The Wolf Of All Streets - Bitcoin Lagging | Elon Musk BULLISH | Alts Recovering | Crypto Town Hall

Episode Date: January 16, 2024

Crypto Town Hall is a daily X Spaces hosted by Scott Melker, Ran Neuner & Mario Nawfal. Every day we discuss the latest news in crypto and bring the biggest names in the space to share their insight. ►►TRADING ALPHA READY TO TRADE LIKE THE PROS? THE BEST TRADERS IN CRYPTO ARE RELYING ON THESE INDICATORS TO MAKE TRADES. USE CODE ‘2MONTHSOFF’ WHEN VISITING MY LINK.  👉 https://tradingalpha.io/?via=scottmelker  ►► JOIN THE FREE WOLF DEN NEWSLETTER, DELIVERED EVERY WEEK DAY! 👉https://thewolfden.substack.com/    ►► OKX Sign up for an OKX Trading Account then deposit & trade to unlock mystery box rewards of up to $10,000!  👉  https://www.okx.com/join/SCOTTMELKER ►►NGRAVE This is the coldest hardware wallet in the world and the only one that I personally use. 👉https://www.ngrave.io/?sca_ref=4531319.pgXuTYJlYd ►►THE DAILY CLOSE BRAND NEW NEWSLETTER! INSTITUTIONAL GRADE INDICATORS AND DATA DELIVERED DIRECTLY TO YOUR INBOX, EVERY DAY AT THE DAILY CLOSE. TRADE LIKE THE BIG BOYS. 👉 https://www.thedailyclose.io/   ►►NORD VPN  GET EXCLUSIVE NORDVPN DEAL  - 40% DISCOUNT! IT’S RISK-FREE WITH NORD’S 30-DAY MONEY-BACK GUARANTEE. PROTECT YOUR PRIVACY! 👉 https://nordvpn.com/WolfOfAllStreets    Follow Scott Melker: Twitter: https://twitter.com/scottmelker   Web: https://www.thewolfofallstreets.io   Spotify: https://spoti.fi/30N5FDe   Apple podcast: https://apple.co/3FASB2c   #Bitcoin #Crypto #Trading The views and opinions expressed here are solely my own and should in no way be interpreted as financial advice. This video was created for entertainment. Every investment and trading move involves risk. You should conduct your own research when making a decision. I am not a financial advisor.  Nothing contained in this video constitutes or shall be construed as an offering of financial instruments or as investment advice or recommendations of an investment strategy or whether or not to "Buy," "Sell," or "Hold" an investment.

I don't know what's going on here, but I see Mario as a listener after hearing one word. Is that the same for everyone else? That's what I heard. He's so bad at this. Literally the world-leading Spaces host, god of X, friend of Elon Musk. The guy can't even get his mic to work. Look at him requesting. I'm drunk with power.

I don't think I'm going to let him up. What do you think? problem is the numbers the numbers are so good when he's here otherwise it'll be so give him a try you think we should try him out today see how he does oh no man ran this is our moment buddy you're connecting i wonder if i'll make cars mario's not working we can say anything we want i wonder if i can be if i I'll be co-host today. Or if I'll reserve that for Mario as usual. I don't know. He says he got,

he got removed from the space. Asked me back. I'm over in the, in the, we have a WhatsApp group in the background guys, you know, talking about breaking news and all the things and, and it feels,

they're saying I removed him. I did not. I did not. Although I did say that I was going to so I could see how that blame could be put on me. But in this case, Mario is just bad at spaces, I think. What do you think of what do you think of Yvette dropping out of the race? Do you think that he's going to be Trump's VP now? I have no idea. I mean, I've heard people saying that. I don't know. I had Bruce Fenton I spoke with at length this morning.

