The Wolf Of All Streets - Bitcoin Bullrun | For How Long? | Guest: Joshua Frank, The Tie

Episode Date: January 18, 2023

►► Sponsored by PRIME XBT! Sign up for a new trading account using the link below & receive up to a $7,000 deposit bonus with “wolfofallstreets” promo code.  https://u.primexbt.com/WolfOfAllStreets Follow Joshua Frank, co-founder of The Tie: https://twitter.com/joshua_frank_ ►► JOIN THE FREE WOLF DEN NEWSLETTER https://www.getrevue.co/profile/TheWolfDen  Follow Scott Melker: Twitter: https://twitter.com/scottmelker  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/wolfofallstreets   Web: https://www.thewolfofallstreets.io  Spotify: https://spoti.fi/30N5FDe  Apple podcast: https://apple.co/3FASB2c  #Bitcoin #Crypto #trading  Timestamps: 0:00 Intro 3:40 3AC & CoinFlex  6:00 Crypto rapper 8:40 More pain to come 10:30 BUSD trade drove Bitcoin price up 12:00 Retail demand 15:00 Miners 18:00 No stupidity in crypto possible? 20:00 Shiba Inu 22:30 Hedge funds in crypto 25:00 Crypto use cases 26:30 AI tokens 31:00 Developer activity 34:00 $1 Trillion market cap 34:50 We don’t deserve $30K 37:00 Cosmos 40:00 The Tie 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.

Crypto market participants are exuberant calling for $100,000 Bitcoin when I don't know, just three weeks ago, they were calling for 10,000 and 6,000 and 3,000, proving once again that people who participate in markets are largely schizophrenic and potentially bipolar. Seeing people dunking on bears who have been right since the very top and saying that now they're wrong and it's a bull market and they're dumb and should have fun staying poor and go home. And honestly, in my opinion, we're just kind of ranging and potentially at the top of that at the moment. But will this Bitcoin bull market continue? Are the AI and metaverse and whatever the hell else averse

pumps real? Or is this just more crypto nonsense? I have one of my favorite people and favorite guests, Joshua Frank from the tie here, who can support these with his opinions and of course, with data. And well, he's almost probably as unfiltered, if not more than me. So it makes him the perfect person to talk about all the nonsense that's happening right now in this market. You don't want to miss it. Let's go. Michael Flatley Riverdance on the like button. Just don't move your upper body, but get the feet and toes going really fast. You'll probably unlike it more times and you'll like it and break your computer, but go ahead and do it.

Anyways, as you know, sponsored by PrimeXBT. You can see that right down below in the description and I don't know, everywhere else. So please click on that and check them out. As I said, we are in the irrational euphoria phase of a very small move in the crypto market. Still, I don't know, like 67, 68, 75, 43. I don't know. A lot of percent down from the 69,000 all-time high.

But reading through the comments and through Twitter, man, you'd think we were just on the precipice of breaking 100K. Right there, guys. 99,990. When's it gonna go and so to unpack a bit of this uh utilizing obviously the superior data from the tie and his uh superior brain i've got today's guest joshua frank what's up man how are you you must have the wrong person you brought the person on with the inferior brain but i'll try my best it's 68.9% down Bitcoin is from its all-time high. So just perfectly 69% down, which is just the epitome. Are we exactly 69, 420?

We're basically exactly 69% down from the all-time high, which is the, you know, epitomizes crypto. Oh, and by the way, we're 69% down from an all-time high of 69. Yes, exactly. Exactly. So basically we should just stay here, trade here forever, pack it in. We are going to stay between that 17 and 18 K back and we have seen it return to some degree. And listen, I do want to talk about the Bitcoin bull run for how long, which is the title here. But first, I want to get your take on a few stories. First being Three Arrows Capital alongside basically insolvent exchange CoinFlex, who apparently gave like $ million dollars to roger veer who didn't uh who didn't pay them back maybe mark from uh coin flex is the third arrow i don't know but

all three of those arrows are back together now to start an exchange for people to trade claims some of which could be against three hours capital for all i know but claims that are result of three hours capital i gave the example yesterday that's like like Kyle and Suzu showed up, robbed a house and then put on suits the next day and went to sell security systems at the same houses. I mean, it's unbelievable. Or they were the auctioneers on the assets they stole, right? So I mean, what do you make of this? Well, so I think there's two things to separate out.

First, I actually think the idea of selling FTX claims is a good idea. Yeah. I do not think that they are the people to do it. And I think that they deserve to be in jail. So those are two distinct claims, right? I think that they are absolute frauds. I think that, you know, it's very clear that unsecured lending was the worst thing to happen to crypto.

