The Wolf Of All Streets - Binance Updates | Cathie Wood: ETH to 170K | Crypto Town Hall

Episode Date: September 22, 2023

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yo morning how are you doing all right recovered recovering but yeah did you see did you see ryan's um a video on his channel of the the event the singapore event talking 2049 no because i didn't want to see the covid flying directly into my face on video he's actually He's actually pretty I get the excitement that you guys got from the event. It was pretty intense. It just literally felt like a bull market again. Yeah, I was there with him while he was recording a lot of that. I was recording some other

stuff. It was a pretty wild week. Everybody's sick. I don't know how Ran dodged it. Maybe he had something recently and has immunity. Yeah, I haven't finished watching it. Anyone that wants to check it out, just go on Rand's channel, the Crypto Bounty channel, and he's got a video there. I think it just came out.

By the way, also, I'm glad we have Wizard here. Wizard, one thing I want to talk to you about in a bit is the – I know you'll give us a market update and you do a lot more than just nfts but going back to nfts i just read a statistic that 95 percent um let me get the news here there they are 95 percent of nfts are pretty much gone dead uh what a weird stat though how do you calculate that yeah i mean i'm gonna look at the metric i'm sure they like you know just take all the all the nfts out there which i mean the the data set is like so ridiculous right because like there are so many scams that probably skew the mark like the overall that's why it's like a very flawed statistic because there's um you know so many projects that have gone literally from like

you know um say like five-eat-four to like zero because they literally were scams and that's like you know a good chunk of them but like all the the mainstays are still around they're doing really well like look at crypto punks look at all the fidenzas um you know even board apes are at around forty thousand dollars i. I mean, that's still, you know, I mean, do you consider that zero? Like a shitty, like a product? I mean, the fact that a monkey picture is still $40,000 American dollars is, you know, that's more than, that's two Bitcoins almost, right? Well, not two, but like, you know, almost. Like that's still pretty, like pretty huge.

You know, pudgy penguins are still 4-8 floor. I mean, Azuki's, even with all their shit, are still around 4-8. I mean, still, the mainstays have been fine. It's just a nice little headline to have. It's like, oh, the tulip mania or the beanie bubble has bursted. But the ones, if you're in the market, it's been fine. I mean, it's not fine, but that statistic is kind of meaningless because it's just a skewed data set. Yeah, I don't know.

Yeah, I calculate that. I'm curious. And I see Mando in the audience as well. I'm going to be reading some news from his that he tweets every day. But I'm curious, Wizard, what's happened with all the people that, you know, you've got a lot of these because it happened in 2017. All these influencers that promoted scammy projects are they're facing the repercussions now people just not caring no they are right i mean there's a there's a lot of um pushback uh about that um i forget what the name was stoner cats or something the one like me like yeah they are

like going after projects there was a there's a few of them. The ones that were very obvious, like hard rugs, they've been going after them for sure. There was some ice cream type of JPEG project, like PFP. I forget the exact name. I think they stole $2 million. And there was a hard rug, so there's a couple cases against them in New York, I believe. So they are going after them.

I mean, I think that's one of the reasons you're actually seeing a lot of projects, A, slow down, B, they're actually talking about, you know, like I feel like, you know, like Kevin Rose with Moonbirds and all that, they're kind of detaching themselves from a lot of their NFTs and projects because of this pushback against all the scams from the last, like, two years. So there is, people are going after them, like, you know, and I think that's why you're seeing this, like, breakdown. Or you're seeing people who were, like, rugs coming back and be like,

oh, you know, we were building, that's why we were silent, and now we're going to do something so that they don't have people come after them right so no there's not there's definitely going to be you know a clawbacks it just depends right like a lot of these people a lot of them move to like dubai and stuff so uh you know that that's not going to come back but the american-based ones yes but like this you know if somebody in some like random basement in bangladesh like launched a you know bored bunny and made 15 million dollars like you're not going to get that back like that's gone um and before i read the news scott i have a question for you is what happened to so i wasn't in the scene like the influencer media scene back in 2017 2018 i know

that you got involved in 2019, 2020. Is that right? No, I got involved in 16, 17. No, not in crypto. In the media side, your channel. Oh, yeah, yeah. Pretty much, yeah. But what happened?

So influencers back then that promoted scammy projects, do any of them still exist? Or all of them either got... The projects or the influencers? Influencers themselves. Did they lose complete credibility or people just forget? Well, I think that that's an impossible question,

but I think there's nuance. I think there's people who generally liked a lot of projects and were invested in things and lost their money like everyone else. And then I think there's outright scam artists and rugs.

