The Wolf Of All Streets - Bitcoin & Crypto Demand EXPLODE On Wall Street Ahead Of Fed Cuts

Episode Date: September 9, 2025

In this episode we are joined by Austin Campbell where we cover how Wall Street is piling into Bitcoin and crypto as the Federal Reserve prepares rate cuts, Nasdaq’s push to the SEC to trade tokenized stocks, Google’s plan for a universal blockchain ledger, Stripe and Paradigm’s launch of the Tempo payments blockchain, South Korea’s UBIT rolling out an Ethereum Layer-2 —all while a Putin adviser claims the U.S. may secretly use crypto to reset its $37 trillion debt. Join us as we dive into how Bitcoin, crypto, and blockchain adoption are accelerating across Wall Street, tech giants, and global finance.

The adoption of blockchain technology by institutions is absolutely exploding. We have a number of announcements of new layer ones and layer two. Meanwhile, we know that treasury companies are growing. And there's tremendous demand for Bitcoin and the rest of the crypto market. We have a lot to talk about, a lot to unpack. Of course, we have Andrew and Tillman, but much more excitingly, we have somebody who is bringing up the average hair quantity, as we discussed before the show. Austin Campbell, enough hair for five bald guys on one stream. Truly amazing.

And you will see it in all of its splendor momentarily. Let's go. Let's go. Let the hair contest commence, but only after you like and. subscribe to the channel or else I can't do it you can't do it I don't know it's can't do it oh we got austin andrew come in look at it isn't it grand we're really operating with a contrast here i know and andrew decided not to wear a hat today so it's like yeah that's right extra uh we get the extra impact awesome it just just occurred to me that the thousand times we've talked on

uh twitter spaces i guess x as you've never actually uh been here on the shows so welcome Thank you very much. I'm happy to be here. There are so many things to talk about today. So listen, I'm going to start on a bit of a macro frame here because this story just came up. Why J.P. Morgan is warning the Fed rate cut everyone expects could sink stocks. So we actually have a long history, which I've shown a million times on the chart, of basically tracking the pattern of how things happen. usually get an inverted curve that normalizes. Then the Fed decides to pivot. And then the stock market goes down. And on all these occasions, I've said, hey, usually the Fed starts to cut when

things are kind of bad. Like the job market looking like crap right now. We've had revisions to show that we actually lost jobs in June. So I'll start here because Austin, I know there's in your wheelhouse. Do you think that rate cuts could actually signal that things aren't that great and we can see a dip. I mean, exactly, as you've described, that's a pattern that you've seen before. And it's one of the things that people overfocused on, call it the monetary side, miss out on is that markets are fundamentally in many ways about expectations. And if the Fed is telling people we're cutting rates because we expect the economy is some flaming garbage, that is not a reason for stocks to go up. Right. And like, you know, I know it's almost 20 years ago now, but if you look at

2008, let me remind everybody, boy, did rate cuts not really particularly help stock prices at that time. And I guess what I would say is this. There are many kinds of rate cuts. If you're having rate cuts because fiscal conditions are relatively good and inflation is calm and employment is good. I feel pretty good about stock prices. But if employment is structurally weak, and by the way, we still have some amount of inflation and you're getting rate cuts to defend the unemployment mandate. No, that is typically a bad sign for asset prices. A little bit of stagflation. I mean, I wish I had an opinion other than that one, but that does appear to be what's going on. And it, okay, so this is one of those things where it's fun to think about the impact of time on markets,

which is to say, when the whole tariff debate started back at the beginning of the year, there were a lot of people who really understand supply chains who are piling in and saying, guys, we're not really going to know what the impact of this is until we start getting to like, oh, I don't know, summer. And now here we are sitting at the end of summer. And what we're seeing is sticky but not extreme levels of like inflation in the economy. Like we're not at 10% like hysterics wanted, but we're also not at like two where the Fed probably wanted us to be. And we're seeing structurally declining employment, which is exactly what you would expect if you would put kind of a regressive tax on some of these forms of economic activity. And so I think what drives everybody insane, Scott, is that things in this

space are never as good as the optimists want, never as bad as the pessimists fear. But we kind of just chop sideways and like pretty mediocre for a while in these sorts of conditions. So some context there. Structurally declining employment is of interest. because declining employment just means that there's less jobs that are being grabbed each month than expected. So there's still jobs being at it. It's just not as much as we would love to have, right? The overall unemployment percentage number is still not only stable, but at historic lows. So, you know, rate cuts or no rate cuts.

We're in an environment, and we have been in an environment since the great financial crisis. where, you know, effectively regulators, the Fed, and everybody else has said, markets just don't go down. We're not going to allow markets to go down. Whether we're bombing Iran, whether it's tariffs, whether it's declining employment, we're going to find a way to support markets so they go up. Now, that says nothing about the structural parts of the economy where people just continue to put money into it no matter what happens. boomers for all their ills continue to be the foundation underneath the markets at large. So, yeah, you know, is there a slowdown in the growth of employment?