I mean, it also happened to CoinFlex, right? They lent money to Roger Ver. It's almost as if they partnered with somebody in a way like Roger Ver, right? I'm not saying Roger is anywhere near as bad a person as these guys are, though I think he did get sent to jail for selling dynamite on the internet, you know, about 10 years ago. Yeah, but it was like chill dynamite. Yeah, it was chill dynamite. Yeah internet um you know about 10 years ago but it was like chill dynamite yeah it was chill dynamite yeah it's fine um but you know it's it's almost as if i mean it doesn't

make any sense i i just hope no one funds this thing i sincerely hope like please it is such a this it's just such a bad look for crypto like we need we a way, needed all of this nonsense to wash out bad market participants, bad players. And the last thing that we need is those bad market participants getting funded. An example of which being Ra's al Khan, the infamous crypto rapper who- Do you have a story? Where's that story? It's in the New York Post today, right? Oh, of course it's there. Dude, you got to share your screen. It's unbelievable if you've got it. But just share itx hack in 2016, became a, dare I say, horrendous crypto rapper. I think your comp, Richard Kaplan iteration is the worst. I don't think I've ever heard of a good crypto rapper though.

But she is like, if there is a kind of a um a range of crypto rappers i think she's at the bottom um we are not going to show or i hope we don't show arousal con video but apparently um she is now um basically um i think she is uh under house arrest and she has now gotten a job from an unnamed crypto company so maybe she has a job with suzu and kyle who knows i mean maybe she's part of that you know who So maybe she has a job with Suzu and Kyle. Who knows? I mean, maybe she's part of that, you know. Who would give this person a job? I just love it.

It can't be real. Look at this. Yeah. What do they got back there? I don't know. In their cabinets. I don't understand. Yeah, she's the Versace Bedouin.

Somehow embezzled like over $3 billion and was trying to move it. What are we doing here? And I really, being more serious, to your point, these people were washed out. Like as bad as that was for everybody losing money and for the damage it did to the industry, sooner than later is better, right? We wanted SBF gone before they could hurt more people, all of these. It's sad, but it happened. But if we let them back in, we deserve every ounce of this bear market. Imagine like this is the Trump organization playbook is like go bankrupt and then raise money for another business and never pay back the bankruptcy from before. But like,

we're going to raise millions of dollars when they open. I mean, this is even worse because this is clear fraud, right? I mean, it's very clearly that they just like, I mean, I'm sure you remember the document that Sue and Kyle wrote, which is like, we have $12 billion signed by themselves on a one page sheet of paper that they gave to all the different lenders, basically. Isn't that like a DCG bailing out Genesis and the loan needs to be paid back in 2032 or something? Oh, with 1% interest. Yeah, it's a promissory note. Yeah. And then Genesis turning around and giving people... There were some confirmation emails from Genesis being like, no, we have the cash, the loans are in the door, right? Where it's, you know, that's very different than a 10 year promissory note. So yeah, it's, it's, yeah, look, I think, hopefully, there's still more pain to come. I think it's really unreasonable to think that there's not more pain to come. And we can talk about the bull market and where prices

are. And prices and pain don't need to be mutually exclusive necessarily. But I think that, you know, there's still definitely more pain to come from this mess. But hopefully those that suffer pain leave the market. There were a lot of really bad market bar estimates in players in 2017. You know, there was just so much stupidity. I mean, you know, my favorite example is Long Island Ice Tea rebranding as Long Island Blockchain Company. Kodak, you know, a dying 100 plus year old company launching a Bitcoin miner. Right. And all of this kind of stupidity, which eventually, you know, kind of washed out.

But, you know, one of the things that frustrates me and actually, you know, was looking at this the other day, like MoviePass is coming back as a crypto company. That was a dead business idea. Somebody brought back Napster as a crypto company. RadioShack is coming back as a crypto company. Like we can't be associated with dead, well-known, but dead brands coming back or thinking that crypto can reinvigorate their businesses. We need to, you know, this industry needs to move forward because of actual real innovation, real product, exciting use cases, where people are actually using the technology to make their lives in some way better, not bringing back Napster and MoviePass, which is a trend that continues, unfortunately, to happen, which I'm hoping the change in market situation eliminates some of that stupidity. Yeah. I mean, Juicified here says, what's next, Bed Bath & Blockchain? and blockchain. I would have called it block. I love that. That's awesome. Block,

bath and beyond. I would have gone with maybe, but although I guess, you know, get the full blockchain bit bath and blockchain, I don't know. But so let's talk about the market though, right? Obviously I'm seeing some volatility today with PPI, I think probably the reason. And you know, I'm seeing volatility here on the five-minute. Look, I've got the Thai terminal pulled up. This is what I use literally all day, every day. For those of you, Josh actually created a real thing here with Superior Data. But it defaults to the five-minute chart.

