The Wolf Of All Streets - Binance Tokens in Freefall! What’s Happening? | Crypto Town Hall

Episode Date: April 1, 2025

Crypto Town Hall is a daily Twitter Spaces hosted by Scott Melker, Ran Neuner & Mario Nawfal. Every day we discuss the latest news in the crypto and bring the biggest names in the crypto space to share their opinions. ►►OKX Sign up for an OKX Trading Account then deposit & trade to unlock mystery box rewards of up to $60,000!  👉  https://www.okx.com/join/SCOTTMELKER  ►►THE DAILY CLOSE BRAND NEW NEWSLETTER! INSTITUTIONAL GRADE INDICATORS AND DATA DELIVERED DIRECTLY TO YOUR INBOX, EVERY DAY AT THE DAILY CLOSE. TRADE LIKE THE BIG BOYS. 👉 https://www.thedailyclose.io/   ►►NORD VPN  GET EXCLUSIVE NORDVPN DEAL  - 40% DISCOUNT! IT’S RISK-FREE WITH NORD’S 30-DAY MONEY-BACK GUARANTEE. PROTECT YOUR PRIVACY! 👉 https://nordvpn.com/WolfOfAllStreets    ►►COINROUTES TRADE SPOT & DERIVATIVES ACROSS CEFI AND DEFI USING YOUR OWN ACCOUNTS WITH THIS ADVANCED ALGORITHMIC PLATFORM. SAVE TONS OF MONEY ON TRADING FEES LIKE THE PROS! 👉 http://bit.ly/3ZXeYKd  ►► JOIN THE FREE WOLF DEN NEWSLETTER, DELIVERED EVERY WEEK DAY! 👉https://thewolfden.substack.com/    Follow Scott Melker: Twitter: https://twitter.com/scottmelker   Web: https://www.thewolfofallstreets.io   Spotify: https://spoti.fi/30N5FDe   Apple podcast: https://apple.co/3FASB2c   #Bitcoin #Crypto #Trading The views and opinions expressed here are solely my own and should in no way be interpreted as financial advice. This video was created for entertainment. Every investment and trading move involves risk. You should conduct your own research when making a decision. I am not a financial advisor.  Nothing contained in this video constitutes or shall be construed as an offering of financial instruments or as investment advice or recommendations of an investment strategy or whether or not to "Buy," "Sell," or "Hold" an investment.

Good morning, everybody. Welcome to Crypto Town Hall, every weekday, 10, 15 a.m. Eastern Standard Time here on X, where we gather the best and most credible and interesting voices in the industry to talk about the news of the day in crypto. Seemingly the biggest piece of news that we have is Binance tokens and freefall. What's happening? For those who weren't paying attention, a number of altcoins on Binance had basically the exact same dump at the exact same time across the board earlier this morning, up

to 50% drops in less than 30 minutes, leaving many wondering what happened and how this could possibly happen on an exchange like Binance. Some of the other main stories before we dig into that, and I know we have some guests here who understand it obviously better than I would. Some of the other stories, obviously Tether buying 8,888 Bitcoin in the last quarter. MicroStrategy buying another $1.9 billion worth of Bitcoin yesterday. It seems we have a lot of companies buying Bitcoin. $1.9 billion worth of Bitcoin yesterday. Seems to have a lot of companies buying Bitcoin.

MetaPlanet also bought more Bitcoin. The Trump brothers are now starting a company with Hut8 called American Bitcoin as a Bitcoin miner, Bitcoin, Bitcoin, Bitcoin. Clearly seeing that trend increasing, but let's zoom back out and talk about what's happening on Binance. For the guests who haven't been here before,

or I don't know, feel free to just raise your hand. If any of you can break down exactly what happened, that would be certainly helpful. BC, I think you probably know Gotham, if I'm pronouncing your name right, I know that you're here to speak on this specific topic. So either of you that can jump in and kind of give us the TLDR, that would be great. Hey, hi, I'm Gautam. Yes, so today what happened was multiple tokens experienced massive dump.

Like there was a token ECT, it had a 50% dump. So the timeline of events is Binance announced that they are decreasing the leverage on margin changes for ACT. And there was a around 3 million or more liquidation was triggered. And this led to a cascade of selling. And so ACT price went from 0.19 to like 0.09 in like a minute or something. So, you can see like a sharp drop in the price. And initially, people were speculating it's Winter Mute and DWF, but both the teams, founders have commented that they have nothing to do with it.

That is something that we need to do. But I think the real thing over here is like it is cascaded because of Binance announced leveraged changes and all these over leveraged positions are like having a problem. And you can closely relate it with what happened with Hyperli liquid of a week back where like where illiquid meme coin jelly jelly was used to make hyper liquid like make a large loss so I think like everybody is delisting all these meme coins which are very liquid and to make sure the markets are performing correctly and it's going to like most most likely like have more meme coins in the future.

So in this case there are like multiple meme coins affected like five six of them and so that is the main thing that is happening. So it's going to be more there are going there are multiple meme coins that crashed today and their like leverage is decreased and it's going to lead to more of them happening. All of the tokens affected were not meme coins though, right? I mean, there were some legitimate altcoins that dropped as well. I mean, I was just kind of going over the list, but identified a number that weren't necessarily meme coins.