Obviously, he sort of was leading Vivek's supporting heavily in New Hampshire, where he ran for Senate himself. I mean, he seemed to think he's pretty much out of politics for now but uh I have no I really have no idea I don't really see actually I don't know that Vivek would unless I'm just I don't do politics to be honest but just thinking it through like I don't know that that helps Trump's campaign very much I think everyone who was going to vote for support Vivek is probably already supporting Trump so you would think that Trump would choose someone that's going to bring in a different sort of class of voter. I have no idea, though. Yeah, but it looks like it was a lot of different arguments, like whether it's pre-planned between Vivek and Trump,

whether he's going to be the VP pick. We've got some people saying it makes sense. I was saying there's no water. He got slaughtered. Like the voters spoke. And I'm not saying that's a good or bad thing i'm just saying objectively coming forward you're done so they did come out of you have to give him credit he'd come out of nowhere to even be in the top fours and achieving them i think it was great he was he was completely being discounted just a few months back though but it's not a good thing you know it's not the best thing for crypto that's uh that's uh that's fair to say but it's

what did you hear what i said earlier because if it cut out after the first three words then i owe you an apology if it cut out two words it said it sounded like a like a dying parrot or something ah perfect perfect i call that i don't owe you an apology for what i said then now can you type it maybe and send me in the background if you insulted me i need to hear it yeah it was a pretty pretty extreme insult but we'll do it in the background how did i not make co-hosts if i was here before you i don't know man it seems it seems that i'm much preferred let me just ask you is it because is it because someone from your team is driving the show? How does it work?

I think frankly we do bigger numbers than Mario's game. I love how we have no filters for the space. Like we literally have no filters. Wait, are we live? Yeah, I swear. Like Ran's shitting on me and my team. We got Scott, I called you an asshole and I dropped out. I even explained why.

I think it was good reason. And I dropped out. By the way, you it was good reason and i dropped out so so and by the way you removed me from the space by accident so i was actually blocked from the space um but i think i think we should in the background in the background mario messaged that he might miss some of the spaces today because he might have a call or something he said i hope that's okay to which i responded it is preferred and i'm assuming that's why you called me an asshole yeah this is why i called you an asshole. I think we should kick off this

pace with maybe a market update and get Saran's thoughts on the altcoin market, because I wanted to dig into it yesterday. I know you don't like it, Scott, but I'm fascinated by it. I love the altcoin market. I think today is the moment of truth, actually. It's T plus 2 day today. I think it's the moment of

truth for the ETF to see how they settle. So I think we must keep a very close eye on what's going on. I think today's a very important day to watch the markets. Why is today such an important day? Because if the ETF settled on T plus two and you feel,

and today is effectively T plus two of the opening day of the ETF trade. So today is like the settlement day for the ETF trade or the first day of the ETF trade.

So remember that it was open day one was Thursday. Friday, we traded. Monday, we didn't trade.

So today is the T plus two two so you kind of want to watch flows today there's a lot of flows out of grayscale today there's a lot of flows out of grayscale i was watching it earlier today so i think today is quite an important day to see what happens in terms of inflight where are you watching that where are you watching by the way arkham tracks the grayscale one it's and what is it like um really interesting what's it like compared to what we were seeing you know thursday and friday when when we start start trading start so remember today's settlement so we saw some some settlement on on thursday and friday look

right it's very hard to call it so early i think we need to watch it a bit longer, but there have been a lot of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16. 16,000 Bitcoin flowed out already. Total, right? Grayscale. Total grayscale.

Yeah, I'm saying total, not just today. Today, last, we're talking the last couple of hours basically the last 53 minutes that's a lot no sorry i see some of it that's all of it's actually from before the weekend sorry let me give it to you one two three four five six seven eight nine ten ten thousand bitcoin have moved today which is 500 million dollars that's a lot and and i assume they identify the receiver so those all to centralize exchanges they don't label i mean they don't show it in arkham but you can kind of

make an assumption that those are going to coinbase and i think the other thing which you need to watch today you need to watch the coinbase premium uh the coinbase premium you know because coinbase trades at a premium or a discount to other markets so right now it's at a discount right now it's trading at a at a slight discount which means there's kind of like more sellers than buyers on coinbase than on the rest of the market right right which would make sense if that's where gray scale i mean basically they're shouldering the entire outflow like all of the outflows for the entire ETF trade. Yeah. If they're all going there. And for the first time in a while, Coinbase's stock is finally on the upward trend today. Yeah, well, they're going to make fees.