You can see we've had crazy volatility basically since the stock market opened. When was the PP up? Was that 9 a.m. or When was the PPI? Was that 9am? Or that was 830? I think it came out at 830. But this is the market, you know, right when the market opened, basically, we're seeing insane volatility, once again, insane being like from 21.6 down to 21.3. But it looks like at least on that chart, but, you know, it seems like with PPI cooling, and that's really kind of a core inflationary measure, that maybe the Fed doesn't really have a leg to stand on here anymore. At least that's what a lot

of the pundits are saying, that this is deflationary, disinflationary, whichever you want to say. Inflation is over, pack it in, let's go. But does that mean that Bitcoin will continue up? I mean, what are you seeing in the market right now? Yeah, so look, I think there's a few things. I think, you know, one thing to note is that most of the Bitcoin, you know, basically there was one large purchaser on Binance who was trading BUSD for Bitcoin, which started to drive price up.

And then we actually saw the most future shorts liquidated since July 2021 on that one day when Bitcoin ran up to 21,000. So it was kind of a very heavy short squeeze in a way with one big buyer. And I think that's just worth noting, right? It's not like there were 50 people out there, 100 people out there buying. One person came out and bought. It liquidated a lot of people. You need to have a lot of buyers for a bull market to continue. And the question is, where are those buyers going to come from and who has fresh cash? I did see a nice news story

yesterday, which is a crypto fund, which I actually hadn't heard of called Hashkey Capital. I don't know if you saw that news story. Raised about $500 million for a new fund yesterday, which is promising. I also saw another news story, which was on Sequoia. They apparently had raised a $700 or $800 million crypto fund. They were only about 10% deployed, which means they have $600, $700 million in cash. I've spoken to a number of other crypto funds that still have cash. So I think there's a couple of things, right? For crypto to continue up, you need to have a retail bid and you need to have an institutional bid, right? Generally, the retail bid is what has attracted the institutions into the space. And so the

question is, where does retail buying come from? Like right now, we're in a situation where I don't think the average person necessarily has so much fresh, dry powder and capital to invest in the market yet, just because the Fed isn't going to continue to raise rates doesn't mean that people have dry powder to continue to invest. I mean, I ask you listeners, how much cash are you guys sitting on, right, where you're kind of ready to deploy into the market? And then the second thing is institutions, right, and investors that have very large piles of capital, right, and that capital, you know, they need to raise that capital. And we're in a world where, you know, the folks that are investing in crypto funds, you know, primarily, you know, your allocators.

Right. You know, endowments and pensions and sovereign wealth funds. Right. They're a lot tighter. They're kind of waiting to see what happens with the Fed, what continues to happen from a macro environment. You know, I've spoken to a lot of allocators that have just stopped investing in crypto funds. And I think crypto funds are having a very difficult time raising capital. So I think there are funds that already have capital, right? And that capital will be deployed. But I think it is harder for them to raise new capital. And I think we need to get to, I think the macro situation in part actually matters for

how easy is it for crypto funds to raise capital, especially venture funds, you know, who are just buyers, right? They're not buying and selling for the most part, right? How easy is it for them to raise, you know, kind of outside capital? So I think we're in kind of a wait and see mode there. You know, I think at the end of the year, we probably had a little bit more forced selling than we had to. I think the biggest thing being tax loss harvesting, I'm sure a lot of listeners sold their positions that they were down a large amount on to, you know, kind of harvest their losses, which is a good thing because, you know, people are not going to be tax loss harvesting now. Right. They might be at come in, right? Future shorts liquidated. But I think the question is, how fast do we move as well? Because I think if we move fast, even if it's

from a few buyers, that's a really good thing because that puts firms in a much stronger capital position. If you think about it, DCG is actually fine if Bitcoin's price is at 50 or 60K, right? And I'm not- Totally fine. Right. And I'm not suggesting that we're going to get there, but if price happens to move fast enough, we can actually solve a lot of underlying existential risks to the industry. Like if price continues to move up, miners can be fine, right? And then all of a sudden you don't have miners being forced to liquidate all their Bitcoin, right? You don't have them not paying back their lenders, right?

So I think it also just depends on like, if the market moves fast enough, we could actually enter another bull market, but we would need to move really fast. The market is the bailout. I mean, I've read people, it's controversial, but that actually miners have ceased to lose now at this price.

Between 21 and 22, there is some profitability for miners already. So you can imagine if price went up much further from here. But what you're saying, though, is that this move is probably just some massive whale trader, and this is what I think too, who saw the opportunity with massive open interest on shorts to just squeeze the hell out of them and push price up and make a whole lot of money. Yeah, yeah. I mean, or somebody who looks at this as a good entry point. Right. I mean, I think, look, if you guys that are listening have been into crypto for a while. Right. We're now 69 percent down from Bitcoin's all time high. Right. If you're a believer in Bitcoin at 65K, why are you not a believer of Bitcoin at 21K,

let alone at 17K, right? I think it just depends on your investment horizon. Like to me, if I'm a long-term investor and I believe in crypto, I believe in the underlying technology, right? Even today is still a good entry point. Yes, Bitcoin could drop to 10K, it could drop to 15K. But if in the long run, you think that Bitcoin should be worth, you know, $2 trillion as an asset or whatever the number is, right, you should still be a buyer at this price point. And I think, you know, there are wealthy folks in the market that are still looking at crypto and are excited. I mean, I spoke to a really large US-based family office last week. And they're like, yeah, we're going to go buy $100 million worth of Bitcoin in ETH. Like, it's not a big position for us. But, you know, we have some conviction in the asset class.