And I think most of those people are probably gone. So I don't think you can lump the two together. I mean, listen, all of us, I think, here have been into, or whether it was just bull market blindness or truly believing in everything that was coming out because we were early, just really thought that all of this stuff was going

to the moon and everything was going to succeed. And, the bear market rinses out that euphoria. And I think that qualifies for a lot of influencers and analysts as well, right? I mean, who didn't think at 69,000 that Bitcoin was going well over 100, right? And so does anyone who promoted Bitcoin all of a sudden an influencer scammer? I'd say the difference between promoting a project that failed versus promoting, you know, just those projects that you know are a scam. Yeah, I mean, I think that the industry largely sees that and that most people are dismissive of those people. But I think many of them still are around. All right, I'm going to read out the news and then give us a market update.

What do you think? Yeah, have at it. Cool. I'm going to go out the news and then give us a market update. What do you think? Yeah, have at it. Cool. I'm going to go through Mando's news. Just kind of read them briefly and then add some of ours. So you got the market update. I'll leave that for Scott in a bit. So Bitcoin, so nearly 100% of short-term holders are in loss.

I think it's like they looked at, I think that was, what is it called? The analysis firm. And let me check, let me check. Glassnode. So Glassnode came up with that number. And they looked at, I think, traders in the last three months, so speculators. And almost all of them are at a loss. And they're talking about how that's creating panic among traders.

We've got Bitcoin hits another record hash rate. ETH futures ETF. The final deadline is in a few days. It's a couple of weeks. It's on Octoberober 2nd um we got eth transaction costs uh no sorry eth transactions are down 12 percent since merge got base that's an interesting one the coinbase cl or chief legal officer talked about base coinbase's base uh protocol potentially getting a future token but that's not their focus now there's some time in the future obviously, they're not going to do anything in that regard now with the SEC, with the lawsuit with the SEC. I've got Binance.

We're going to talk about Binance in a bit. They're asking for the SEC case to be dismissed. What else do we have? Oh, and Binance is warning that they'll be delisting stable coins in Europe. Now, they've done something similar before in the reverse course. I think it was privacy coins previously. So we'll see if they go ahead and delist stable coins in Europe. Obviously, it's not a good thing for Europe at all.

And then we've got eToro. They've got an EU license for crypto. And lastly, we have SPF. So he's going to be in jail till his trial, but also his dad. So that's kind of the TMZ of crypto. His dad is in trouble. His dad held an advisory role at Arabella Advisors. Arabella is a top – I can't make this stuff up. They're a top democratic dark money network. I can't believe, by the way, that that's a thing that's public, that you can have a company and be known as a dark money network. Yeah, and so as a dark money network, so when you donate to politicians, you can do it publicly. You can do it privately. Legally, you can do it without disclosing that information.

And it's through dark money donations. You remember SBF was talking earlier when you got slack for donating to a lot of democrats like no i donated to a lot of republicans as well but did it through dark money networks um or dark donations um because i'll get a lot of slack for donating to republicans um well now we know that his dad worked at an advisory firm that has a bunch of funds so So they manage New Venture Fund, 1630 Fund, Windward Fund, and whole 12. There's just so many damn funds. There's so much money. And they raised over a billion dollars in anonymous cash annually.

And in turn, they give it to liberal causes and initiatives. It's just crazy. It's crazy how much money there is and how much money is donated through these dark money networks. And the SPF's dad was an advisor at one of those firms. But that's the quick news update that we have here. We're going to dig into Cathie Wood's price predictions for Ethereum to get up to $180,000 and talk a bit further on Bitcoin and Binance. But Scott, you want to give us a market update? I just want to hang out with Cathie Wood and drink and smoke whatever she's having because

I love her takes. And if ETH goes to $170K and Bitcoin's at $1,000,000, well, dude, no, she thinks Bitcoin's going to $1,000,000 by 2030 as well. Oh, okay. I remember she said half a million by 2025. Yeah, that was her very conservative, you know, that's her base case. But obviously, the market update could be the most boring thing we can do on any random day in this market. We've got Bitcoin being, I don't know, flat.