They're going to make fees. How is that? By the way, we haven't talked about base for a long time. Does anyone have any metrics? Is it doing well? Is there adoption? I have no idea. We saw in the Coinbase's last results, we saw the numbers. If I look on L2, currently in terms of TVL, it's the one, two, three, four, it's the fifth biggest chain, Arbitrum being the first,

Optimism being the second in terms of TVL, Metis being third, Manta being fourth, and Frith is obviously based. I don't know Manta's in the top. I've got Manta on my show later today after this. I didn't know they're in the top four.

Just under a billion in TVL. Do you mind if I ask you, who are the number six and seven? ZK Sync and DYDX. Well, DYDX is a bit of a nomad. So it's a mantle. Okay. Before starting the show and digging into altcoin season,

Ran and Scott, I think the same thing as well. Anyone in the audience could do this, but I think us three should do this. If you see the top right corner, there's that share button, that arrow to the top. We should honestly, all three of us, every space, just click it since we air everything in public,

click on copy link, and then just tweet it out. I think us three should do it in every space. I just did it now. I've been doing it for the last, the ranch left, just dropped out. He was like,

no, I'm out. Not sharing this with anyone. No, no, he clicked on leave by accident. He's right next to the leave button. So the timing is epic.

You guys are a disaster. I'm amazing, but you guys are a train wreck. Yeah, yeah. Let's kick it off. First, you want to just give a market update, Scott. And then we're going to go to the panel and then we dig into else when Ryan joins back. Sure.

Just checking. I use the Tide dashboard. To me, it looks like the market is largely just really, really flat. I think Bitcoin, obviously, we know that it went up to 49 and then dropped, but kind of just trading in this 42,000 to 43,000 area right now. I think a lot of people either searching for the next narrative or just waiting to see what happens and how the ETF trade starts to shake out. Ethereum has generally been outperforming Bitcoin since that day, but also just kind of flat today. I'm not seeing anything of much excitement.

I know Rand was here, I want to, and he just did a show, I think, on, you know, how altcoins about to blast off. I generally think that altcoins look better. I do think that there is a narrative switching to eat but looking at what I'm just looking at right now, there's not much going on. I mean, maybe maybe Chris, have you been on top of the all coin market the past few days? I know you're charting 24 seven. So are you seeing anything? Yeah, I mean, you know, there's always something you know, going

on out there. I think overall, it looks pretty good still. I think people are a bit concerned about what's going on with Bitcoin. So there's a lot of, a lot of really more bearish narratives going on out there as far as emotional takes on it. And so I think people are just kind of concerned about what's going on with that. So they're, what are, what are the bearish takes? What are these emotional takes? Just people talking about how you know, the pretty much if they've been saying that the tops in the entire last year, they're saying it again now, but with more oomph. And, and so now that it's overextended, you

know, people are looking for that pullback. So emotionally, it's a difficult time for people to try to, you know, convince themselves to buy into anything. Those that do, though, are catching a lot of these altcoins that are popping off a bit. So, I mean, generally, the altcoins seem like they're doing all right. But I think overall, I think retail market participants are just kind of waiting to see Bitcoin actually do something. Like Scott was saying, we're just kind of range bound right here um between what is that like uh 41 and 44 or so um you know ever since that drop of last week and it hasn't continued down lower yet so people are kind of sitting

there nervous about you know everybody's talking about how it's going to drop down lower the top's in for right now um but they don't want it to be so you know it kind of it just gives people that really difficult um time where they where they want to get in but they're nervous about doing it so then they don't but like i said the few that do end up then uh kind of enjoying the benefits of what's going on can you can you chris and scott and any other tech analysts here but i think christian scott you're probably the best for this one is what are the resistance levels and the support levels that you guys were talking about yesterday? I think Gareth was there as well. I think it's like 42K is an important support level and 48K is an important resistance level. Is that right? I think it was like Chris and Peter both answered

that one. Go ahead, guys. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, exactly. I think if we clear 44, especially if we do it with a little bit of impulsiveness, I think 46 is easy. And if we're at 46, I think if we clear 44, especially if we do with a little bit of impulsiveness, I think 46 is easy. And if we're at 46, I think, you know, new highs incoming. You know, at the end of the day right now, we're just sitting on the, you know, sitting above the daily pivot. And so we're not, we haven't like broken down structure on the higher timeframes is still there. It hasn't broken down that market structure.