So, you know, we'll put a couple of chips in, right? You don't need that many people to move the needle, especially in this market now, which, you know, obviously volumes have picked up quite a bit, but volumes dropped off, you know, drastically. Well, listen, I have your screener right here. This is coins, you know coins by market cap one through 912. And so my favorite metrics that I like to use here when you walked me through this, relative trade volume and relative tweet volume. We basically hear relative trade volume, relative tweet.

So it shows us over, I guess, against the average of the last 30 days, how much we're up. What I find interesting is we do have that one $5 billion buyer or whatever it was, but we're seeing massive increases in trade volume. And these numbers were bigger, by the way, until three or four days ago, you know, before we started to start to cool off. But like even, you know, Shiba Inu up 474 percent.

I want to talk Shiba Inu, actually. Well, we can talk Shiba Inu right there. I just want to make the point that so that is bringing someone in like that, that even if it's just one buyer pushing Bitcoin, it is bringing traders and interest into other coins and to the market in general, because they're also seeing the benefit of this other things, too, that's going to be a catalyst for this bull market as well. And it's something I forgot to mention earlier. I spoke with one of the five largest hedge funds in the world last week. And they are like, we are ready to go in crypto. We have all of our ducks in a row. We have a compliance team. We have a legal team.

We have the traders, everything. All we need to see is no stupidity for a few weeks. They're like, we just need to see. Oh, good. Let's send them Rosalcon. Yeah. Well, yeah, I'm hoping they're not listening to this, but they're like, look,

we just need to be able to monitor and get alerted when there's stupidity, right? And have processes and procedures in place. But also we need to, you know, we just need to see the market kind of stay sane, right? Because, I mean, I think it's worth noting that there's like, there are a lot of, there's a lot of interest on the sideline. I know from talking to one of the largest crypto exchanges that they've onboarded 76 of the top 100 crypto hedge funds as clients.

76%. All of the public, like, you know, surveys that you see and everything, the numbers are nowhere near that high. But I know for a fact that they've onboarded 76 clients, it's probably that a lot of them aren't talking about that publicly. Right. So there are. Because they got washed out of FTX. Well, yeah, some of them might not be there anymore. But the point being is at some point in the last two years, they've onboarded, they've expressed some interest in crypto. Right. And so, yeah, I mean, you know, there are buyers that those buyers tend to be more

institutional. I mean, if you look at, you know, social conversations and, you know, I could pull a chart up if you guys want, but like social conversations on these different asset classes, they're definitely going down, which to me means, you know, it's not really retail activity. If, if, you know, the number of people are talking about these assets are going down. But one thing that a lot of people are talking about is Shiba Inu, which is launching, is now a layer or two on Ethereum, apparently. And I guess the second biggest one behind Polygon, naturally. I don't have any comments.

I'm curious if you have any. Does that mean that Shiba Inu is actually real now? Like, did it meme its way into relevance, like into actual utility? I think that that's what they're trying to do. But I mean, that's also... Yeah. I mean, there was a tweet about it the other day. I think it was a top news story.

Let me see if I can find it. Yeah, I mean, it's here somewhere. I mean, I saw something about it, but I'm so dismissive of meme coin news that I just didn't get my clue. It is the most tweeted about news story in crypto over the last hour. The last hour? Wow. Okay, well done. It's...

See what you got. Can I bring your screen up? We good? Oh, yeah. Go for it. Go for it. Dude, your terminal looked much more robust than mine. Yeah. Well, here's the news story. Shiba Inu traders are in FOMO mode with the Shibarium launch. Yeah,

I don't know. So remember that top five hedge fund that you were talking about that didn't want to see any stupidity? Yeah. Yeah. What do you think they think of Shibarium? Look, I think on the other hand, though, you know, stupidity can be good if it begets volatility because volatility creates opportunity. Right. At the end of the day, you know, for institutions to get interested. Right.

