The Wolf Of All Streets - BITCOIN BREAKS $79,000#CryptoTownHall

Episode Date: April 22, 2026

In this Crypto Town Hall episode, the team breaks down Bitcoin breaking $79K amid the Iran ceasefire, strong ETF inflows, short squeezes, and macro liquidity improvements. They also cover Justin Sun suing World Liberty Financial, the NY AG targeting Gemini and Coinbase on prediction markets, Polymarket and Calci launching 10x leveraged perps on events like weather, DeFi hacks exposing centralization risks, the Avis Budget short squeeze drama, and debates on gambling fever as a potential market top signal. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Good morning, everybody. Welcome to Crypto Town Hall occasionally on X-15am Eastern Standard Time. Yeah, it used to be daily. Then it became every other day Wednesday, Monday, Wednesday, Friday. Then Dave went away for like three weeks. You might remember that Rand and Mario used to participate. And it was just me forever. Then we brought in Dave. Now Dave's on vacation. And I've launched my new Yahoo show this week, which is at noon and a very hard time. to do my morning show, then this, then that with all of the technical side and prep.

But I had to launch a show today since Bitcoin is pumping right now at the moment. We're about 78,000. Where are we at? It was at 79 last I looked. So 78, 916, we did break above 79,000. A lot of narratives as to why this is happening. I have my own thoughts. And then the crypto gods reigned news on us.

us today. We have Justin Sun suing World Liberty Financial, making me question which part of the simulation we're living in. We have the New York Attorney General suing Gemini and CoinBiz for prediction markets, but seriously, not anyone else who's offering prediction markets in New York, just the two crypto companies, because of course, then of course, we have Kalshi and Polly Market launching perps. Not just crypto perps, but apparently you'll be able to trade on prediction markets with 10x leverage

unless I'm reading this wrong before the contracts close. So that means you'll be able to bet on tomorrow's weather with 10x leverage and close that position before there's actually weather tomorrow, if I'm understanding this correctly. What could possibly go wrong? It is the sign.

I mean, now I've just realized it on my Yahoo show at noon I need to just completely fucking wing it. But I'm probably going to go ballistic on that today. Because this is the sign of, listen, I'm a libertarian. I deeply believe that people should be able to use their money for whatever they want. But that doesn't mean it's a good thing that they'll be able to gamble with 10x leverage on literally anything. And it is 100% gambling. And every time you see gambling reach a fever pitch like this historically, it is the top when people are the most desperate and the most economically

frustrated. And so I think it's just a side of the times. But anyways, let's start with Bitcoin breaking 79,000. Go to the panel. What he does make of this, obviously the headlines are because we have an indefinite ceasefire in Iran, which blows my mind. But good, I guess. Good. I don't want more war, obviously. I don't think that's the reason necessarily, but would love your guys' opinions to start picking on people. Andre, you're first. Thank you. Good morning. Yeah, I think everyone's watching the ADK mark right now. I think the real reason is that you have the confluence of different pricing levels. At around 80K, I think the true market mean is slightly below that, which is like essentially the average

cost basis of all investors excluding the Satoshi wallets. Then you have the short-term model cost basis around 79ishk as well and then you have the ETF cost basis I think at 81K but I think we still have to break all of these levels especially the ETF cost basis because the off-chain activity the ETF activity has become somewhat more important in recent years essentially since 2024

for like the performance of Bitcoin and then the on-chain activity in my view but I think once we break those levels I think the probability that we're in like a genuine bull market again is quite high because now the average investor is essentially underwater, right? They have like unrealist losses and they tend to be in this kind of sell the rip mentality until you cross these cost bases, right? And so, but yeah, you ask, why is this happening, right?

Why are we like going higher? I think it's like two things. So institutional demand has been picking up, right? You saw trading company numbers, right, MSCR numbers. You probably saw those ETF inflows. They picked up to the highest level since January, 24. And like the cumulative number year to date is at the highest level, right? So cumulative net inflows into all Bitcoin ATPs at the highest level.

So that's picking up. And at the same time, if you look at selling pressure on chain, right, it has actually decelerated. So you have like a mixture of like increasing, accelerating institutional demand and decreasing selling pressures or decreasing supply that is coming online. And I think that's lifting prices. I agree with all of that. Right.