Sure, but it's just a slowdown in growth. And we'll see how long that lasts. I also think in terms of the Fed, it's interesting that they're at a rate cut moment for all intensive purposes just because they're reasonably stubborn. you know the fed has been late uh when is the fed not been late right when is the fed not been late um so it's transitory and yeah yeah of course it is um in a great financial crisis you know let's scurry and scurry and scurry to to cut rates as quickly as possible you know while the world is burning um so you would think that they would have learned their lessons

um but they haven't uh so so we'll see where it goes but again Over the past, you know, let's call it 17 years, you know, there's been a mandate that basically says, we're not going to let markets go down, we're going to support the economy in every way that we can possibly imagine. And, you know, I think the current administration probably signs on to that particular idea in a way that is turbocharged, let's call it. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I think, you know, Most of the media that I read, I assume, is political in nature these days. And I think probably that headline has more to do with a political bent.

Rate cuts have been being talked about for a long time. We obviously know that Trump wants rate cuts. It's not surprising that there are people out there saying that when the rate cut, be careful what you ask for type deal. I don't pay any attention to that, honestly. you know the thing i pay attention to is how much money is coming into the world and at what rate and that has never been higher and it has to continue and so those are like to me gravity they can't be argued with and if you ignore them you die um and so m2 money supply and what's

about to take place globally in terms of the printing of dollars i i think is going to make everybody money around like they always do. And I think Bitcoin and I think alt coins and I think anything that provides people hopium that they're going to make a 10x is going to catch some of that money. And that's just the nature of human beings. And so, you know, if you look at, I think the modern investor is very different than the previous generations of investors. The modern investor is really more of a gambler in previous generations would absolutely characterize them as such. They're not looking at S&P growth over 20 years. They don't care about that. That's old money talk. New money talk is, you know, how can I have a side hustle that makes my job less

miserable and gets me more time and money to spend with my kids on boats and other things like that. And, you know, crypto has been that for a lot of people. And so I think that still is what, you know, a lot of people are chasing is disproportionate returns. And, you know, that comes with disproportionate risk. And a lot of people don't acknowledge that, but it always has been, always will be. And the money that's about to be printed over the next two and a half years, I believe, is going to be a rising tide that overwhelms any short-term indicator, or any unemployment or anything, honestly. It's just like, you know, where is all that liquid going to go?

You know, if it starts raining for 40 days, it's going to flood. Well, you know, when they print $5 trillion in two and a half years, there's a liquidity flood. A quick side note, J.P. Morgan stinks at wealth management, and they stink at it. They stink in analysis. Like, literally, that's well known in the world of wealth management. they are uniquely terrible at that and so you know a prediction from it if alliance bernstein put

out a report that had something to do with raids and the movement i'd be i'd be interested in reading that that would be compelling because as a reminder back in january that bernstein put out their black book having to do with all things but you know in the front of that book was crypto and it said buy everything right they weren't wrong right that's literally the quote yeah exactly buy everything not hyperbolic so jp morgan you know good for them they put out of paper uh they suck at making predictions and they really stink at wealth management um being in that again being in that world for a long time it's well known across the wealth management world that if you're a jp morgan wealth client you're getting two

thirds of your portfolio is jp morgan product and you're going to like it period that that that that's it that's what they're going to give you well and honestly when you're a market maker and you have the types of strings and levers to pull that they have and other companies like them have you can report headlines and then know in advance what's going to happen based upon you being a market maker you know it's it's not hard to predict things when you're really at the helm of those things and so if there was a short term pullback They get to say, I told you so, look, you know, Trump is wrong, blah, blah, blah. They'll create whatever narrative is the motivation behind that.

Either that, and they just get two researchers, since it's never actually J.P. Morgan saying it's just some dude at J.P. Morgan. Exactly. Yeah, one guy who's like bullish on Red Cuts and one guy who's bad. And then, yeah, see, we were right. They also have, as somebody lived inside that beast for a while, wildly differential information. Like, okay, so if you're looking at J.P. Morgan from the outside. it sort of appears like a monolith, but let me take you behind the curtain for a moment. I couldn't go talk to asset management or wealth management without a small army of compliance people. And as I sat there talking to the guy on the other side of my market, there's like some lawyer with a shotgun pointed directly at me, and he's just going to pull the trigger the moment I say something I'm not supposed to.

So the left hand and the right hand are not communicating. And I would tell you, if you look at the profile of J.P. Morgan and you want to watch what they're doing and you want to understand the people who know what's going on, you need to see the research coming out of global rates and global credit from the investment bank. That is not the wealth management people. These are people historically like the Josh Youngers and the Jay Barry's of the world, right, who very much knew what they're talking about. The problem is to get on those lists, you probably have to be an institutional client. That is not stuff that is distributed publicly because Tillman, to your point, who's actually seeing the flows here and would have the

ability to, like, call a turn, it's probably the folks of the investment bag, because I'm not exaggerating when I tell you, like, our repo desk was rolling like three trillion of overnight repo at times. So, like, they've got a pretty good view on what the market is doing, but the wealth management people are kind of walled off from that. So if you see this, like, schizophrenic behavior of like, why are their trading results so good and why is their wealth management research garbage? The answer is these people are not actually in the same organization. I should have mention, guys, Austin used to work at J.P. Morgan. And I'm pretty rational about that firm because, look, any time, this is something that's hard to wrap your head around. But if you work at a company of 360,000 people, which I will remind people is larger than many countries in the world, you're going to get everything from amazing to completely stupid. Yeah, makes sense. So listen, I want to pivot from the Fed and such to the idea here of institutional adoption. of blockchain, because, man, it seems like we get 10 of these announcements today.