Altcoins being, I don't know, flat. Altcoins being, I don't know, flat. I think the real story, obviously, has been in the reaction of global markets or certainly the stock market to FAFOMC minutes on Wednesday, which just makes me laugh every time. Powell did exactly what he said he was going to do. He took the exact tone everybody knew he would have. He's consistently done that for 16 months. Yet now, all of a sudden, everybody's panicked that rates might be higher for longer. And we've seen the worst week. Well, we'll see how the week closes, but could be the worst week for the stock market since I think roughly December, some of the worst days that we've seen in the last year. And maybe people just starting to realize that things aren't as rosy as they thought before. But, you know, the market update is brief. There's not that much to look at. I don't think obviously treasury

yields have been raging. It's just a lot of indications that there could be some slight cracks in the sentiment and system right now. But we all know that it could be next Friday and we could be laughing about new highs, right? So hard to dig in too deep yeah wizard maybe get your thoughts been a while you haven't given us a market update on here and then i want to go to patrick on one piece of news that god i feel like it's going ignored and that's the the announcement about pancake swap integrating transact so they allow fiat onboarding now on defi just shows that gradual move towards DeFi where you can actually use Apple Pay. You could use, what else? Apple Pay and I think, I'm not sure about PayPal, Google Pay, Apple Pay and debit cards, credit and debit cards to purchase crypto through PancakeSwap. So I'd love to get

Patrick's thoughts on that because that to me seems pretty major, but maybe I'm wrong. But Wizard, maybe get your thoughts on the markets and and just not today but in general over the last few weeks and months sure man um yeah i mean um you know that was a great point about powell i mean he's been very consistently saying that you know two percent is going to be the target uh it's going to be higher for longer uh he's not looking to cut but you know obviously market always tries to get ahead and it's like okay there's gonna be cuts they were pricing in so that's kind of what happened so we've had this huge rally over the last few months in the stock market uh the speed of a very fun statistic like the speed of the rally um from a sharp ratio standpoint would put it as one of

like the top three biggest bull runs uh that we have seen in like the last hundred years like it's kind of ridiculous like the year to date on like the nasdaq it's mostly been like pumped by like you know just a very few number of stocks like nvidia amazon like an ai type of run but uh it has been a pretty unreal uh move um you know even like meta and stuff are almost free x from the lows uh from like december so all of this was is you know it kind of puts like a a hurt and power because the earnings have been great right so if earnings are great and that means that uh people are able to play play the employees a lot um so if earnings are great and that means that people able to play play to employ employees a lot so if employees are getting hurt at the at the grocery store if they're getting hurt and service industries like you know they

need services whatever if those prices are going up they're able to pay them so that means that wage inflation is going up which you see in the average hourly earnings so the first Friday of the month when you get the payroll numbers you get the average hourly earnings as well and the average hourly earnings. So the first Friday of the month, when you get the payroll numbers, you get the average hourly earnings as well. And that average hourly earnings is essentially a proxy for wage inflation. That along with CPI, which is obviously price stability. And then you have unemployment, which is the dual mandate, because the PRED has two mandates.

One is price stability, which is inflation, and the second is keeping maximum employment. So making sure that there's price stability, but does not hurt employment. So what's been happening is, you know, there's been this feedback loop of inflation where, OK, prices are going up. So, you know, like food's going up, rent's going up. So employees are asking their employers like, hey, I need to get paid more. So and then companies

are making money i mean you look at earnings it's been like unreal like back to back uh the last several quarters like even if you look at the gdp yeah it was like revised but the fact that you know it was higher than expected you were expecting a you know maybe a small recession but instead we got we're getting expansion uh kind of shows that you're seeing this big hot run still happening, which obviously has kept the Fed on its back, kept its pedal on the metal when it comes to hiking rates or keeping it up. So that's kind of what's been going on. So you've had stocks kind of pumping.

Crypto has got so many headwinds over the last several months, especially with SEC. So obviously you had FTX. then you had sec coming after crypto then now you have ftx again because they're uh voting to liquidate the ftx assets so all the assets like you know the altcoins and obviously ethereum that they have solana etc they're taking hits uh here and there so yeah crypto has just been under pressure so there was i think three four months there was no core the correlation to stocks was broken and then one stock started kind of correcting itself a little bit the correlation came back so then

crypto is going down with stocks again too you know that's never fun um so that's mostly what's been happening but you know the the big thing right now is that you know the market's kind of not expecting a recession um and the the fed's not expecting a recession either and i think that's where you know there could be something to be to be done like if we do get if you think we do get a recession um then you'll see inflation come down which will be the only reason that the fed will be like hey let's's kind of pivot. Because right now they're just talking pause. Now they're talking no cuts for 2024,

all the way to 2025 on that dot plot that came out yesterday. So the only thing that will make the Fed really pivot is seeing unemployment at 5%. That's the number, and that's it. I appreciate it, man. I do want to go into the pancake swap news patrick you with us yes i'm with you yeah man is it is it is this major or it's not really that surprising because i don't think they had you had the ability they worked with moon pay beforehand

but did you have the ability to buy crypto through package swap using your credit card and how about apple and google Well, this is completely new. Yeah, I'm not sure if they had MoonPay directly on the site. But, you know, just given the number of retail people that were using PancakeSwap, I don't think there was a lack of on ramps. However, I do think this is significant in that it's part of a really important trend. And that is if you look at all the reasons why people would use centralized exchanges which i think there's really four reasons why people would use centralized exchanges um they're all starting to get whittled down by d5 and the main reasons why someone would