They just need to see that there's a lot of volatility. There's a lot of trading opportunities. Right. Whether that's up or down, it doesn't necessarily matter. Right. Like, you know, if you're if you're a large market maker, you just care that there's a lot of people trading, you don't care if prices are moving up or down. So, you know, I think the concern is more like under collateralized lending in things that create existential risk for the market, because as much as this Shibarium thing might be a meme and might be a joke, and there might not be any real activity, hopefully, it's not causing harm to others. And I think the biggest thing is existential risk. And it is avoidable to not

buy into that asset if you want to avoid it. And I'm not saying anything positive or negative towards that individual asset. How dare you? But yeah. Okay. So first of all, I want to ask you, you talked about one of the top five hedge funds. I'm going to roll my dice. You're not going to tell me. I'm going to say 0.72. I'm just going to roll my dice and say that's who it is because I keep hearing these rumblings. But do you think that they're coming in actively to trade and buy these assets? Or I've sort of made the point that I would not be surprised to see

them raise massive distressed asset funds and just come in and sweep the floor with our entire industry. So in some cases, these funds have multiple different legal entities that are doing multiple different things. So I know of one of the largest funds in the market has a distressed asset fund

that is going to be doing crypto with almost a billion dollars dollars has a venture fund, has a quantitative fund and has the hedge fund touching crypto as an example. So there are, and there are more. 0.75, 0.76. I'm not, I'm not, I'm not saying. It's my guess because I know Stevie Cohen loves this shit, but yeah. It's not, it's not just one fund.

There are a number of different funds in the market. And they're also, you know, there are a number of funds. Like I spoke to another, another 60, $70 billion fund or 50 billion, whatever the number is the other day. And all of the senior executives are trading crypto PA and they're just like with their personal accounts and they're just like getting ready to they're like getting ready. They're just trying to get the legal paperwork and everything in place. So but it's a really big mix.

I mean, you know, I think I think it's public that Apollo raised a crypto fund. I don't know. Hopefully that's public. I think it's public. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, so like I mean, you know, there's, you know, like guys like Apollo that are massive asset managers, right? You know, BlackRock has a Bitcoin fund that no one talks about, right? Like where they make it easy for institutions to buy Bitcoin, right? So there is- That was a blip in the news, that was a blip in the news like two months ago.

Yeah, Yeah. I mean, and, and, and, and, you know, meanwhile, you know you know, the, the, the news wants to cover the FTX the, the, the three arrows FTX resurgence, but yeah, I mean, I think, I think the thing that I feel best about is the fact that the institutional interest isn't waning. Right. And so as we think about the bull market coming back, it might have slowed. There might be less allocators looking to allocate, but at the end of the day, it's clear that people are taking crypto seriously. Another news story that you might have missed is Sockgen, Societe Generale, just basically lent DAI through SockGen Forge to SockGen. And that's one of the largest French banks interacting with DAI. They're not interacting with USDC. They're not interacting with JP Morgan coin. They're interfacing with DAI, which is really interesting. I think that's

something that is probably getting missed in the news. That's a French bank. I mean, you know, European, you know, European institutions tend to be significantly more cautious than those in the United States, right? And to show that movement, I think is really exciting. So I think, you know, the question just becomes throughout all of this, which I always bring up is what are the use cases, right? DAI is still a, is an algorithmic stable coin, but it is still a stable coin, right? And so the question becomes, all right, it's very clear that stable coins work. There are a lot of people that are interested in stable coins, right? But what is kind of, for this asset class to survive into the future, there needs to be something that we use. And the question is, what is that something? Stable coins.

Other than stable coins. I'm hoping that there's... That's just be our killer app and we move on. But so, yeah, as I pointed out in the screener, we've obviously had this sort of Bitcoin bull market, the push, but that's been followed by some sectors, I guess we'll say, or different things. We had our DeFi summer when we were farming taco yams, and we have, of course, NFT summer. Facebook rebrands as Meta, and all of a sudden, everything named Metaverse goes up 400%. Well, now we have ChatGPT with AI changing the world. And once again, we're seeing a trend of everything AI-related in crypto for no apparent rational reason pumping like that. Yeah. I mean, this one is pretty bad. I mean, one of the ones that has done really well is SingularityNet. And I'm not trying to call these guys out particularly, but I think there are a

lot of them. There are a lot of projects that are like 2017, 2018 projects that have just not had, and I'm going to share my screen here, Scott, that have just not had, and I'm going to share my screen here, Scott, that have just not had any activity. I mean, if you look at this just for perspective, this is the number of commit counts for developers. It's not that we're missing data, it's that there's no data. No one is working on this project right now. I mean, there hasn't been a development. I mean, there are like a couple of commits or individual things that are happening, but there hasn't really been a development push since October 8th, 2021. And this thing is, if we look at market data, like it is outperformed ETH by 227% over the last 30 days, right? I mean, it's up 341%.

I think maybe they announced they're moving to Cardano. They actually just got one new developer in August 9th of 2022. So one person made a commit, but prior to that, they hadn't attracted a new developer since June of 2021. And they've been losing a lot of developers throughout the year. So I don't know, personally, if I'm investing in something for the long run, I want to invest in something that has at least one person building it, right? Like, you know, I don't think that's a crazy ask. So, I mean, you know- Do people know or care? I mean, this is just traders trading on a narrative, right?

But I mean, that's insane. There's literally nobody doing anything. I'm trying to like find the chart right now and it's pretty laughable. Well, I mean, there's nothing going on, right? I mean, it's just marketing, right? It's a facade. And that's the thing that I always complain about.