Yeah. a number that weren't necessarily meme coins. Yeah, I think the common thing around all of them is spot liquidity is very low. And so if the spot liquidity is low, and if the purpose listed, it is possible for someone to attack like how Hyperliquid had an attack a week back, essentially pumping up the spot and manipulating the prices. So I think that is why Binance delisted to these markets. So but this has led to a liquidation cascade and you can see on scene there are a lot of transactions by Wintermu, DWF, etc. which are the market makers of this token, which they claim they are doing like arbitrage the SECs and the DEX prices.

Interesting. BC, go ahead. BC, go ahead. Yeah, thanks. So not educating the on-chain side as much as my friend here, which was really interesting to hear, but something that did come across the desk early was about Wintermute. So dumping 2.5 million AUKER tokens, saw that big hit to the market. I think looking at a little bit of research, I think they've got a little bit of previous for this as soon as back in February. And obviously, please correct me here. Obviously, running a

trading desk doesn't certainly make me a non-chain analyst. I'm obviously taking what's coming in at the moment. In February 25, they withdrew about $40 million in Solana. We saw a really big, I think, between 7.5% and 10% correction that happened in there. I know they came under scrutiny for market manipulation as well around a similar kind of time, which is why I found it really interesting to look obviously what's going on with Binance and what our friend here was discussing in terms of the liquidity issues and obviously looking at changing those leverage positions, which has obviously caused this. But do we think that this was any part of the catalyst?

When you look at the previous history they've got, it doesn't seem, it was under $10 million worth, wasn't it? But then it was a huge amount of the Orca tokens. Do you think this was something that was wrapped up within that kind of, you know, that liquidity purge, if you like? Or do you think that this is kind of like a separate incident? Because this really stood out for me as a little bit of a red flag when we look at the previous that's obviously been reported on Wintermute as well. Maybe Gotham can speak more clearly to that. I have no idea. I mean, it's a bit speculative, right? You can't really say for sure because it's too early, but yes, there have been massive dumps on the side as well. But only common thing I can see is Binance delisted

and there was a sharp decline, it's like a very big lack of liquidity on chain for this spot. Though market cap might be high, it's like they don't have much liquidity. And it's more like, is it like, can you do price manipulation? What matters there is more how much depth the liquidity has, right? And for that, like from Binance's side, it does make sense to release these markets in

that sense. There are rumors like, you know, some market maker is going under the foot or anything like that, but I don't see any conclusive evidence on that because that just leads to market panic. I think everything is fine. I think market has dumbed a lot as it is. I think this begs the natural question and Dave, I have a feeling I know what you're going to say, but you said that these should be delisted probably by Binance. I think it begs the question of whether these things should be listed at all and certainly whether these things should be listed with leverage. Absolutely insane. The

things this illiquid are listed with high leverage when we know that they're going to last a week at best. But go ahead, Dave. Yeah, I mean, you are directionally correct in what I'm going to say. I mean, look, it's not about delisting. There's no reason for Binance to delist any of these things, but it is absolutely something that if I were running a perp exchange, the first thing I would do is I would be charting spot liquidity on every single perp that I have and make sure that the leverage that's allowed on those spot on the perps is scaled to where the spot liquidity is. I can tell you that that that 10x is probably too high for a lot of these. God, forget the 50 to

100x that that they that they allow. It's it's literal insanity. And, you know, yesterday, I was talking in the context of major markets about something that pros call liquidity arbitrage And I'm sure that BC knows what I'm talking about where you can have significantly differential liquidity between The same asset in different types So, you know whether it's futures and stocks or options and stocks options and futures or perps and futures whatever it is It doesn't matter if liquidity is vastly different than there are games that can be played that are

manipulative. But there's a couple of features here. First, in all likelihood, with these are, you know, with between Dex's and purpose changes, the market makers are mostly getting victimized, not the perpetrators. They could be perpetrators, I suppose, because they're in the name. And there have been allegations about some market makers, not Wintermute, but others, of them doing this in illiquid tokens for years. I'm not going to mention who, but everyone in the industry knows where the rumors have come from. Those Alameda did this. They're no longer

with us, thankfully, but you know, etc. But what happens is market makers are persuaded to put up two sided quotes. They are in liquidity pools, and liquidity pools don't have enough liquidity. And somebody manages to get a big enough position in the perp to make it worth their while to lose a pile of money by pushing the price one way or the other in the liquidity pool or in the spot market. And that's where all of this comes from. So you make a lot of money, you lose a lot of money on the spot, but you make double, triple, quadruple, or 10x that amount of money in the purse. And so it's a successful manipulative attack. I don't know for sure that that's what happened here today. Anyone who heard the buzzing in the background yesterday, I've been chased away from

my desk because of ongoing fire alarm maintenance, so I can't see all my screens to figure shit out, but that's what it sounds like. And so, when you get these situations, it doesn't matter. It begs the question of, should exchanges actually scale the leverage they offer per product? Now, I have lots of criticisms about the CME and futures compared to perp setting

perps are generically, or generally much to be a far superior product, or risk etc. perspective, but the CME 100% will scale the margin requirements based on the individual contracts characteristics. And one of those characteristics is liquidity of the underlying, which is something that if I were running Binance or I were running OKX or I running by better, I were running any of these exchanges. That's exactly what I would do.

