The Wolf Of All Streets - Bitcoin ETF Inflows EXPLODE & U.S. Banks Go ALL IN On Crypto!
Episode Date: November 12, 2025Bitcoin ETF inflows are exploding as Wall Street and U.S. banks make their biggest push yet into digital assets. Today’s market moves come as SoFi Bank becomes the first nationally chartered bank to... launch crypto trading, JPMorgan unveils its new deposit token “JPM Coin”, and Visa rolls out a USDC payout pilot to power instant global payments. Meanwhile, Washington is back in action — the government shutdown has officially ended, and the Senate’s new crypto market structure bill could hand CFTC oversight of digital assets, setting the stage for the next regulatory era.
Transcript
Discussion (0)
Bitcoin ETF inflows are once again exploding, putting up massive numbers yesterday,
$524 million in net inflows just to the Bitcoin spot ETFs.
Of course, while that's happening, we are getting banks going all in on crypto,
and we're having a nice green day with prices trading back to levels not seen since
checks notes yesterday morning.
We've got Dave Weissberger with me here today to unknowingly.
pack it, all, because who wants to do a show alone when you have Dave Weisberger available?
Let's go.
Good morning, everybody.
Happy Wednesday, going to go ahead and just bring Dave right on.
Much better to have you than to have to plow through this by myself.
today. So I appreciate your last minute willingness to join. We've got a lot to talk about here.
First, of course, the good old market, right? We've got Bitcoin trading 104,865, completely flat on
the 24 hours. But when we're up around 105 or 106, we're making an all-time high, when we're down
around 101 or 102, it's all over. It's amazing. I did a video yesterday because people had asked me
to do so to lay out the bullcase for Bitcoin. I'm not going to reprise it here, except to say a
couple of things. The first thing to keep in mind is when you're in a trading range and you get
toward the bottom of the trading range, fear tends to spike. And people tend to get panicky.
And all the stories and all the fud that people have on assets get recirculated. And so you get
really bad takes. Now, why are we in a trading range? That is kind of important for people to
understand. Bitcoin had a rally to over 100,000 basically almost a year ago. I mean, after the,
after the election of President Trump. In point of fact, most of the reason it was rallying are
things that he's already done. He's declared a strategic asset. They have, you can argue they've
stolen it. You could argue they've done whatever. But the fact is, they've acquired three
300,000 plus Bitcoin in the United States, held by the United States, that is part of a strategic
treasury. You have rules on stable coins done and momentum to get something on market structure,
which we'll talk about why that matters in a bit. You have the ETF issuers, you know,
ganging up. You add this mini bubble in digital treasury companies that has since subsided,
but now you have a firm foundation in creating a Bitcoin-based banking system, which is something
that is a very big future driver that I don't think people truly appreciate. And yes, I'm talking
about strategy, but not just strategy. I'm talking J.P. Morgan talking about allowing Bitcoin as pristine
collateral inside of loans once the accounting lets them do it. These are all major drivers. And so what does
that mean? What it means is that institutional buyers, people that look more like me and with grayer hair
than I have, are all saying, hey, this thing makes sense. We see the possibility of a 10x here.
and let's acquire some. And if I can acquire some on sale, I'll do it even happier than chasing
than fomowing in and chasing on the way up. So this year's been a godsend for all the people that
look a little bit older, a little bit more grizzled, and understand that they're buying
Bitcoin for a 5 to 10x over the next, you know, end number of years, as opposed to buying it for
a 10% move because they're on 20 times leverage over the next 5 or 10 minutes. And so you have this very
different dynamic where the bids are very, very real, very consistent, not a wall of buying
like people like to think of in crypto, but just consistent bidding as the market, you know,
kind of comes in. And when the market goes up, the bids kind of stop because they wait to see if
it's going to stabilize there. And that behavior means that people who overextend during rallies
get their noses smacked and lose. And that's okay. Now, this is great. Now, this is great.
great for traders who understand we're in a range. It's horrible for people who just expect
the range to be broken on the downside. So if you're trading the range this year, you're doing
phenomenally well. If you're trading it based upon, okay, I'm pyramiding down. So let's just consider
two things. Consider a trader just to explain to your audience what I mean by that. Consider a trader
who, when it gets over 115 to 120, starts layering in shorts. And then when it gets below,
you know, 108 down to, you know, 102, buys it back and either goes long if they're smart
or at least colloises their short. Compared to somebody who starts shorting at 116, you know,
it increases it a bit more and it gets to 120. And then when it drops to 108,
pushes even more into their short because it's in profit and gets themselves wiped out
when it rips back up in their face. And by the way, we've seen a lot of all of that. The fact
is that you need to understand it's a range. Now, that's Bitcoin. Anyone who's trading altcoins
expecting a Bitcoin rally to immediately fly into altcoins is not right reading the room. The people
buying Bitcoin don't give a crap about most of the all coins. It is true that if you're a Bitcoin
trader, you might want to flip into something that is more altish. Now, I'm excluding Ethereum
from this because that's a different dynamic. And we can talk about that if you want.
