The Wolf Of All Streets - Bitcoin Jumps as US-China Trade Talks Spark Optimism | Crypto Town Hall

Episode Date: May 7, 2025

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Morning, everybody. Welcome to Crypto Town Hall. Every single day, 10, 15 a.m. Eastern Standard Time here on X, every single weekday to be more specific. Our topic here, we know that they always change, but Bitcoin jumps as US-China trade talks spark optimism. I think the fact that our topic today is not the fact that Ethereum got a massive upgrade should tell you everything you need to know about the market and people's sentiment right now in Ethereum because once upon a time on Crypto Town Hall, that probably would have been the topic of the day. We probably would have gotten a bunch of Ethereum devs and maxis on to talk about it. And now it's Crickets was barely even on our radar. But yes, the Ethereum Pectra upgrade has gone live on mainnet at EPEC Epoch 364032.

The update activates smart contract smart account wallet UX features doubles L2 blob data capacity. I mean that we that the fact that we call things blob data just ridiculous and introduces validator UX improvements. The community will monitor the network for any issues over the next 24 hours. If you're trading on any of the exchanges, I know that there was like Binance,

obviously to support this upgrade had to freeze some L2s and L1s at least withdrawals and deposits and some of the activity on those. So just keep an eye on that. Joe, I mean, why, listen, you're all over the ecosystem. Why is, we talked about the merge for like six months last year and these upgrades. And now you get a major upgrade in crickets.

It's the blob update. I mean, how could it be crickets? It's the blob. Like, did you even know that we were updating the massive L2 blob? You are actually seeing a tiny bit of market reaction to this. It's really tough to see. But Ethereum is up 5% on the 7-day.

And then you've got some of the other ERC-20 L2s that have been around for a long time, kind of more flat, like Avalanche is more flat. Some like Toncoin is down 4% on the week. So you're seeing like a little bit like Polkadot down 3%. So you're kind of seeing a little bit of it finding its way into, okay, there's some iteration happening. There's some improvements that are happening, but some iteration happening. There's some improvements that are happening, but my God, is it not the same as it used to be? There are so many different L2s out there right now and they've sucked a lot of the liquidity away from Ethereum. It still seems to be the way that people tend to launch things and get into the ecosystem, but more and more, the conversations with so many different startups and so many different founders when they're looking to launch something is,

where are you going to launch? And it almost never seems like Ethereum is in that conversation anymore in a big way. It's always about what other ecosystem has fast transaction times always about what other ecosystem has fast transaction times or has a lot of community excitement and people building in that direction. And Ethereum just doesn't have that, even though everything that is built around it is built because of Ethereum. And you might always come back to it in some way.

I think if people hold large amounts of USDT know, USDT or USDC, you know, they tend to hold that on Ethereum. It feels like a safer place to do so. But the yields and, you know, I would say like the building excitement is happening and it's happening elsewhere. Yeah, but they increase the L2 blob capacity data. I have a dude. We need data. They need two blobs. We need three blobs. But I don't know what the day this means. I'm sorry. I've been here a while, and I still

get go when I see some of our vernacular. It's hilarious. It's hilarious. But it's also a marketing thing. If you look at a lot of the different projects out there, it's kind of like imagine Avalanche, people know that's for gaming. The narrative there is there's a lot of people that are gaming, it's growing, it's a huge

audience. If you want to go building gaming, you think, oh, I'm going to go build over there because that's where a lot of other people are building. You have to have that feel to it and you have to sell to people. Sometimes when you just get super technical like this, it's almost like a cop out because they didn't have anything exciting to say. They're like, hey, here's just like a backend upgrade

to the app that didn't really, you know, there's nothing exciting about it for the front end consumer, which ultimately, you know, drives that price action and that excitement. And Matteo, you raised your hand. I was going to go to you next, because I know you are literally building on BitTensor and not on Ethereum. Maybe you would have been building on Ethereum a few years back.

So yeah, I mean, these are different purposes, but I actually think that this upgrade is pretty exciting. I don't think it's like L2's drawing the liquidity away. I think it's Bitcoin dominance continuing to rip to all time high for this cycle. That's drawing the liquidity away. I do think this upgrade is very impressive given it could be branded a little bit better, especially as a marketer. Of course, I always cringe at how Ethereum decides to position things.

But essentially, we're getting like a complete consolidation of the validator network by raising the cap, which is going to just really increase the institutional validator performance as well as the user validator participation. And I actually think that that's significant. They're also making it a better user experience on the front end, from being able to like connect your wallet without having to constantly reconnect it, better security features, and the blob capacity is actually impressive, right?

Because that actually means that you get an order of magnitude faster rollup capacity from like Arbitrum and Optimism, which means that if you have stable coins on optimism or arbitrum, they can actually roll up twice as fast, which again, we're, you know, Dave and I have talked about this and Dave is a big advocate for this as am I the increasing the velocity of money. So this actually does do that considering that stable coins on Ethereum and different layer twos are still the primary place where this volume is happening. I actually think it's quite substantial. I think that if the macro conditions were

a little bit different, we didn't have Bitcoin making all time high this morning, there would be a lot more hype, Bitcoin dominance ripping for this cycle. We'd have a lot more hype, Bitcoin dominance, ripping for this cycle, we'd have a lot more interest and excitement around this. I also think that, you know, to Joe's point, they did a bad job of hyping this up leading up to it. I think there was a lot of people who woke up or yesterday saw that this was going live,

they didn't know that this was being planned and had a lot of information around it leading up to it. So overall, I actually think it's a pretty sizable and substantial exciting upgrade for Ethereum. I think Ethereum, this upgrade will start to show the value that it brings to the market in time. People just haven't caught up to it yet. I had a news tweet that the Ethereum Pectra update went live and one of the funny, I rarely read my replies, but one of the funniest replies the guy said, I feel like I got kicked in the Pectra holding ETH all these years. I actually laughed out loud when I read that.