And so, you know, again, we're just kind of holding here. And so if we can get that pop above 44, you know, I think we end up above 50. We start looking towards 60. If we lose this, you know, this 40, whatever it is here, this 41, 42 area, you know, I would probably first look around 38 and a half and then potentially down there around 34 and a half. But honestly, I don't think we have a real good chance of getting down to 32 or 30 or anything like that. Peter? Yeah, no, I have support at 40. What I'd love to see is get a wash out of that 40 level and really kind of get people short term negative.

And if Bitcoin can hold, you know, that wash out of 40 and start back up. I mean, that for me is a sign that we're back on track. It's not a prediction that we're going to break 40. I just think, you know, 40 for me is support. We really need to get back on a closing basis. Grinney's meantime, get a close back above $46, $46.5 to really put this thing back on track. I think Ether gains. I think we saw the big support level on Ether Bitcoin taken out. So it was just kind of a bear trap on the chart,

on the Ether Bitcoin chart. So I think Ether gains on Bitcoin, at least for the period forward. Ether still, the chart of Ether daily chart looks solid to me. So I just see that Trump is on. On both the Bitcoin and the USD pair to me, Peter. Like you said, it swept that 0.049 area on the Ethereum Bitcoin chart, was oversold on RSI for only fourth time ever on the weekly, has bullish divergence there, massive bullish engulfing candle on the

Ethereum Bitcoin chart. And to me also, what you're talking about that washout with Bitcoin, we had that kind of sentiment on Ethereum, right?, what you're talking about, that washout with Bitcoin, we had that kind of sentiment on Ethereum, right? The sentiment we're talking about you would love to see on Bitcoin we've had for ages on Ethereum. It's dead. Solana is taking over. It's going to zero. It doesn't work. It's slow. All the things. Yeah, I'm not an Ether lover. And so, you know, for me, it's kind of hard. I almost have to bite my tongue when I say that I see Ether overperforming Bitcoin in the period ahead. But I mean, that's what the technicals tell me. the crypto traders. And I think the minute that spot ETF was approved, they started trying to get ahead of the next trade being an Ethereum spot ETF. That's just my feeling on it.

Mario, I can see. What's up? Now, I'll let you finish off with this discussion because I want to move to the alt season. I don't know what's happening with Ryan. He keeps trying to come up. So we can send him an invite. And I said, team, send him an invite. But starting with Scott, just going to the panel, I'd love to get your thoughts on this car i know you try to avoid

giving your thoughts but i'd love to get you started off and then go to ryan and others but i was reading an article by coin gecko we're talking about 50 of all cryptos have died according to you they consider 70 percent now they said they said 50 over 50 percent so 50 53.6 according to coin gecko according to this analysis analysis by Sean Paul Lee on CoinGecko. So it says that that's since 2014, they're looking at tokens listed on CoinGecko, 14,000 out of the, I don't know how many they have listed, but you could do the math, 14,000 have died. And there's 11,000 tokens. So most of the tokens, most of the ones that died were from the 2020 to 2021 era. And it goes to a question that we've discussed before.