But just assuming that you're buying every all coin is going to go up in tandem is just insane.
Now, that's very, very different than saying there are several alt coins, which are building things that are really interesting and will hold up over the long run.
And if you want to invest in those, that makes sense.
That is logical, too.
And there you should just be DCAing in taking all this, this, this with.
I'm laughing because you said, you know, there's all coins with fundamental use cases.
DCAing into, and it brings me back to the greatest ICO of all time, Dave.
I think it's worth discussing.
Coinbase says goodbye to five all coins.
Price collapse instantly.
If you're wondering which ones, ladies and gentlemen, the greatest ICO of all time, EOS.
Here from Jameson Lop.
Arguably the most successful ICO of all time,
raising $4 billion to develop a new layer one cryptocurrency.
The market cap of EOS now sits at less than $500 million,
but Block 1 still holds a hundred.
160,000 Bitcoin from the ICO worth $16 billion.
They also own quite a few other things like a big chunk of bullish, which went public.
Here we are.
Eos, this is going to be the future of blockchains, raised billions and billions of dollars and never did a damn thing.
And this is where things I've been saying for eight years come home to roost.
Now, consider, first of all, when you say EOS is still worth, you know, whatever it is.
$400 million when I checked a few seconds ago. It's zero. It's just masquerading as 400 million.
Just alone, that makes my head hurt. I mean, effectively, EOS, which has zero utility,
zero value, zero potential. There's no reason for anybody to own it ever is worth more than
almost all of the Russell 2000 companies that we consider the small cap universe that are real
benchmark. So just that gives you something, some understanding of
the overvaluation of the fat tail of crypto.
Fat tales for those do not know what that means.
In a statistical, basically, if you have a curve, the way the valuation curve is,
you have this group and then this huge number of coins.
Mike McGone likes to call them competitors to Bitcoin,
and I laugh at them every time he says it.
But the fact that there are coins with multi-hundred million dollar market caps
that have absolutely less potential than the rights to the book,
that I'm writing. And by the way, I'm not joking about that. I mean, lots of much less potential.
And trust me, I would sell the book rights to a million dollar frat boys for 400 million right
now, make me a bid and it's yours. But the point is, it's just silly. But now consider, you know,
why people like me, when I first saw the ICU boom, just thought of it, the three words that
drove me absolutely bananas back then. And I know I was right. And I used to piss people off is
non-dilutive capital. That's what founders called it. So you're raising money to build a
blockchain and you don't get your stake in the blockchain, you know, diluted, and at the same time,
you get to hold the treasury. If you're smart, you don't spend it. So this is the key. If you went
to a company, a normal investor, and instead of saying, hey, you're going to get immediate
liquidity that you can dump at a profit if you buy into this blockchain and see,
it was we're going to take it public and you're going to be able to use retail exit liquidity.
If instead of that, you said you're going to have to hold this thing, but you're going to have a
right to anything we do with your treasury if the token doesn't meet, you know, certain usage
characteristics, utility characteristics, then you would actually have done okay on your investment
in EOS because it would have reverted to a block one investment.
Now, it couldn't be done that way, even though it is a far, far better investment case.
But it couldn't because the U.S. SEC couldn't get their act together to agree with Commissioner
Purse and create a safe harbor because such a deal would have been considered an investment
contract. And there was no way to do it because it didn't exist before. There's never been
a way to invest in a commodity project with a kicker that if the commodity fails or gets
closed up, that it converts into equity. Now, there should be because it's good for investors. It's
good for founders, but it's an exact example, a perfect example of why Paul Atkins says we need new
rules, why people, lawyers in the crypto community, whether, and there are so many of them that
would agree with this, think this matters. And so if you think that it doesn't matter what the
regulatory environment is, then you're not paying attention because investors would gobble up
tokens where the founders are accountable to what happens to the assets that are invested. It would
be such a stronger case, but it doesn't exist. And it should exist. And this is,
this is the classic example. And I'm going to be ranting about this for weeks.
Should I mean, should that $4 billion just be like redistributed to the original, uh,
well, he can't. Investors, because they didn't buy that right. I mean, I don't just say it's like
rationally, it's so ridiculous that they can be sitting on hundreds of thousands of Bitcoin
and all these investments without ever building anything. It's not their money. There are plenty
zombie treasuries out there that are worth more than the original, you know, that are worth
something more than the tokens are worth. There are plenty of zombie chains that are sitting there
that are basically been abandoned by their founders that still have value. In pretty much every one of
those cases, the proceeds of the ICO, there's something left. Now, admittedly, most of it probably
went into yachts and second homes for the founders, but, or the VCs that back them. But the truth is
that a real investment environment would have given something back to the original, you know,
buyers.
And there was just no way to do it.
And I'm not yelling at the founders.
I don't think they did anything wrong.