And that's why, you know, I think I've had, you know, a few people. AGIX. Yeah. Yeah. I think I've had a few people in your audience get mad at me before when I bring these things up where it's like, look, we need to be rational. Right. Like at some point, somebody needs to be building on these, building these things. Somebody needs to be using the thing. There needs to be an actual use case. Right. Just because it says AI, just like just because like Bed Bath and Blockchain, right? I love that. Yeah, there's the Long Island ICT blockchain company. Yeah. Right. Just because it's got AI in its name, right? I get it. It's a narrative. You can trade it, right? But you got

to be careful as an investor because I would not be surprised if this asset drops by 90 something percent. No one cared about this thing three weeks ago, right? Or until chat GPT started taking shape, right? But it's, you know, look, I mean, it's, but look on the upside, at least that's more reflective of what a bull marketing crypto looks like, right? Where you, you do see, you know, you kind of do see that just nonsensical movement. So I guess it's a little refreshing to see some of it come back. Can we, well, here's, I think maybe the most,

I mean, can we say that FET is one of the more legitimate AI projects in crypto? I mean, you know, I had a humane shake on the podcast at one point. It seemed like a really intelligent guy. That's moving like crazy too. I mean, just a couple, I guess it's weeks ago, but in November it was at 0.05.

Now it's at 0.27. I mean, we're talking about more than the 5X. Yeah. They have a couple of developers. They had, you know, between one and five working on the project for the last few months. What does actually have developers then? Is it just like ETH?

No, I mean, there's a lot of projects. Some Solana and Cardano. I mean, obviously, there's a lot of projects that do. Obviously, we have developer data on our platform, but also for anyone who doesn't have access to our platform, Electric Capital also just put out a really interesting report on developers. So anyone can access that report for free where they talk about it. But there are a large number of projects with a significant number of developers. If we look at from a layer one perspective, most of these layer one ecosystems actually do have quite a few Ethereum, Polygon, Cardano, Solana, Polkadot, Avalanche. Cosmos actually is an underratedly large development community,

which I don't think enough people are talking about. But yeah, I mean, there's still certainly a lot of developers, you know, working in this space. And I think, you know, I think Electric Capital did a really good job at making the case. So I definitely recommend checking that out. I give them a lot of credit. Yeah, I have a, I don't know if this is the,

I know it's embedded in the media. Yeah, well, that's last year's. There's a new one if you go to their Twitter. Look at me, man. I don't even know how to Google anymore. I stink. Anyways, yeah, you guys can probably Google it and use the Googler machine better than I can,

apparently, to figure that out. But so, I mean, is developer activity a really compelling driver of price or are we still just... Well, I'm not talking about developer activity necessarily as a price indicator in the short term. I like to think of developer activity more as a long-term indicator, but certainly like, I don't know, like I wouldn't want to invest in something that no one is improving or iterating or building on. Like imagine buying Apple stock in 2004, whenever they released the first iPhone, right. Or whatever the year was. Right. And you had the

same operating system since 2004, right? Like, like the product has gotten infinitely better over the last 20 years, even though seemingly the iPhone 27, 26, 25, and 32 all look exactly the same. Right. But, but like my point being is you need, you need to have developers, you need to have development improvement. But I think to your point on, on looking at, you know, kind of activity and volume, if we look at, you know, Uniswap from an on-chain usage perspective, we actually saw quite a bit of a bounce back in active users. So, you know, we were looking at about, you know, 82,000 users a week on Uniswap, which bounced back up last week to about 111,000 users. We just don't have a complete week of data yet here. But so seeing-

That's a big bump. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, almost a 40% increase in the number of people trading crypto last week. I think Uniswap is a pretty good indicator of the rest of the market. And also, you have 20,000 new wallets interacting with Uniswap for the first time. So we are seeing a little bit of a bump in activity after this. We kind of fell, obviously, in November. I think that's basically around when FTX collapsed. A lot of people were trading, right? A lot of people were active that, that fell off a cliff and, you know, we started to see a little bit of a bump here. So we'll see if that trend continues. Well, you and I were kind of joking. I remember when you're

in Vegas in October and we looked, I think at Uniswap version three or something, it was like 12 people are using this today. Yeah. It got really bad. It was getting bad. Well, that is the case for a lot of other assets. Yes. For almost every other asset other than Uniswap, to be honest. But yeah, I mean, it's interesting to see, you know, at least a quick bump in the number of people using DeFi. And we'll see if that trend continues a little bit as well. I mean, look, DeFi has a lot worse of a narrative when treasuries are yielding higher rates than DeFi is without any of the risk associated with interacting in DeFi.

I just noticed on here that, looking up here, we just hit a trillion market cap again. We're back, baby. Did we have three trillion at one point or what was the whole thing? I think it was over two. Over two. I think maybe 2.7. I think, yeah, I mean, I think we approached three,

which would make sense since we're down 69%, right? Well, 69% on Bitcoin, but presumably more on alt. So likely, yeah, likely. Yeah, so two thirds. Except for the likely, yeah, likely. Yeah, so it's going to be back in there. Except for crushing it, you know, so. I mean, yeah.