And if any of them is listening to this and would like to understand how my DMs are open and I'm happy to explain it. Awesome. Yeah, I'll pile in after Dave here because we've traded some similar markets and echo the same like this is something crypto writ large has been been at like bad at there are call it basic risk management practices that don't happen. So if you're thinking of spot markets versus derivatives markets in general, you've really got to think about a couple of variables leverage is definitely one of them, but also aggregate

position size, right? If you've got a token with call it 100 million market cap, right? And let's talk even market cap, because FDV is a whole different issue. And then you allow 500 million of futures positions against that thing. Well, what did you guys think was going to happen? Of course, weird shit is going to happen when you could use one side of the market to manipulate the other, especially when spot cannot easily scale. Because one of the other things about like commodities spot markets is they can be demand responsive when futures get really out of whack.

But with tokens, that's often not the case. So one, I really do think there are some structural issues with how perps are listed. If you look at open interest across all of the exchanges versus underlying, clearly things are a little bit out of whack. Two, exactly as was said, this leads to spot versus perp manipulation issues. And you see those in a lot of ways. Right? So one of them is the previously referenced AMM pool thing. One of them is short squeezing people in perp positions by simply buying a crap load of the spot and forcing a market to move. Another one that you see that I think people are not always hip to is you can manipulate

things like the lending protocols. If we go back to mango markets, fundamentally, again, another very basic TradFi failure was what the heck are you doing lending in size against a highly volatile spot price? Right? Like at a bare minimum, guys, can we use like a 24 or 48 hour rolling average price? You would never like in repo markets and traditional finance have a rate rip 60% in two minutes and then massively lend against that term at size, right? This, again, is a core problem. So when I see incredible volatility like this, I'm looking at some of the problems we've had in overall crypto market structure of people have very rapidly deployed a lot of technology

to make trading very efficient from just a click button perspective, but have not spent a lot of time and quite frankly, have redone some of the pre 2008 mistakes in traditional markets, right? Most of what's happening here is stuff that are known problems that we have seen break before, and there are also known solutions to them. Austin, Dave, you guys are way too smart for the rest of us.

So, you know, we'll play tag team here. So I would say this. I mean, look, I was on the original CIPMA committee on limit up limit down, which is in response to you didn't mean 2008, you meant the flash crash, but that's okay. I think in terms of, uh, well, actually probably didn't mean 2000, I meant to wait fixed income markets, but you're also good.

Yeah. I'm an equity, I'm an equity guy. So, yeah. So look, there are things you can design. I mean, weirdly, you know, had FTX done what Sam said they were doing in terms of the way they were handling their liquidation engine, it would have and the way they were handling leverage, it was actually a slightly better model. Of course, he wasn't doing that. So it's like, well, whatever, we talked a good game. I think that the point here that the underlying thing here is in the United States when you hear those of us like me And I get shit from a lot of the crypto community for saying, you know that regulators have a time and a place to do things one of the things we're talking about is very basic rules of the road that are well understood and and and Effectively being able to surveil for things like market manipulation

So we talked about you know fair and equitable markets as a concept that we have for years. One of the reasons the US is the biggest capital markets in the world is because people felt they weren't going to get ripped off as often here. Now, if you listen to day traders and GameStop and shit, you know, you'll go to others, but they're wrong. I mean, yeah, there are still problems in the market. I'm not saying games not present perfectly, or MNLP or whatever the hell that thing is called

is there perfectly. But in general, you don't have daily or weekly occurrences like we're talking about in crypto, because of all the things that Austin said, and these things are solvable. The good news is they're going to end up getting solved. And what you'll find is as the US market structure bill progresses over the year and you see people who want principles-based regulation running the SEC like Paul Atkins and Brian King from the CFTC, what you'll end up with is some very basic rule frameworks. Those rule frameworks will then get adopted by all the majors. You know that finance is going to be adopted because the DOJ has crawled so far up them. Well, that's not the gross here, but the DOJ is there. And OCEX has shown a

significant compliance commitment and given rules, they'll want to play ball and I'm pretty sure Bybit will also. And of course, the US of change is going to have no choice. That's really the message here. It's not panicking about it, it from a listener perspective, just if you're going to trade perpetual swaps on an illiquid instrument, do yourself a favor and do what Austin just talked about. Check the open interest compared to what's going on in the spot market and the market cap and the volume, because if it's dramatically higher, it means you are massively vulnerable in both

directions. So I don't want to give investment advice here but I can definitely give risk management advice. Be very careful. At a bare minimum have very tight stops so that you won't be swept up in the liquidation cascade which can execute the price dramatically farther from where you want to be. Better advice is don't touch them because with a tight stop, you're getting stopped out every single time just by the natural volatility of any of these

assets, even if you're actually correct. You know, I agree, Scott. I just look, people are, what do you always say? Humans are going to human. So yeah, I'm just giving advice for those who've been a human. Yeah, I agree. I mean, it just seems crazy to even have leverage on these. Right. And that is something that still remains unique, I guess, to what we

would in America call offshore exchanges, although I hate that term because off who shores. But yeah, I just also Dave important to note this happened across the board on multiple assets, right? It's not like this was just one token that somebody took advantage of an opportunity on. It was a lot of tokens. They all did it at the exact same time. Full list. Again, Dave, go ahead and then full list. I was just going to ask the previous speaker the question. Did Binance do a notice of leverage change on a list of tokens? And if that was the case then and that was the correlation list then maybe You know, they should do it a little bit. I don't know give more advanced notice or do something but that might have been cause There's I think that question was for you Gotham. I

Think they didn't do anything like I Think as far as I know there hasn't been like that advance notice because even when you give the notice it will come kind of similar. I think Binance just said at 8.32 and they just like delisted it. Wild. It was like not that much of an update. They did inform like two hours before the update. Crazy. Yeah I mean you could be in a position in a sleep right so it's just it's a wild scenario. Fullus go ahead. I think what you said earlier was correct, right? Like when you are in a meme coin and you are leveraged and it's completely liquid, things

like this is expected to happen. And people are trading it should know that it is expected to happen. Right. But again, they're not all meme coins. Like I agree with you 100%. But I mean, there were some tokens that have been around for years that are sitting there and suffered the same fate. So, Paul Ostrud. Hey, Scott.