I think, yeah, I mean, we've had historic ETF flows, right? And then the next logical, I guess, misread will be. That's also because of the war. But okay, it was all of last week. Exactly. That's probably the catalyst, right? Right. But even before the ceasefire agreement, you saw like accelerating flows, accelerating buying and so on.

Yeah, I mean, I take it this way, right? And just to add to what you were saying is that we had very clear evidence on chain that huge whale wallets were selling in massive clips all the way down from the all-time high into the 60s, right? I think that that's not disputed. And then last week, there was a report that over the previous 30 days, we had the largest inflow to those wallets. So I think it was 270,000 Bitcoin ever in a 30-day period. At the same time that we had the lowest amount of Bitcoin supply on exchanges since like 2013 or something, and at the same time with perps negative. Right?

I mean, we had perps funding negative at resistance, which you don't usually say. see, right? So shorts are piling in, which means that this squeeze, at least to this price, was very obvious. And as of yesterday, they were still negative. I'm assuming today they've gone positive. No, they're still negative. Okay, so we're going to the 80s. I mean, and that's just, that's just technically, you know, you generally see, almost always for people who don't know, like when you see the funding on Bitcoin is almost always positive. It's in the green. You know, people are just generally optimistic. They bet on future prices being higher. When they go negative, which is rare and this negative you generally see a short squeeze because somebody

is a market where someone can literally go in and say I'm going to just squeeze these shorts I can see them right there they're there for the taking so I think it's more that and not Iran headlines yeah exactly anyone else want to jump in on this before we get into yeah I would just I would just add to that you know we kind of talked about it but it's the supply I mean sailors gobbling up so much more than miners or even that was the other one so yeah that's CRC Yeah, sorry, that was the last one that I wanted to mention. It just slipped my mind.

David, go ahead. Yeah, just my speculation is that Iran's being very successful in garnering Bitcoin as a toll-taking device through the Straits of Hormuz, but also that and Michael Saylor sucking things up. But obviously, if people want to move trade and you've got, what, hundreds of ships that are bottled up in the Persian Gulf, I mean, $2 million. a pop in Bitcoin, you know, multiplied by the number of ships, shows a nice increment to demand. Looking at the charts, I would say that we had, you know, March 17th, there was kind of a high of like $76,000. We're through that now. And I would say that, you know, if we get through the high of January 14th, which was about, you know, 97,000, then yeah, definitely we're back. to a bull market.

Yeah, I think that would be the first high or high, right? So we can literally go to 96 and people can argue bare market technically, right? So that makes a lot of sense what you're saying, which, you know, you get these face-ripping bull rallies in bear markets anyways. We'll be hearing that all the way, I think, up to 96. All the Bitcoin bulls can just thank the mullahs. Yeah. I mean, what do you know what I love is, I don't know if you guys saw this.

I shouldn't say I love, but it was a crazy report. You brought up the Straits of Hormuz. did you see that there were scammers scamming ships in the streets of Hormuz asking them for Bitcoin and USCT? What? That was in the news yesterday. No, they literally like somebody. Yeah. I mean, somebody was like, well, these guys are sitting out here.

They'll probably fall for my scam because it's crypto. After all. Austin, go ahead. So one thing I would say is I do think with Bitcoin there's some, call it, correlation to what's going on in Iran, but you've got to think about the market structure that creates that. What I mean is if we go back to a risk on environment, funds are levering up and we think about who trades Bitcoins in these markets, Scott, right? Like it's not the big bank balance sheets that we're holding them.

They're still mostly not allowed to. It's funds. So you've either got retail money, which will be coming back into the ETFs, which we're seeing, or you've got hedge funds who are highly levered. So when they're degrossing, they're just selling everything they can, including Bitcoin, to get out of positions to find margin. and when they're regrossing, which is right now, they're going to be buying back into the stuff they want, which can include Bitcoin. So one thing I would also say to everybody to think about in terms of price dynamics here is Bitcoin lately has had significant correlation to equities markets, probably because of this structural effect.