I'll just cook through a few of them. South Korean crypto exchange up-it launches Ethereum L2. Cool. Stripe and Paradigm unveil tempo, a blockchain designed for payments. Cool. Google Cloud unveils details for its layer one blockchain, the Google Cloud Universal Ledger, aiming to serve as an open infrastructure layer for financial institutions.

Another one right there. Same thing. Oh, by the way, NASDAQ asks SEC for rule change to trade tokenized stocks. I happen to be of the belief that if the NASDAQ is going to trade tokenized stocks, they're probably not going to do it on a decentralized permissionless open network. But maybe I'm wrong there, which leads me to believe that Wednesday we're going to get a NASDAQ layer one. We had the announcement three weeks ago of a circle layer one. So I guess it's very clear that we're going to have this battle for the soul of centralization and decentralization

when it comes to institutional adoption of blockchain because these are all purpose-fit blockchains meant to enrich, in my opinion, these companies or to make sure that they at least have a certain level of control. And that is not going to accrue down to your favorite layer one. Well, it's competition and innovation. And what does that mean? It means that we're going to have a very, very fast explosion of this. this technology across finance over the next 18 to 36 months.

Where money can be made, how much of it is going to be made. I don't know, but I do know that there are going to be meaningful structural changes to the way that everything is traded, the way that money moves and flows. All of that is going to adjust and change very, very quickly. When the NASDAQ is on the verge of moving to tokenize stocks, we're moments away, you know, let's call it at worst 18 months, to 24-7 trading, right? I put a post out and I got to ask, well, isn't Robin Hood doing 24-7 trading? I'm like, no.

They just basically follow kind of futures, right? Friday and then they open back up on Sunday. They add a couple hours to the top and the bottom of that deal. But tokenized trading is going to go full 24-7, and that's going to make meaningful structural changes to even places like J.P. Morgan. Like, there's going to have to be dudes sitting on desks from, like, you know, 8, 8 p.m. to 8.30 a.m. Like, they already kind of have those, you know, in little tiny little enclaves down in the basement. But there's going to be much more of those people because of the structural changes that are going to be made. When structural changes happen, there's generally a lot of money to be made.

So, you know, I'm very, very interested in being in this moment where crypto has pushed. things forward to make these structural changes. It's fascinating, to be honest. Yeah. And if you look to Scott, your earlier point about everybody launching one of these things, models of these things that have been successful in the past, there's kind of three pathways. One is you're so big, you can force everybody else to use your thing and kind of have a monopoly. There are very few of those. And by the way, somebody like Stripe is nowhere close to that, right? Like not even within spitting distance of it. Two, you get together a consortium of all of the big players at the outset on equal economic terms and everybody starts using the thing. So a good example of that

historically is DTCC, which to this day is the rickety, janky, semi-functional infrastructure underlying settlement of all of the securities in our current markets, right? And why, to Andrew's point, we don't have 24-7 trading? Because there's actually dudes in a basement like moving paper tags between vaults. And then the third is you have to build an open access network that future people can join on fair terms. And that's an extremely important point. Because if I build something today and say, aha, I built a consortium. But everybody who comes later because we did the work, you got to pay me more. You have incentivized everybody to compete against you instead of join you. Visa was a good example of how to build that sort of thing back in the day. And so

So if I'm trying to parse through all these things and figure out what the hell is going on here, rule number one, if J.P. Morgan couldn't force people to adopt their private blockchain, anybody smaller than J.P. Morgan is not going to do that. And rule number two, look at the models in the past that have worked and think about what is being booted up that could go that way. In that sense, like, Scott, of the things you've mentioned, the one I'm probably most optimistic on is NASDAQ because it is that kind of platform. But this Google one is interesting, the universal ledger. that basically is for interoperability and a base layer for all of these other ones. So I guess it doesn't mean you adopt it as the sole one,

but maybe it's used as a piece in the puzzle for, you know, a number of them to speak to one another. I mean, it's called a neutral blockchain for financial institutions. That's how they're advertising it. Yeah, well, we all know there's nothing that's neutral. But my whole thing is, like, finally, we finally see. our industry looking at utility instead of like this hype. I think layer ones being launched by real world companies that have real world goodwill, depth of liquidity, application to market,

all the things that provide a reason to use blockchain. And most companies that I'm looking at for this type of adoption are focused on, I think it would just be a convenience that people would welcome, right? Disney is a great example of this. Think about how much money is flying around in a hundred different ways throughout the Disney organization. If you could consolidate that and you could have a easier way for me to sell my season pass to the park and for them to track and monetize the entire inventory of passes that they have to manage, coupled with the merchandising, the intellectual property rights, the royalty payments, like, if you took a top-to-bottom overhaul of an organization like that and injected salana, pick one, it doesn't even matter.