I think that they did what they did.
Of course, they did do something wrong.
They got fined a whopping 24 million.
That's million with an M, not billion with a B, you know, for it being an investment contract,
which is the ultimate irony.
They actually settled and admitted when they sold the tokens as an investment contract,
but yet it contained no rights to the underlying equity.
So it's really a fucked up story, Scott.
I mean, there's just no other words for it.
The good news is, though, now we got ICOs coming back to Coinbase, you know.
Right.
And in Coinbase's case, to their credit, they're trying to at least create transparency into
what you own and what the obligations of the market makers, other people on the platform
are doing it.
Could it be stronger?
Yes.
Should it be? Yes. Well, ultimately, rules end up making it stronger. Yes, but we have to wait for it.
And the real thing, the thing that really grinds my gears, and I know you're going to agree with this one, is how there could still be a political party dominated by members who think you shouldn't be able to create rules to provide investor protections.
And we want it to stay as the Wild West to be driven offshore because literally that's the policy that.
Elizabeth Warren and her brand of the Democrats believe in, and people that, you know,
we'll see what happens with clarity. We'll see if Gallego actually honors his commitment to
fair shake or not and other senators. But the truth is that we still have a political party
who believes investors should be hung out to dry in this emerging asset class. And to me,
that's just sad. Yeah, I do want to touch slightly. Actually, it wasn't news I was going to bring up,
but we talked about it on Crypto Town Hall yesterday. And I think it's worth noting when laughing
about previous ICOs that Coinbase has this platform now for launching tokens.
Their first one is going to be the very highly hyped for a very long time, which is already
trading, I think, in futures markets, Monad, you know, yet another EF killer here.
But interestingly, I brought this up yesterday on Cryptotan Hall.
I think there's two problems to be solved with ICOs, one you just dove into massively,
and we've talked about endlessly, which is why does this token have value?
Why should I invest in it?
how does the value actually accrue to the token and not the company, et cetera.
We've done that.
The other side, though, is the actual disclosures as to what's going on to how these
tokens are handled, why they're going up and down.
Coinbase and monad actually released here, and this is the first time I've ever seen
it, a list of the market makers exactly the duration of their market making services, how
much the loans are.
So to their credit, they are trying to bring transparency, at least into how the tokens
launch, how they're traded, where the liquidity comes from.
and exactly who, whether you agree with the tokenomics or not, is holding the tokens,
how long the vesting is, all of those things, right?
I think the release is 7.5% of the token supply to the public.
I view that is very low.
So that's a criticism, but they're transparent about it.
That's up to you.
Investing lockups, I think, are a year for the early people.
That's when they start.
But we are getting more transparency this time around, I guess, is the note that it doesn't
mean that there's a great value in the token itself.
That's up to you to decide.
are getting a clear understanding of what is going on at the mechanics behind the token price
movement. This is a classic example of the market trying to and arguably doing a better job
than the regulators of doing what needs to be done. So, you know, we have these rules for IPOs that
were written in the 30s. I kid you not. They haven't changed. You know, and for those,
anyone who disputes that fact, just keep in mind that the reason we have a 30-day cooling off
period in an IPO process is because that's how long it took to get, once the prospectus was
written, to get it actually published because printers took that long in order to be able to get
the printing presses to crank out enough prospectuses that they could sell. And we haven't changed
the rules. So what Coinbase is doing is essentially saying, okay, you guys are giving me no guidance.
We have no rules. We're going to come up with something that we think investors will want.
the kinds of disclosures, the method of disclosing it on the internet with all these things,
you know, contractually bound. And honestly, it's a very, very good start. It is something to be
applauded. I think the legal team at Coinbase is doing a great job. I think they have been a
leader in the industry and doing things that are bringing us forward. And you can criticize Coinbase
all you want. And there's lots of things you can criticize them for that people whine about.
I personally think that if you want to understand what matters and why this industry needs to move forward,
it needs leaders like Brian Armstrong who are pushing it forward and his legal team that are pushing it forward.
And by the way, I will be similarly effusive in praise on the legal side for, you know, Ripple and what they're trying to do.
And Robin Hood, what they're trying to do.
I mean, Robin Hood's chief legal officer is, I mean, I'm friends with him, Dan Gallagher.
He is a great, he was an SEC commissioner.
he was my favorite commissioner when he was there he's an awesome guy and these guys are working
tirelessly behind the scenes to push the markets forward and and have been up until now literally
now fighting against a against an SEC that is just so slow to act now the government shut down
took a lot of momentum away but i think that we're going to start seeing it but this is really
really, really bullish for what will ultimately be the all coin market and the ability for founders
to raise money, et cetera. It is extremely bullish for that. It doesn't necessarily benefit any
existing tokens, but it is a very positive development. So I don't want to be overly effusive
for the investment case, but I think, Scott, this is exactly the sort of thing that the industry
needs to see happening. And it should be codified as well. Jumping back to obviously,
something that's adjacent to the price action. So, yes, we've been trading now in a tight
range. We'll call it 100 to 107. You know, after dropping down, we had some outflows on the
ETFs. But yesterday, interestingly, even with price sort of bouncing around this very tight range,
U.S. spot Bitcoin ETF saw the best day in a month with $520 million in net inflows. I believe
Solana ETFs have not had outflow days yet. They're new, obviously. They have staking. Yesterday,
we reported that Atkins said we will be getting staking for the other ETF.
issuers so we know that that's coming. We have Bitwise Link ETF listed on the DTCC website.