So call it an overall momentum trade is something that will also be driving Bitcoin prices. And that exactly, as previous guests have said, you get into the underlying technical. of what's going on with sailor buying versus minors, et cetera. But to me, that's all how fast, how harsh is this move going to be? The underlying dynamic is really just core momentum in macro assets writ large. Yeah, I think that you have a rising tide lifting all ships with an environment where Bitcoin was ready to go up anyways that could be explosive. I mean, maybe it's the best way to sort of summarize that.

So I agree with you. I think that it's not completely uncorrelated, but I think there were a lot of reasons to think Bitcoin was going to go up regardless. BC, you're up next. Yeah, hard to follow on from that, guys. I think Austin's points really aligned with mine and And Andre as well, and everyone's really brought up some good stuff. But I'm very much on the momentum training here as well with the,

you know, if we look at what's happening with equities, you look at the punishment that's been going on from geopolitical tensions, everything like that. As soon as you're just getting any little pressure relief from that at the moment, we've had an amazing undercut rally on the NASDAQ, for example, that's tearing into new highs, right? ultimately, you know, the Linnaudan, you can't stop this train kind of adage comes in. So just not to go over old territory, I think everybody raised some really good points,

but just from a technical's point of view, Bitcoin does love to move when it reclaims the 100 MA, you know, and we have the shorter term moving averages moving under it. That 200, the 100 to 200 fill is definitely something we're looking at here at the moment. And that declining 200 is sitting around about 85, you know, I think conditions are a good for progression here as well. And I think also as well, you know, the markets at some point, you get so much news information, so many false headlines, everything starts to come out. It's amazing how quickly the markets digest this. And, you know, we've got institutional interest in this, like people said before as well, if you look at the infows into BTC. But liquidity as well,

you know, we've got a lot sidelined, lots to go back into the, into the market. Supernormal returns are looking quite good in Bitcoin at the moment compared to maybe, you know, some other kind of risk assets that are maybe a little bit more overextended. Oil settling a little bit and the kind of noise around that starting to come down, you know, a little bit. And fear dropping capital rotates out of defensive assets, people feeling a little bit riskier as well. And I think something to keep an eye on is the reacceleration of the AI narrative. You know, not long ago, everybody was talking about the idea of this being a bubble, etc., which is always a little bit dubious because it was never really heavily debt funded. But yet, positioning money a little bit over-invested.

and maybe now also chasing things as well. But apart from that, I think the guy has really covered a lot of the hot topics. Yeah. I mean, I think people take for granted that at ADK, basically 33% off the lowest. It's a big move. Andre, go ahead and then Darkside. Thank you. Yeah, going back to that question, why is this happening?

What I found really interesting from the macro side was we know Bitcoin is this kind of canary in the macro call mine that sniffs out, changes, liquidity conditions and financial conditions well in advance, right? We have this to the downside, but we also had this more recently to the upside, right? Bitcoin rebounded from 60K, right, outperform gold. At the same time, like the Bloomberg Financial Conditions Index has now reversed as well, right, like signaling, easing financial conditions again. If you look at this whole kind of private credit complex that was under pressure,

like leverage loans, business development companies, high-yield bonds, right? They were trading at the lowest level since 2022, right, like massively under pressure. Now reversed as well, right. I think it makes sense that Bitcoin is once again sniffing out like increase in liquidity, improving financial conditions, right? So easing financial conditions. And my like ad hoc explanation is that yield curve, the yield curve and like rate cut expectations

slash rate hike expectations are like somewhat complacent while like inflation expectations are moving higher so like the nominal yields is essentially stagnating right because fat funds futures they're even pricing in cuts right

they're still pricing in cuts until mid-20207 one cut I think still priced into the curve no hike whatsoever while inflation expectations are creeping up right so the real yield is going down. That means monetary policy expectations are improving, right? And I think as long as the Fed doesn't signal any kind of intention to hike rates, you'll see like a continuous improvement

in financial conditions. I think that's, at least that's my ad hoc explanation. I know we'll be keen to hear your thoughts. Dark said. Thanks, Scott. Congratulations on your show. It's been a minute. Thanks, you're welcome. So, Perps going negative. I think there's more to that story than maybe we're reading into it. I think underlying spot Bitcoin is getting really tough to borrow. And you could see perps go significantly worse, significantly more backwards if that story begins to develop.