You're talking about a delta of improvement of cost and labor that would make any competitor have to do it based upon competitive advantage. and I don't think that it's going to be forced based upon competitive advantage. I think it's more likely going to be some sort of collusion like alluded to earlier where everybody just agrees, okay, now's the time. And it's because the people that run the financial layer have now opened up and integrated to allow that to take place. And I do think, though, that I looked at previous cycles and I would just scratch my head

at some of the market caps. of some of these useless blockchains. And they're not useless. They just haven't found their application, I guess, is a better way to put it. And if real world companies inject their liquidity depth into that and actually start using it, it would be no different than if XRP actually started being used for cross-border settlements. I don't think that application is legitimate anymore now that we have staple coins. But I do think that there are a lot of blockchains that are going to find a home with being adopted by real industry and real corporations as their quote layer one and it it always begged the question like if i'm a

if i'm swift why do i need ripple i just go copy the code and i do it myself and i inject all my liquidity into all of what i control and own versus you know giving up half to somebody who i mean that's why the circle blockchain makes so much sense to me i'm not saying that they can force everybody use it i don't even know what their intention is necessarily but you know we're probably headed back to a zirp environment and like 70 or 80 percent of their income comes from treasuries simply being high yielding they need to find a way to make a hell of a lot more money since they're publicly traded equity and uh letting you know all the fees accrue to salano or ethereum or whoever else is going to be problematic for their business i mean they're going to

have to just find a way to make money yeah circle has a leg up because they're tethered you know this is a playing words because they're tethered wow i was going to say good yeah very well done because they're tethered to coinbase and and again i've said this several times on this show coinbase has you know about 30 percent more customers overall than jp morgan does which is kind of a mind-blowing thing to to imagine um what i would what i what i would add is that i'm waiting for the announcement because NASDAQ tokenized all that stuff. That's great. The only real competitor to NASDAG from an overall standpoint in that space is intercontinental exchanges who, you know, they own basically 90% of all the other exchange trad-fi exchanges across the globe, right? Like you go

to any country that has an exchange, ICE owns it, right? So if they then make an announcement say that we're looking at tokenized that tokenized trading 24 that game over game over so so now you've got 99% of exchanges are looking at tokenizing assets and going to 24-7 trading so we're you know again we're one step away from that um i did hear uh that internet international continental exchanges are looking at pepe to build on pepe for uh their their tokenized uh real world assets that as i'm breaking news here on this show. Holding on Trump Toggin. Yeah.

Melani. All joking aside, Pepe has had some of the best uptime percentages of any out there. And we've jumped a shark. Yeah, but it is, it is,

again, to your point, Scott, about, you know, circle having, you know, kind of first mover

opportunities here attached to Coinbase. Oh, by the way, J.P. Morgan continues, attach themselves to Coinbase, you're beginning to see the movement towards this kind of new world order. They're smart people at JPMorgan. Even though they stink at analysis, there's some pretty

sharp folks there. 360,000 of them. Yeah, you mean, you're bound to find, your squirrel's bound to find a nut somewhere, right? So yeah, it is interesting to watch for sure. Austin, you were at Paxos as well, right? So I mean, you have quite a You have quite a bit of insight here into the tokenization stablecoin side. I think, so something you said earlier relating to NASDAQ needing an exemption from the SEC to start actually tokenizing stocks is probably applicable to the stable coin thing as well and applicable to a lot of the public blockchains, which is, you know, I've been somewhat controversial in the crypto space previously for saying some of these things. but current public blockchains kind of don't work for this stuff at scale. And I think that's a really misunderstood problem because the fundamental issue,

so like let's take a really obvious example. If we go tokenize housing title, right, and grandma's house is on the blockchain and the North Koreans steal it, do they get to move in? Right. It's sort of the hypothetical question to which most legal regimes are going to tell you no. Although interestingly, some crypto people will tell you yes, which is where you can already see the divergence happening.

But let us assume that the underlying legal regime, like say the American military, is not going to let the North Koreans move in. Okay, fine. So then question number two, and here's where things get gnarly for the current public blockchains, is great. So how do we fix the ledger? Because if your answer is once that happens, your ledger is just broken, nobody's using that.

So you need a way to claw it back. And everybody will tell me, well, the issuer has freeze and seize controls. But let me tell you, as somebody who is at an issuer, as Scott just said, one of the things I'm most terrified about is my private keys controlling that smart contract getting hacked. Because if that happens, now what? And now you're into the world of realizing rapidly, oh shit, permissionless probably does not interact particularly well. If your network is like just permissionless period, full stop, interact pretty well with real world assets because real world assets are not decentralized and not permissioned. like permissionless excuse me so there's going to need to be a middle ground between these things

i would also be keeping an eye on who takes that discussion seriously who tries to find a solution that like call it allows the base layer to be permissionless like i want to be very clear i'm not arguing for permissioning like the btc or like eth tokens or like the btc chain at all but i am telling you if you want to have tokenized stocks on there you're going to need a network that's willing to start enforcing some stuff you're not used to because you can't have like Apple get hacked and then the North Koreans have a board seat. Yeah, and I've given this example quite a few times, but it was in reference to the circle blockchain, obviously, is that I'll say it once again.