And I think any investors here, any DGEN investors, VCs would probably like this discussion. Is when you get a bull market, remember, I wasn't too active in the last couple of bull markets. I was in the last one, but not the one before. But when you get into a bull market one thing that was said on the space a few times and we never really dug into is it is it the the listed tokens that benefit the most is it new projects launching that benefit the most because i feel like a lot of that new money a lot of that vc money that's been sitting on the sidelines they tend to they they tend to prefer new projects launching rather than ones that have been building for many years of course

why because the cash because it's an obvious cash grab and there's no sellers i mean we it's a you know the way that this uh for better or for worse the way this industry is structured is that insiders get in early they get coins and liquid immediately and they can effectively take a profit and then wait and see what happens, at least with the first tranche that they get. I mean, I'm not saying that's definitely a good thing, but the older a coin is, the more forced, passionate community members there are who are holding it for five years talking about how it's going to finally come back. But they're really just looking to sell at the first moment when they're either near break-even or in profit.

So it makes a lot of sense that new things perform better. I find it interesting. I'm looking at the same article right now. First of all, it says over 50% in the chart, but over 70% for some reason was the original headline. But I think that's, first of all, exceptionally, exceptionally low. Their methodology for determining this is things that they have been deactivated and delisted specifically from CoinGecko. So they say cryptocurrencies do not reflect any trade activity within the last 30 days. Projects are revealed as a scam or rug pool. Projects request to be deactivated. But so I would say that that's only based on these three criteria by CoinGecko. If you look at all the things that have actually been launched, and also it's hard to determine dead,

but I would say it's 98 or 99. Exactly. I think it may, first, the number is too low. I agree. I think it should definitely be above 95%. But, and so Microsoft is what they determined as a dead project.

And I don't know the process of delisting a coin. But if they only look at projects that are listed on CoinMarketCap or CoinGecko, I think think that's fair i think it's unfair to look at all projects including a random project launched by someone in their basement that raised you know 5k 10k i wouldn't count that as a project um but it's just fascinating to see like a lot of the projects that build it's it's much harder for them to get love to get the capital inflows they need to prove themselves a lot more than new projects launching from scratch i'd love love to get Carlo, Ryan, Fred's thoughts on this. Anyone else? Well, you know, to circle back on base, I sent you a link base actually won a poll on decrypt as being the chain of the year

or project of the year. It is impressive to see what's going on there. And one of the key takeaways from that is that Coinbase is growing to be more than just a trading company, but is also getting into the developer aspect of things. It's not really widely reported, but they also dropped a native token for base called Seem. And I haven't seen much happening on that yet, but it's interesting to watch another one that's really interesting to watch is this say sci token which claims to have faster speeds than solana double the speed of solana and is starting to really get a lot of attention in the space among builders yeah so he's getting a lot of attention as well and i just keep seeing seeing it talked about and something's performed really well so i'm not saying that all projects that were there in the last bull market don't get loved like we're seeing a lot of them do get attention. I see a lot of the games that were

part of really finally get the love they deserve. But it's just incomparable to new projects launching and the hype behind them. Ryan, we were just talking about altcoin season, and we're looking at an article about the number of projects that failed and how new projects launching in the bull market get more love, get more capital inflows than projects that we're building. They're solicited already, but they've been building for the last couple of years. Have you seen the same trend? Yeah, I mean, you're always going to get new shiny objects

every old season, right? Like you're going to get, I mean, with these things, specifically with token, you're going to get 99% of them eventually failing and then 1% or 2% of them actually surviving. And so, you know, I think this is a very typical of the cycle I'm actually to be honest I'm quite surprised that so many projects from the last cycle are still around

that to me is very very very surprising a lot of projects that haven't done anything and they're still around miraculously. But define still around that's what we were trying to get at when you weren't here like what does still around mean tokens still exist like still trading on theens still exist.

Still trading on the tokens. Still people buying and selling the tokens. Still a relevant market cap. You know? That's quite big. I don't want to mention individual projects because I think that's a little bit unfair. But there's a lot of projects that, you know, in my mind should have been dead. I'm surprised that they're still around at all.

And maybe what I was asking you earlier when you dropped out, and Ryan, feel free to jump in anytime because I do want to get your thoughts on this. But what I was asking you earlier, Ryan, when you dropped out, is first I was asking you to share the space, but then I was asking you to give us your altcoin narrative that you've been talking about for the last 48 hours. I don't think there's one narrative. I think the narrative is jumping.