use a sex in my view are first more liquidity second would be onboarding and off-boarding so this sort of pancake swap thing is a step in that direction and you know probably some people who would have onboarded through binance now will just go directly to pancake swap third reason why someone would use a centralized exchange would be cross-chain bridging and although bridging bridges are still a major source of hacks layer zero thor chain and now chain link have done a lot to make it easier to swap native assets cross-chain and then the third reason why someone would use our fourth reason why someone would use a centralized exchange would be that it's easier to use and that fits with this trend we've seen

this year of of bots apps like friend tech where where it uh abstracts away some of the actual on-chain complexities and manages things for you. And so basically every single area that would drive people to use things off-chain on an exchange versus on-chain is being slowly, DeFi is slowly solving those issues. And I was seeing that liquidity move more and more towards DeFi out of CeFi because I think the numbers were showing that when we were discussing it a few weeks back.

Yeah, I think that's probably the missing part so far. However, that's kind of the last thing that has to be solved, right? Once you have the onboarding and offboarding, and once you have the UI, then that money will, I think, start to move more on chain yeah because like today we're reading the news on on binance and scott i've just sent you through an invite to come back up uh let me try to bring you up but we've seen um the news on on binance delisting stable coins in europe and we've seen that crackdown on centralized exchanges and then

what regulators will be hoping for and maybe you disagree with this but regulators are hoping for that people will move. So it's one argument is that, you know, they're just trying to kill crypto, which I don't think is the case. The other one is they're trying to control crypto. But I think this could backfire on them because they're trying to move that money off the existing exchanges that are, you know, not by the incumbents, not by the triad five guys, not by the banks that have existed for decades, onto those exchanges that were launched. I think we have Fidelity, whoever launched a crypto exchange not long ago.

It was a few months back. But what's happening is that that money is moving to decentralized exchanges instead by the looks of it. Would you agree with that statement, Patrick? So truthfully, I haven't seen evidence money is moving to decentralized exchanges. DEX liquidity has been trending down. However, overall, DeFi liquidity has been trending up. And a lot of that is because liquid staking has been cannibalizing other sectors of DeFi.

But if you look at the volumes, volume on DEXs, they're down, of course, significantly from what they are. But they're not down that much from what they were a couple months ago, despite the fact that the market's cooled. I think you kind of got to wait for another bull market to have a very good sense of like how volume is going to be dispersed amongst SEXs and DEXs, I think. It's just hard to tell right now. Market's just very dead across the board. Yeah, absolutely. So it's tough to compare. But how do you think in the bull market,

do you think that money will shift to decentralized exchanges more and more? Or do you think people will revert back to what we're used to in decentralized exchanges despite the risks involved? It's too early to say, in my opinion. I think you don't know what the next bull market is going to look like, and you don't know what the position of major centralized exchanges is going to be.

You don't know where Binance is going to be a year from now, 18 months from now. You don't know where Huobi is going to be a year from now, 18 months from now. There's still just a lot of uncertainty about what that landscape is going to look like i think i think for the united states i think it's going to be uh either end and nothing in the middle so it's going to either be trad by that's masking as as as c5 uh or d5 which pursuant to the uniswap decision uh is is now in the clear i think the middle of the field is where wrongfully but you know that's what the legislature wants to do uh that's what they're going to go ahead and attack and they're going to blow it to bits right and regulatory agencies clearly are on top of that too i mean finance won't exist you know for purposes of the United States. And so therefore, I think people are going to be left with either the traditional finance

that take the CFI over or DeFi. And I think the DeFi has a good chance of really winning in the end. I mean, David, Binance already doesn't exist in the US, to your point. Exactly. I think volumes are down 98% since the SEC enforcement action, something like that. They killed it simply by making accusations. And what's happening in Europe will be really interesting with the stable coins, Mario. But I don't know if you saw, there was this whole story about Binance delisting stable coins came from a statement from a Binance

exec. But then after the story came out, CZ basically said it was for FUD. He said it was taken out of context and that they have a couple of partners launching Euro and other stable coins in fully compliant manners, of course. So with the Mika, there's a $216 million cap imposed on stable coins. Obviously, Binance, that's a drop in the bucket for daily volume. So it's effectively means they can't use Tether and USDC. But CZ is saying here that they're going to look for ways to use compliant EU stable coins for Mika. So I think that there's more to the story than just a delisting. For Binance, I don't think it's going to matter to them. I don't think they're going to be operating in Europe a year from now, honestly.