But yeah, I think that that basically sums up the sentiment perfectly. Yeah, it's really good. So let's go on and talk more about what's actually happening with Bitcoin. We obviously had the move yesterday from the mid-94s up to almost 98, a matter of two hours. That means that since we have a daily show, we have to pretend that we know the narrative and can figure out exactly why it happened. Many saying it was the sort of geopolitical situation, the risk of war between India and Pakistan, obviously, but most saying that it was the vague news that maybe there's a chance that in some world,

potentially in the near term or long term future, we might get a trade deal with China. That's sarcasm because we get these updates from China and it's a random minister confirming or denying a rumor that's already coming out of China. But there was a comment that China was likely to sit down at the table and engage in trade talks. Dave, this is where I jumped to you. Go ahead, I mean, what are you making the move yesterday? I know you're gonna say we're in a range

and you don't care and you're right, but we still have to talk about, I guess, what is actually happening in the macro that could be moving in. Well, we're in a range. We are looking like it's breaking out-y, kind of, at the top of the range. I think that if you bet against the self-interest of the people

with the levers of power, you will generally be wrong. And I think that a lot of the people on the short side, technically are betting against the self-interest of the administration and some very powerful people, and they will end up being wrong. I think that, you know, it seems extremely clear that the administration learned their lesson and are letting the Treasury Secretary

kind of lead the public narrative, and he's an adult. So that is reassuring markets. That's why they I mean, look, the volatility is way down. Right? You know, this week, you know, Bitcoin actually had, you know, the same move today that gold had yesterday. So you do look at a two day basis. It's essentially okay, they're both up. If you look at the same thing on the stock market, you know, kind of like flat for two days. So I don't really see a whole I'm not going to be able to do that. I'm not going to be able to do that. I'm not going to be able to do that. I'm not going to be able to do that. I'm not going to be able to do that. I'm not going to be able to do that. I'm not going to be able to do that.

I'm not going to be able to do that. I'm not going to be able to do that. I'm not going to be able to do that. I'm not going to be able to do that. I'm not going to be able to do that. I'm not going to be able to do that. I'm not going to be able to do that. I'm not going to be able to do that.

I'm not going to be able to do that. I'm not going to be able to do that. I'm not going to be able to do that. I'm not going to be able to do that. I'm not going to be able to do that. I'm not going to be able to do that. I'm not going to be able to do that. I'm not going to be able to do that.

I'm not going to be able to do that. I'm not going to be able to do that. I'm not going to be able to do that. I'm not going to be able to do that. I'm not going to be able to do that. I'm not going to that conference to make a decision on Bitcoin and then they got really excited in the audience and they texted their CFO and they said just smash the buy button. I think that's legitimate. I do too. I'm giggling because that literally could be what moves Bitcoin. I think I'm spot on right there. You know, you had 250 different CFOs. Someone was right there on the edge and they saw how excited Saylor was or they saw one chart, took a picture from their phone, sent it to someone and they said, let's go. It's possible. I mean, Dave and Ian, you guys see what's happening on CoinRoute, you can tell what's

actually happening in the markets. Ian, good to have you. I mean, what's your theory here and what was happening with the market move yesterday or I guess how we can put that in context of everything else happening? I mean, look, like everyone knows Bitcoin dominance is climbing and we're seeing it in our volumes with respect to the overall market volumes. It's just, you know, it's where all the liquidity seems to be going. I mean, the only outlier I see is hype. And honestly, I wish I had gotten into that earlier, but a lot of our clients did and did quite well on that. So I think

that's that's an interesting name to watch. But otherwise, you are seeing an increase here in volume and liquidity coming specifically into Bitcoin. So there is some support that this is a real move to some degree or you're talking about more generally and not specific to yesterday. that this is a real move to some degree, or are you talking about more generally and not specific to yesterday? I am noticing a lot more of our clients in general are saying now, I mean, cause look, we've been doing this since 2017,

but I do think that most of our clients now, when we ask them, okay, what names are you trading? And it's Bitcoin and maybe some ETH and Solana, but back in the day, it was a lot more alt heavy. And a lot of people that used to trade alts just aren't even bothering anymore. Dan. Good morning, guys.

Good to chat again. One thing that I check most days is the ETF inflows. The ETF inflows have been just consistently quite strong. I think we've had 15 days of inflows into the BlackRock ETF. Yesterday, they brought another half a billion. I think that's probably also contributing to its move up. It's interesting that I saw it. Now I have to dig it up. But I think we had an outflow yesterday from ETFs of like 80 million, but BlackRock still had inflows. Yeah, they've been buying consistently between like a quarter of a billion and just under

a billion for about 15 days. There's a powerhouse. It's unstoppable. It's a bit of a meme, but you think of the number of new Bitcoin that are mined per day and how many times above that are they buying up. And then there's other companies announcing their treasury plans. I think there's just so much buying pressure. It's insane.

Joe, you mentioned the strategy conference. Like, I don't know if that was kind of on everybody's radar, but they've done that every year. I remember in 2021, when they first did that, it was like 2000 CFO showed up. And we were excited that everyone was going to buy Bitcoin. And of course, gap accounting rules didn't really allow that to happen. So we were just sort of wrong. We basically saw none. But now, I mean, do you think that this conference is going to finally push a lot of people over the edge, as you mentioned? I mean, obviously, yes, if you think that maybe someone bought yesterday,

but is this finally going to be the catalyst for that major level of institutional treasury adoption that we were hoping for for all these years? Well, I think you're seeing other players coming in, right? You're seeing Jack and what they're doing, you know, like MetaPlanet, very similar. You are even seeing that strategy adopted into altcoins with Solana. It's an interesting strategy. If you really think about micro strategy, it was just this mediocre BI tool. Now they've turned that company into basically a Bitcoin holding company. They own the most Bitcoin for a corporation in the world.