I mean, today we saw NFTs, like Blur's running, and we saw Pudgy Penguins, the floor price going up. So like it's a small NFT narrative which is coming. But I think the narrative which has been dominating so far

is fast L1s. So it started off with Solana, an injective. It went into, say, it's now going into Sui. And so there's a massive, massive narrative around fast L1s. And that's been the dominating narrative. That's been where all the money is starting to flow.

Majority of the money flowing into the Cosmos ecosystem. I think there's lots of innovation in the Cosmos ecosystem. I mean, I spoke to a project last night, which we'll probably make an investment into, but the project is called Saga, S-A-G-A. And what they do to me, I mean, it's in my mind, the way they've solved cost and scalability is very, very, very, very smart. So what they've done is they've said, look, every chain,

so it's like every time that a that that a project wants to launch they launch their own chain and the chain is a copy of the main chain so to speak so and they call it a chain lit and so what projects will do is they'll pay like something like small numbers like three four five hundred dollars a month and that will be there for them to run a chain a separate chain now the chains unlike avalanche the chains don't settle on the main chain but they actually run on the same set of validators in parallel with the main chain right so just think of like a world where if you want to launch a chain you clone the main chain and you run on the same validators and as the main chain which is a very very very fast chain and you now get lots and lots and lots and lots of these sublets

or subchains or chainlets, I think was the term that they use. Now, that for me is a very, very, very smart way to solve the scaling problem, which I haven't actually – I've never heard of anyone doing it. So right now there's a focus on fast layer ones, but we know that that's how every cycle starts. And then from there we'll move on to all a focus on fast layer ones but we know that that's how every cycle starts and then then from there we'll move on to all the tools on the layer ones we we have an investing thesis if you don't want to spend too much time um on investing and making investment decisions every time you invest in a protocol in a layer one invest in the layer one invest in the

decks and invest in the meme coin in the main meme coin like so in solana you would have invested in solana radium and uh and uh bonk and like if you would have just invested in those three you would have done well you know um damn that's really smart that's really smart i always say just invest in the uh i mean my base case from last cycle was you know just invest in layer ones you'll get the benefit of everything that's built on it. But then if you get the main DEX, you also get the upside of the actual trading there. And then all of the TVL seemingly always comes from the first big meme coin. I'm not even a meme coin guy at all, but that makes sense.

Yeah, what you want to look at is you want to look at balancing your risk. The L1 is the lowest risk. The next risk is the DEX. You know know the dex to me is the casino so like the casino is always like the lowest risk bet because the casino makes money regardless of what happens if the chain is successful and then we always put the smallest amount into the meme coins like we put like in small amounts into the meme coins and you know know, the truth is these days, if you're not sure what the best meme coin is, you can either take a couple of bets or just look if the founder has a dog or a cat

and then just find the meme coin, you know, that's named after the founder's dog or cat that seems to have like the largest chance of success. Now, just interestingly, the meme coins can give you up to a thousand extra returns. So even if you just put a thousand dollars in the meme coin and you actually get it right, you know, you get a thousand extra. I'm not saying you will, but you can get up to a,000 extra turns. So even if you just put $1,000 in the meme coin and you actually get it right, you get 1,000 extra.

I'm not saying you will, but you can get up to 1,000 extra turns. That's enough. And so you could put, I don't know, $20,000 into the main chain, into the chain. You could put $5,000 or $10,000 into DEX and like $500 or $1,000 into the meme coin. And you've got yourself a beautiful diversified play across an L1 chain so that's that's our lazy invest i i love i love crypto obviously um been in the space for a long time

but i sometimes just hope that audience members or panelists that come on my other spaces don't join when we're talking about adopting all three i hope're not listening. All three, I hope so. All three of us get it. So if all three of us get a ferret and we launch ferret coin, you're saying, and we launch it on an L1 that's doing well, it's gaining traction.