If you've got Peggy in accounting, who's 73 years old and a year away from retirement working in Omaha, Nebraska and it's told, hey, you're going to use stable coins to settle our books and she sends $500,000 to a salon and drive. instead of an Ethereum one, there's no oops when it's two companies settling, right? And you've got to be able to, there's a reason they use banks for that because you can claw it back and fix that. And maybe Circle's going to have customer service for Peg. Listen, if Kim Jong, yeah, if Kim Jong-un gets on the board and he actually creates

black AirPods, I'm all for it, right? You know, I'm all about it. I would love that. I'm down for Kim on Apple's board. They need a little extra help. Here's the reality. What we're talking about here is a feature of the blockchain, which we love in the form of instant settlement. There's very few ways in this world that you can trustlessly instantly settle a transaction.

That is what attracted me to blockchain is. It's a better form of cash settlement. The problem is that not everything needs instant settlement, nor do we want in. and settlement on everything, right? And some of the things that you just talked about, car titles, house type, you know, deeds, all those types of things require what I would call a clearing period. And there's nothing that keeps, in my mind, the way the world moves forward is, is that there are a lot of private blockchains that manage the complexities of a lot

of the things that we're talking about through AI and smart contracts. that work gets done. We think it's perfect. It's the cash counter at the bank. We trust it 99.999% of the time, but they still manually count the cash for you when you walk out of the bank, right? It's that form of dub's belt and suspenders. And so I think that there will be a lot of private chain application where we get to have 24-7 markets without human dependence, without labor costs, incrementally rising, all of the benefits. But then you as a private citizen have the ability to move that asset off of their private onto a public, self-custodian. And that is a task risk that's fraught with risk, right? We all know that even in the self-custody, you know,

argument as it pertains to your crypto. So, you know, if people are willing to endure that and go through that risk to its health custody their assets, then they're going to be able to do that. But if they want somebody else to manage all of that for them because they have a depth of liquidity that they can insure against individual error, then you're going to keep it with a, you know, a custody provider. Why? Because they're going to ensure that if they make a error, that you're going to get your money back. And they can do that and you can't self-insure, you know, against your own problems unless you have a lot of wealth. which case you might be able to do that. But that is where I think it's delineated. I don't think

that there's going to be an all or nothing, only private, only public. I think it's going to be like, hey, private is where you have to be subjected to their rules. And you may want to be subjected based upon the benefits that they provide. But public will always be an option because I don't think that we can ever go forward with true integration unless those two things are interoperable. I think that is inevitable. Yeah, I agree with that entirely. And obviously, the stable coin, I mean, there's a thousand stories here about stable coins as well, but I think it's just at this point repetitive to say, hey, there's going to be a whole lot of stable coins.

So I'm going to actually pile in there as somebody who's dealt with some major stable coins and say, I think a lot of people have the story backwards on stable coins. So I'm going to remind everybody there's only three stable coins that have durably been above $20 billion. $Tether, USDC, BUSD. All three of those were attached to very large distribution partners, and Tether had a first mover advantage there. I actually think the real battle that people should be watching is with the distributors, because they're the ones who are going to drive adoption, and they're the ones who are

going to control the economics. Like, has anybody been following what's been happening with the hyperliquid proposal for stable coins, where now you have like CEOs of large companies, essentially writing love letters to a public chain to try to get them to adopt like stablecoins. By the way, I'm not even saying that's the wrong tactic for those people, but I think there will be a lot of attempts at stable coins. I'm not certain there will end up being a lot of stable coins, but I also think the

issuers may end up looking more like public utilities or vanguard than people think because it's going to be the distributors who can extract most of the value for that. I would agree, but I think it'll go to. to all corners of the market. I think that it's too much of a money grab. For example, if I was a Taylor Swift and I issued a Taylor stable coin and I said, you have to buy all my tickets and all my merchandise in Taylor. Yeah, obviously, it's not a, you know, a financial instrument that's going to be recognized

on Wall Street, but there are going to be millions of people using it and they'll have depth of liquidity and people will be holding it based upon the fact that you're getting special perks when you, you know, all sorts of crazy new gameification. of markets. Andrew talks about gamification all the time. And I think this just allows so much creativity to be injected into someone's goodwill and someone's ecosystem. I mean, think about the fact that this market has been successful in not just creating one, not two, dozens of billion-dollar brands out of thin air that mean nothing to anyone outside of the crypto community. Pepe being one of them, right? You know, all of these means.

coins that have doge coin. I mean, billions, hundreds, you know, trillions of dollars of liquidity back and forth being traded across all of these markets. Well, if they can do that with and build communities that are that strong with complete abstract value props, like, what if somebody comes to the table and it's a Mickey Mouse coin issued by Disney and it's a limited edition and you get a annual pass? And VIP treatment, if you own, I mean, there's just all sorts of fun ways to extract. Which really blurs the lines between NFTs, meme coins, and then if you create that as a stable coin.