The picture is coming out of there with the team that we have down there. You know, crowd is full. Like, you know, a lot of times you see pictures and there's a couple of people in the front row, like this thing is slammed. It's a really good time, you know, for them to be talking about what's going on.

Like, you know, we're just saying like the buying pressure is coming from all over the place. And you just have a lot of companies interested in what's happening, right? If you can put out a bond, you know, buy Bitcoin, holding Bitcoin in your treasury, and then that convertible note turns into basically equity or shares in your company. It's a way more efficient way and a hedge and a slower way to distribute

shares. It's, it's actually, you a hedge and a slower way to distribute shares. It's actually more predictable for the companies that are out there doing this. Then now you get to hold the Bitcoin. If Bitcoin goes up over that longer period of time, you get to hold the difference if that person wants cash back on that loan. It's a way simpler process. It's way more transparent. Public or private companies can participate And I just think you're gonna see so many more companies adding Bitcoin to the balance sheet It's gonna be crazy and then you're actually gonna see I think companies start to add alts as well Yeah, I think it's going to happen this time

I think most nobody's very few of them will do what strategy does, but I think people will just allocate half percent or 1% of their treasury to Bitcoin and that would be enough, I think, to spark a pretty serious move. Dave, I would love your opinion on this, actually. Do you think that this is the time? I think that it is pretty clear that there is momentum for companies to do things. I mean, look, if you look at the 80 companies that have done it and their average return versus the companies that haven't, it's staggering. And companies like to have their stocks go up. Most companies have a significant amount of option compensation to employees.

They have their measure based off stock prices. You know, CFOs are going to do so if they have cash. I think that the notion of levered buying Yeah, I think that there'll be a few years and I don't think that's a big deal. I also heard those at a conference today, that some people were saying that there are CFOs out there that can hold ETFs and part of the reason BlackRock might very well be having inflows is you might have some corporates and people who might otherwise have ginned up to try to use Coinbase saying, well, wait

a minute, we're paying a really small fee, but we get BlackRock as an insurance policy that we're never going to lose anything. And so I think that part of it is that. That sounds right to me. Yeah, that makes sense, Dan. Yeah, if you saw yesterday as well, New Hampshire passed the Bitcoin strategic reserve bill. But when you look into that, they can only buy exchange share products.

They can't buy the Bitcoin directly. So they can only buy the ETP. So you're talking BlackRock, et cetera. So yeah. And I think it's up to 5% of treasury and it actually never mentions Bitcoin, I don't think. I think it's a digital asset reserve, but only assets that are over 500 billion market cap, which obviously only needs Bitcoin. And it has to be the ETP. They can't hold them directly. So it's, you know, again, a boon for BlackRock. I assume, you know, nobody gets fired for hiring IBM, right?

Nobody gets fired for buying a BlackRock ETP. Yeah. Matteo. Yeah, I expect that if other states also get this approved, it's going to be the same thing. The last thing that any state who does this strategy wants to have in the headlines is that they lost their keys for loss of access to Bitcoin. I just don't think they're sophisticated enough to manage this themselves. So I expect that if any other state

starts to adopt a Bitcoin strategy, it's very rarely that they're going to control their own keys. It's going to be ETF allocations over time. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Gareth, good to see you on the screen after seeing you in person last week. How are you? I'm good. I'm good. Yeah. I mean, like just to jump in on the tale of it, everyone said, I think the two big news items were obviously that announcement out of New Hampshire yesterday. And then Strikes Lending, which came out yesterday, we actually just did an X-based on Cointelegraph with the co-founder of Ledin, Mauricio. And we were just talking about these offerings at length. And, you know, Ledin is like one of the earlier kind earlier Bitcoin lending platforms out there. And now you've got the likes of Strike, Zappa Bank, Bitcoin Back Loans. There's a few other people that are doing it.

And I think we're very quickly getting to the point now where Bitcoin DeFi in this shape and form has really come to fruition. And it's really compelling. Like if you take the time to go and understand how these Bitcoin back loans work and if the price of Bitcoin really appreciates, you can end up getting your collateral back without having to pay your loan back. Yeah, that's the idea is that Bitcoin outgrows your interest rate and you never pay back the loan basically. And it's, I mean, it's a crazy thing. And I think if it really does go that way in the next five years, you know, like these

early sort of cypherpunk dreams of Bitcoin being the central bank of the world could come true because if that's the way pristine capital works as a lending mechanism, the proof of the pudding is in the Ething and we're getting to that point very quickly. So I'm not surprised. We're edging a lot closer to 100k. And yeah, the New Hampshire one, I mean, like, yeah, they didn't outright mention Bitcoin, but it's clearly clear that it's Bitcoin that they'll be doing. Even if it's through an ETF, man, someone's still holding the underlying assets. So it's a net positive for Bitcoin and a net positive for the Overton window moving forward. Token 2049 was

great last week. I felt really bullish anyway. But it seems like we're moving a lot more quickly in that direction. And I'm now super excited for Bitcoin Las Vegas. I mean, the speakers list is crazy, the amount of people that are going to be involved there. Yeah, it's going to be a crazy month. I see Dave's got a shock his hand up very quickly when I mentioned that. Yeah, but I have a more important question for you about token 49. That you, did you end up getting sick? I didn't actually, I feel all right, but, um, uh, I was dead tired when I got home, um, I think that you need to, uh, put a teaspoon of cement in your coffee in the morning, Scott, and you should be better.

Something like that. Okay. Go ahead, Dave. And then, and then after Dave Goroffoff who I know did get sick because I was with them. Yeah well you know your immune system Scott we're gonna have to work on that but it's only crypto conferences by the way well you only crypto conferences I'm a rock otherwise you were in Formula One but anyway I was at a conference yesterday dedicated to insecurities finance and was sitting on a panel talking about blockchain and it came up on lending and collateral.