Suddenly ferret coin becomes a meme token that has traction. Is that essentially the strategy that would work? No, what I'm saying is... You're muted, Ryan. You got a call. Ryan would love you... Oh, you're a call Ryan would love you you're back

I'm back go ahead Ryan start again you put 80% of your investment into the L1 put 15% of your investment

into the DEX or whatever 17% and put 1% of 3% into the meme coins and that's all you need Ryan your thoughts

on I'm going to go back to the original question are we in altcoin season has it finally started I don't believe we're there yet I think we're still really early in this cycle and I think altcoin season really comes later in the cycle from my experience

you know we talked about a little bit earlier how bitcoin's kind of been range bound and eth looks a little bit better uh than it has in the past but i think that we're you know we're still sitting 30 40 off all-time highs for the the major crypto assets and and so i think we're still in the early innings here and that the altcoin season doesn't come until later on. Can I ask you another question, Ryan? I know we talk about history rhyming, if not repeating itself, especially when it comes to the halving. Does that mean – so have we had an altcoin – sorry, a crypto dump every time prior to – I think it's a few months prior to the halving. Does that happen in every single cycle?

Does that mean, in your opinion, it will happen again? Because it just seems way too calculated, way too obvious. Even though I believe it will repeat itself, become a self-fulfilling prophecy, it just seems way too obvious. And the last bull market ended the same way the one before it ended. Could we have the next bull market, which is one we're waiting for now or we're in now, start the same way the last couple started? Yeah, it's one of those things where we don't have a ton of history, right? We have 15 years of history. We have three cycles maybe behind us where we've seen that play out where the year leading into a Bitcoin halving and the year

following a Bitcoin halving have been the best performing years within the four-year cycles that we look at. And so, I mean, on the one hand, history would tell us that there's a high likelihood that it does repeat itself because it has done that three times in the past. And so, and, you know, the past six, eight months have been really strong months for Bitcoin, for Ethereum, for other crypto assets. And so with the halving coming in at the end of April here, I mean, it is rather interesting that the historical trends would say that the year leading up to the halving and the year following the halving are generally the best. I mean, it is rather interesting that the historical trends would say that the year leading up to the halving and the year following the halving are generally the best. I mean, the other way to look at it is that generally the second year of a bull market is the best, most highest performing, biggest breakout year of the cycle. And so those two kind of historical data points

would point to 2024 as being perhaps the best year if we are in another four year cycle where there's three strong years followed by a year of retracements. And so that's where I think all season. I mean, if it is coming, I would expect it to come towards the second half of this year and going into 2025 versus having happened here at the end of 2023 and already in 2024. Sorry, I was muted. I was going to go to you, Fred, to get your thoughts on the same question. Well, I can say that you're asking the lawyer about alt season, and I'll just say that none of my alt coins have done anything as of yet, so I'm still waiting. No, not the altcoins. So the question I have for you is still about the markets, though,

is whether you'll see history repeat itself. And I'm going to pivot the next question I have for you is going back to the ETF. But first, I'll ask you a market question. Yeah, you know, I'm in the camp that we don't really start seeing the season until the halving. And, you know, you don't see the altcoins running until a little bit after, you know, Bitcoin starts its leg. You know, I will say there's a buddy of mine that I follow that, you know, he's called the top on the last Bitcoin and said that he thinks Bitcoin is just correlated with the stock market.

And we're due for a major correction there. And Bitcoin is going going way way down i have a hard time believing it but he's been on on the top of his game lately and so uh it'll be really interesting to see how it play out but i'm still waiting and we've got another article here scott you there i'm not sure where the guys are so i've got another article you just get your thoughts here i'm having an issue with Glitch. But yeah, same. You add.

