who are trading it, well, yeah, they're selling it. And the speculators are selling. They're clearly, are they done? Probably pretty close. But, you know, that's what you're looking at. And you just have to watch, these things are waves. I mean, James Lavish made a point, which I think is a really important one

that no one else has talked about, which is when you see quarterly rebalances, a lot of institutions, and the most important one, by the way, is September, which is why September always tends to be the way it is. But June is not trivial. They tend to sell their losers and buy their winners in order to make their portfolios look like they're holding winners. And so June 30th tends to be one of those days. The end of September tends to be another one. The window dressing at the end of the quarter tends to be that people puk out the things that have underperformed in the first half of the year. And they buy the stuff that's performed well. And that trend tends to then reverse after that. And by the way, pretty much everything Bitcoin related got sold.

And so, yeah, so the fact that that was the low, I think that's telling you something. So that's a large part of what was going on yesterday, I think. Once again, could be wrong, but James is a pretty smart guy. And, you know, he's been tracking this. I assume that's an old hand, Mauritio. Yeah, it's an old hand. I appreciate the color and the lavishest point. I think that's really helpful.

Right. So, you know, to me, that I think there's. There's a lot of that going on. And the stable coin news, the most important thing that I care about is what's really happening. When you start seeing the point, I mean, with all due respect to Carlo,

and I think you probably are gonna agree with me, this isn't a knock that the most important part of the announcement yesterday is all these financial services companies are basically saying, look, we are not going to get ourselves disrupted. We want to be part of these rails. We know they're more, efficient and so we're moving in this direction to the extent we have money that we make out of inefficiency we're going to keep making that money until we're forced but we're not going to let

ourselves get locked out and Wall Street's learned this example a lot right you know they I was right at ground zero for when the internet first came in and I literally was on the internet operating committee that's what they called it at Solomon Smith Barney I was actually the nominated to be the global architect of our new set of trading systems because of all the revolution that happened with online trading and the internet and everything else. I saw this. Now, did those companies, did the companies that were making that infrastructure? Did they all do well? Yeah, they did phenomenal. And so you just have to understand that the same thing is going to happen here. But it doesn't mean it's a windfall for those companies because it doesn't mean it's a windfall for those

assets, it means that there's value there. And so it really is a question of value. I hope that makes sense to people, because to me, that's a very important lesson here. And, you know, I think Bitcoin is undervalued. I think that for a whole host of reasons, and I think there are a bunch of other assets that are undervalued. And we'll see how those goes. Undervalue doesn't mean it's going to go up 10,000 X, though. And I think that's a big difference. I see, I see, I see, your hand flashing. Again, Mauritio, I don't want to cut you off. No, no, I didn't, that was an old hand, but I think the stable coin announcement is a very interesting one to me. And I, you know, it'd be interesting to see how it plays out. I get some, not PTSD is not the right word,

but some, you know, vague memories of Libra when they came out with their massive effort across a bunch of platforms and they got kind of shut down. That was pretty genius. Well, Libra was really when the day that Libra got announced, I told people that this is not going to work, but they are going to get absolutely destroyed. And the reason Lieber got destroyed was because they dared to tell people that they were going to set exchange rates. That is a no-no. And you know how you know it's a no-no?

There's this thing that probably most people watching, listening, whatever the hell they are, don't know about called the SDR Special Drawing Rights, which is a, it's a, a quote currency that virtually nobody uses, the amount of political bullshit and the amount of power that was just exercised in order to create and decide how what the exchange rates are in the in the SDR, which is this conglomerated beast currency, was massive at the nation state level.

So it was very obvious to me that Lieber trying to do that, they were going to, they had zero chance. And that's exactly what happened. It wasn't that they were creating immediately exchange. It was that they were doing exchange rates. Nothing in the stable coin. This is all within dollars or within euros or whatever, but they're not trying to do anything on the cross rate side.

Just to be clear, I'm sorry, Maritia. I don't want to argue, but I think that's the thing that happened with Libra. I think Libra made a lot of key design errors during bringing the product to market. But again, you know, I am a little, not to say, skeptical. I think it's a phenomenal effort from the companies involved. Definitely a lot of coordination there. But I am, I am curious to see how this plays out because a paper, but what the token actually looks like and what you can do or can't do with it. You start, you know, the rubber meets the road in terms of who's going to use this thing. Yeah, no, that's fair.

Carlo, any final thoughts on this stuff? You've been bouncing around. Yeah, been in and out of the loop, so to speak. I think the more we see stable coins become an infrastructure build, the more there's going to be competitive pressure on how the fees are generated. And Circle is definitely catching the headline right now with this consortium announcement, whether this is the existential threat that some think it is to Circle and to the broader stable coin issuance model, I think, remains to be seen. There is still a lane that has not been developed yet with stable coins, and that is agentic payments.