Basically everything was about collateral. Two takeaways I think are really important here. One is I'll do the negative first for a change. One is that there's enormous skepticism because of capital rules out of the Basel rules on capital and that's going to be the final boss. So, you know, when you're doing, you know, everyone put pictures that, you know, the Basel rules where Bitcoin is not treated as pristine capital. There is no way to over collateralize it. There's no way to, you know, it's not there's no rules that it basically says it's a liability, that kind of stuff. That is being worked on. That is the final boss. You win that and you move forward.

I think the US is probably, is likely to put enough pressure to do big bonds at some point that that will go away. But watch that because that's when Bitcoin potentially could have an explosive move to the upside. That's the bad news, but understand that it could take years, right? These things are not simple. The good news is I was sitting next to and had a long conversation with a

guy who's a DTCC of all places, and they are really deep into using blockchain technology and cross-chain technology to create capital and collateral movement across the entire ecosystem. And they're big believers in Bitcoin will be pristine capital and are organizing themselves as such. And there's some huge implications there because they are the the 800 pound gorilla in the in our settlement. Yeah, they are settlement and it was only last week or two weeks ago, they did a thing future proofing today's financial services infrastructure for an interconnected and digital economy. Yep, like they're they are not only are they doing it, they're talking about

it and so please pay attention. Yeah, well, Joe, Cerrico is on the panel with me was he was very clear that people will be really surprised at where you're going. I was also with the CEO of GLMX, which is one of the largest fintechs in the collateralization space in the repo markets. And then they're starting to look into things. So there's a lot that's going on here

that if you really wanna get excited about the future, there's big openings. None of this should be impacting short term price movements, because frankly, it's still a ways off. But it is it is amazing. You would never have had anything like conferences like this to invite people like me to sit and talk about and evangelize and quite a collateral about through the big news. Yeah, go off.

Oh my god, So many open topics. So first of all, I never got COVID, including when COVID was a thing. But this time it's special. I didn't sleep for more than two hours. Congratulations. Yeah. Welcome to the party. Yes. Yes. So this is my first official COVID. I know for a fact that I never test for it, but Bitcoin 21, Singapore 23 and Dubai 25 for sure for conferences for me.

Yeah. A lot of handshaking. And if you remember, because nobody tests these, and hence nobody knew it was COVID, but I was with a royal, like literally the guy who manages the main family of Abu Dhabi, I mean the ruling family of Abu Dhabi. So in order to get to the palace, he had to go through the test

and he was the one who told everybody that it's actually COVID. So that's COVID for everyone and we get it in all the crypto conferences, no matter if we get sick or not. Because I think while we are the ultimate propagators of COVID and the people who are keeping it alive, still probably, we're also the rocks

where it sort of lives as a dead fungus. I feel fine anyways. I totally feel fine already. But yeah, so anyway, let's go back to the topic at hand. Yeah. So to the topic, I think we have an incredible panel here with Dave, Joe, Dan, and everyone else has covered the institutional side and the buy pressure.

And if nothing, the on-chain analytics of the holdings of the exchanges clearly tells us that the smart money is already wiping off the floor every time you would say Bitcoin hits the floor of whatever floor we are hitting. So all of that is leading to one eventual. Everything that everybody said is eventually leading to the stupid buyer pressure. And the stupid buyer pressure is always the retail. And the retail hits it when it's at a peak. You have to make new peaks. So if all this wiping of the floor would lead,

let's say to an ultimate 110, 120 in the coming six months. And of course, this is not a price prediction. I'm just using reference numbers. It's the retail that will drive it to 2x from there because the retail doesn't care. It wants to buy everything at the peak and while making new peaks. So we can agree to everything that everybody said and just multiply it with two, three, or four, whatever component, because let's not forget all these name dropping that we do on these conversations are also being dropped amongst the retail and they're excited and they're just like,

it's just their base metrics is not hit and their base metric is the peak. I mean, they love buying it at the peak. So the moment you start hitting 110, 120, 130, we'll see massive buy pressure. And because there's no Bitcoin almost, even in the exchange holdings and in circulation, the new price targets or the impractical price targets

will be achieved much faster than we assume. So that's two. Three, Bitcoin lending and Bitcoin protocols. I am actively talking to more than 20 protocols that are either launched or being launched, each one with more than a billion dollar in TVL. Now you're talking about old holders, miners, and let's say crypto sophisticated money, because nobody would just like commit a billion dollars of Bitcoins to new chains, right? So these guys are are pretty crypto educated. Now imagine if 20, 30, 50 billion

dollars worth of bitcoins are already committed to this side of the business, which is the Bitcoin L2 ecosystem, you can only dream about how much or imagine how much more would come when this launches and when the returns, the promised returns of 10, 12, 15% BTC to BTC are realized. We already saw that way once with the stacks. I would love to quote Merlin, but that was a bust. So I would rather save the audience from a from a wrong example. So yeah, yeah, that's what that's what we're looking at. I mean, we're looking at a Bitcoin explosion. So this Bitcoin dominance, I don't think is is is dying anytime soon. But at the

same time, I mean, myself, in two or three posts in 2018 and 2019. I was called alt Jesus, which I of course hate. So I have to commit to my shitcoin commitment. And in that capacity, I have to say that while this is a massive Bitcoin bull run we're looking at in a Bitcoin dominance run, we're looking at in the short term, this will eventually lead to an out season of all time. Because the same example that I give you about 20 billion or $30 billion of Bitcoin

being committed to Bitcoin L2 is a big, big commitment and sorry, is a big example of degen money. It's a big example of the fact that no matter what and how institutional this space looks like there's always a trickle down capital effect. So the more Bitcoin rises, the more capital will trickle down to all looking for the next Bitcoin. And that just has to happen. I know that's fish for thinking for a lot of people and a lot of people are retiring

from crypto exactly at this point. But this has to happen. That's the best signal there is. By the way, I've hung out with, I've spent more time hanging out with you than probably anyone else in crypto, like in person. I don't think I've ever heard someone you tell me that you were called shitcoin or altcoin Jesus, but that's literally the only thing I'm going to call you from now until the end of time. No religious remarks, please. But yes, while yes, while we hang, hang out a lot together, we barely discuss anything together.

