The Wolf Of All Streets - Bitcoin CRASH, GREED Sentiment, SEC, ETFs & MORE! | Crypto Town Hall

Episode Date: March 20, 2024

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Hey, Joe, I missed the alpha show last night for the first time. I still plan to watch it. I'm sad, but L1's ready to rotate, man. What's that all about? Maybe before we get everyone on stage, you can give me a summary of what you're seeing and what you're thinking there. You missed the first one you missed, huh? Yeah, they're watching them all. I appreciate that. It is on my channel after all. the first one you missed huh um yeah they're watching them off i appreciate that yeah it is

on my channel after all uh yeah we need those watch minutes um yeah no things you know was looking at the market yesterday as bitcoin was really down and you know there were a couple of l1s that were up and it wasn't like they were up a percent or two they were up eight to ten percent aptos was one stacks was one and so it was just kind of watching those throughout the day yesterday and then as bitcoin started to you know kind of move up a little bit the rest of the l1 started to push up you know phantom was up there um starkware so like you know i think we're starting to kind of see a little bit of activity kind of coming back in there. And really, the other coins that were up in the top alt rank were obviously it was the meme coins.

They're still pushing. But the one thing that I'm seeing right now is that as soon as an L1 goes and there's kind of a sustained push higher, then it seems like the community just wants to launch meme coins out of that, whatever L1 is doing well. That's where we are right now. So yeah, that was what I was seeing yesterday. And so eyes on the market today with FOMC and with Bitcoin. And now it's my job to go figure out where the correlation is between the interest rates and things like cock Inu.

Obviously, CumRocket, Sonic, Bitcoin, Inu, Face, Peace, Coin. We're doing a meme coin spaces tomorrow. So, Joe, you got to show up for that. For sure. We're going to have a bunch of memesters on here. That should be interesting. Always my laughably, the ones I laugh at and kind of suffer through. But it should be interesting. I pinned the show from last night. If you guys don't know, Mario and I have teamed up to build a new content together.

And Joe is the first new host on my YouTube channel outside of myself. He does a show at 9pm Eastern Standard Time every night. Interestingly, Joe, Joe, you talked about stacks going up. You talked about Aptos going up. I've noticed Solana actually hasn't bounced as hard as a lot of others, which I think a lot of people would have expected, you know, had this move kind of up to over 200, like 209, the bottom did like one 62 and now at one 72. I noticed today though, the ETH has bounced more. ETH has bounced more. I think Bitcoin's

like 5% off the lows, Solana less. ETH is 10%, I think, off the lows right now. Does that surprise you? No, not at all. I mean, I think some of Solana has run up more than others. And so it's going to just have a little bit more of a break in there of what's going on. But Ethereum, it just seems like it's at some point here, it's going to be the ETH party and Bitcoin is going to take a little break and have like one of these many corrections and it's just going to run. It's just, I mean, it's got the OG L1 attitude and the community's there. They're building all sorts of things. There's still tons of meme coins and other things being built there. So at some point, it will really, I think it's really going to push on one of these breaks that happen.

So I think you're right. It's like the old lady on the Titanic for me at this point, like standing on the back of the meme. It's been 84 years. Yeah, it's like it literally feels like waiting for the ETH that I've been sort of bullish on for as long as I have to finally catch up and make it smooth like it has in previous cycles. But I do believe it will. Mario, you're here and there's some news. Did you see this BlackRock news by the way, since we're talking about Ethereum? No, I'm trying to read the agenda now.

Yeah. I don't know if it's on there, but this was huge news. Nobody's talking about it. BlackRock creates fund with securitize a big player in real world asset tokenization for those who didn't see this, they filed, this is on Ethereum. They are filing with the sec. It's called BUIDL build, right? But like with the huddle sort of mentality. So they've used a BlackRock, cause use a full on crypto meme and terminology to name it. And they've already this is to tokenize real world assets.