This is usually a harbinger of future things to come that they will anticipate an approval.
And of course, with the shutdown coming likely to an end today, now we get this big rush for all
of these things to get approved. We're supposed to get a pure play XRP ETF likely debuting tomorrow.
We had that one that sort of skirted the rules and got approved a few weeks ago, but this is
pure plate just like the rest of them. So clearly, uh, the tailwinds are back on the docket here.
If the government reopens and the SEC starts approving these things, I don't know if the
inflows are indicative of that or we just got to a low enough price that, uh, things seemingly
turned around, you know, 100,000 obviously. If you're looking at the equivalent, you're an investor
saying, I want to buy a $100,000 Bitcoin, you're going to probably, you know, buy that ETF form to
some degree. But I think it's time to get the bullish news going again and start to get some of
these things launched. I mean, yes, 100% yes. Although I, you know, I have arguments with people
about the magnitude of that bullish move and what does it actually mean? And we can talk
through a lot of that. But the truth is that the government shutdown had some very large
effects that have not been anticipated or at least understood by people investing. So there are two
major things that, you know, it impacted. It impacted the gears of government. And that has impacts
that people don't think about. Like one of them, for example, that no one crypto really cares
or are going to cry crocodile tears for is the IPO market, which was setting up in the fourth
quarter to be one of the best in years, came to a grinding halt.
because the SEC wasn't there to approve registrations.
And now we're into Thanksgiving through Christmas, which is not when they wanted.
The idea was going to be get IPOs going in, you know, toward the end of October through to November and rush to to have listings every day, have people ringing those bells at the NASDAQ, you know, the fake bell and ringing the bell, which I've been lucky enough to have done done a couple of times on the New York Stock Exchange.
that translates directly into bonuses for Wall Street and billions of dollars to founders and
initial investors that isn't going to happen until 2026.
So that was a very big effect that people don't understand.
The same time, if you wanted to get an ETF approved, it also stopped for the five weeks
of all of this.
So, you know, the gears of government, that does matter.
Now, of course, the other thing that people don't want to think about is how much money didn't end up in people's bank accounts, right?
How much money is sitting in the Treasury General account that would have been spent already and will now get spent at double pace.
And that money will filter through the economy.
And when money filters through the economy, some of it ends up in investments.
It's that simple.
I know it sounds obvious, but this has to be the easiest to front run trade in history,
if you think about it.
And it's just, it's crazy, Scott.
I don't understand how, you know, I was on a space two days ago with James Wynn,
and he was going on about, well, he's long-term bullish on Bitcoin, but he sees the
actually had a conversation with him.
Yeah, yeah.
He's a, you know, it was funny because Mike Alfred and he got into a little bit of a pissing contest.
Mike was very respectful, you know, Mike.
Mike is a respectful guy.
He doesn't engage in ad hominem attacks.
He's just very methodical in the way he explains things.
And as far as he's concerned, if you think he's wrong, God bless you.
He doesn't care, but he's going to tell you that you're wrong.
And the two of them got into it.
It was actually really entertaining.
But the truth is that everybody who is saying all these people who are saying,
short, short, short, short, short, short, are basing it upon a myth. They're basing it upon a phantom.
It's called the four-year cycle. And they don't understand where it comes from, right? I mean, the four-year cycle,
you lived it. I came late. My first cycle was 2017, right? But the fours. I know I started in
2000, late 2016, early 17. So, okay. So fine. So, but people need to understand history. If you don't
understand history, you are doomed to repeat the mistakes or doomed to make mistakes.
The first cycle, the first having in Bitcoin that people talk about with reverence,
nobody knew if Bitcoin was going to fail when the miners got half the rewards.
They didn't know if there was going to be a network that was going to be able to survive a 51%
attack when that block reward dropped so substantively.
They literally didn't know.
That's why it took six some odd months for people to say, oh, okay, the network is still
okay and that's when the rally started the second having there was still fear of the same thing the
third having there was still fear of the same thing but you noticed that the fear was less and the
resulting rally was less but still incredibly substantive today when you cut the last having
cut from a number that didn't matter relative to demand drivers to a number that mattered half as
much. That is not the same thing. There was no fear after the Bitcoin having that the market was
going to fail. The Bitcoin chart of hash rate, as I've shown on every macro Monday, every time McGone
ignores it, is incredibly robust. It has grown geometrically since those days. It's now back to
linear growth, but it was geometric growth for a while. That means the four-year cycle based on the
having is nonsense. It doesn't mean there aren't cycles. Obviously, we have bull and bear cycles in
every single market. But the S&P has more or less been with a couple of blips on an uninterrupted
cycle since 2009. That's 17 years with a couple of blips. Why should Bitcoin, which is
tracking other risk assets, be treated in any other way? It makes no sense. Yet, that's the reason
in that people are calling for Bitcoin to drop now because the four-year cycle demands that it could.