Because 99% of what you just described has previously been attempted by selling an NFT and making that your membership card to the community or by calling a meme coin something with utility, which is nonsensical. If you can do that in a stable coin way, you would have to have a hell of a lot of them. Pudgy Penguin's trying to do it right now, and they're doing it pretty successfully. I mean, Pudgy Pinguin launched their own coin after having a very successful NFT launch and now have, you know, essentially NASCAR with their logos on it, they're launching storybooks. They're trying to create a Mickey Mouse caricature that is the number one brand on chain. Yeah, if there ends up being a Disney token of any sort, I bet everything I have that J.P. Morgan and Coin are behind it i bet everything that they'd be they'd be behind it and they're going to be the tech and

liquidity behind it um that's where we're headed um you know we spent about 48 hours in crypto on the news that jp morgan and coinbase has partnered up to create effectively checking account to wallet type of functionality that will explode over the next 12 to 24 months because collectively you've We've got J.P. Morgan with 84 million customers, Coinbase with 120 million. That's 200 million plus customers across those two entities. That is a powerful, powerful, you know, thousand pound gorilla in the space. And it's only going to grow. So what you'll end up seeing is, yes, things like Tillman is talking about will happen with a Disney, with a universal, with a Coca-Cola for whatever, reason with the NBA, with whatever it happens to be, but behind it is going to be the first movers associated with JP Morgan and Coinbase. It's just, it's just going to go down that way. Tillman, you said something else that was really important in there too. Like take the Taylor Swift or the Disney example, which is people are going to want to use them to pay for things. They

are going to want to affiliate. They are going to want to get rewards. And by the way, this already exists. If anybody has the Starbucks app, that thing is a, like, call it branded stablecoin and all but using a blockchain. So these are real. They will happen. I think to bring it to Andrew's point, the ones that will be really successful are the ones that bring in customers, deliver the right benefits, but also have a pathway out. Because if you look at it as a thing where once I put money in that box, it is functionally impossible to ever get it back out, no. So I expect a lot of convergence on the back end. That's kind of why I brought up Vanguard. Because Think about the following world.

Tons of stable coins affiliated with brands. All of them just use Vanguard's government money market fund as the backing asset. And now suddenly all the stable coins can be fungible with each other as well. So consumers really have the ability to affiliate. But then if Andrew hates Taylor Swift and is a huge fan of a different musician or the Disney guy in this example, right, like the two of you could still interact with each other. Yeah. Yeah.

it is uh you're 100% right on that um you know yeah everybody uses the Starbucks app that uses Starbucks but to your point once you put money on there you can't get it out right you've got to figure out how to buy just one egg bite for like a dollar 49 if you have a dollar 49 on there well I have like 46 dollars stuck on a Starbucks card that won't work and it's like I've made the joke to my wife I was just like they've got you know it's my my other bank I mean they've got my 46 bucks and I can't get it out there's no way to you know it doesn't work at the register and there's no withdrawal button so you know right we'll go through a phase like we will go through a phase where you know for all intents and purposes this conversation turns into let's call it digital gift cards

but then there'll be a moment there'll be a you know a a moment where it changes from that and now it's not digital gift cards anymore where your money gets stuck there's interoperability across all of it And again, you know, we'll see a lot of players make moves in this space, but, you know, I can't say enough. As much as I kind of bang on J.P. Morgan as I did earlier in this podcast, the fact that they're the first ones creating, you know, partnerships with the Coinbase and pushing the envelope from a tech standpoint, kudos to them. What other bank of seriousness has talked about, you know, checking or savings account to wallet functionality? Nobody else has done that. Nobody else. And so the fact that one of the biggest, most prestigious, oldest banks on the planet has done that, one means that it's coming for everyone at some point.

Well, let's give credit where credits do. Trade Station actually had that functionality for. years five years plus and then they they had to take it off but it that is the loop that everybody's been waiting for is the the wallet to brokerage for the integration loop right is that that's the way that you know the 21st century should be working yeah Austin I know we've only got you for like two or three more minutes here on the calendar so any final thoughts on this from you before I let you go I mean I guess my final thought on the thing is financial plumbing is incredibly complex, and if you really want to understand

what's going on in crypto, the best way is to zoom out and not just look at crypto. Like I say a lot of times, and we've seen it in this discussion, that crypto is just speed running, a lot of the history of financial innovation writ large, and that I think if I were looking at all of the news that we have coming out today, I would kind of plant our flag as being in the internet era of the 90s as we're exploring blockchain. Like, I find a lot of these things very interesting in concept. Most of them are not going to stay at the test of time, right? These are experiments.

And I'm glad people are doing it. That is not a criticism. But the reality is we're going to fuck around and find out with a lot of this stuff. And the things that will eventually work might be surprising. Like, nobody, when you remember those old CDs AOL used to come on, nobody picked up one of those and said, TikTok, right? Like, it's not a linear pathway to get there. So I would just tell people lower your certainty levels, increase your volatility bans and try to pay attention to what has worked sort of like governance wise and structurally because it will be replicated.

Oh my God, just induct around and found out more than anyone else in history. So I hope that we don't repeat the finding outs of the past. Well, and sometimes you're just early, right? Like, I don't know if anybody remembers, but there was a company called Webvan back in the, you know, 98, 99. That was the entire idea and precursor to DoorDash and Instacart and the like, right? Webvan, and it was a public company and it completely flamed out. But that idea existed back then in the same way that so many of the ideas in the crypto space exist now. There will be huge ups and downs and swings, but we may be 15.

years from now and because we've got our heads stuck in this crypto silo we'll look back and say we were talking about about it on that melcher guy's uh podcast you know 12 years ago and now it's finally here we by the way i couldn't agree internally that they've called you melcher so that's an inside joke there's a lot of melcher uh there's a lot of melchers out there yeah no i agree with austin i will say I think that the closest cousin to this industry that I can draw from in my experience is the streaming media side of things. Like when I was in college, everybody was just streaming on these tour browsers, like these peer-to-peer networks, everything under the sun. You could get every CD you ever wanted burned while you were, you know, in class. And then what happened?