And they've already seeded it with one hundred million dollars on Ethereum. And Ethereum doesn't. I mean, maybe that's why Ethereum is bouncing slightly more today. I don't know, because it seems like the market is now sort of pricing down in Ethereum spot ETF approval. I had actually just this morning on YouTube, I had both Balchunis and James Seifert, who I like to call the LeBron and Jordan of ETFs because, and I actually asked them if they had ETF groupies at this point, but they begrudgingly decided not to, not to answer because they're such celebrities now,

but they both said they're now at like 35% on this Ethereum spot ETF approval and dropping, right? They were over 50%. What was it before? Okay. Over 50%, you know, the kind of we've had the argument over and over again that it would get approved because it's sort of the same path as the Bitcoin spot ETF. You know, futures were approved and the same arguments, but they're starting to think that they haven't seen the SEC engaging. You know, they have obviously, they said that they talked to people directly.

At this point, we're 61 days away, I think you said, from that date that everybody's been pointing at in May for VanEck and the SEC hasn't engaged with any of them. So this is reminiscent of those months and years before the Bitcoin spot ETF became even a glimmer of hope, when the SEC was just kicking him down the road and rejecting and not even mentioning him. And they said within 60 days, they should see at least some movement, you know. And to that end, what we have seen is that a lot of the issuers, I think Fidelity yesterday, Franklin Templeton before ARK have added

language saying that they would like to do staking within the Ethereum spot ETF. And I think a lot of people view that as bullish, which I think it is long term. But to me, and I pointed this out, and these guys agreed, seems like a capitulation that these things may not get approved because adding staking makes it definitively different than the Bitcoin spot ETFs that were approved. And so maybe this is positioning for further down the road when Gensler is gone or something like that, or for approval further down. And those guys also, Juan, you're here. They pointed out, they were like, Bitwise hasn't even filed for an Ethereum spot ETF yet. So they must be super derished on the idea. That's what Valtrudes actually said on the show this morning. So maybe the hype around Ethereum spot ETF is diminishing.

But yeah, I don't know. Jeff, you're here. We've got all the Bitwisers here as usual, Jeff and Vaughn. I mean, you guys have not filed for one, correct? Yeah, that's correct. We have not filed for one, though we've obviously been actively working towards it. And a lot of the things that you have raised are truly important, valid dynamics around this product that's fundamentally different than the Bitcoin ETF.

And so this is not new for us in having explored the bounds of what is possible in product development. And I think we are approaching it fairly cautiously. And I think staking does really introduce a lot of new dynamics that make the total return aspect of ETH different than Bitcoin. And as you know, staking is not a process in which you can seek daily liquidity. There's a certain cool- down period associated with that. So the gap risk in managing a daily liquidity product like an ETF with some asset liability construct, if you were to directly stake ETH, introduces new variables that hasn't been fully, fully explored yet.

There are different ways I think people are being strategic about navigating that, but it does ultimately go back to the complexity behind the current administration's ability to work through these problems with us. That makes perfect sense. I wanted to ask about the outflows yesterday. No one's talking about this. So is that, Juan, what do you make of this? So we were talking about how the ETFs will react to massive corrections. We're talking about bull market now, everyone's FOMOing in, but when we see 5%, 10% corrections, will ETFs start selling?

And will the opposite of what we've seen over the last few months happen? Have you got an answer before? Because I asked. Yeah, well, I can answer that only because I asked that exact question to Val Tunis and James Seifert. And once again, if you take a deeper dive than what you're seeing on X or by a bunch of crypto people, it's not really what you think it is. So we had 326 million in net outflows yesterday.

That was the largest day of net outflows that we've seen. But Eric was quick to point out that I believe it was over 600 million one of those two days. But either way, we've had two massive days, again, of outflows, specifically from GBTC. And everybody else still saw inflows even on these massive down days for crypto. So I think I've been had 72 million, something like that yesterday. So I don't think people realize yesterday was the worst Bitcoin sell off since the FTX collapse in November of 2022. So it cannot be understated how much it actually dropped. I think that was in Coindesk or something today. Yesterday was the last few days have been really, really brutal. Just with the velocity that had happened within a very short period of time.