I mean, they've been kicked out of Belgium. They've been kicked out of Netherlands. They've been kicked out of Germany. And they're under investigation for aggravated money laundering in France. How does one aggravate money laundering? No clue, but it sounds bad, right? Yeah, it's terrible. It also just sounds kind of French.

But Travis, what would it mean for Tether and USDC then? Oh, you know, it's hard to say. Yeah, I think it really is hard to say. I think very little. I think, Travis, to your point, as they're being kicked out of these places one by one, it goes back to the same story we've been telling about Binance just progressively being marginalized and getting smaller and smaller and smaller

before this becomes an issue. This won't be like a sweeping thing. It will just be slight, slow reductions in usage and volume that will be replaced elsewhere or won't really be noticed. Yeah, but those regulations are not anti-Binance regulation. usage and volume that will be replaced elsewhere won't really be noticed yeah but that but that those regulations are not anti-binance regulation they're anti-stable coin regulations just yeah i mean the world it's interesting because people have jumped all over the industry has jumped all

over mika as this great uh move forward because finally we have some regulatory clarity in europe or anywhere but when you really dig into it, these were things that before people would have pushed very aggressively back against the industry had problems with. I think it was just a situation where people wanted clarity and even bad clarity was better than no clarity. So this is going to be, there's a lot of things in Mika that's going to be highly problematic for the industry, even outside of here. Patrick, your thoughts? Yeah, I just wanted to piggyback on something David was saying, because I agree 100% that you're going to see things bifurcate between either highly regulated, fully compliant firms or DeFi. And the reason is, although the SEC has talked about regulating DeFi,

as long as you can withdraw off-chain, as long as you can withdraw ETH from a wallet, or really even BTC from a wallet into a wallet, you can access the entire range of DeFi suites. And unless you're trading millions of dollars, there's dozens of exchanges you could comfortably trade on using DeFi. So that's something that it's really an anti-fragile ecosystem where there's almost no way that that could be shut down unless you just straight up forbade people from withdrawing. I wrote about this in a monthly update a few months ago. You know, maybe you could throw UAE ined gardens that are fully KYC'd and, you know, quote unquote institutionalized, and then you would have DeFi. And then I think the probably critical part is going to be the movement of crypto assets between those places. So it's

like you can move things from one walled garden to another, from Mika to Hong Kong, for example. But then it's like if you're trying to move assets from KYC-free DeFi land into these walled gardens or from these walled gardens out into KYC-free DeFi land, those on-ramps and off-ramps, it's going to be very interesting to see how those get, you know, just what the level of freedom is of asset movement between those. Because I think, you know, anybody that's got, say, a Coinbase account, Americans have a Coinbase account. I mean, Coinbase has been doing a ton of KYC refreshes. We've experienced it. I've experienced it personally.

We've experienced it with our fund. A bunch of other people that I talk to have experienced the same kind of thing. if I'm depositing 100 Bitcoin into Coinbase, you know, Coinbase has a database that they're going to check whatever wallet that 100 Bitcoin came from. And if they don't like that address, for some reason that it came from, it comes back in their system, they're going to freeze my account. And if I try and send 100 Bitcoin from my Coinbase account out to some address, they're gonna do the same thing. And if their system comes back, and they don't like that address I'm trying to send it to, they're going to freeze the transaction. And you can just imagine that kind of scenario being in place for all these walled gardens. And so you could even end up having like a truly bifurcated crypto market of like KYC crypto inside these walled gardens and then movements that can

happen from one walled garden to another walled garden because everything's kyc and then that's quite separate from uh the kyc free defi land and it gets increasingly more difficult to transfer assets into and out of these walled gardens. Mike, we'd love your thoughts on this as well. On what Travis is saying related to KYC, non-KYC? Exactly. And just mainly the two ecosystems that will coexist, hopefully, the DeFi ecosystem and the CeFi,

the walled gardens, as Travis referred to them. And maybe where Binance will fall into that. I was trying to avoid Binance, but sure. Yeah, I mean, look, I don't just talk about Binance, obviously. I think it's going to be more complex than that because I think the U.S. eventually will realize that it will fall behind. I think we're all focused on gensler and the sec right now because they haven't figured it out and it's messy um and they're not letting people do what they want to do but i i don't think that's going to be the regime forever so so while there

is a bifurcation today between kyc and non-kyc and by the way bitcoin maxis have been all over this for years telling people to take their Bitcoin off of exchanges and put it in cold storage before the regulators are aware of it so that you always have something that's in that sort of non-KYC land. I think in the future, it's going to get easier for people who want to follow the rules and for people who want to do business. I actually thought Binance's pushback on the SEC related to not having a pathway to regulate. They asked the judge to dismiss that lawsuit from the SEC. I actually agree with that. So even though I don't agree with everything Binance has done historically from a business standpoint, I agree with them that the SEC did not create a pathway for Coinbase, Binance, etc. to regulate themselves, you know, to into that system and so they have they have