It's sort of like, you know, people, it's like the cargo cult, if you go back and read about that.
Because, you know, I don't know.
What do you say?
So that one, I don't know.
Yeah, it's a lot.
You could Google it.
It basically cargo cultists in the Polynesian islands, they were given, for a while, they were, they were given aid packages and things.
And they felt that that was, it was on some sort of time.
period and people kind of thought that it was going to continue forever.
There's all sorts of examples throughout history.
Just because something's happened a few times doesn't mean it continues forever, right?
And that's why I posted yesterday my favorite indicator.
It's actually not my favorite.
It's a bunch of bullshit, but the McRib indicator.
It actually has more probative value.
It has a higher statistical correlation than the four-year cycle.
Yet, we all know intuitively that McDonald's putting out.
No, the McRib pumps Bitcoin.
It's fact.
I mean, I mean, come on.
It's, it's at, there is, there is no more intuitive explanation for it, for the McRib
indicator than there is for the four-year cycle.
And it has happened more often.
So honestly, you know, does that mean you should buy base of the McRib indicator?
No, but it means that you should ignore things that have.
have no statistical significance and understand, have an investment thesis that makes sense.
Okay, I got that rant off my chest.
Is that okay?
It's very good.
And the next half of the title was U.S. banks go all in on crypto and pretty big news.
We discussed it yesterday, so I don't want to dive in too deeply, but SoFi Bank becomes
a first and only nationally chartered bank to launch crypto trading for consumers.
So we know that if they're doing it, everybody else is going to be doing it, right?
Because you can't just have one.
So I think interestingly in the interview yesterday that we watched on this show with the CEO of SoFi, he was asked the question, you know, why would someone choose you over Robin Hood or Coinbase or any of those others? And he basically laid out all the reasons you wanted to be an actual chartered bank to do this. It's mixed with your checking, savings account. He didn't go as far as to say they were necessarily FDIC insured on the crypto assets, but they are FDIC insured as a bank, obviously. So we have two approaches here. We got the banks coming in.
in one way. And then we have the Robin Hoods and the Coinbase is and everybody else trying to
become banks. I mean, look, I think it's a merger of the models, but when you see that happening,
this is big news because they already have the bank charter that these companies, I mean, Robin Hood
is bank adjacent, but they already have, you know, the charters that they're looking for.
So here's the real kicker with the Genius Act and people building, you can bet, take this one to
the bank. And yes, pun intended.
that every platform that allows trading of tokenized assets is going to end up with
easy, simple payment rails for consumers to use using stable coins.
Now, the consumer may not even know that it's stable coins, but think, imagine a world that is
inevitable.
By the way, this is not, this is, I'm not talking flying cars here, although those are probably
inevitable too.
I'm talking, it is going to be true that you're going to be able to have an account where
you can have all your auto pays going through it. You can pay all your bills that can go back out
through Zell or a Venmo type thing or writing a check with bank partners via stablecoins at the same
time as your account can have automated sweeps from the payment account back to an investment
account which can hold any tokenized asset. And one of the tokenized assets, obviously one of the
larger ones will be Bitcoin. That is the future. It is undoubted that that's the future.
Now, if you're sitting at a depository institution that's paying half a percent interest and you're
not thinking about offering trading crypto and ultimately tokenized equity is trading everything
on your platform, then you are destined to become Kodak or Polaroid and see your monopoly or
your oligopoly go poof before your eyes because within five years that is going to be the state
of play so you should expect every single financial institution that takes deposits to be able to
offer crypto trading services now i love this because you know you know you can see the logo here
i mean you know companies that provide institutional grade trading will will be eventually be worth
an enormous amount of money why because right now people
don't care if they're paying half a percent or more to buy or sell these things. Whereas if you
consider equities, people pay nothing on commissions and have the tightest spreads known to man.
You know, and that's what's coming to crypto as well. So you're going to see this mad rush of
M&A. You're going to see this mad rush of adoption because it's not that expensive for them to do it.