And to Eric's point, he's like, you're still actually seeing influx. He's like, so there may be, I asked like, is there a reason that GBTC would have seen an acceleration? They couldn't point to anything specifically in the past when we've seen those massive days from GBTC, it's been like FTX approved to sell a billion. And then you find out a week later, right? Something like that. We all know that there's massive exposure to GBTC for a lot of these bankruptcies. Maybe Andrew can talk about, like to talk about that a lot,

but I guess the point was it's $326 million in outflows, but it's all GBTC and nobody's buying GBTC. There are no inflows, as he said, to GBTC. So actually, if you take GBTC out, people were still buying on the bloody days. Yeah, but then Juan, I'll go to Andrew as well. But just the next question, would we see outflows pretty much instantly as the markets collapse? If the markets go 10%, 15% within a 48-hour period, will the ETFs respond pretty much instantly? Or it will be more lagging? Juan, I'm not sure if you can take that one.

Oh, sure. Yeah, I can step up. Yeah, well, I think you could definitely see some instant reactions in terms of people selling and then those outflows translating on the day to the sales. We have seen a significant amount of the initial demand into the ETFs from retail traders and individuals. So, you know, those are people that are less long term focused generally. And so they could they could very well sell. But if they just got in recently, I imagine that unless they really are very short term oriented or just like using it as a very short term trading vehicle that many, many will stay for the longer term. Now, we've seen also flows from institutional players, independent RIAs, some hedge funds that are longer term capital.

Well, hedge funds not necessarily, but independent RIAs are. So I wouldn't expect a large amount of selling on corrections like these. I mean, if we look at it, last week was the latest all-time highs at almost 74,000. It was also the biggest week, biggest day and biggest week of inflows for the ETFs. They surpassed 1 billion on one of the days. And then for the week, it was 2.6 billion in inflows, which was the biggest week since launch. Now, there was a correction that from what I've looked at is, is being driven by some, some short-term profit taking as well as liquidations clearing out leverage

positions. And, you know, that has a cascading effect. And now this week with that, we're seeing the first week of, of sustained outflows, the, you know, last Monday and yesterday were two days of outflows. We're now at 4, 480 million 480 million in net outflows for the week as the price is under pressure. So I think it's just normal dynamics that are now being exacerbated by the ETFs. But they're normal bull cycle dynamics where you see, you know, all time highs and then you see a pullback and a consolidation in the price before it climbs higher again. And we're also moving up, we're also bumping up to the Bitcoin halving. And traditionally in past cycles, Bitcoin has tended to outperform after the halving. And so I wouldn't be surprised, especially with the run that Bitcoin has had this year, we're still up 42% this year, to take a breather here and see some consolidation coming into having before moving higher.

In the past two days, we've seen almost one point one billion of outflows from GBTC. That that's that's that's a massive amount. Could you correlate it with anything? Other than we're finally getting to a point in the arc of outflows for GBTC that we've moved on from people that were, you know, in the trade because it was an arbitrage trade. Those folks are gone. We've moved beyond any legal outflows that are attached to an FTX or attached to a Genesis or anything like that. I think we've finally gotten to the point where there's a lot of people in that product that have significant tax burdens if they sell, and they don't care anymore.

I got two DMs from people that I would consider in the legal community very close to BlackRock's product. And basically, they've just said, you know, it's starting to look like people don't care about their tax ramifications. They just don't like Grayscale. They don't like those guys. They hate the product. They're like, you know what? Screw it. It's possible that we may look back on Grayscale's, you know, quote unquote arbitrage decision to lock people in at 1.5% fee as a historic mistake. I mean, the outflows that they've seen, and somewhere I replied to either my own tweet or somebody's tweet, if Bitcoin was at 40K right now, I think Grayscale's AUM and their GBTC product will be down from $28 billion to right around $15 or $16 billion. It's about half. They've seen

enormous outflows from the jump. And over the last two days, they've accelerated, right? $1.1 billion in two days is, you know, there was net inflows to the entire class of $2.6 billion last week. What would that have been if you take GBTC out? There are no outflows over the last two days. You know, yesterday was a net outflow. That's not how it should be characterized. And I know, you know, other companies that have BTC ETFs, you know, aren't going to go running around stomping on grayscale and causing their own problems. But, you know, yesterday was not a net outflow day if you take GBTC out. And you should, because their fees are, you know, six to seven X what everybody else is. And that's for a purpose.