But I wanted to point to a new subject, which is Avis Budget Renekar. We have another game stop in full motion. a complete debacle of the U.S. stock market. Two hedge funds owning 108% of the underlying float in a company with another at least 50 to 100% short. And the stock's gone from, what, 90 bucks, up to 800 this morning and is trading like a meme coin. Absolutely.

End times. Yes. It's just a joke, right? But this points to the fundamental flaws in the U.S. markets, right? The rules don't apply to the big players. So clearly, reg SHO is being ditched here. I mean, how else do you get to, you know, 108% of ownership of a company and another 100% short?

So it's something to keep an eye on because it really speaks to the validity of the system. I'm sure there are some really big losses. and it's going to be interesting to see what the policy response is to bring this situation under control. I'm curious to see whether they do a secondary. Now, normally the company should announce a shelf and begin selling into this and raising capital, but they're not. So that tells me that some of the big players are sitting on some massive losses. So we'll see how it plays out.

I wonder if it's another game stop and they end up doing a secondary way, in the hole. Yeah, I mean, align this with what I said at the beginning about being able to gamble on everything now, being able to gamble on everything with leverage and the behavior. And it's not a sign that people are feeling financially comfortable. It's just, you know, people are willing to gamble on literally anything now, I think, to get ahead or feel like they have to, you know, from the dark depth of their mom's basement. It is what it is. Let's talk about it. I mean, we have, I don't even know. I'll put it to the, to the, to the Should we talk about World Liberty Financial?

Sure. Or should we talk about... Yeah, why not? That's a good time. So Justin Sun is suing World Liberty Financial. Just to give you the, I guess, very quick timeline of Justin's son and World Liberty Financial. And then we can dive into World Liberty Financial. 2003, the SEC brings charges against Justin Sun for market manipulation,

wash trading, TRX, and for paying celebrities without disqualification. closures to market the token. 2004 in a series of investments, I believe he got up to $75 million in World Liberty Financial. Just a couple months later in 2025, his charges were paused. I'm not saying these things are related. I'm just telling you the timeline. Then a year later, only about a month or two ago, we had Justin's having those charges entirely dropped, no wrongdoing, paid a $10 million fine, and then within weeks was suing

the Trumps. So you get that right? So World Liberty Financial, obviously he was. was a main investor. His claim here is that they bullied him. They actually threatened him to burn his tokens, that they've locked him out, that he doesn't have the governance rights he's supposed to, that the governance vote itself is basically a scam and all of this right afterworld. Liberty Financial took all mention of the Trumps and Wyckhoffs off their site and took a maximum loan on a platform that they control and cash out the money. Is that a good summary, anyone? I don't know.

Does I miss anything? And now, and now, Now Sun's doing them. Okay, so, yeah. Good morning, Scott. Okay, Carlo, hey, good morning. Yeah, that was a pretty good summary. And I like that you hedged it very carefully, that this was not a exchange for a dismissal.

It worked out pretty damn good for Sun because he got his SEC case, if I recall correctly, dismissed with prejudice, which means they can't bring it back. so no backsies on that. It's interesting that Sun was shocked to find that World Liberty was not decentralized and that they executed these restrictions on him moving his tokens. It's an interesting lawsuit.

You know, some of the things that are being lobbed in the lawsuit with respect to threats of potential criminal slash, KYC violations by Sun is alleged in the lawsuit as being borderline extortion. You generally can't try to leverage an advantage over someone in a civil dispute by threatening criminal prosecution. So that's going to probably play prominently in this. The downside for Justin is going to be that when you bring a lawsuit, you're going to be subject to discovery and Trump's going to lawyer up. Trump's going to go after him hard. There's no. there's no surprise there.