a case there so you know as an individual i don't know what the answer is i think you know people should probably um you know if they live in the u.s and they can follow the kyc procedures they should probably have multiple kyc accounts and then they should probably also have multiple hardware wallets so that they can kind of go between until we see where the regulatory clarity shakes out. Yeah, we're talking about Binance. I do want to talk about Coinbase, Scott, unless you want to talk a bit more on Binance. No, I think we're good. Yeah, I want to talk about Coinbase and the announcement for BASE launching their own token.

I didn't know BASE is doing that well. I'm guessing it's because of Frontac, but BASE's TVL is already ahead of Solana. Were you aware? They're already in ninth. Yeah, a lot of that is Frontec, as you said. Frontec is dominating, obviously, yeah. But the CLO for BASE did talk about launching, and I'd love some thoughts from the panel.

I feel free to jump in, but about BASE launching a token. When and how long could something like this take um considering the the uh issues with the sec um you know based on on our discussions with previous attorneys that is it's going to take a long time for the for the courts to play out for us to know what is considered security and what isn't and for that battle between obviously binance us and the sec and Coinbase and the SEC and the Ripple case. So the question for the panel is how long could it take if Coinbase wants to launch a token for base? How many years should we wait for that?

Mikkel? Yeah, I don't know how many years, but I do think it's an interesting strategy, right? It's kind of the opposite of what we've really seen from crypto rather than instantly creating a token and then kind of forging on from there trying and we'll do it then. And kind of looking back at it, I think it's a pretty smart strategy, especially with what we're going through in the United States, right? They're building this adoption on their platform and then they're kind of getting rid of the legal uncertainty around what a lot of the, a lot of what surrounds these blockchains.

So what they're probably gonna do is just wait until they have that clarity, issue the token, and then not only are they able to foster adoption and kind of work through this learning phase, but then they're also able to issue their token with more clarity around how they're supposed to do it. So whether or not that takes a new administration or whether or not this administration kind of gets it together, which I highly doubt, I think they're going to need some real rules in order to issue this in a compliant way. But ultimately, I think this could be a pretty interesting strategy for a lot of projects to

model themselves after, because it seems to me like it's probably pretty smart from a compliancy way. I assume that's exactly why they're doing it, is to show a path or at least force the SEC's hand to give some clarity, which won't work. But I have a feeling that's actually part of the strategy. Yeah, and I'm curious whether we're going to see more projects do this as well. I'm going through, there's a website that goes through all the projects launching their token and see if there's a slowdown there. It doesn't seem like it. So projects launching on, obviously it's very slow now

considering it's a bear market, but there's projects launching on an almost daily basis. Well, unfortunately, I feel like a lot of projects have the token because they need money right they need funding coinbase clearly wasn't in that position they had a lot of capital build this stuff out without the need for a token so they were in a pretty unique position where they had the money to build out a lot of this infrastructure and then say you know we can sit on our hands on the token it's not worth the legal troubles and then issue that later i mean, it seems to me like a pretty smart strategy from Coinbase. Obviously, they have their own issues with regulators in the SEC that they got to work out with staking and

the other tokens on their platform. But this would have been one more big headache that the SEC probably would have used to leverage in their case. And it seems to me like a pretty good strategy to kind of just get the adoption, work out the kinks in the chain, and then later on come out with the token and to really bolster the ecosystem. Yeah, I'm trying to get Preston up. He's meant to join. I think he was struggling to come up. I'll try to get him up to just get a better idea

whether we're going to see a shift because now regulators are starting to act and we are getting finally more clarity. So I'll try to get Preston Byrne to come up and discuss this. But Travis and Patrick, go ahead. It makes total sense that they would at least float the idea, even if it never happens or it's multiple years away or whatever, because it keeps people engaged to be conducting activity on the base, for future airdrop farming, basically, which is which is great for Coinbase and, you know, TBD on what the exact path is.

If like Republicans won the White House and you get Hester Pierce that's running the SEC in 2025, then, you know, it's a completely different ballgame for all kinds of stuff in crypto. And yeah, in the meantime, it's like it makes total sense that they would just kind of float the idea out there. Patrick? Yeah, so I wanted to add in, obviously, they're going to wait to get regulatory clarity. But the other thing is, if you look at the most comparable situations, which are probably Arbitrum and Optimism, which are other layer twos that launched without a token and then

added one later. Arbitrum waited over a year and a half. Optimism waited almost a year. And so it makes sense that Coinbase would probably, I think, wait similarly long. And the reason is, if not longer, the reason is that the people who are going to bridge to the chain early on aren't necessarily going to be the people who actually care about it. They're going to be a lot of people who want to either be early adopters and try new apps, in this case, Frentech, or they're going to be opportunist farmers who want to get there, get any sort of incentives, and then get out. And if you're trying to actually launch a token and you want it to be in the right hands, those really are not the people who you'd want to distribute it to initially.