Yeah, look, I was just going to jump in there and make the point. At the expense of kicking the hornet's nest, I mean, the issue isn't necessarily leverage. And it feels like I make this point a lot on my streams. Like, leverage is just a tool. I think that it often becomes this weird scapegoat for market participants who have no concept of good risk management. I think the issue when you talk about this, and this is just a broader, I guess, nitpick of mine, leverage isn't the thing that we should be vilifying, right? It leverages just a tool, right? And actually, in the right hands, it's a fantastic tool because it allows you to it allows you effectively to use less margin to store less money on an exchange and less

counterparty risk with the exchange, right? And I mean, that has become that should be, I mean, I know it's a while ago now, but that should be fresh, still fresh in everyone's mind in the aftermath of the FTX fiasco, not your keys, not your crypto. You can keep just enough margin that you need on the exchange and trade by levering up. If you're managing your downside, if you're trading with a stop loss right and you're and you're using leverage correctly it's just a tool it's just any other tool it's it's it's it's there's nothing inherently bad about it and I feel like the vilification of leverage is from people who have no concept of risk management and just seems

like an easy tool or an easy scape to go just to look at it and say, well, that's the thing that's causing all these issues. Yeah, I don't disagree. It's not a kid's risk. I don't disagree. But I think on some of these, there's, you know, you can't get enough size or you should be using such low leverage that it can't be used as a risk management tool on some of these assets. I agree with you as a whole concept.

I've said that for years, but I mean, on some of these, because there's absolutely no liquidity. Do you have no business even touching any leverage that's higher than, you know, a couple of percents and it's not really saving you that much a counterparty risk, but I agree. I think with the sentiment. Yeah. Yeah.

I want to pile on here because I've had the discussion with Caitlin long where I'm team leverage and she's the whole market should be unlevered and and look there's there's The only place where she and I agree is I don't think it should be outlawed But I think that free competition will ultimately be the end of fractional reserve banking or damn close to it because we don't need it anymore. But that's a totally different philosophical conversation. As far as Follis, you and I 100% agree that it's like fire. And fire is great if you're cooking your food or warming your house, not so good if it's

burning the walls. And that's really the situation with leverage. My point isn't that leverage is evil because it is not. And in fact, you can't have well-functioning financial markets with market makers who can't leverage individual exchanges or across board to be able to make, be able to provide pricing in a risk control manner. But what is a problem and what Austin and I were talking about specifically is when you allow an amount of leverage

that is dramatically in excess of the underlying liquidity available in that underlying because in that particular case, you set up very bad structural issues. And that's the issue. And you can make the argument and I know the argument that that you don't, it's not you shouldn't stop it, you should let people get their fingers burned constantly. And they'll learn that Oh, putting my hand in that fire is really dumb because it's going to burn my fingers and it's going to hurt.

That's true. But we don't tend to regulate that way because, and as an industry, the problem is, is that all these black guys from the industry, you then see the next day that newspapers or whatever people are crypto, people burn by stupidity, and then everybody gets afraid of it. And so if what we're striving for is mass adoption and we're striving for building things that will mesh that will help us create the Internet of value, then I think that sucking it up and saying, you know what, having some rules

and some some guidelines is probably not a bad idea. Yeah, 100%. I just think that's a really important point. It's educating and onboarding. But I do think that it comes back to that point I made where the principled approach should be to talk about risk management, right? Talk about position size, talk about downside risk, right? Don't just say to newbies like, oh, leverage will get you wrecked. Because that's such an oversimplification and it really misses the point. I guess that's the only qualm I have. I feel like that's my mission on CT is to make that point any chance I get.

It's a good point. Very, very good point. Yeah. 100%. Austin, go ahead. Yeah, I think part of what we need to think about too is not what's the right way to say this. Thinking of all of the market participants as a monolith, right? Because like, let's take two extremes of the market. One, literally JP Morgan, right? Like, I know banks are banned right now. But if you trade swaps, futures, repo, anything, they've got 24-hour trading coverage globally at all times with like a small army of professionals looking at every single market. So for something like, you know, the Binance markets with 24-7, like very leveraged, like highly volatile, you're totally exposed to drawdowns and liquidations, that sort of setup is fine for them. But Scott, as you said earlier, I believe, like individual to like it human beings have to, you

know, sleep sometimes. And so the rules of the market is you would apply them to an individual are going to be very different than you would apply them to an institution. And this is, for instance, one of the things the CFTC is thinking about with 24-7 margining is that's actually a very different proposition from a legal standpoint and a risk standpoint for an individual human who cannot have 24 seven coverage versus an institution. And that's still only when we're thinking about people

who do this professionally, right? If we zoom out even further, you know, a good example of somebody here is literally my father. He was an oncologist. He worked 80 hours a week in the hospital telling that guy, yo, yo, yo, maybe treat less people with brain cancer and spend

more time thinking about your crypto portfolio would be self-evidently insane from like a world perspective. And so we need to think as we look at market structure, what is the right way to do this for a market that will be sufficient to cross many types of investors and rules that could either sort people into the right buckets, provide the right privileges or provide the right structure. And part of what I worry about with the current crypto market is because we've just completely like taken a pass at that and not tried. It invites over time as you get more and more negative experiences and headbinds, both very adverse regulation and a lot of people just refusing to adopt in the mainstream after they got burned, as Dave said, touching the stove.