We're like always hanging out. We just hang out and do bad dance moves. Uh, it's whatever. Yeah. To meet the CEOs of the top exchanges. That's what we do to, to see our friends, uh, like Mario talk on the stage. We barely talk business, man. Seriously.

Yeah, that's how it works. Ian. Yeah, I mean, I'm sorry. Sorry to interrupt. Yes, one last minute, Ian. I'm so sorry. Yes, we're all gonna be in Bitcoin Vegas.

Yes, we are bringing like all our guns and forces and everything we have and our fresh bodies to get COVID again. So I'm immune now. Strong, strong. That's just what we need for Vegas. Go ahead Ian. Yeah, I mean, Guarav, look, I ran into you.

I met you, I think originally at a regulation panel somewhere in Dubai. And I think I saw you again. Right after I said, yeah, point Jesus thing, you want to run this up? I know. And I really have to comment there because, I mean, look, all these inflows are coming via ETF, right? And so I think before, when people were just buying direct exposure to Bitcoin as in previous cycles, then yeah, everything would rotate into alts.

But I just don't really see that happening again. And then I guess another point that I think is probably more pertinent to the audience here is like what actionable trading things can we kind of think of? And I've been saying this a lot and I and you know you guys talked about micro strategy earlier and you know all the leveraged Bitcoin and then I think Dave mentioned the potential rule changes regarding Basel and I've been asking this question for a while. If institutions no longer need to buy micro strategy, preff bonds, right? And they can just get exposure to Bitcoin directly, then where does the demand come

in for those bonds? And isn't that kind of a risk to the Bitcoin price? And then the other thing is, so if that's the case, then what's the actual actionable trading thing from that? And I can't help but think that there's a trade there in that if these rules do get changed, which we think they will in the next six months, then is the premium on micro strategy going to collapse? And I think the answer is probably yes, right?

And then do they have to sell some amount to cover redemptions and interest payments and whatnot? So I'm curious if any of you else kind of think this way and thinking on that line, by the way, I mean, we've just, I mean, probably you've read the announcement about sailor looking at the fixed income market. And that's a fresh, you know, a fresh field of sales, fresh flow of money and not small money. More than anything, again, I know this, my answer is not very objective, but we've known Saylor to be this degen that sort of finds his way in every tricky situation with the capital markets, like with the traditional capital markets to come up with something.

I know this is not the best answer, but that's what I mean. I've started to build trust on him. That's what I would say. While not believing in the ultimate Bitcoin religion, by the way. So I don't believe that the future belongs to the top cap and the holding of the top cap, which is Bitcoin. I think there will be SMP 500 or equivalent in this industry over the course of next five to 10 years. And the Bitcoin religion is also seemed to be failing and falling with the foundation of 21Corp, the SoftBank Tether partnership that is already starting Bitcoin 3X, leverage sort of treasury of the company. But at the same time, my faith in Michael Saylor hasn't really wobbled a bit.

Yeah, I mean, look, a lot of people had faith in Sam too. I'm not saying that's the case, but it's still trading at 2X over NAV. And the question is, is there something actionable here? I mean, I know Dave Weisberger Sr. was trading Grayscale before the premium collapsed and he did okay. I made the same trade. So is there something tradable here? And I think the answer is yes.

I'm too. You know, Gaurav, I think altcoin Allah is gonna be your name for this cycle with keeping that same sentiment. I am, I am. If you know it, he's altcoin Buddha. Yes, I'm Indian. And believe me, in 30 minutes,

we are going through a nationwide military drill, especially after attacking Pakistan. I think we can do better than that, man. Okay, that's fair. We'll go with Buddha. You can be Bitcoin Buddha as long as dominance is ripping to all time high. But yeah, I just wanted to like state that I actually think the FOMO is going to come from more corporations creating more debt instruments as when rates eventually come down and the market settles.

And then all the companies and corporate, everyone's just going to pile on on the institutional side into Bitcoin. And I think that's what's going to push it and rip it. But then I think I don't know that I mean, there's going to be some element of retail that does push and by the top, because they do love doing that. But I think they're going to feel priced out. And I think that once they look at the, you know, Bitcoin at 130, $140,000, the average retail buyer isn't pricing Bitcoin in sats. That's something that the Bitcoin community does stack Sats, but that's not the retail buyer. I think the retail buyer is going to feel priced out and they're going to look at what else is available in the market. And that's exactly what's going to catalyze the big push here. Interesting. Duane, I showed you as a listener this entire time and then you popped up as a speaker for the record because we're always in the glitch, But now I see that you are a speaker. So if

you have been a speaker the entire time, I apologize, but I would love your take here. Thanks. Good morning. Yeah, I was, I was a speaker the whole time. But it's like you'd never at half the time I do people show as listeners who are speakers. It's crazy. Yeah, yeah, I know. Sometimes I don't even see myself in this space, but I mean that's, you know, neither here nor there. But I mean, yeah, yeah, thanks. Good morning. Just a couple of comments here. I think a lot of the sentiment now here is just a lot of investors, retail especially, and yes, there's the institutional side as well, but a lot of this is a is a is a thirst for good news right if we look at um you know on a on a bird's eye view what's going on with the economy we're getting

you know mixed signals in the economy because I mean there's this big expectation in regards to tariffs for there to be a drop in GDP and we've already seen that we've already seen a bit of a fall in GDP unexpectedly and this actually happened earlier than we were anticipating initially. So we're not really going to get any news from the FOMC meeting, which is going to be more of the same really that they're just watching for their dual mandate. And I think overall that's what's really moving the price right now is that people are looking for some positive news. So even the murmur or the whisper of actual talks from China regarding tariffs and that's being confirmed, I think that's definitely going to help. We've also seen gold,

you know, gold rise. We've also seen overall strong inflows from Bitcoin ETFs since around, I think it was like around April the 20th of this month. So despite the fact that we've had a slight pullback here, I think that's what's really moving markets here as we move forward. Also, basically the FedWatch tool saying that we have a priced-in cut perhaps coming in September also helps the push here as well. So I think really that's just some of the things to consider here. I think it's really just really that's, you know, just some of the things to consider here. I think it's really just, you know, people looking and wanting to hear some good news, you know, do you mean there's a chance? Do you mean there's a hope? So I think that's the overall prevailing sentiment at this time.