Not to mention the fact that base currently is running around 60,000 active users. Coinbase has, what, 30 million monthly users in 2022. So I imagine they'd want to push to get more of those users actually using the chain before they distribute the tokens. And Mike, I want to get your thoughts whether we're going to see a change in the way projects launch a token now that we have more clarity. Now, you could argue that clarity was always there, but it's a more difficult argument to make back in the last bull market compared to the one now. Could we see a bull market?

It's a bit different to the ones we've seen before, that it is a more regulated bull market. Projects are being more careful now that regulators have offered clarity and they're taking action, swift action. Yeah, I mean, I actually have said this before, that if projects would just file an S1 with all of the, disclose all of the detail about the project and treat it like a security,

I don't have a problem with people selling securities, right? Like I'm in the securities business in a sense, running a public hedge fund and sitting on a public board. You file a bunch of stuff with the SEC. As long as you meet your disclosure requirements, you can sell securities as long as the market wants them. So I think the challenge historically is that people were selling things that looked a lot like securities without following any of the basic guidelines for disclosures that you'd want to provide to the public so that these so-called securities would

actually be understood better. And obviously, retail investors don't read any of the stuff anyway. But as long as you've filed it and you've disclosed it, if somebody wants to do the work to understand the token mechanics or the fact that the VCs own 80% of it and they're all going to unlock in six weeks and dump on your head, then you have the ability to buy it and all that information is disclosed. But wouldn't you have an unregistered security offering then? I mean, hasn't the issue, Mike, been that it costs you millions of dollars and the SEC

is never going to approve it anyways? Are you saying that there's a way to file and just go ahead? I don't think it has to cost millions of dollars if there's a streamlined disclosure process for- Oh, so you're saying an improvement they can make yeah okay well yeah i mean look like they they've done the same thing with you know allowing uh private companies to to raise money with certain exemptions right they're trying to make it cheaper uh for for companies to to be public it's obviously

been challenging since sarbanes-oxley and some of the financial crises that have happened before and all the new regulation. But they could build a streamlined process that allows a Coinbase or somebody like that to list tokens once they've made some basic filing that's been reviewed by the CFTC or the SEC. And I just don't think that should be that onerous. And I think projects should be willing to do that, especially if they can do it for, say, less than a million bucks. I mean, most of the projects that are that are launching big with vc backing have way more

they have tens of millions of dollars of financing historically in some cases hundreds of millions of dollars of financing and they easily could have made basic disclosures if there was a pathway to do it scott you want to get into the oh we've got preston here preston how are you i dropped out i don't see him he came out and dropped out again let's get into the kathy wood story man because i know that got you excited uh what'd you say again who doesn't get excited by a wild uh time-based prediction for the price of their beloved assets yeah let me read out what she said exactly i had it open just now uh there it is. So right now she's doing a prediction of half a million dollars by 2025 for Bitcoin.

And then thinks that Ethereum could have a $20 trillion market cap by 2030, which means it will be $170 to $180K. That's a 7,000% increase from today. Now, the reason is DeFi. DeFi is already on a growth trajectory. And Cathie Wood believes this could set the stage for ETH growth to become a globally adopted currency. So shift from the banking sector to ETH as an alternative. I don't know. This is like a way to be extremely bullish and get attention or whether she really means it uh scott you probably you know kathy better than i do um but the numbers obviously seem pretty insane and uh do you think the narrative makes sense in any way i think the narrative makes sense i think the numbers are non purposely nonsensical right i don't think you can make a prediction based on amount of time that's that grand uh i think that's a great uh pr bit but i mean conceptually i think what she's saying makes a lot of sense and conceptually what she's saying about bitcoin makes a lot of

sense too but this is you know under a number of cascading circumstances that would have to occur for something like this to be possible so michael i see you have your hand up go ahead okay mike yeah i was gonna say yeah i was gonna say the same exact thing it's like who cares about another ten thousand dollar price target for ethereum it's like to really generate the pr to generate the attention makes a lot more sense for her to just go higher now i'm a big fan of kathy woods and i don't think this is her just blindly putting out numbers for publicity i think she's probably a big believer in most of the crypto asset class. But the only thing I'll say is, despite her very, very good knowledge of a lot of different

technologies, if you really listen to her talk about cryptocurrencies, right, there's a lot of people in this space who have a ton more knowledge than Cathie Wood on this subject. I think she's doing a great job of kind of bringing this topic to Wall Street and kind of putting this more in the public eye. But in terms of whether or not that's a realistic price prediction, I think it has a lot more to do with her just saying, hey, I'm extremely bullish on this asset class. And by the way, ARK is now the most bullish company on the street on this asset to generate attention. Mike? Well, it's working, man.