Before you jump in, I'll go ahead, John. Yeah, I was just gonna say, listen, you know, the CME argument, that argument is bullshit. And it's rare that I call bullshit on you, Austin, so I want to be careful. We always assume that we have to have a market structure that suits every individual the same. And that is absolute bullshit. It does not need to be the case there is you could easily have a layer of FCM futures contract merchants who can smooth out the risk curve for people as a service, so that you don't have to be monitoring a 24 seven, you pay a small amount for a professional to do treat you like margin calls like the CME does at the same time, others who want that 24 seven risk

management can have the 20% of risk management. I just I really hate when people make that argument. I've heard Duffy make it and it's self serving claptrap. The fact is, we in crypto know like there's businesses that have grown up around this in a different area So you have Mike Belshi at Bitco has built a great business providing custodial services in a world where any human being Can can cut see their own Bitcoin if they want to the issue is is if you do it through a custodian Additional levels of service. You don't have to have the market structure be Monolithic and everyone acts of the same way there can be varied levels of service. You don't have to have the market structure be monolithic and everyone acts in the same way.

There can be varied levels of service. That said, everything else you said, I totally agree with. Well, just to pile in, I think what you're saying is part of what I'm saying about market structure, right? That is to say, we haven't done a good job of developing the ability for the average two-legged human to have these

services. I'm totally fine with the structure you described, but the problem is for most people, that's currently not a realistic option. Fair? Interestingly, I don't know how long people have been in this market or trading, but I started in 2016, so I guess I was sort of a range for probably most people participating and the exchanges didn't even have stop losses. I don't know if people remember those days.

I remember the launch of Binance, but I remember trading on Coinbase and Bitrex where you literally were trading something illiquid with or without leverage at the time. And if you fell asleep, you risked going to zero because you couldn't even put a stop loss on your order order on your position. Don't forget Scott, they also at the same time when they first introduced stop losses, they were totally prone to flash to flash events and people manipulated living crap out of them. So that you could be trading something that was trading at 500 bucks and you have a stop loss at 450 and you go to sleep and you wake up and your position's gone and you notice that on all the other exchanges that are traded below 490 but on your exchange it whiffed down for a nanosecond to 425 and you were flushed.

Yeah, I mean in 2017 when Bitcoin hit an all-time high there was moments where know, it was trading four thousand dollars higher in one exchange another literally twenty twenty five percent Well, it was we were starting coin routes at the time. It was structurally Closer to two thousand for first days and weeks at a time and that's just within the u.s And if you get to the kimchi premium, yeah, then you get to the four thousand Let's not forget 99% of the time, whenever the market moved higher or lower, you were not able to log into the exchange. I mean, 2015, 16, with the most liquid exchange at that time, Poloniex, as soon as the market started to move and no matter which one it was

in the top five, the exchange would just crash on your face. You wouldn't be able to log in. The prices would show up right after you were like either lost or not able to exit. I mean, having a stop loss, I think was the least of the concerns. So bad. If you were only, only if you were KYC'd in one and a half years, like we were the I see it in one and a half years, like we were the fourth or fifth largest traders. And I remember meeting the CEO randomly in consensus, Times Square, Marriott, and telling him that I've been in the waitlist for eight months for KYC.

So, yeah, those are... Absolutely. Absolutely. So, yeah, those are... Absolutely, absolutely. But yeah, about what Austin said, I would actually back Austin, not that I'm against entirely what Dave's saying, that there are tools, but Dave, let's not forget, we, Austin's talking about average two-legged human. They're not aware of these tools most of the time.

They're not aware about the complexities of these tools. I mean, we ended up creating most of our trading strategies and most of our trading engine by ourselves, while everybody in my company that was institutional and not a degen crypto like me was laughing at me behind my back. Of course, they can't laugh at me in my face. I was a boss. That in the average institutional world, they don't create all of this. They have fixed APIs and they have smart order router protocols and products and infrastructure and come what may, everything was available. And in crypto, we were like busy, bloody droplets around the world, building droplets around the world only to retrieve the original order book of BitMEX. They used to throttle the APIs. They used to mask the orders on directional, location, and account basis. It was as bad as that.