And to not do it risks an existential loss of business. They don't talk about it this way in the
public-facing stuff. But trust me, that's what's happening. And when I say trust me, I'm not
guessing. I remember because I literally was nominated by the senior management of what was Solomon
Smith Barney at the time before it became Citigroup to run our internet operating committee and
to completely rebuild our trading infrastructure because of this internet thing that the senior
executives didn't know what it was, but they knew that if you didn't have a website, you weren't
going to do well. Seriously. And so if you think the same thing isn't happening now at every bank
that there isn't somebody who's responsible for the technology to start modernizing their
systems and get ready for this, then you're just not paying attention. This is an absolute
certainty. I agree. And there's a lot more news that supports that we have. Not surprisingly,
JP Morgan rolls out deposit token, JPM coin and digital asset push. So this has already existed,
Interestingly, they're now rolling it out publicly more for institutions, institutional clients,
and it's being done on base, which I find very interesting that JPMorgan is working this closely
with Coinbase to do it on base blockchain of all the blockchains they can choose.
Visa launches pilot for direct USDC payouts to power instant global payments.
We obviously know this is coming.
What happened?
I haven't heard XRP mentioned yet.
Keep going.
Okay.
that's not the use case of XRP tape the use cases in payments for all those years they would
replace Swift and be used for cross-border payments but now it's the liquidity layer that allows
you to transfer one to the other and a decentralized man okay anyways latest the UAE just
completed its first digital Durham transaction under the CBDC pilot that's a big one yeah these
But let's talk about adoption of tokens, which are all effectively stable coins one way or another, boy.
Well, I mean, understand that one is so important. And I'm going to tell you why and why what drives me crazy about the XRP army. Now, I am not against XRP as an asset growing in line with the crypto ecosystem. I think people who think that it's going to outperform the rest of the crypto ecosystem need serious counseling. But that's a different story. But why do I?
Well, if you believe that the ecosystem moves tokens based on community, then they might not be crazy at all because well, I don't want to go down that road, but I do want to make the point.
So the UAE doing a digital dirham is something that's going to happen in every single currency.
Understand why do I mean that?
Today, you need, if you want to make a transaction between, you know, for you can dollars in Durham, it is a pain in the freaking.
ass. How do I know this? Coin routes, big office in Dubai. We have, you know, most of our profits
end up one way or another in dollars and we have expenses in Durham. We know this is a painful
process. When this pilot is done, it's going to make our lives easier. Instead of having to go
do two transactions, which is a stable coin dollars across and then convert the stable coin
back into an FX transaction, you're going to be able to do a single swap from,
USDC, Tether, J.P. Morgan coin, whatever. It doesn't matter from a dollar coin to a
dirham coin. You're going to be able to do the same thing from a dollar coin to a euro coin.
You're not going to need a liquidity layer in between the two, because why the hell would
you interpose another volatile currency or asset in between? Is it going to be a direct
swaps? It's the same reason why Tether grew to be the most valuable company in the world.
Remember, it wasn't all that long ago that every all coin was nominated in Bitcoin.
And so in order, if you wanted to buy an alt, you bought Bitcoin and then you flipped it.
Today, you buy Tether, if you want to buy Bitcoin or all coins, and you do direct swaps back and forth.
You don't have that extra layer.
Bitcoin is no longer used as an intermediary asset very often for people because there's no need for it to be used that way.
And so the same thing is going to happen with payments, same thing is going to happen with global money.
And this story is exactly what I've been talking about and chirping about for the last six months that it was inevitable.
I'm glad to see it's in the UAE because they're one of the most forward-thinking governments in the world when it comes to finance.
So I do think it's important.
Yeah, let's just hope that it's not the dystopian privacy violating social credits version that we're going to get in China.
But as you said, all CBDCs are not created equal.
That's the bottom line.
A CBD in a communist country is used for control.
a CBDC in a lot of these other countries
will literally just be used like Fedwire.
Well, understand.
And it won't be consumer.
I,
the world gives people choice.
If you choose to live in the UAE,
you know you have no privacy.
Full stop.
You go there, you go there,
you get your retinal scan
in order to enter the country.
You,
they have north of 90% of all public spaces
covered by,
by cameras.
you make a choice that living there you prioritize safety yep you prioritize safety that's what you prioritize
there's nothing wrong with that so them having a cvdc makes perfect sense now will they implement
social credit scores the other stuff that the communist governments are doing almost certainly not
because then they would lose their entirety of their economy because most of people would say would
throw up an absolute shit fit about it and they're not dumb these are very smart people but the difference is
is, and there are governments which are straining to get power, and the CBDC would give them
that power, namely the European government, the European central government, is straining for power
and that's something they want. The U.S. government, you can make an argument that that's what they're
doing, and that's why those of us who are anti-CBDC think that private stable coins are so much better,
but that's a totally other topic. But it is important to understand that not all CBDCs are created equal,
And not all governments are created equal.
I mean, isn't JPM coin just a stable coin by another name to some degree?
Well, but of course, they lobbied the governments that a stable coin can't pay interest,
but a depository token can.
And if you think that that there aren't lawyers who are absolutely stone cold serious when they make that distinction,
you haven't sat in meetings at banks, trust me, lots of years at city.
group, I can tell you with an absolute fact that there are lawyers who have told their business
people that if you damn well ever call this a stable coin, you're going to face severe consequences.