By the way, did I just say, Carlo, that he actually, and maybe we should pin it above, but in his tweet, he, like, praises Trump repeatedly and says it's Trump's team. He supports Trump, he loves Trump, Trump's doing great things for Cryptod America. I'm sorry, I have to sue you, bro. Yeah. I don't know how that's going to play for Trump,

but, you know, there is an element of lawfare that is always a play with the Trump administration, and any law firm that chooses to take on Trump in a court is certainly going to catch a lot of heat. This law firm is probably going to catch a lot of heat in the public domain. And yeah, I mean, they're going to have full carte launch to demand discovery from Sun to depose him. Sun is essentially burning it all down with this lawsuit and basically calling out world liberty. So this may give us all some good insight into what exactly is going on there. And I'd be curious to know how the most recent defy debacle plays into this and whether that'll come out in the wash too in the discovery.

So we'll all get our popcorn out, I guess, and watch this one unfold. Hey, Carlo, one question from like a legal perspective. I don't know if you saw like with World Liberty where it was like they put out a proposal, right, a token proposal. It was like if you didn't vote for the proposal, your tokens basically got indefinitely locked. I mean, what's your, it was like, I mean, I can't even believe that that was like real. And correct me if I'm wrong on it, but it was basically, hey, if you don't vote for this proposal to pass, which will give you basically everybody a 10% haircut, your stuff gets basically permanently locked. Like, I can't believe that that would ever hold up under any sort of like legal scrutiny, but I'd love your opinion on it. Yeah.

I mean, it goes back to this whole notion of is this thing centralized or decentralized and who actually controls the decision-making process and what kind of proper notice was given. You know, one of the big complaints that came down when all that happened is that there are obviously concerns about ethics provisions with respect to the Trump family and how they're handling their Trump family crypto ventures and transparency. if this thing is indeed more centralized than people may have believed, then there are certain reporting and disclosure requirements that are baked into this. And I could see token holders, especially significant token holders,

prying foul for this and bringing litigation, bringing class action and saying exactly that. There was not sufficient disclosure of this. There was not sufficient notice of this. and those tokens should not be locked up. Locking up tokens in that manner doesn't really suggest that this was a very decentralized thing. Decentralized. I'm literally laughing out loud.

I mean, we're talking about the fact that Arbitrums. I know that Arbitrum is like freezing 71 million in Eiff. And that Avey has their markets frozen because of the defy hack. I mean, there's no desecate, okay, whatever. Austin, yeah. Yeah, I mean, All right, I've been, I think earlier to this point than many because I had to confront some of these things when I was running BUSD at Paxos and figure out what our procedure would be. But like on the hack part, I'll quote the great Corbac McCarthy here of if the rule you brought followed you to this of what use was the rule, which is to say if the purpose of decentralization is to prevent people from being expropriated by government.

and nation-state actors, that having a nation-state actor attacking everybody and stealing all of their money and that being the result of decentralization is kind of a problem. So I think we've hit this existential point where we're coming full face with the fact that there's a huge power disparity

between the average user and the average project and literally nation-states. And the reality is decentralization is a very powerful thing, but that powerful thing depends on who is using it and you create maximum crime if you build the wrong stuff, right? Like this becomes a form of techno-barbarism or piracy. And I want to go back to the start of this podcast and give a shout out to Bitcoin, which is to say when you keep it simple and you don't build complicated stuff

and you create the surface area that is small for attackers, you tend to fare very well. I think the problem with Defi is that they made an extremely large service. area now, especially with the advent of AI, are under siege from all angles. And in that context, I'll just be realistic and say, I think you are going to have to make some tradeoffs between decentralization, security, and simplicity. And so if you want to hold on to the decentralization, you're going to need to get rid of this complexity. I actually posted something the other day asking that very question. Does defy need to become more centralized before it'll gain back the trust of investors. And of course, TradFi is watching everything that's going on right now in DFI,

and they're probably taking a pause on jumping into tokenized everything, which is bad for the space overall. Yeah, Carlo, from a regulatory standpoint, isn't some element of centralization necessary? Yeah. I mean, that's the very definition of regulatory environments. Everyone criticizes the Genius Act as being highly centralized, but I mean, that's what it is. The Clarity Act is being passed to centralize all of this so that infrastructure can be predictable for the big institutional players. They want centralization of all of this before they're going to put massive money on the line. And you can't get massive money on the line without centralization because otherwise you end up in the Ave mess.