And it's not good today. It's not that good today if you're not just trading on Binance and Coinbase and you have to move out to, let's say, smaller exchanges to build your alt portfolio. And God forbid, if you're in memes, I mean, you're already dead. But if in case you think you're alive and you still want to trade, you have to go to the likes of Gates. And I don't actually want to name names. Gate is actually the better one, the best one of the league. Their APIs have stopped responding. Smaller exchanges tell you to take the dump every one second. They don't give you webhooks. It's that bad. I don't want to get into jargons but it is it is terrible

terrible terrible so the infrastructure doesn't exist is my is the bottom line I want to mention here yeah I mean we off as a joke about how there's a meme coin casino happening on pump fun and salana where you know the house edge would make the mafia blush blush? 98% edge to the house. But also true on a lot of I guess less regulated or lower volume centralized exchanges where you think it wouldn't think that was the case where you're still gambling in a casino with like extreme edge against. Yeah, let me make you two good points that might be amusing as well as informational and might bring a little shame to crypto, but let it be. So one of the best tactics of these tier three exchanges that you will start to observe if you haven't already observed is till the time the

token does not actually hits the range of Bybit, Qcoin and Binance, you'd see these absolutely shitty exchanges doing the maximum volume on the shittiest token. And the reason I'm doing that is because as soon as a new buyer goes onto CoinMarketCap or Coingecko and wants to buy this token, the obvious choice is to go to the most liquid exchange, right? this token, the obvious choice is to go to the most liquid exchange. Right. So if they're making like 80% of the volume, which is of course, absolutely fake. Yeah. Oh, I mean, being a market maker, I tried to save myself from those words. So, so, so you see them flashing on the

top and, and, and of course the retail wants to go to these exchanges because it looks like the best place to be. And then the moment the token goes on to, let's say, a slightly better exchange, all of a sudden the volume, let's say from 90 million goes to 90k on the same shitty Right? So that's one amusing part. The second part about PumpFun and the Solana mafia, call it whatever may, I think that has already started to happen on Binance coming back to the topic of today's town hall. You have started to see Alpha 2 wallet accumulating, broccoli, and I think Archom has already published a thread on the same. You're looking at $300 million of perp volume of a BNB token on Binance while the volume around DEXs and all the other sexes collectively on spot is less than three. So I don't know who's trading those perps, but let it be whatever it is.

Third, so first sign, on perps, three, Binance trades across smaller exchanges have increased insanely. If you look at the number of trades now, transfers happening between the BNB-listed tokens and the BNB-listed memes in particular particular and to Binance wallets have increased to a whole new level. So, and that's why I've already announced and I want to make that announcement once again, maybe to inform people that we're getting ready for a BNB meme run. And again, this is for your own research to do. I'm not a market predictor or anything, but I'm just telling you, these are the signs that give me a hint that we are getting ready for a like Binance has, I mean, BNP has taken

their lessons from Solana. They don't want to be left alone in the race against Base and Seoul. And that's happening. So yeah, maybe tokens are taking a free fall because somebody wants to accumulate before the run begins, but you'll see a similar casino, Royale, my favorite movie of James Bond. You'll see a big casino starting up in Binance. That was a lot to process. Before I want to... Oh, should I give you one last one last hint. Why not? Why are you on a roll?

Okay. Yeah. I mean, so funny incidences also have started to happen in the last, I think, two months Binance did this sort of arrangement to look organic, but they listed like five tokens on the voting to list. And out of those five, the one that had least vote but was on BNB chain got the listing, something with less than two million in volume, right? And all of a sudden, you know, it went on to $200 million of volume on pubs and getting spot listing.

So I think those four hints are my, you know, my direction, are forming my direction towards BNB run. A lot. I do want to pivot since we've talked about finance so much just to the other biggest topic of the day, which is obviously liberation day tomorrow, which I guess we could rename tariff Palooza or anything you want. But looking for the clarity on the United States' tariff policies and what other countries are going to do to react and what that might mean for markets.

Mr. Anderton, you haven't had an opportunity to talk, man. Great to have you here. I mean, you're generally always on top of market direction here. So I jumped down literally right when I went to him. Do you like that? Perfect. Okay. So, Folas, maybe since you're watching the market so closely and you know

publicly trading. How you approaching. Liberation day or at least the other the volatility we're expecting tomorrow as the tariffs become clear. Yeah so I mean it's a point I made on this show before is that it feels like

the market conditions currently are so prone to headline risk that you really need to be accounting for that when you're trading or else you're going to have a bad time effectively. It's something that I've mentioned to my guys, it's something I've mentioned to my team. More so than the previous instance I can think of that was particularly news driven was last year around the time the ETFs were being kind of approved and or at least towards the time at which it started looking like those were going to be approved. This last kind of like two, three months between the election, the hubbub around the strategic reserve, the tariff situation, the various ongoing geopolitical situations. We have a new one with Iran now, with Trump threatening to bomb Iran, which is, I believe those are the exact words he used,

Iran, which is, I believe those are the exact words he used. You know, an ongoing NATO situation, ongoing tensions in Ukraine. There's just there's a lot of there are a lot of news headlines that can come out and destroy the chart. That's effectively it. I mean, and I don't I don't just mean to the downside. It's it's it's headline risk that goes both ways. And I think you really need to be accommodating for that. From a technical point of view I

really do think and this is something I've spoken about before I really do think that we're seeing this breakdown of the previous range the kind of November to February range. That we had. Which was it seemed like it was anticipatory

price action it was price action that was in a holding pattern in anticipation of what what felt like to action that was in a holding pattern in anticipation of what what felt like to me it was in anticipation of a bullish version of the strategic reserve. Right. Trump was going to come out and he was going to say we're going to have a Bitcoin reserve. It's going to be like the American gold reserve and we're going to be buying this much Bitcoin. And that was kind of I I mean, it was always doomed to fail, right? It was always going to be because no, no, the actuality of the thing was always going