It's in our title and we're talking about it now. Let me bring up, by the way, I'm going to bring up Ninja to just kind of wrap up the show talking about Killer Whales. We've got the producer, one of the main producers. Go ahead, Mario. Mike, go ahead. Yeah, of course.

I just want to say, Kathy's in the asset management business, so her incentives are to raise the maximum amount of assets and charge the maximum amount of fees, and there's nothing wrong with that in a capitalist society. And she has some great analysts. So what my view on this is that she's quite sincere. She may not actually know what she's talking about in great granular detail a lot of the times. Right. So like when she's doing a forecast on like Zoom adoption over the next 10 years, like like she thinks she has good good numbers but her forecast for zoom's valuation is absolutely insane but you know it's a shot on goals business and so like a vc because she's

really like more like a vc right she's buying these earlier stage tech companies like believer believing in tesla five or seven or nine years ago it was still sort of even though it's a publicly traded company it was still a really early stage bet and so you make dozens and dozens of bets and the one or two or three or four that work make up for a lot of the ones that don't. And so she's in the business of like trying to find those. And so she's going to strike out 90, 95% of the time to try to hit a Tesla or a Bitcoin. So I think, you know, it's all rational when you look at it that way. But as an investor, you got to be really careful chasing her higher into those predictions. Because again, most of she's making those predictions for a different reason than you're investing i agree um yeah i wanted to get ninja up by the way uh scott i wanted to put him

on the spot and ask him ninja you got to make sure scott joins the next uh season of killer whales because i think me and rand will have a lot of fun there um but i think he dropped out as well we're having a lot of glitches today uh but was there any other news that's worth uh discussing i don't think so i mean i think you know this has been one of those kind of uh down weeks which is totally fine no don't need to create something out of nothing i think that uh we covered it pretty well yeah let me give a shout out to killer whales anyway even though ninja dropped Guys, you've got to get Scott there. I promise you. Scaramucci, me, Ran, Scott,

and obviously you can choose the rest of the judges. It will be a shit show in a really good way. But anyone that hasn't seen it, Killer Whales. Oh, there's Sander. Shit, I think he's one of the main guys behind the entire show, Scott. But it's glitching. I hope he comes up.

I've just accepted it. CEO of Hell Labs, yeah. Oh, he is the CEO. There you go. Sander, can you hear me? Sander, are you there? Let me get the trailer in the meantime while Sander fixes his mic.

And let me pin it at the top because if anyone hasn't seen it, the production quality of these guys is by far the best show in crypto. I've just pinned it above. You can watch it from the audience just check out the pin tweets go on your phone and scroll up to the top but sander i promise you i promise you do you know what a shit show means when it's a good thing a good shit show hey mario yeah yeah yeah definitely definitely man thanks thanks for bringing me up on the stage uh yeah not at all man first

congratulations on the trailer. I think you got over a million impressions since you posted it and a lot of great feedback. So you must be feeling very excited. Yeah, definitely. We're excited, but we got to give it up to the whales as well, man.

You guys have done terrifically. And I think we try to play a role in making sure that Web3 becomes much more mainstream. So, you know, happy to be able to deliver on that and happy to have you guys on the show, Aaron and Mario. And you've got to get Scott. You've got to get Scott. If you want to see me argue with someone, you've got to be Scott. It'd be very heated.

There'll be a lot of cursing. I'll be throwing a pen at him he'll be throwing his shoe at me I promise you that will happen maybe the next season of Killer Whales Mario should just be that we print our YouTube, I mean our WhatsApp conversations and just let them scroll through them

oh man but yeah guys congratulations on the show, I think it comes out in January is that right? yeah, that's the current planning show. I think it comes out in January. Is that right? Yeah, yeah. That's the current planning. So trying to make sure that all the distribution is locked in at that moment in time and the right distribution is there. So, yeah.

And Scott, I might have talent hunted you a little bit during Token 2049. How'd I do? As anticipated, man. As as anticipated always good to see you in action yeah man thank you all right next time here we got it we got a chat go come on cool all right guys i'll connect you on whatsapp anyway guys appreciate you all for coming on we'll see you again on monday assuming there's no breaking news on the weekend um and yeah i think that's it thanks guys thanks for the panel