Right. Going back to your earlier point, I think Justin's son has the budget, the funds, to take on World Liberty and champion the little guy in crypto here. And I'm just curious in World Liberty

Financial as we're doing discovery, we also have the opportunity to depose. I'm curious to see whether we can pierce the corporate veil in the case of World WDubty Financial and start, you know, deposing Whitkoffs and the Trumps? I would think yes, because they're prominently listed as principles of this thing. And there's going to be. They took their names off.

Oh, that's right. They're not there. They're gone. They had nothing to do this. Never mind. How dare you? I'm going to go set my law degree on fire because I forgot about that. Also, you don't have to show up for a subpoena if you no longer work at that.

job apparently. So yeah. Yeah, that wasn't even me. That was a different Donald Trump. I was going to say that's if the company is named. If you're named in your personal capacity as somebody who's once a Dodd-Frank covered person, you still have to show up. Yep. Well, last thing I would want to say is that relative to nation states taking crypto, Austin, I think that we're seeing in the case of Raleigh Financial is that the call is coming from inside the house. That's a good way to put it. I think Carla really summed it up. I look at this as really, a deeper issue. It's centralization risk wearing a decentralized decentralization costume when you think about it. I think that's kind of the way to put it. And you've seen, there's been reports

already across the timeline about investors complaining about like opaque governance and whale heavy voting power and special access for large holders. And I think the politics really makes it harder. Like 75% wasn't it of the world liberty token sale revenue ended up going to the Trump family? And I think they pocketed like a billion dollars. So there's, Yeah, that's a great way to put it. The call is definitely coming from inside the house. Matt, they're not even on the website. It's not them.

Yeah, I'm sure nobody screenshoted that. They're not on the website. That's all I got. It's not there. Yeah, I mean, I think that this is like the craziest story. And there's, I don't know if you saw that there was a story yesterday that I love when they attribute things to like an entire organization like Jeffries says or J.P. Morgan says.

But a guy at Jeffreys basically came out. and said that this helped Dow hacked and everything that's happening with it actually will have a meaningful impact on how Wall Street approaches tokenization and crypto and that this is actually a much bigger deal when they think. Here's the headline, crypto's massive exploit may force big banks to rethink their blockchain plans. Jeffries Warren's. I mean, is this big of an own goal that that's actually true, Austin? Yeah, I mean, I guess what I would say, like dealing with a lot of institutions in this space is the fundamental problem we're facing here is very much like a core risk management judgment,

Scott. You look at what's going on. You say tokens are being stolen constantly. We do not want, like here's a great example. Say you run a tokenized money market fund, right? The simplest of financial products. And you've got all of the T bills. There's no loss in your fund. But if you were collateral in, say, an AVE or something like that, and now people who are holding your token and lent it into this protocol or implicated in these losses, your name gets dragged in the press, whether you were directly involved or not. That's intolerable for many of these institutions.

The other part is as losses of this sort start mounting, if you're a regulated entity, the regulators are going to start looking closer and closer and closer at this. Like, I would be very worried right now on multiple levels, right, about the SEC becoming emboldened and getting more aggressive or the DOJ stepping in here because the number one thing that gets their attention is retail people getting screwed. Right. Like that is the number one factor.

There's outcry. Regulators always hold the bag when something bad happens. And so if you're in that sort of uncertain environment as a major financial institution, you just look at this and you say one of two things, which is either, whoa, we're not doing this at all. That's fucking crazy. Or you say, oh, okay, okay, we can do this, but only on all. terms, which would meet an entirely parallel system of, like, defy. That's what's coming.

Is going to emerge. That's 100,000 percent especially, there's no such thing as 100,000 percent. Exactly that. And when you add, that's right. And when you add mythos, mythos, if you're Greek, I guess, I don't know, the new anthropic model that apparently has already been leaked out into the wild that can, you know, stack vulnerabilities and hack us all every minute. Like, defy is so screwed right now.