to fall short of that. Right. So we had this kind of holding pattern where BTC was kind of bouncing between 90 K and 100 K or 105 K. And then when the soft version came out or when it started looking more and more likely that a soft version was going to come out, initially it was just going to be assets that they had confiscated. And then it was going to be, they were going to buy some, but it was only going to be select with controls in place and only going to be on certain assets. I think now we're seeing a retracement of that kind of that hopium pump we

got in the aftermath of the election of the first pro crypto president, not just the first this wasn't just the first election where crypto was a main talking point but actually the first election where we actually got a pro crypto president voted in. So now we're in this kind of this this funny part in the market where there's just it's like what's the catalyst, right? That's the key question. Like people talking about, you know, we're going to it's going to be like the it's going to be like what we got in 2021, right? We're just pulling back and then we're going to put in a new high final exit pump and then you're going to get to sell it.

But like what's the catalyst? What's the fundamental driver that's going to take us back to 100k? It's going to take us back to 110k. That's maybe even going to push us to 120k. I think the market was waiting for Trump, for this pro crypto president, to enact a bullish version of the strategic reserve or various other pro crypto policies. And so far we've seen realistically, I mean, he's been a net negative for crypto, mostly by virtue of the fact that he's, you know, escalated, introduced and escalated this tariff situation, as everyone knows.

Markets, especially risk on markets, do not like tariffs for reasons that I've explained a number of times before. Basically comes down to discretionary spending for consumers. Right. But all of that has kind of led to this situation now where I feel like the markets are just de-risking. We spoke to equities guys, Scott, on this show maybe three or four weeks ago,

or rather you said that one of your friends who worked at a desk that you couldn't name, they were short from like 105, 110. Exactly, shitadels. Rhymes with shitadel. Exactly. I mean, you said that those guys, like once Libra came out,

they all got on a call and they were like, okay, we're shorting this market because it's going to 70K. And I mean, so far it looks like they were pretty bang on. I think at the time the price of Bitcoin was like 105K and we're seeing this mass retracement now because instead of the idealistic version of what was going to happen during Trump's presidency, pro crypto policy, a bullish version ETF, bullish market conditions, stable market conditions, instead we have market uncertainty escalating geopolitical situations and arguably an environment that while not

necessarily hostile to crypto is not conducive to risk on assets flourishing. So it's a funny one. I can't be bullish here as much as I would love to be. I just don't see the fundamental driver that's going to take us to new highs this year. I know a lot of people saying that if that doesn't happen, then it means the cycle's over. I'm not sure I'd strive to the cycle, the cycles being existent anymore actually in light of what's happened in the last kind of 12 to 24

months with the ETFs and et cetera. So look, I don't know. I mean, that's my main, I kind of ranted there a little bit, but my main point here is that, I think that this market goes down a little bit before opt, and I really do think that it's one of those situations where it's very difficult for me to be risk on here when Trump can say anything he wants and send the market, you know, plus five or minus five percent.

That'll be the case for four years. I think so. I think so. that There's too much movement and it really feels like people are still waiting for that catalyst that's going to send us higher. I think it's one of those classic things. Once all the hope is drained out of the market speculators, once everyone's saying it's over, once we go back to 70k, once price starts crabbing around, that's when there will actually be some fantastic opportunities, I think, starts, starts crabbing around. That's when, that's when there'll actually be some fantastic opportunities, I think, to buy. Yes. Yeah, we're, we do have a sponsor today. And just before we get started, I want to make a note that Mario's company, IBC, does marketing, incubation, and investing. Sponsors on the show are working with IBC specifically,

not necessarily Crypto Town Hall, Scott, or even myself. IBC is also hiring for writers, journalists, and moderators. If you are looking to join a great team or your project that wants to get up here, just expand, just DM Mario or even the Crypto Town Hall account up here, and somebody on the IBC team will get in touch with you. So we have the expand account up here in a speaker spot. They have the beautiful black and silver logo here.

Why don't we start with just an introduction of yourself and an elevator pitch on the project. Okay, sure. And you guys can hear me well, right? Yeah, loud and clear. Great. And I need to say before I begin that you guys have been doing some great work here.

And I'm very happy to be here today and introduce Expand. I know I've met with some of you guys before, like at Stalkin 2049 and some online meetings we had. So let me just briefly introduce Expand first. Expand is a trustless authentication layer for AI ZK agents. It basically introduces a new approach to data access for AI agents by utilizing zero- proofs, ZK proofs. Basically, by integrating ZK proofs, Expand enables AI agents to become ZK AI agents and verify sensitive data

without exposing it. This enables ZK agents to securely access a broader range of high-value data and data sources while of course maintaining privacy and security which is the main objective here. So for people who are tuning in, if you could really just summarize, why is this needed for AI agents and where AI agents are right now? Basically, as I said, we expand leverage with VK proofs. This allows AI agents to access and verify

sensitive data without directly exposing the underlying raw information. Actually, the AI agent doesn't even need to access the raw information. It can just verify the information from the ZK proofs. Those of you who are already familiar with how ZK proofs, zero knowledge proofs work, will know what I'm talking about. And expand avoids risks Expand avoids risks by enabling AI agents to verify data through ZK-proofs, minimizing data exposure.