So, I mean, if you had to sort of predict, do you think that we could make a much bigger put? I think maybe we could go to like 28 or 30,000 here on Bitcoin, but I have to imagine there's going to be a retrace before that happens. And that would be really aggressive, but I just don't see a reason to believe that we're like back in a raging bull. Yeah.

I would be shocked if we moved to 30 K it would be the most undeserved 30 K ever. Like we don't deserve that. I think it would be a trading as a result of trading and short squeezing and just, I would, I could imagine us doing like the 30 and then back to like 16 thing.

Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, why don't we pull up like a, I mean, maybe you want to pull up like a 2019 price chart. I don't know if you remember this kind of really quick bull market summer in 2019 when Bitcoin ran up to 13K. I'll scroll out once I get a weekly chart. But yeah, oh yeah.

I mean, I'll never forget when we went to 14 in June and everybody thought we were going to 100 and then we went back below four. Yeah, yeah. It reminds me a little bit of that where you had a little bit of temporary exuberance, right? The market, yeah. I mean, the market had a quick run up for a couple of months.

This was actually on the back of Facebook launching. What was the what was their libra libra libra yeah this was facebook this was libra summer um and and i think you know you know we had this big bull bull run whatever a little bit undeserved libra wasn't working yet nothing was really happening there was not really much new interest and the whole market retraced. Yeah. And it's just, that was one of those like face melting bear market rallies that you get in every single bear market.

I mean, it went from three to 14 and then back down to four. It was slightly higher. It makes sense. The market naturally overcorrected, right? Like to think Solana deserved to be at like, what was it? What did it drop to? $7, $8, right? Yeah, I should have bought that shit. It was at $250 last year, right? And then it fell all the way to $7, right? It's not like, yes, FTX and Alameda were very involved and engaged with the Solana ecosystem, but like all of the arguments for Solana didn't change.

There was nothing underlying or fundamental about change, right? It just, it retraced a lot. And naturally it's going to bounce back. And that doesn't mean that it's going to exist for the next 30 years. And as the greatest technological invention in history, but it's, but I mean, markets, markets retrace it. Maybe it is right. I mean, I don't know.

I think at this point, it's very easy to say that it's very clear that Bitcoin and Ethereum are winners and everything else is kind of a question mark going into the future. I think everyone agrees with that. Miguel asks, what token is underrated and actually has users or developers? Is there anything that would be on your radar for something like that? Well, you just said Cosmos. I mean, kind of, right? Yeah, I mean, I think Cosmos. I mean, kind of, right? I mean, they have... Yeah, I mean, I think Cosmos is definitely interesting.

I mean, there's a lot of chains that are built on top of Cosmos. I believe BNB is built on top of Cosmos. Terra was built on top of Cosmos. Yeah. We don't talk about Luna. Yeah, but I mean, everything that I hear from developers, people are very excited about Cosmos. That doesn't mean, though, that the token economics of Cosmos are good. And I think that's something that we need to.

Oh, my God. A project, a project, a technology can be great. The token can go to zero. Yes. Yeah. And I think that's the thing we need to talk about, right? Like Uniswap has users. But right now, as a holder of Uniswap tokens, you are not yet entitled or you are not at all entitled.

You're not capturing that. Any of the revenue, right? At least with Sushi, if you stake Sushi for X, sorry, if you get X Sushi and you stake that, you're entitled to, for 30 basis points of trading fees, five basis points, right? But so at least as a SushiSwap holder, you can accrue some of the value of people trading on SushiSwap. But with Uniswap, like we're not yet at the point and that might change. Right. And things can change. That's why you need to monitor governance proposals. But like right now, as a holder of Uniswap, you're not entitled to any monetary value from the appreciation of the token.

And there's not really a particular utility. Right. I think this whole idea of just like governance voting rights on something, I don't really know how much that's worth. Like if you're a shareholder in a public company, you might want governance rights because then that impacts the shares that you're holding, right? I mean, the only thing with governance, you know, obviously having governance votes, you can then change the token economics theoretically on a token, presuming that it's not controlled by, you know, one or two centralized entities. And I don't know if you saw this morning, you know, some data came out, I think saying that 99% of Serum was held by Alameda and 99.97% of, I forgot, Max or Oxy or one of these other. One of those, yeah. God, so brutal. Someone asked here, I know the answer,

but I'll let you ask. Ian asks, is this dashboard free? It's very much not free. Unfortunately not, but there are a lot of great free resources out there. And Scott, I don't know if you want to add anything, but. That's right. Listen, it's not free

and it's actually only available to institutions. And now you're hinting at, and this is not something we've ever discussed publicly, but we are actually I'm working on something. Josh and I are working on something together, which is basically a another newsletter that would give daily updates utilizing all of this without you having to look at the dashboard. But, you know, top 10 story, everything basically you saw on my screen. But, you know, like what's happening, each sector, what coins are trending, the relative tweet volumes, these things, and like a heavy news feed just to give people that update.