It is for a purpose. I think, by the way, I don't know anybody at Bitwise. I don't have a relationship with anybody at Bitwise. I think Bitwise is the perfect proxy for retail involvement in spot Bitcoin ETFs. They're out there constantly talking to retail wealth management organizations. They see inflows on a daily basis at a fairly consistent pace. So the retail appetite, you can really get a feel for it in the Bitwise product because it's not wild institutional money that BlackRock is stuffing into their product. It's not coming from huge hedge funds or whatever. It's retail-focused inflows. And those retail-focused inflows have been consistent every single day since launch with Bitwise. Yeah, I want to go back to the markets. I know we've got Joe and Ryan.

Ryan, this is the first time on the show. It's good to have you. I know you've got a great YouTube channel as well. We'd love to get your thoughts on the markets. And I know you did say in your show, right on your agenda, you and Kyle saying that, you know, they could be a bit lower to go, but this is not capitulation. We'd love to get your thoughts on how much lower this could go. Welcome to the Crypto Town Hall. You've got Armut, bottom left corner. Bottom left corner, our mute. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. It's my first time here. It's my first time here. Sorry, I have been absent, but we hadn't moved back my show times because the US clock changed and we've

only just started moving back the show time. So now I'll be back. What do I think? I think that we need to have corrections in a bull market i think that when we have the corrections the corrections are designed to change and to flush out bad behavior and you know if you if i remember all the other corrections in every other correction we were doing something wrong and so the and and we got we got ahead of ourselves we got carried away with with our bad behavior and then we had a correction and then we kind of stopped doing it. And we started with a new bad behavior. You could say that a bad behavior now is buying sold meme coins like absolute apes, sending hundreds of millions of dollars or tens of millions of dollars to people that we don't

know is a bad behavior. Taking too much leverage on't know is a bad behavior. Taking too much leverage on altcoins is a bad behavior. And what these corrections do in a bull market is they flash out or they're designed to flash out the bad behavior. Now, the reason why I think that this correction is not yet over is because when I looked at fear and greed, and I looked at how much fear and greed got flushed out every other correction. So I'll read you some stats just so that you can understand the analysis that I looked at all the other corrections, and on an average 22% correction, the fear and greed went from, say, 91 or 96, and it went down between 50 and 70 points to levels of, like, 30 on the fear and greed.

Now, we topped in this cycle at, say, 80 or 85 on fear and greed, and today we're at 75 which means that no one's scared there's been absolutely no flash out there's been absolutely no change of behavior i don't know a single person that has changed any one of their habits or or swore on their lives that they would never touch another meme coin ever again or that they would never take leverage ever again and to, that is what bull market corrections are supposed to be about. And so for me to be convinced that this correction is over, and I may be wrong, but for me to be convinced that this correction is over and is worth buying, I'm actually not even looking at the charts anymore. I'm looking at the fear and greed.

And when the fear and greed drops by 30 or 40 points, then to me, it shows that people are scared enough that they're going to change their behavior and that we're ready to go into the next part of the cycle. That's pretty much my thesis for this correction. And look, it could be invalidated. I mean, Powell may come out tonight and say, listen, we're dropping interest rates and it's, you know, he may open a bottle of champagne during his speech and, you know, we could go into full bull market. But in the absence of of that i think that this is going to be a little bit of a correction i think we need to flush out all the the the leverage and we need to move on i think if pal does that the market goes down because that's what happens after every other

pivot but i guess that's a conversation for another day um but ran do you think that that could happen the the what you're describing could happen with extended sideways action. So I sort of tweeted the other day, or I've been talking about it here on this show constantly, the exact things you said, the meme coin madness, overbought conditions, high leverage, high funding rates for all these clear sort of local top signals. And of course, people pushed back and told me we're in a new paradigm. Things can't go down ever again. We have ETFs, all the classic things you would hear sort of at a local market top. Do you think that we could now drop back into what is effectively the conventional halving cycle? Right? People forget you get this 30% correction-ish, or maybe it's shallower this time

around the halving. Then things are dead ass boring for four to six months, six to eight even. And then in the fall, things go up massively. No, I mean, I don't think if I look at where we are in the bull market, I don't think there's time for four and six months of sideways action. I think though a month or two months of sideways action could happen. Yeah, I guess I'm asking, do you think that sideways action can have the desired effect that you're talking about where they just time-based capitulation rather than because they go broke?