There was structural, those were violating a lot of people's rights. So every musician was being left in the cold. It was this outcry, and all of Hollywood hated it. They resisted it, resisted it. What do we do now? Well, it's every major company, Apple music. So it's just going to be adopted by the real world brands. And I actually see them creating layer ones as the signal.

That's it. That's no different than Apple saying, we're opening iTunes. That's what happened shortly after the government said, Napster, you can't do this anymore. I mean, it's just this transition of power, basically. Terrific. Well, Austin, we're going to give you a farewell. I'm glad that we finally got you on. I would like to do it more. I believe he's Campbell J. Austin on X. But if I had butchered that, it's down below. You should definitely give him a follow. He's always on Cryptotown Hall with us offering these same high quality insights. He's way smarter than the three of us.

no idea why he's hanging out with us. Well, my wife feels otherwise. That's what they're here for. You know, if you're not being put in your place, then you're not married. That's all we got. Thank you, man. All right. Thank you, everybody.

Take care. See, Austin. Awesome, guys. And before, obviously, we run, I wanted to highlight the fact that Arch Public, right up there. Look, I'm going to do the thing, Andrew. Thank you. Thank you. You always get mad at me.

I don't know what I think. You guys have added a whole bunch of new pairs here with Cracken. We have. Yeah, that's one of the things that we were looking at in opening up services on Cracken was there was a lot of pairs that our customers were looking for. These pairs specifically are pretty volatile. They're very volatile. And so if you're looking to play volatility with our tools, these are great additions.

So that's really what the purpose of it was. And there's some timely news, too, around. some of them. For example, NMR, which is Numeri, you know, they announced a tie up with J.P. Morgan about a week, week and a half ago. They're an AI driven hedge fund that was AI before AI was cool. And J.P. Morgan invested 500 million into that fund. So again, it's pretty crazy the integrations and how deep they're going into the crypto baskets to try to find, you know, value. Same thing with Flair. Flares have been, you know, a couple of NASDAQ companies are using them as their treasury service provider. And then, yeah, just lots of positive, really crazy

stuff that is going on in the markets. Specifically, I think, in the yield, people are looking for yield, especially institutional yield. That's what one of the hot buttons that I've noticed this cycle is, folks are really focused on that. So for us, you know, the innovation continues, not only the symbols, but crack in Gemini and Coinbase, we are, you know, let's just call it, you know, moments away from being able to use Robin Hood as well. And so we'll announce that at some point in the near future. You know, our company is all about innovation, right, in many, many ways. There's so much that we do, and I'll give a, you know, just a huge shout out of Tillman, you know, not only CEO, but he leads the dev team for us. The products that he and they create, they don't exist

anywhere else. I know that sounds like hyperbole, but they simply don't. And to be able to use our tools across a bunch of different exchanges and to volatility farm just at the minimum and turn that into Bitcoin, it's just not something you can do in a meaningful, trustworthy way anywhere else. You know, I can't say it loud and proud enough that what we do is really, really extraordinary. And also, we're about to kick off of friends and family promotions. So ear to the ground on that as well. Are the people here friends and or family?

Yeah, yeah. Well, the reason any kind of special we threw out there is obviously based upon demand. And we do have a lot of customers that are using the. product that have said, hey, my sister wants to, but she, you know, she can't quite get to the concierge's level from an affordability perspective. And so, you know, those are, those are loyal customers that love our product. And we want to facilitate getting as many people trading. That's why we've offered a free version of it. It is the full version. There is no, we haven't watered it down. You get every tool that you would get in the concierge side. You're just limited to

$10,000 of capital per year that can go through the software. So you're free to use that, and it's completely free to use. But what we want to do is get people to see the other side of what automation can be for them. And a lot of folks have heard about automation, but heard about it from scam companies that don't really have it, don't let you put your hands around it, and don't let you run it. We do not custody any dollars. We are letting you license our software and load it with your trading exchange in the parameters and execute trades completely with them being in custody of all of your trading dollars. So all you're doing is essentially using a more robust set of tools that you've never really seen or had access to.

And with that robust set of tools, you can create instances as deep and as wide as you want that will cover the market with buy and sell orders that you've prescribed. You've identified, this is how I want my executions to look. And then it's a set it and forget it. And so what you find at the end of the day is that you're getting exactly what you want extracted from the market without having to spend all day sitting there in front of the screen looking at it. So it's something that if you haven't used before, I think it's a big eye-opener. And that's why we offer it at no cost so that you can have the same realization that we did when we started using it.

And we built it out a selfish desire. There are companies that tout automation, but they require you to send your money overseas to exchanges that aren't regulated and or they are a black box. They just pay you a return and they're managing your money for you. All of those things were non-negotiables for us. We wanted automation that we could prescribe and control. That was user-driven, and that's exactly what we've created for you. So come check it out.