I want to talk about that for a second because there's one piece of that that I think people are missing. If that is indeed what's going on here and if the Lazarus Group and the North Koreans have have gamed Defi in a way that we never could have imagined through AI, I have to imagine that the lower hanging fruit in TradFi is also going to be in danger. So they can take a victory lap and say, yeah, Defi got wrecked and it's so dangerous. but most of TradFi still uses to factor authentication for consumers via SMS text messaging, and they simply refuse to evolve. So if they think they're going to avoid the dangers of AI finding vulnerabilities,

I think they have another thing coming too. Yeah, I don't think this is a crypto-only problem, but I think it's going to compound the crypto problem in context of what's happening right now. Dark side. Yeah, hats off to Austin who nailed it, right? There really is only one decentralized blockchain, and that's Bitcoin. And it's designed with a... I thought you were going to say Tron.

That's what he said. It is designed with an exceptionally low surface area. Slow block times, create security. But to Carlos' point, look, the real low-hanging fruit for anyone who's ever designed trading systems on Wall Street, you understand. that the entire system is based on fix, fix messaging, which is TLS security. Mythos will eat that alive. Those systems, exchange-based systems, are layered technology.

So if you look at exchanges like New York Stock Exchange or CBOE, they're running software from 1990s, layered with software from yesterday. And they are exceptionally vulnerable. So all centralized systems will come into play in a world of Mithos. And we're going to see it roll out here. And yeah, anybody who thinks they're safe in Tribe 5, they're not. The safest place to be is Bitcoin and self-custody. Anyone, I don't see hands at the moment.

I just see a lot of clapping. A lot of clapping. Well, I'll hop in to make an interesting point going back to this. Like somebody raised Justin's son, and this is not to totally defend Justin, but to the best of my knowledge, he is named. never really robbed or abused the TRX holders. He's a controversial figure, but I definitely agree with that factually. A lot of people have problems with, you know, the Nunes and all the things that they've

offered, but to your point, I think he does care about those holders. And to be quite honest, TRX, funny like it or not, has held up better than most things over the years. Actually, almost shocking when you look at it. And that's largely because we can talk about stable coins to, were blue in the face, most of them are moving on Tron. And that's the wallet and blockchain that people are using all around the world to send five bucks to

their friend in a country where they don't have access to dollars. I thought Polygon was a bigger player for volume. Bro, no way, man. Not even close, man. No. Yeah. No, not at all. It's not close. It's not close. Tron was number one for U.S.D.T. by far

for a while. You've been sci-opted, Carlo. You've been sci-opt by the Polygon guys, man. They're trying to make it the place, but it's definitely not the place. I'll actually drop some knowledge here, which is that Tron is probably number one for stable coin transfers writ large ahead of even Ethereum when you look at like one-way transfers for people, eG payments volume. And some of the other really interesting stuff happening in that space is way out into the

wild. Like, is anybody here aware that the crypto-like project with the most two-legged human users is probably mini pay, which is part of the opera browser and is running on cello. They've got like 12 and a half million actual two-legged human people using that thing. Right. So like a lot of the stable coin activity does not hit the press, but the numbers are actually growing more than people think. I'd actually say, I mean, that may be true. I don't know, Tron certainly has a lot of like real humans, you know, that the kind of Bitcoin was supposed to serve, you know, in the global south, as you'd say, but...

It certainly does. Their numbers are very real and humongous, and it proves, listen, I mean, at the end of the day, the average person who wants to use a stable coin doesn't care or probably even know what chain they're doing it on. They're completely agnostic, right?

Their friend says, I want to send you $5, download this app. And they send them $5, and they don't know that it's on Tron or care. They think it's a dollar. And pay-paling, right? And that's to their credit that they've abstracted enough of the complexity away that it can work that way.

That's why when Tom Lee came out with the, you know, Bitmine, Ethereum is going to go up to $60,000 originally when he said this, you know, when he was launching Bitmine and said it's because of stable coins. It was such a brilliant stroke of genius to speak to Wall Street and investors in a language they understood on the back of Circle going public. And obviously everybody talking about stable coins, but anyone who was here knew that it was nonsense that Ethereum was going to go up. you know, 10, 20, 30 X because of stable coins, which you can move on any chain, faster and cheaper, right? So a lot of credit there, I think, I think, to Justin's son. So the final topic I wanted to talk about is Kalshi and Polly Market,

moving in, and we've only got four more minutes. I can't run until 1115, launching perpetual swaps. What do you guys think? Yolo, you're going to, 10X on the weather? Is this the end of hype? I mean, that's really who they're going after, kind of, right? Well, although I guess adding perps to the actual prediction markets and not just crypto perps is a whole other level.