I think that there's really only one type of capitulation and that's time-based capitulation. I think price-based capitulation is not a real capitulation because if you think about a massive price dip, if the price dip gets bought up really quickly, then nothing's changed. You know, people still come back to the casino. People will leave the casino when we go down, slightly up and they get hope again, and then further down, and then slightly up and they invest again

because this is the one, the breakout that's going to continue to go up and slightly down. Now think about how this correction has been playing out. It went from 70 down to 64, and then it went back to 70 and then it's like oh okay it's over and then it went all the way back down to 62 and then it went last night it went up to 64 and then this morning it went down to 60 700 and so it's that a month or two of that kind of behavior and then and and at the same time we go down to 50 000 or 55 000 on bitcoin and the old coins go down 30 40 50 from here and then we're ready to go into the

new part of the cycle yeah i think that makes sense joe what do you think about uh the current cycle and where we're at and you know what could kind of help flush out all that behavior? It's really interesting that everyone is feeling it almost like in a weird way, like bearish, you know, with Bitcoin at 64K. And, you know, I posted about this yesterday, but I just, in my heart of hearts, I don't believe we just went through almost a 1,000-day bear market to have a 72-day bull market. And I think with where rates are at, it's like all of this is happening with rates high. And you can go find 5% risk-free in a money market right now. And that will unwind. You know, if you do talk to some folks out in the job market right now, it is difficult.

And Paul is doing what they said he wanted to do. He wants to make it, you know, he wants to put people out of work. And once we put enough people out of work, then, you know, potentially we start to see a cool off in these things. But we're seeing other macro things that I'm seeing is housing prices are coming off in some of the major metros, right? Finally coming off. And so I think it is cooling from a macro level. And then when you kind of pierce all the way down to crypto, you know, like some of the stuff I'm seeing on the ground, you know, at Lunar Crush, you know, people have to apply to be on to Lunar Crush.

We're seeing 80% of the people that are applying is all meme tokens. It is just kind of like it's the market's just chasing its tail, trying to figure out like what to do and where to go. And it always ends up being meme coins. You know, even in the top 100 that we have by alt rank here, you know, baby Dogecoin is back in there, like index to Doge, like Pepe's in there. You know, like I said, Pepe kakinu like maga trump like all of these things being launched like kimbo like kimbo slice i don't even know what that one is like there's just so much of this that's being pushed out there how do they joe how can you just sorry how do these work sorry i'm just curious so when you say launch are these meme talkers that develop into communities are these

pump and dumps are these rugs like it's just I want to better understand the ecosystem the stated purpose obviously is to create Community you know whether or not these things are being rugged you know some of them probably will be that's why it's a you know it's a very you're playing with fire if you're playing in that side but most of the ones that i'm even covering on the alpha show i mean you know they launched like that day right i've got another one i'm looking at right now launched literally this morning and it's already in like the top 200 and so you're seeing like a very jesus like concerted effort to add tons of liquidity on dexess, launch these things. And then, you know, they're going to come out there and say, hey, we want to create utility and less than 1% will make that happen.

You know, we did, I talked to, we had a space with Cloaky yesterday and they've done some amazing things. I mean, they've built schools. They have like a tokenization platform of their own. I mean, they have more utility than some layer ones I've seen. So some of them can pull it off, but most of them, you know, it's like any other startup, they get in there, they have more utility than some layer ones I've seen. So some of them can pull it off, but most of them, you know, it's like any other startup. They get in there, they get really excited. They state that they're going to do all these amazing things. And then, hey, are you going to go run a business

where you just eat shit for the next five years, right? Like that's like a lot of people can't do that. So like a lot of these things are going to go away. As we're at... When they hit, sorry, the ones you mentioned, what market cap are they hitting? I mean, most of these out of the gate are sitting in it at 250 to 350 million like that's mental how many another question sorry how many how many a week and reach above 100 million market cap how many launches a week would you say i mean based on current conditions

it's tough but in this market you know, we're seeing at least five. Right? And if that's a billion, that's a billion dollars in market cap. And how many, that's a billion. I'm saying, how many would you say a week that reach above a hundred million in market cap? A little bit tougher. I'd have to go back and look. But if you had to guess, do you have a number?