A lot of uncertainty. A lot of plates spinning. It's kind of hard to gather what's actually moving price at any given moment. Gaurav, actually, I want to ask you quickly, I know the guys are going to jump in a couple minutes, but India, Pakistan, I know this is not necessarily crypto related, but obviously, we had this yesterday. You generally are based in India. We only get the media kind of on our side. How big of a deal is this? It is a big deal indeed. A nation's safety, tourist safety, and sovereignty in a way has been compromised.

And of course there are a lot of activities happening in that direction. It's not like it's not a Russia-Ukraine kind of conflict which can be debated. I mean, of course, each side has a very proven angle and not saying what's right or wrong. In this case, it's a clear case of terrorist terrorism. There was no conflict going on. There's nothing happening for those who are not aware of the matter, just a few terrorists show up in a tourist spot and blind shoot, I mean just shoot and kill people, right?

Pure tourists. So it's a bad case for sure and deserves retaliation, the kind of retaliation being done in my books. I mean, I would have loved even more severe, but I mean, as for today, India shot 26 missiles targeting some military bases or terrorist bases, as they call them. As a very neutral and politically neutral figure, I mean, I have no pro and against the current government. While, you know, this is a move a lot of people are applauding and media is applauding, I still don't find grounds to applaud it because like nobody knows where those missiles hit. It's like, did they even hit the ground? We don't know. So that is the step. It is pretty serious. I live in the central part of the country

and the flights are dismissed. So thank God I actually came back home because there are like barely any flights from Dubai to India now. And then, and we're like the police and military and even home and societies are going through mock drills. So like I said, in 30 minutes. Yeah, I mean, that means it's pretty serious if they're bothering to do drills, right? I mean, that's not something you've really seen much in your lifetime. I would imagine. First time in my life, man. And I've gone through like worst, worst

activities at the border. So it is pretty serious. But again, that's what we are into. And by the way, bringing it back to crypto, while while Pakistan just announced mining Bitcoin, I mean, they mocked India for 30% taxes, which of course, India deserves pretty well. But the mockery they did to themselves is they said, we'll mine Bitcoins with the extra electricity. The problem is they don't even have enough electricity supply for the country. So good luck.

Appreciate that, Gaurav. And we do have a pretty interesting sponsor today. It's Portal to Bitcoin. Let's just do a mic check here. Do we have Chandra behind the mic? Yes. Can you all hear me? Yeah, I can hear you loud and clear.

Before we get started, let me just read our disclaimer. So Mario's company, IBC does marketing, incubation and investing and sponsors on this show or sponsors working directly with IBC. Not necessarily Crypto Town Hall, Scott or myself in particular, but definitely a timely day to have you on Chandra with Portal to Bitcoin. Why don't you just give us an elevator pitch to start off? Yeah, thanks for having me. And thanks for being here again, Mario. Gaurav, good to hear your voice again.

And Scott. So our elevator pitch is we're here to solve the single biggest problem that has plagued this space since the single biggest problem that has played this space since the first fork of Bitcoin has existed, which is counterparty risk. If you think about the era of off-chain custody, where centralized exchanges custody your coins while people are trading across different blockchains that lasted from 2010 to 2019. And then we invented these new things called bridges, walls, multi-sigs, different forms of wrapping, custodial solutions, on-chain custodial solutions. And so with what we've done with Portal, the custody risk when doing cross-chain operations

is gone forever, permanently. And that's the infrastructure part. And then we actually ended up building the app layer as well because we see that in a lot of projects in this space, build infrastructure and hope somebody will come, right? Like if you build it, they will come. That never happens if you're someone from traditional startups.

People would laugh at you if you say that. So you have to build the user interface. You have to build incredible user experiences, incredible user value propositions. And so that's going to be right. And some pretty notable investors here. If people want to follow along and go to the Portal to Bitcoin website. Obviously you can click on their profile here and navigate directly to their website which is portaltobitcoin.com. Some of those investors include Arrington XRP Capital, Coinbase Ventures, so

definitely a notable project to dive into. Why don't we start just from an infrastructure perspective or architecture rather. How does this differ from other cross-chain solutions like bridges or wrapped assets? Yeah, great question. So there's generally three ways of doing any kind of a cross-chain transaction or operation. One is you just have a custodian in the middle. Think of what Eric Voorhis used to do. It's either changeily or you send your Bitcoin to someone you want to swap them into ETH. You trust the counterparty, they send you the ETH that you negotiated for. That's the complete custodial model. Outside of that, there are cross-chain message pressing protocols, which is its own category

of things where there's a bunch of validators come together, validate a message or state of a contract on a chain and then pass that to some other location. If you look at something like layer zero, their quote unquote DVPN is essentially on you to create that consensus mechanism and pick those validators. So it's basically a very obscure form of custody, obscurity by design to make people believe that it is custody-less. The third way of doing things is actually very, very pure and it's very difficult and it's one of the greatest innovations that was pretty much announced by an anonymous

poster on Bitcoin Talk forums. Like most innovations, we talk in crypto. They've all been there for a decade on Bitcoin Talk forums or less. So atomic swaps are that they not only solve this cross-chain operation problem, they provide a solution to this long-standing problem in computer science called the impossibility of fair exchange. This dates all the way back to pre-Bicoin 1995 or 96 when the first informal came out. It says that if parties are separated in time and space, it is impossible to do fair exchange, meaning if I send you my asset, whether it's digital or whatever, and if I expect you to send me your asset, you could just do it or not do it, and there's no entanglement guarantee

that actually binds you to do so. What atomic swaps do is with a clever way of structuring these hash time lock contracts, which are on-chain contracts that go on Bitcoin and equivalent smart contracts on Ethereum or other two incomplete chains, you essentially have compressed two transactions into one. So either each party gets what it wants from the counterparty or none of that happens. And that's what makes it atomic.