The chain and the stable coin issuer that can effectuate agentic payments, lightning fast, and at near zero fees to deal with the compression model that exists there with micropayments, is going to be a big winner. this consortium doesn't appear to be building in that space. Circle has ARC, and they probably should be taking a very close look at what they're doing with the Gentic payments right now to be a differentiator. So I'm definitely watching all of this,

but I agree with your bigger thesis that this is not much different than the stock trading era. Everything is being pushed to near zero fees, and the banks understand they're being disintermediated and disrupted in all of this, and they are clutching with their last ditch efforts here to try to preserve what they offer. Another interesting thing. Let's remember something.

The banks always do multiple things. They have their legion of lobbyists to try to stop, keep the system the way it is, and then they have people inside the banks who are working to make themselves work with the new system at the same time. I mean, these two things are happening simultaneously. I know it's cognitive dissonance to understand that, but having spent decades inside two different bankings, you know, Morgan Stanley, Solomon's with Barney, the City Group, I can tell you with absolute certainty that there are lots of people in all these banks who are just assuming the lobbyists are going to lose,

but, you know, Jamie Diamond is going to talk about it because, you know, the lobbyists will lose the day that Jamie Diamond accepts and people like that accept that they've lost, that's the day the lobby. There's no point to even spending. the money on the lobbies. So they're doing... What's funny about it too, what's funny about it too, Dave, is on the stable coin lobbying front, I put out a piece earlier this week talking about the X money launch and it basically talked about

the fact they fought the wrong war. They were fighting stable coins and they bricked up the back door to protect stable coins from attacking consumer deposits and Elon strolls right through the front door with this completely Fiat-based Neo-Bank model and completely is now threatening everything because he's offering near zero fees to move money and really is the major disruptor to the banks that they didn't see coming. I saw you said that. Has Elon and X, have they announced definitively that they're just using Swift, et cetera, and they're not going to adopt the stable coin base model when it's available?

I cannot see anything in their, first of all, they're announcing this in a very unconventional way because it's basically just a fact on their on their X. platform, the website doesn't really have anything in existence yet. There's no material. There's no white paper I can find. You don't know what they're actually going to use. No, you don't know. And I've asked that question, are they going to evolve into a stable coin? Because we both know that, yeah, the 6% APY to consumers is an interesting hook to bring in, but that's not a sustainable business model. So how do they evolve from that? But the biggest thing they have is network effect. They have all the users in the app. They have a capture audience.

Very, very, very, very important. It's everyone in the crypto world obsesses about the technology. It's not always the technology. It's the it's the usage. And if you're smart, you'll use the better technology, but that's not the reason, right? You know, so if you can figure out a way to to use Swift fine, but you're not, but if it's going to, it's going to cost you X. If it's going to cost you one-tenth X, do you use stable coins? They're going to, they're going to use stable coins. Most of the stable coins revolution is not going to show up as stable coins. It's going to show up as services as, as people give you an account that says that you can look at on a Sunday afternoon and know where assets are priced because it's looking at,

it's using referential prices off of, say, well, I'll pick hyperliquid for now, but it, It's using referential prices that are global that are 24-7 in all your assets and gives you the ability to enter trades or trade on those markets and do so without friction. Stable coins are an essential part of that, but it's kind of like the various pieces of technology in your iPhone. You don't really care. You just want to know that when you want to buy something, you can buy it and you're done. Right?

Mauritio. I assume that now that's really good. Yeah. This is a legitimate hand. And I think with the point Carlo made and the point you made, David, are excellent. I just wanted to reinforce that. I don't believe, like, when you look at what X money is doing and when you look at the way banks are reacting to stable coins, my view, again, very basic high-level view is that this is not an attack on stable coins are not an attack on the banks themselves or on the dollar.

This is all really trying to come at bank margins and bank economics. The reality is that banks are paying zero to people that are putting money to work, and that money is oftentimes being lent for much higher interest. They're not seeing the benefit of having those deposits. X money is seeing this. They're saying we'll give you some back. Obviously, that's a sustainable rate to start. But the idea, I think the way this all resolves is much better interest rates at a consumer level

at the banks and through stable coins, wherever that lands, it's just going to be more even across the board. and banks are just going to have a harder time competing with faster, more efficient services. But at the end of the day, where it's Elon doing it on dollars or Coinbase or someone else doing it on stable coins, what people want us to get paid. And I think ultimately this is where that lands, whether it's Fiat or Stables, people are just going to get more interest. Right.

But the point to bring it back to the topic is if you're bearish on Bitcoin in a world where it is getting easier to transact, and people are understanding the importance of being digitally native, you're probably picking the wrong narrative, unless you believe the fud about infinite forks or quantum, et cetera, et cetera. 100%. And on that, we are at time. So I think that's a good mic drop moment for people, and we'll see you again on Friday morning.

Is that okay? Anybody else have any other final words? Great show, Dave. Okay. Take care, everyone. We'll see you on Friday at 1015. Ciao.