I would say maybe just double that. Maybe 10. All right. And then so, and how many of those end up rugging? But if you had to guess, do you have a number? I would say maybe just double that. Maybe 10. All right. And how many of those end up rugging? I'm not talking about just a random meme coin. When it hits that level, 100 million plus. I mean, right now the market's still running,

but I don't think we've seen actual too many pure rugs, but we are just seeing as soon as the community goes away or that community can't sustain it, the price is just moving down because the community's, the ball of money is rolling to the next meme coin. So that's happening pretty consistently. Interesting.

I'm just fascinated by the ecosystem. Actually, I want to yield a little bit of my time back to Andrew on the ETF real quick. My question is like, and I know the Bitwise bros probably don't want this, but why doesn't Grayscale just lower their fee? Like we talked about this at the beginning when, you know, the first week when it was like sell the news event to the ETF, everyone's freaking out. Everyone's like, just lower the fees. And as soon as the inflow started to happen,

everyone like kind of forgot about that. Cause we're like, sweet, we're in a massive super cycle suddenly, but now we're back at it where the price is starting to move down and people are asking about the fees again. At what point have they become that negative where it's not worth it to just hang on to these fees to try and get everything? Well, if you want the somewhat professionalized answer, I can give you that here on this. If you want the unprofessional version of the answer, I can give you that too. large, Genesis and now Grayscale have been playing a longer term arbitrage game with the price of Bitcoin as it relates to their products. It's been going on for, let's call it a three year period. There are, you know, there are things that they've killed off inside of their ecosystem.

Four years ago, if you were to go to DCG's website, they owned, let's call it, two-thirds of the crypto ecosystem. They either owned outright or owned large pieces of every company that mattered in the crypto ecosystem. All of those, 99% of those companies are dead, haven't made a dime in forever. DCG remains in the crosshairs of law enforcement for a bunch of different reasons. Genesis is bankrupt. So Grayscale and their fees have been the only thing over the past two years that have made a dime for DCG, Barry, Michael, and their group. Why does that matter? The reason why it matters is because they've had to pay massive legal bills in their fight against Genesis creditors. The largest of those was the Gemini Earned creditors and the Winklevoss Twins. Fairly formidable foe, right? Paying huge amounts to PR firms, consultants,

hundreds of millions of dollars, literally. And so the arbitrage that Barry has played is we think that Bitcoin is going to go back up. The price of Bitcoin is directly tied to our fees because we have $25 billion in our GBTC fund that before it became an ETF, you basically couldn't get your money out of there. And the fees were even higher at the time. So all of that funded their problems. They decided on an arbitrage process and a pathway. And this 1.5% fee was kind of like the final arbitrage play, thinking there's so many people in this product that bought Bitcoin via GPTC at $5,000, $8,000, $10,000, $15,000. They're not going to sell for tax purposes. Well, that's beginning to look like that's not the case. And so they're going to be forced to lower their fee at some point based on constant outflows. Because the problem that they, you know,

they think they're smarter than everybody else. Okay. And so there's parts of that is they do think they're smarter than everybody else. And there have been moments where they have been smarter than everybody else, right? If you're Barry, you're sitting there, hey, my thought process, this arbitrage that I've played has actually worked because we've had massive outflows, but our AUM is still sitting at 20, 21 billion because Bitcoin is at 64,000-ish right now. But at some point, the outflows being so, um, aggressive, they're going to have to decide, do we remain a meaningful brand outside of the little signs we put in airports and to the 57 viewers that still watch CNBC that they're going to have to pivot at some point. And I don't, I don't know when that is um they may you know

they may never pivot they may keep it the way it is but it it is remarkable to watch um you know ceo grayscale sonnenschein get get on cnbc get on fox business and when he's asked about the fees there's no flinching there's like well you well, you know, we've got great liquidity, we've got a great product, and we feel good about the fees. And meanwhile, you know, outflows are just remarkably aggressive. So it is a process right now from a price standpoint without the drag of the GBTC arbitrage play by Barry and Michael and a 1.5% fee? Where would it be? Where would it be if we didn't have a billion dollars in outflows from GBTC over the past two days?