By the way, I had a conversation with the people from Franklin Templeton years before
genius that the Benji, their token, which is effectively a fund, a tokenized fund, I said, well,
that sounds like a stable coin that pays interest.
They got really indignant.
They were like, well, one of them laughed, but the other one got really indignant.
I think it's like, no, no, no. Nope, it's not a stable coin because, you know, that will be
blah, blah, blah, blah legally. But yeah, it's, it's a distinction without a difference.
It is. And it just shows exactly what's coming, right? I mean, whether it's going to be the,
it's interesting that they're doing it on base, right? So it's not on JPMorgan network. So I find
that very interesting. There's clearly a relationship with Coinbase for them to be doing that.
But, I mean, of all things, JPM token, right? It just, this is just further proof visa.
you know, direct payments with USDC, utterly disrupting their entire business because there's
something better. And once again, they just don't want to be completely displaced.
Why are you surprised?
Less than a week. Lessons of the past. They learned.
Was it two weeks ago that MasterCard, who Visa kind of competes with,
announced a $2 billion purchase, right, of zero hash in order to be able to build their own
tokenized structure? And we're all like, that's not worth $2 billion, but I guess.
it's a raise. Well, I don't know, beauty's in the eye as a beholder. I mean, I can think of a lot of
tech purchases that didn't make sense based on revenues, but did make sense based on tech.
And I'm not going to say boo or or who on whether or not what zero hash was worth. What I will say is
once MasterCard says, I know I'm going to get my model disrupted, I need to have this core
technology to think that Visa wasn't going to do something similar is, is not.
Of course they're going to.
The real question is, are they going to unbundle their services?
Are they going to charge separately for credit versus, you know, versus just straight payments?
They're going to charge for being able to dispute transactions versus potentially offering a service where you don't have disputing.
My guess is they won't.
My guess is they're going to still charge a premium, probably have to go down a bit, for extending credit bundled with being able to disbueing.
dispute transactions, because there are a lot of people who really depend on the fact that when
they do, when you sign up for whatever service and you cancel it, and then the people who you're
trying to cancel it from don't let you cancel it because they make you go through 16 hoops,
cross your fingers, jump up and down on one foot and howl at the moon in order to get it canceled,
that is the ability to go to the credit card company, say, listen, I tried, here's the email,
please dispute this discharge and all charges going forward. That's a service.
It was actually a news today.
I don't have it brought up, but by bit put out a report that said 16 blockchains have,
you know, rollbacks and can be frozen and all these things, which we know, right?
But this isn't, that's not even unique to J.P. Morgan coin and the institutional tokens.
Like most of our favorite decentralized blockchains can also be rolled back, forked, fixed,
reversed, frozen, et cetera.
So, okay.
Of course.
I mean, it is very simple.
Everybody who said, and I'm not going to name names, but lots of people over the last five years,
that blockchains are just a database, don't understand the core of what's actually happening.
All of this is going to move to rails that we know and love.
Now, the real question for crypto investors, for your core audiences, is there a value proposition
where the owners of the tokens get at the revenues that are going to move on to those chains.
Full stop.
And if the answer is yes.
Same question we were asking before what the token launches.
Correct.
If the answer to that is yes, it's very investable because the total addressable market is going to explode.
If the answer is no, then stay away.
And moreover, if the answer is yes, it's going to appreciate it is just something I want to make clear.
If you can get an investment that you expect over the next five years is going to double,
that is a great investment.
If you buy an investment,
you expect to go up by 100x, that is a lottery ticket.
And that is not an investment.
That is, I want someone stupider than me to buy me out at a ridiculous price.
And so it is not bearish to say that the,
to say that substitution effects.
mean that the better blockchains that have a value proposition and win business can only go up
so high because if the prices go up too much, then it becomes too expensive to use, then people
will substitute away. That is not bearish. I know people think it's bearish, but it is not
bearish. It means that economics still works even in the crypto system. So I think it's important
to understand that particularly on a show where you have one of the better blockchain,
sponsoring you that if I if someone like me who is more skeptical than others says you know what
this thing probably can you know double or triple in a period of time that to me is a ringing
endorsement for an asset that is not bad and yet there are people in crypto that are like you know
I was on a spaces last night you know I want a Mario spaces and one of the guys said well I don't
care I only want my bags to go up 100 exits if I can't get that then it's not it's it's not
venture investing in blockchain technology shouldn't be at a level at least for something it shouldn't
be venture unless it's brand new and if it's brand new then sure it could go up 100x because you should
be but because you should be expecting it to go to zero exactly you you can invest in something
that you think can pull 100x but the downside risk of that should be 90% chance you lose your
investment like any bc and then you're just spray and pray and you're taking 10 bets and
hoping one goes up and nine die and the other one that counts for the nine
to die that's right and everybody thinks everything they hold is going up 100x when they're retailed
so it doesn't work right well and that's the problem so i if there's one thing to take away
if you're a retail investor is moderate your expectations and invest for your actual family and
actually growing wealth and you can do that in crypto but you can't if you over leverage yourself
or if you have unreasonable expectations because or if god forbid you see you see
your use case, your thesis unravel before your eyes. And this brings us back to the first story,
which is EOS. Yeah, absolutely. So let's say that's one topic I just want to touch on here. The story,
BTQ technologies, acquires option to acquire, exercise is option to acquire Q perfect, a leading
neutral atom computing company, strengthening BTQ is a fully integrated quantum company. This was
basically just an excuse for me to ask you about quantum. I mean, this,
This company has a full stack for protecting mission critical layers.