We'd love to help you. And the best part of our company, I'd love to take credit and say that the tech is the best, but it's not. Our tech is great, and it is first in class, and it is something that we don't have any knowledge of anybody else providing. So it's a very unique set of tools. But our people are where we shine. If you call us and you're a free user, our people will spend as much time as you need to understand how to use the software and to answer as many questions as needed to get you confident in using it. So if you want a free resource where you can make some great connections and have somebody kind of handholds you through the process, please reach out.

We love to meet folks. One note about our people, they're fantastic, but they did make me shave my beard. So let's ease up on the people thing for maybe a week or two before I grow this thing back. Yeah, man, it's really, the beard is just gone. I mean, you know, a different person. Listen, you're going to switch it up every once in a while, Andrew. I think I like it. Listen, I get it.

I look like a cue ball. That's okay. You know what? I'm okay with that. That's the top of the head, not the bottom of the head. Yeah. You don't look like a cue ball because of your lack of beard. You look like a cube.

My fiancé cried when I did it. And then late last night, she came to me and she's like, when am I going to get my Andrew back? Listen, it's difficult here in the parish household at the parish town town. streets man it's hard out here it's it's tough it teaches you to open up your mouth when you make bets you got to pay the potter when you lose it oh it didn't make you you lost but i don't i don't you know i stick what was the bat not yet do we know he gave the sales guys a lofty target to hit and they smashed it and they proved him wrong they listen when you call somebody out

and say they can't jump as high as you don't they they will jump So Andrew deserves. That literally doesn't work for me. I can only jump so high and I'm never going to get up higher. Yeah. No, again, shout out to our guys. You know, Todd, Daniel, Austin, Luca, Smitty, Joseph, Martin. Listen, everybody does a great job, Alex.

Everybody does a fantastic job at our firm. Love to help people. And I'm happy to be the proverbial QB. all but of their jokes for a few days. I'm happy to do it. Well, I think you're always the butt of our jokes. I just think now we get to share it with the world. So that's the best part of it.

That's true. That's right. All right. Yeah, good stuff. Never a dull moment in the crypto space. Just absolutely never a dull moment. And it's going to stay that. The crowd.

I think you look great. See, I didn't recognize you. That's not, yeah. Is that Smitty? that's yeah that's what he said but let's let's dig into that comment a little bit more he says you look really sharp i didn't recognize you so i don't know what's worse worse that you look sharp now or that he's saying you didn't look sharp for the whole previous you've always looked like hot trash and now yeah hey tilman why don't you shut your face okay

Wilman, you're next. This is too fun. Well, Tillman told me he considered shaving his face in solidarity with me. And then he saw me over the weekend before I tried everyone else. He said, I'm not doing that. No way. I'm not going on that route. When's the last time you didn't have a beard?

Well, I, Andrew or me? When it was nine years old? When he was nine years old? I've had a beard consistently since I got me. married which you know 22 years so yeah and you didn't have one uh about seven years ago yeah about seven years ago yeah so this was this was this was a jarring moment right like i did it and i looked at my face and i said this was a terrible mistake do you know those do you know those turtles in mario brothers that listen if you that's enough all right that is enough

Cooper troopers. I believe they're called Kupa Troopers. You know, we're big so much. That's what the Kupah Tupers. Right, wait for it. I'm going to find a picture now. Yeah, yeah, you're, you're, yeah.

The one with the black glasses, Scott, the Kupa Trooper with the white. Kuba, Troopa, Tupa, black, black, those. Oh, yeah, this guy. It's pretty good. It turned into. Yeah, there it is. Yes, there he is. Hey.

Lucky. Black, too. This guy. There he is. Right there. That's the one. All his story. He's a mythical creature.

I'm okay with, you know, more chins than a Chinese phone book. You're not allowed to say that in 2025. My God, that's an 80s joke. You can't say that. Let me tell you something. That is the thing about the beard. You just got us gift off of YouTube literally forever. We can't say the word Chinese.

Like, what are we doing here, right? Okay, more chins than a, I don't know. You remember truly tasteless jokes, like the things we used to be allowed to say, those books? I used to read those and I was like 10. Listen, I just said one of those, like you are canceled forever. Yeah. So my fiancee is Latino. She's she hails from Venezuela. So like, she hasn't seen like, she's Latina. Because if she's Latino, right. She hasn't seen like late 1980s, 1990s movies. And we watched sleepless in Seattle the other day. And, uh, yo, there are some jokes in that one.

I have a feeling we should. I have a real Donald told by Rosie O'Donnell. Told by Rosie O'Donnell. That would blow your mind. holy smokes they said that so yeah there's been some adjustments in culture over time it's going good yeah i just think about those 80s movies we've talked about they would just never be able to make them again no even revenge of the nerds like to me it was like the most i don't know i think i think everything goes full circle i think eventually you culture returns to culture right um can't wait to bring back my truly tasteless jokes books then all right guys you sign up to archpublic.com. I showed it before, and then we started

going to Coupa Troopers with glasses. It's right there. She always gets so weird at the end, but I love it. And that's all we got for you. Andrew, we'll probably have a full beard by next week. We're going to know if it's real or prosthetic, but I think he's going to tape one on because we've talked about it so much now. And otherwise, guys, that's all we got for you today. Thank you, gentlemen.

Check out Archpublic. We'll see you next week. Later. See you guys. Let's go.