I don't know. Probably a better spot, right? One, two. So they're choosing to generate $300 to $400 million in fees to fill their coffers, as opposed to an organization like Bitwise, an organization like VanEck, who have made... Can I interrupt you for one second?

Why do we even care about whether there are outflows of GBTC or whether there are no outflows of GBTC? Let me maybe give you the way I'm thinking about this, right? If you want to hold Bitcoin, then you're going to hold it either via yourself, GBTC, or one of the other ETFs. And if you want to exit Bitcoin, then you'll exit, right? That's pretty much the market where we're at right now. And I just think that this whole discussion,

I just think that this whole discussion around the GBTC outflows, you know, if people want out of Bitcoin, they're going to exit the GBTC. And if they want out of Bitcoin to switch into one of the other ETFs, they're going to switch into one of the other ETFs. And so it's just we're in a market now where we had an unlock of 600,000 Bitcoin tokens. And now we're in what you could call like a normal market, a market that's not manipulated by fake lockups, right? And I think the GBTC thing doesn't even matter. If people want to hold Bitcoin and they don't want to hold it

through GBTC, they're going to sell their GBTC and they're going to buy it through BlackRock. I mean, that's a reasonable position to take. I would just rather not have large scale players who are still comfortable pissing in people's faces in this industry, right? That's never going to, you know, there's always going to be, you know, not great players or bad players, you know, across any industry. Who cares? Who cares?

I think, you know, you think they're bad players. I think they're bad players. Some people think they're good players. Let the market decide. let the market decide the real decision is do you want to hold bitcoin in your portfolio don't you want to hold the credit yeah well that that once you made that decision that wasn't the question that i was asked the question i was asked is why did they keep the fee at 1.5 and the explanation is is they've got an arbitrage play because they're still fighting you know law enforcement issues,

and they're greedy. That's bottom line. I think they're greedy. I think they're greedy. They are short-term thinkers, not long-term thinkers. If they were long-term thinkers, they would have capitalized on their advantage, and they would have gone in with low fees, and they would have extended their head start. They decided to play a different game. I think Barry has made some really good decisions in the past and he's made some really bad decisions. And this is one of the really bad decisions that he's made. But ultimately, I think that there's an industry-wide obsession with this GBTC outflow. And the obsession should be a different obsession. The obsession should be an obsession that says, do people want to hold Bitcoin or do they not want to hold Bitcoin?

Let's be obsessed with how many more people want to hold Bitcoin, whether they hold it through Grayscale or BlackRock or Bitwise. Who gives a shit? Honestly. whole Bitcoin, that's been answered and shouted from the mountaintops because the Bitcoin ETF launch, let's call it 60 days in now, is the most successful of any ETF class ever. Sorry, I muted you, Ryan. Go ahead. Why do we have minus 150 million every yesterday and the day before? It just shows that maybe in the last two days, for whatever reason, there hasn't been a great demand for Bitcoin. The inflows, no, but the inflows, I think, hold on,

Juan said that the inflows were actually pretty high. Juan, can you say what you said earlier because Ryan wasn't here about the inflows being pretty high, just the outflows kind of outweighed that? Yeah, well, you mean this week? Yes. Yeah, this week we've seen net outflows of $480 million given the selling in GBTC. If you took GBTC out, though, we have net inflows of $150 and $120 million through the week so far. But why are you taking GBTC out? That's the part I'm not understanding.