Because current AI agent authentication methods also pose some security risks. They hinder access to sensitive data, and they limit the agent's potential. Basically, expand minimizes data exposure, as we said. It eliminates also centralized dependence. And it ensures efficient, secure, and scalable AI interactions. And let me just also add that this breakthrough promises to basically expand AI agents' use cases across industries, like health care, like finance, and many, many fields we can think of while it will be ensuring compliance

with privacy regulations. Healthcare definitely makes a lot of sense with compliance with HIPAA regulations, but we've had some really good conversations on this show just regarding how comfortable people are with sharing sensitive data with AI, like even things that are not agent related, like using chat GBT or whatever LLM people are using. Some people are just willing to give it their banking information, any information required for taxes and stuff like that. So it's been a hot topic recently, just regarding the comfortability of people with sharing anything with an LLM to have it analyzed or work with them.

So what other types of sensitive personal data can these ZK agents handle? And are there other fields other than finance and healthcare where you see this being really applicable? Absolutely. So CKE agents can handle a wide range of sensitive personal data across many, many fields. This includes medical history, diagnosis results in healthcare as you mentioned, bank account details and

credit scores in financial services. For example, client privacy data and trade secrets in legal and business contexts. Also household routines, device usage in smart houses. We all know how weird it is, how we feel in our houses having to use an AI agent and give out all our data. So this also tackles that. Also there are more fields where it's applicable, like student grades and psychological assessments in education, personal identity details of course, criminal records in public safety, payment details and browsing history for digital footprints, all the ways that today data is collected. Chat history, geolocation data, on social media, all that can be tackled through ZK and be safely stored.

And you don't have to actually expose all this data. So a lot of people who are in the audience are probably vaguely familiar with zero-knowledge proofs, but there's probably a lot of terminology that would be helpful to define for them. So can you maybe give an overview of why zero-knowledge proofs are very secure when doing this type of product? Well, I know it's a bit technical, but I can give you a very simple way to understand how zero-knowledge proofs work. Basically, it's like you are enclosing information inside an envelope. And outside of the envelope, you only need to add some tags,

which the agent will use to verify that this piece of information actually includes what they wanted to find. This is a simple way to understand how the gate works. The info is actually always encrypted inside the envelope in our example, it's not an envelope, and the agent only will access the tags to verify the info. Basically, ZK proofs allow ZK agents to verify properties or characteristics of data without revealing the data itself.

For example, a ZK agent can verify that the user's credit score is above 700 without knowing the exact score. This ensures that sensitive information remains private while still allowing AI agents to utilize the necessary data for decision making and for providing personalized services. And this is of course applicable to any of the fields we mentioned before. Yeah, that's a great example. I love the envelope analogy.

I also find when talking about technologies that can be highly technical for some users, using a specific example can really help them understand. Could you maybe dive into a specific industry and a specific data challenge that this could solve? I know before you referenced credit scores, perhaps that's a simple example we all understand. For example, in healthcare, Expand can allow patients to provide Zika proofs like age over 50, for example, without ever revealing detailed medical history, allowing AI to generate personalized treatment plans without actually having the exact information.

It will have the thing it needs to have, and it can provide a better outcome. Or in finance, users can submit ZK proofs such as credit score above 700, like we mentioned before. And they don't need to expose further account details. But this way they will enable AI to provide tailored investment suggestions with enough ZK proofs of course. Similar applications also expand to HR, to legal, to education, to public safety, commerce, social media, almost driving each leveraging ZK proofs to balance data accessibility with user privacy. Those are great examples because fundamentally a lot of those examples that you use suffer from centralization of data as well, which is obviously a very hot topic in blockchain. Can you maybe touch on how this makes the data storage

and security process more decentralized as well? Right, so basically, traditional identity verification often relies on centralized institutions, right? Like banks, like governments, often relies on centralized institutions, right? Like banks, like governments, which of course creates vulnerable related to data misuse, privacy breaches, I'm giving up all my information

to centralized institutions. Expand trustless authentication layer allows ZK agents to verify data authenticity in a decentralized environment without relying on these third parties. Basically, this greatly reduces the risk of data exploitation, and it enhances user control over their own data and information they give. I love that, Ali. I do want to make a call-out in the audience just here as we're wrapping up.

The expand profile is up here. It's at expandzk. So definitely give that account a follow. You can access its Discord and the website directly in the expandzk bio. So on April Fool's Day, make sure that everyone is being safe and trusting verified links there, but I'll also give Ali a follow as well. And as we're wrapping up, is there any call to action or anything coming in the near future for Xpand that you wanted to let everyone know about? Right. I want to first ask everyone to go to our Twitter, to XandCK Twitter, and give a follow.

At the moment, we are working actively with our whole ecosystem. And we will be rolling out activities soon. So make sure to follow and check out the information on our Twitter, because enough things are coming soon. Also some of our partners, for example, DeCamoWallet is about to launch some bug bounty program these days. There are lots of things going on and will be announced shortly, so make sure to follow. I want to thank you for inviting us here today.

It was great to talk to you guys. Thanks for coming and if people are tuning in make sure that you're giving that expand profile follow. Appreciate expand ZK for coming today and to give all the other speakers a follow as well. These are people who take their time to give their opinion on what's going on in the market and of course builders in the space who are teaching us about their products as well. So everybody have a great Tuesday. Happy April Fool's Day and remain safe on X because this is definitely one of the days

where the most scams are active. So make sure that you're following official links. Click on that expand profile and follow all the links directly from their profile. So everyone have a great day and hopefully we get some green candles in the market. Thanks everyone.