It's atomic in the sense that it cannot be further deconstructed into its components. That's all well and good. So how come nobody implemented it and brought it to a consumer level experience? If you go to our website right now, you can actually see how fast, more than seamless they can be between Bitcoin, ETH and so on. The problem is atomic swaps on layer one take a lot of time because you need on-chain confirmations, one, two or three depending on certain, cooperative or non-cooperative use cases.

They are expensive obviously because of L1 fees, they're slow and they're not consumer grade. No user who's used to the user experience of a centralized exchange will ever actually want to ditch that and go find an atomic swap peer-to-peer network. What we've essentially done is built an alternative system to Lightning called a Channel Factory, heavily modified it and made the first AMM on Bitcoin, native AMM on Bitcoin on the L1 chain. There's no roll up. There is no L2 or side chain LARPing as an L2.

There is no storial middleman. There is no wrapping. There is no derivatives issued on other L1s or L2s. All these atomic swaps are actually happening in channels between these AMMs on different chains. So there's an AMM on Bitcoin, equivalent AMM on Ethereum, Solana, all the other supported chains. So all of these trades and transactions are actually happening as atomic swaps. And if the listeners are familiar with Lightning, this is exactly how we do payment forwarding on Lightning.

The atomic release, we do an off-chain atomic swap forward payments to a person that you don't have a direct channel with. And once it passes to the recipient, you just clean out your channel of all of the junk and nothing ever gets broadcast to the L1 block space. So what are the implications of that? You could have incredible levels of throughput, right?

You're not clogging the limited block space. The only problem with using Lightning for this purpose is that every participant has to have a channel with each other. Otherwise, you run into a couple of problems because you're not talking just one asset. You're talking different assets that are moving in price against each other. You run into a couple of problems.

I'll just mention them. I won't go deep into them. They're all like... Liqu liquidity griefing is one, there is the free option problem. So with what we've done, there's two or three key innovations that nobody's ever done. One of them is actually scale the system beyond the limitations of Lightning,

and Channel Factory is the name given to this approach. It was invented by Roger Waterhoffer and Christian Decker, and they were working at ETS Zurich and then at Logstream collaborators on the project. We've also heavily modified the typical one-party hash-time lock contract into a multi-party hash time locked contract and created this non-custodial delegation. And this is the first time we're actually traders,

liquidity providers, anybody in the system can actually rest assured that the worst thing that can happen on portal is that your funds will be locked on chain for a maximum of one epoch, which is 30 days, after which you can actually broadcast the pre-commitment transaction that's already given to you before you log your funds in. Broadcast that to the corresponding L1, get your money back. Any other custodial alternative, whether it's ZK roll rollup or whether it's something like Thorchain or whether it is any

other form of a custodial, you know, sidechain based, quote unquote, Bitcoin DeFi, you're actually taking complete counterparty risk. And the worst thing that can happen is a permanent loss of your capital. So that's the key differentiator between us and anybody else. can happen is a permanent loss of your capital. So that's the key differentiator between us and anybody else. And when you talk about the scaling problem that you guys are looking to solve too, are you referring to your product BitScaler as well?

Yes, BitScaler is the underlying technology that serves as the infrastructure that allowed us to build the portal decks, but you can do a lot more with it. You can build many more complex contracts. You can do, for example, derivatives, perps, lending, all on chain. For example, some of the products, the lending products that some of these exchanges like Coinbase came up with is like, oh, they take your Bitcoin and now they convert it into this Bitcoin. And now you can do lending against that collateral and blah, blah, blah, and all that stuff. And, you know, I don't

want to criticize product managers, but the whole reason people want to do this and not sell their Bitcoin is to avoid the tax set. And as soon as you convert your Bitcoin to base Bitcoin, what does that actually mean? It's a tax-recognizable event. A pure way to do it is actually to lock up your Bitcoin and use a contract where you continue to pay a certain amount of USDT or whatever the corresponding currency is at the fixed exchange rate,

which is determined at the outset. If you continue to not make payments for a certain duration of time, the collateral goes to the lender. That's the way mortgage works. That's the way lending works in the real non-retarded world. You can actually build that using Bitscaler. Many financial instruments are possible. We could get away from all of the shenanigans of Treadfy with full transparency,

and most importantly, a complete lack of trust in third parties because we always remember trust that third parties have security holes. Appreciate that. And with ETFs and strategy and many other players like that really dominating the Bitcoin news cycle for at least the last year, I think self-custody has become a much bigger topic that more people have started talking about in the last year or so. Why do you think self-custody is so critical for the future of DeFi? So a couple of things. Let's actually go back to what Bitcoin is. It's non-arbitrary stateless money. What does that mean? Nobody can come and just print money and give it to, you know,

whoever's at the front of the line and create these amplified canteen effects. And that's one of the reasons why we took Bitcoin. Genesis blocks us, a governor on the brink of a second bailout. We don't want that. So not being able to arbitrarily increase money simply, that's one. Number two, you actually, these are digital bearer instruments by design.

The word peer-to-peer electronic cash appears not because they couldn't find any better words, but cash is a bearer instrument. So used to be securities when they were paper. And so what does that mean? Whoever holds the asset actually owns the asset. With the ETFs, I'm a little bit more comfortable with the ETFs because they solve a problem for a lot of people who don't want to manage their own wallets, their cold storage, their multi-sakes, how they store their shared or parts of the secret and how they actually determine the lineage, etc. etc.