No, but when you say it you go, Edwin. I mean, I'm taking a GBTC out when people ask me about this because we're considering the entirety of US Bitcoin ETF products and what that's doing for flows. And if you're trying to gauge the demand on these products, well, you can't really take that one out

just because it's having outflows while the rest are having inflows. I get your point. But Brian, your point that GBTC are people, holders of Bitcoin that want to get out, they've been wanting to get out for a while and just waiting for the right time. I think what matters more is new money, whether new money is coming in, because that's what's going to sustain the blue market over the next 12, 18, three years, whatever. Yeah, if we weren't counting the outflows from GBTC since the ETF launched, they've had 24, 25 billion in inflows. Now you take out the

outflows from GBTC and that's why we're sitting at like 11 point something in net inflows. But yeah, it's that dichotomy. Yeah. And just to go to, go ahead, Jeff, before I ask my next question. No, I was just going to add one more dimension to this which uh which which all makes sense um the other dimension i would add is is the lens in how people view a crypto cycle at times is established by the cost basis of the new investors and the reason i think grayscale is interesting away from the fee dynamics that andrew articulated is because we can assume most of the GBTC investors are very, very deeply in the money. And we don't know exactly what that flow looks like as to whether they're selling to buy

something else. They might be selling and not buying something else. But what's important here is that the movement of that capital essentially resets the cost basis such that there is a chance for a new reset of what people need to maximize their profits for trading. And I think that cleansing is actually equally important to the discussion here because the new entrants that are coming in through BlackRock, through Fidelity, through us at Bitwise, they're resetting at a different point where the reflexivity to the selling dynamic from GDPTC is getting cleaned out.

So I think that's just one more additional dimension. People talk about these cycles measured in the opportunities of when these whales would sell into shrimps in every peak where the shrimps are the smaller tickets and they're establishing a higher price. And here, that dynamic is that these shrimps are actually now giant RIAs and FAs that may be legging in, but rest assured, they're not shrimps. They're here to stay. And that is going to create, I think, a new dynamic. And that plays a little bit of a role as to why people care about the GBTC outflow, not just from the fee perspective, not just from Andrew's salient points on the character dynamics, but really it's resetting expectations for investors at a price point for the next run, which I think is important. There are simply no inflows for GBTC either. And there are no meaningful conversations

happening with TradFi organizations at 1.5% for the GBTC product. It's just not happening. The reason why we take out the dynamic of GBTC on a daily basis to evaluate what's really happening with spot Bitcoin ETFs is because it's not a serious product. They're not going in to Morgan Stanley. They're not going into Dynasty Financial. They're not going into those organizations and having meaningful conversations about, hey, this is a great product. Yeah, guys, just let me kind of, one final question for the panel. I want to kick it off with Ryan,

just for the markets, because I think we started talking about the markets. I want to wrap it there. Ryan, and actually Scott, since Scott hates giving his opinion. Scott, what do you think? What do you expect over the next, just let's keep it short term,

next couple of weeks? I think we bounce around in a range but i have no idea but great opinion but i mean i would say anyone here was it just me did you can you hear me no i can hear him oh good um rand go ahead because i can't hear scott michelle if anyone could hear him unless you can hear him maybe can you hear me mar Mario? Oh, shit. Okay, Scott is talking. All right, Scott, go ahead. Go ahead. I'll let you know when he's done. I'll let you know when he's done.

I'm not talking anymore. I said something. Go ahead, Ran. Yeah, look, I mean, to be honest, I hope that we go a bit lower. I think that this market's overheated. Let's go lower. Let's flush out the garbage.

Let's buy the tokens that we've missed out on. And then let's catch the next bus to Valhalla you know what I mean like let's I really hope it does it worries me if it doesn't because I think markets that go out too fast too quickly and you know that that's that's usually the behavior at the end of bull markets and it would be quite sad if we went through this whole bear market to get like a 70 day whatever if someone mentioned the number of days uh whatever day bull market so to me i want this market to go i want this market to go down i hope it does uh yeah let's see let's go to andrew and then joe uh just on the markets you know a minute recap andrew what you

expect to see over the next few weeks again i, I don't see short-term and medium-term catalysts that are going to push Bitcoin down in a real meaningful way. A 10% correction is not meaningful. It's just a correction. It's not a bear market. It's not anything like that. And we've gone from 25, 27K to where we are now a year ago. I think that continues. I think the inflows into spot Bitcoin ETFs will continue. And yeah, I think the narratives remain. And I think there's some new money awash that will find its way into

Bitcoin. You know, meme coins are ridiculous, but they are creating some new money. And I think over time, there's continued flight to quality that is Bitcoin.