Completely basically like AI generated and without our opinions, just really the data very straightforward on a daily basis because this isn't available to normal humans. I am very lucky to have access to it. Since I have, it's changed definitely. It's made my life incredibly easier, especially when I'm trying to report on the news and stay on top of the market. And often I'll pull up a story that hits right as I'm streaming or something, utilizing it. I mean, it's basically like a very impressive version of Bloomberg for crypto, But we are working on something like that.

And actually that reminds me that I owe you guys a draft. We do. But yes, we are releasing an accessible version to all of Scott's listeners. So not an institutional price point, not difficult. You know, and also this is, there's a lot here it can be difficult to use, but we are working on a more accessible version

so that everyone can have access to a lot of the same data and insights that Scott uses every single day on the show. Yeah, and I had no intention of discussing that today. No, I didn't either. I showed the dashboard because in context of what we're doing here, it's very easy. And Francine says, I think retail needs these tools that will level the playing field. Yeah, you guys have no idea how useful this is, even for just staying on top and getting a gauge of how impactful any piece of news actually is. Even just for that, to me is so like compelling.

It's really amazing. Rosal Khan is trending. Yeah. Look here. I'm going to find, I know the Rosal Khan story is going to be right here. This is the trending news. There she is. Rosalcon, 12 tweets in the last hour, New York post RSS going down. There's the ship with 37 tweets in the last hour. It will be, it will be more than, it will be more than 12. It'll be 13 when I get off and retweet that Rosalcon story.

Oh, I'm going to, I'm tweeting the shit out of that. So you get there first. And 14, uh, Sly says, thank you scott and joshua that would help a lot yeah i mean we just want to give people access to listen josh walked me through this thing what do we have literally three meetings this is before we were even building something you just wanted to show it to me i mean and i can't even begin to for a second. If you gave this to anyone, myself included, and just said run, you would never be able to use it ever. The amount of data, the amount of ways you can compare different things.

You can literally compare the most seemingly unrelated metrics, coins, assets in any granular way possible. I mean, I'm sure institutions have like have 10 dudes at their fund who like look at this all day. I'm using like the most basic bitch aspect at the like predetermined screeners,

but it really is. It's really incredible. I appreciate it, Scott. Yeah. Anyways, that's what I got. And I kept you two minutes over time. I'm very sorry. That's all good.

Thanks for having me. I'm always happy to come on and talk about stupidity in crypto. It's my favorite topic. But we're getting a little less stupid, I think. We are. I really do think that the evolution of our conversation, since it's been through the bear market, is actually showing a bit of maturity and giving me a bit of hope. So I'll take it.

I'm cautiously optimistic. And I think that I am, as well as everyone in crypto, in a significantly better mental state as it relates to the market than I was three or four months ago. I mean, look, we thought FTX was potentially existential, and it's not. It's not. Yeah, price is higher than when we went down before it in the first place, which I find absolutely incredible. Well, you're obviously welcome back anytime. Maybe we'll have some, and I'm just going to call you anytime I see really stupid stories pop up.

Please do. I'm always happy to talk about it. I know, it's your favorite thing. And Josh always gives sort of the caveat. He's like, yeah, I like, we, the two of us like to banter about this and kind of make fun of the industry, but we're probably both like more heavily invested our net worth in crypto. So it's tongue in cheek a bit because we do believe. Oh, I, I, yeah, I'm more than 99% of my liquid and illiquid net worth is tied to crypto. So if, if that says anything, right, it's, it's,

I do believe in this industry. I think that there are an incredibly large number of very intelligent people working on it, working on great solutions. I think there are things that crypto does that are better than any other asset class. I think the one thing I always come back to is stable coins. But I think there's a tremendous amount of interest in the asset class. There are institutions moving in. There are intelligent people working on it. So I am bullish in the long run, right? I mean, at the end of the day, if you have a large number of very intelligent people move into a space and start working on it, they will find really interesting technologies and tools and solutions. So I am bullish, but that doesn't take away from all the stupidity that exists in this market. Yeah, at all.

And literally, like, as we're talking, I saw Drew's fight over here. So U.S. Justice Department, we are about to announce a global cryptocurrency enforcement action. And it literally like hit your screener just now. Yeah. So that's going to be an interesting story worth reporting on. But we'll save that one for Friday. Guys, I got to let Josh go. Tomorrow, I have Jeff Garzik and Matthew Rozak,

who are two of like the more mind blowing billionaires you'll find in the space. So that's going to be an incredible conversation. Can't wait to have them, Josh. Thank you. Once again, everybody else,

I will see you tomorrow. Peace. Let's go.