I mean, Carla, do you think that that's the end of hype? I mean, is that? I don't think so, but it definitely does introduce a new level of degenerate gambling. For people that are desperate to get any advantage in the market, to be able to leverage this high on prediction markets is a dangerous, dangerous game. it ties into the other story you were talking about, which is the lawsuit that New York filed, which, by the way, Coinbase is already trying to remove the federal court under the notion that they're preempted under federal law because the CFTC controls that arena.

Prediction markets are coming to a head this season. I don't know that I think hype is going to be okay because I think hype has more institutional interest than degenerate interest, if I could summarize it in one sentence. Carla, really quick. Totally. I mean, I'm sorry. Sorry, Scott, I was just going to say that, I mean, if you look at, if you're on whatever, TikTok or whatever, you're looking at what Kalshi is pushing out there for, it's basically targeted at fucking kids and 20 year olds, right? You mean, institutions aren't going to 10x leverage that tomorrow's weather?

Yeah, it's literally, I mean, it's a different ballgame to Carla's point. It's like, I just think the real money, the crypto money, the big money is on hype. I can't see that flippinging over to, to fucking Kalshi. Carlo, I need, listen, I'm going to probably try to talk about this on my show, so I need your legal insight on the New York AG going after Gemini and Coinbase so I can gratuitously steal it. So what do we think of that? Yeah, Paul Greywall actually came out already and commented that we've removed this action, or they're trying to remove this action.

I don't think the court's granted it yet, but they're basically saying that New York needs to concede this issue to the federal courts, and there is a motion to notice of filing of notice of removal, they want to remove this lawsuit to federal court. It is always interesting that New York seems to only target the crypto players. Again, I don't understand why they continue to want to stifle innovation, but it probably does belong in federal court. Graywall's argument is pretty strong, but it is not an absolute. It is a high bar.

Congress did, I think, intend for the CFTC to regulate these types of markets, although We're still not clear exactly how the CFTC is going to regulate all this stuff. So remains to be seen. But Calci is CFTC regulated, which I guess could be an argument for why they weren't included because that's just too complex for the New York AG to make her statement and go after someone who already has CFTC regulation, right? So I guess that kind of makes sense. Well, remember, at the end of the day, it's all about protecting the consumer.

My God, I remember when New York used to be fun. Go ahead, Austin. I was going to say one thing, and I think Carlo will agree with this, though. Kalshi, Coinbase, Gemini, all of them need to be very careful what they list predictions on, because the CFTC is your generic de facto regulator for derivatives, but if you start having markets on things that are securities, you very quickly can become a securities-based swap, which will bring the SEC into the game. And I think their views on prediction markets are significantly more negative than the CFTC.

So I would say that's not a New York AG issue. The NYAG is quite frankly making the same power play as many other states, and I expect it to be slapped down in the same way, similar to Carlo. But I would say what all of them need to be very careful of is the closer you get to investment products, the closer you get to being a securities base swap, which is dangerous territory. I think Graywall is smart enough not to walk into that trap on behalf of Coinbase. And remember, we just got word that the Jenner Coin, is not a security.

Big news, big news. Big news. That's in California, too, right? California of all places, right? Right. No common enterprise or something. I read it. That was on my deliberately ignore list,

but I saw it anyways. I tried not to my eyes are burning. But yeah, it's like how many, how many decades ago does that feel like? For the first time, we've created a federal insecurity. That's about the best note to close. on. I was just going to say, and we're out. Yeah, guys, thank you very much. I will be back on,

we will be back on Friday. I've got to run. But that was a really great show. I don't think we've ever had more emoji reactions in history than today. So I know that we were all quite entertained and deeply engaged. Great show. Thank you all. See you on Friday. Bye. Go get them, Scott. Thank you.