Obviously, that then goes down to cryptography and blockchains.
Just a good moment to kind of take your pulse on how fearful you are of quantum
or how much of a real threat you view this as because there are people spending a shit ton of money
to develop technology to protect us from it.
I mean, I have no expertise in quantum entanglement.
I have lots of friends who were physicists, mostly because they all went into finance instead of physics, but the ones who stayed in physics could explain it better.
What I can say is the best sources that I have seen tell you that going from theoretical breakthrough to actual product takes time and you'll have warning.
And so in every investment, in everything, you need to understand what this means.
I will tell you, the people who should be terribly afraid are the cybersecurity folks in the traditional
financial systems, which are far bigger, have far bigger surface areas of attack vectors than
most crypto.
And some of them and government agencies are still trying to update tech from the 70s and 80s, right?
So I would be more fearful of what happens to ACH Swift or Fedwire than I would to what happens
to the Bitcoin network.
Well, the Bitcoin network will be fine.
It's designed, you know, with difficulty adjustments, et cetera.
There are old wallets and don't dispute the fact that some number, don't know the exact
number, some meaningful percentage of Bitcoin could be stolen and dumped on the network.
So it is not like it's an irrelevant fact.
But if whatever that percentage was, that is not an existential threat to the network, an existential threat to the banking system if all of a sudden all the encryption on everybody's account, most of which using SMS's and other sort of stupid things now, you know, to the two factor, which could be sim swapped, et cetera.
You know, if the existential threat is to the existing financial system, that's where you really should be worried.
Now, does that mean that you should ignore it?
Of course you shouldn't ignore.
That makes me bullish on those who are developing the quantum tech
to make sure that it's not a problem and evolving as we get closer to it becoming a problem.
Absolutely true.
You know, there are people, you know, we still have firms out there using compliance systems
based upon, you know, older technology that effectively throws up 95% false positives
or 98% false positives.
I mean, that's how most of the banks work, despite the fact that there's companies like,
Like, for example, a company that, I don't know if you know them, Solidus Labs, which is, you know, started in crypto, which had to, therefore, understand and use AI in order to decrease false positives and make the compliance part more specific.
But that extends to threat detection as well on cybersecurity.
There are people who are using who basically put their cyber locks in place and have no monitoring software that has any intelligence behind it.
You know, everyone's talking with the AI boom.
Well, yeah, it's a big deal.
LLMs are really cool.
I ask rock stuff all the time.
You know, it's, and it's incredibly useful.
But the truth is, the real use cases, the ones that are driving actual adoption are, you know,
you're going to have AI agents scanning for cyber threats, including quantum.
And all of this stuff relates.
And so if you think we're going backwards, impossible to go backwards.
But going forwards has very investable implications.
We just haven't seen them yet.
I mean, yeah, obviously invest in data centers and power, you know, to be able to create AI or quantum companies.
All of those make sense.
If you believe they have the secret sauce, right, you know, it's going to be massive.
I mean, the first quantum chip company is going to make, because everything is bigger the second time around or the third time around, is going to make invidia look like a tinker toy.
But we're years away from that happening.
Anything else on your radar before I let you go?
we have got Cryptotown Hall in 20 minutes.
Yeah, I mean, you know, it's, uh, I want it all back.
We're talking too much.
So this morning for people, I hope somebody else is going to talk more on Crypto Town Hall
because I've kind of said what's on my mind.
Some days it's tough, man.
Some days we get on there and it's just, I mean, look, you know, we're getting the,
the market opening fall in Bitcoin that happens every single day when people, you know,
when people short the initial ETF, you know, holding ramp and you get this and then it'll
stabilize around sometime in crypto town hall yada yada but just remember repeat after me scott we are
in a trading range until proven otherwise yeah we are all right guys that's all we got we're at
104 000 everybody likes more dave so thank you for showing up i would have uh i would have struggled
to plow through that one on my own um i have much better when uh we can talk it all through uh in real
time that's what we've got we will be on crypto town hall 10 15 a m eastern standard time on
X. You can follow that on my X or Dave's X or Cryptotown Hall X. Otherwise, I'll be back tomorrow and
Friday. And Dave, we'll see you here on Monday for Macromonday. Yes, sir. Thank you, sir. See ya in 20.
Thank you.