All of that is rooted in jurisdiction. It's heavily regulated. They have to settle every day. So that's okay. MicroStrategy has some controversial views on, but because they're all in the good mood today, I will refrain from saying that the common stockholders are the people that are getting reward free risk. Makes sense.

I appreciate that. Solana fits into your cross chain architecture. Can you maybe dive into what role Solana is specifically going to play in your upcoming launch? Yeah. So for us, Bitcoin block space is going to be the settlement layer for millions of markets. That's our thesis when we started the company. And it's important for Bitcoin. I'll describe the why, because of course, the block subsidy and the inflation rewards are going to decay and there's a half-life.

And at some point, they will be non-existent or insignificant. So what actually supports the security of the system that, you know, Bitcoin security model comes down to one thing. What is the amount of hash power in dollars, not the absolute. So I see a lot of graphs where people say, oh, hash power is increasing. That doesn't matter. What is the cost for hash multiplied by the total amount of hash power is the determinant of Bitcoin network security. So what prevents people from doing repeated 51% attacks on Bitcoin training confidence in the system, blah, blah, blah, is revenues

that the miners get. And after the exhaustion of miner subsidy, what do you think will do that? You have limited block space, so you have a certain amount of bits that each transaction takes. So how do you actually increase revenues? You need to increase the economic density of the transactions that are actually being settled on the Bitcoin blockchain.

So for example, with what we're doing, every blockchain L1 has its own use case. Solana was great for meme coins, Ethereum is great for DeFi, and there will be many others. Some of them will be useful, most of them won't be. But we see these as permissionless markets, and they all will eventually use the security and the trust of the Bitcoin network as a settlement layer. And so they're basically the adapter layer. So supporting these currencies, supporting these alternative assets like Ethereum, Bitcoin, and maybe soon many others is basically a core to our strategy because you can't trade just Bitcoin against Bitcoin.

You need other assets, stable coins, hopefully many more use cases will be found. Luckily, we're not in a situation where we have to pick winners and choosers if you want to become the infrastructure layer or the adaptive layer. Let a million experiments bloom. That's our thinking. Can you explain to people who are tuning in how Portal DEX compares with centralized exchanges and how they're using that? I feel right now a lot of people who are tuning in, if they're getting into Bitcoin this cycle, they're probably onboarding via a Coinbase or via Binance or something like that. I feel like that'd be a good perspective.

That's a wonderful question because the centralized exchange experience is the gold standard of any cross-chain operation right now. You download your app, you do your K-Y-C, blah, blah, blah, open your account, and then you can trade really fast. You have liquidity, you have market depth, you have speed, you have low transaction fees, etc. None of the custodial alternatives can give you that if they actually do it using atomic swaps. We can give you both. So you get the completely trustless nature of or trust minimized nature of cross-chain operations. And if you go to our Twitter right now, we just posted how simple, fast, easy it is to do. Native Bitcoin to Ethereum, Bitcoin to Solana, ERC, SPL tokens. And so it's completely custody-less.

You don't have the counterparty risk of worrying about whose multisig got hacked when, and will I be good for my coins? No other FTX repeats or whatever happened recently. But you get the user experience that you're used to and maybe even better because we have an AI agentic copilot right in there which helps users to rebalance their portfolios, which helps people to pick up on all of these thousands of hundreds of thousands of technical indicators and news articles that are actually going to impact their stuff because it's, you know, right now what do most people do? They follow a thousand influencers on Twitter to find the next one. They follow a thousand influencers on Twitter to find the next one. How many variables can you keep in your head at one point?

As cognitive limitations are pretty clear. One of the things that AI is great for is detecting these patterns, analyzing these correlations and all of these variables and backtesting them on the fly. And so you have that in there as well. So we say from the product side, not from the infrastructure side, I'll be less technical from now on, is to build the world's best exchange.

Forget about DeFi, CFi, whatever, Dex, X, doesn't matter. The world's best exchange. It's completely trust-minimalized. It has delightful user experience as fast as anything that's best exchange. It's completely trust minimized. It has delightful user experience as fast as anything that's out there. Absolutely no custody risk. And there's actually a helper, a guide that can make you a better investor or trader.

I appreciate that. And I mean, for people who are tuning in it's very clear that Chandra you have a depth of knowledge when I have been in the space for a long time especially when it comes to the Bitcoin ecosystem so I encourage people who are tuning in to definitely click on the portal to Bitcoin profile it's up here with the gold check with the purple logo. So click there, give them a follow and definitely go to their website to see some of who their investors are, some of the partners who are integrating their infrastructure. It's pretty incredible what they're building. So Chandra, I appreciate you joining today

and sharing the wisdom that you have. Is there any other call to action or anything that you wanna highlight upcoming for Portal that you want the audience to know about? Absolutely participate in our testnet. Right now, if you go to our Twitter, you can click on the GoldSheck Portal Bitcoin, join our community, join our Discord, it's a super active community. I mean, every time we release a new thing, we get inundated with

about 1,000 to 1,200 tickets and we have to solve that in like a couple of weeks. It's a super exciting community, feature requests, any feedback. We're happy to take the decentralized ecosystem or trust-minimized ecosystem to the next level, and we're very excited to be here. Thank you for giving us the opportunity to educate your audience. Yeah, no problem. Thank you for joining us. I did just pin a tweet up from the portal account with a direct link where folks who are tuning in can access the testnet, but I always recommend going directly to the portal profile and finding the link for yourself.

It's just best practice in the space. So, Chandra, I really appreciate you joining. I know I'm going to check out the testnet myself. It was great to hear from you and I hope you have a great day. Thank you very much. Appreciate it. Thanks, everyone. Have a great day. And hopefully we see 100k Bitcoin soon. So I know that was on the radar of a couple group chats that I was in yesterday hoping that we'd hit 100 at the China market open.

So fingers crossed. And again, Chandra, thanks for joining us. Have a great day, everyone.