Go ahead. Yeah, I was going to go back to Arthur Hayes, who believes that Bitcoin ETFs could bring in billions from trade fights. So it's going back to the same narratives that we've seen before. We do have some new voices. I want to get Peter, Fred, your thoughts on the same discussion we've had over the last few days, the inflows we've seen so far, and what we could see over the next few months? Yeah, I'll just say that where I am, I'm in Southern Cal, and I live in a nice area

that's got a lot of nice financial planners, financial advisors, people that run 401ks, and I try and get my Bitcoin mantra out to all of them. And they just do not care in any way, shape or form. I know this is anecdotal, but it just hasn't filtered down to everybody yet. I think it will. But I'm in a slice of the world where there's a lot of those types of people there that that can make that decision for their clients and there's they're like no it's not a real thing

no i'm not doing it so exactly exactly exactly what other concern we had earlier um the the who's what was your vendetta boycott vanguard wasn't it yeah it just means we're exactly and also means that we're, you can't say, okay, if, if, if they come in as good news,

if they don't come in as good news, like, you know, there must be something as bad news. If Vanguard is just completely blocking access. I mean, I think that news I'm saying what Fred is saying is that, you know,

the trend we generally see more people eventually come into the space and then they don't leave. I mean, the, the, you know, the statistics show that. So even if it's a slow trick trickle it just means we're early to those people coming in vanguard is bad news i agree yeah but yeah my take on this is your take on this as well peter

and maybe touch on vanguard like what do you think influenced that decision because you know in our bubble all of tradeFi is going to be engaged. How could Larry Fink be an evangelist for the industry and then Vanguard doing the complete opposite? I would expect TradeFi to be speaking together, to be aligned in some way. So basically, first on how I think the ETF will play out is I think we'll get a little push today and tomorrow where we should see some inflows. People are waiting for the ETFs to launch, to put money in. Some were probably ready last Thursday or Friday, but it happened quickly. So I'd expect if we're going to bounce, we'd bounce today, tomorrow. If not, I think we break through some

of those support levels you guys were talking about earlier, 42,040, and we reset because I really do think it's going to be weeks or months before this can get more broad adoption. So it'll be interesting to see if we can pop through today, tomorrow, we get some inflows from people who just didn't have time to react and we're wearing orders today. We'll get that breakthrough, you know, where maybe solidifies, then people can start talking about, okay, do we put this in? How long does it take RIAs? And then I think it becomes a month to two month process. And I'm not really surprised by Vanguard. I think Vanguard is always at the conservative end. That's kind of been the reputation. Even if you think about fee structure, right, they were very early on low fees and driving fees to zero across ETFs, right? They've

got their version of SPY, which I'm blanking on right now, but it's much cheaper to own than SPY and SPY itself is not a very expensive way to own the S&P 500. So I'm not surprised by them. And again, I also think BlackRock has made a name for themselves by being evangelists, and they get some right and they get some wrong. So I think that's also been in his very nature. You know, it's hard to tell how much he truly believes in it or whether it's just, okay, well, ESG didn't work as well as we thought. Maybe crypto will work. What's our next huge asset?

And again, I think we're starting to see those fees come down. This was just, GBTC was like $500 million of potential fees that all these ETF providers were swimming around saying, how do I get a piece of that $500 million? GBTC is cutting down their fees already. Other people are coming down. It'll be interesting to see where some of this shakes out. Coinbase, that's a name that's come up. Clearly, they'll probably be a beneficiary in terms of custody for a lot of this. But as the ETFs shut down their fees, what will they negotiate with Coinbase?

So this could be really the first time I think we see a real compression in terms of margins and what people can make in the space. And it'll be interesting to see how many people play through that. And the problem is it's probably been going on all the time and everyone sees it a little bit. This is just going to be such visible. And daily, you're going to see these inflows and outflows. So weirdly enough, I think for the next few weeks, maybe even a couple months, these ETFs are going to be the tail that wags the dog. People, everyone, everything can see, ooh, did inflows come in or not? Did prices come down or not? Did discount and NAV change? So I think we're going to spend a disproportionate amount of time watching the ETFs relative to the size of crypto, but that's what's going to be driving price action, I think. And it still seems to me a lot of people got too hyped too

quickly on how ETFs work. So I just don't know how many of the people who front ran this are using leverage or not. If they are using leverage, that's why I think you go from those 42 to 40,000, maybe through to low mid 30s, if we don't get this pop in the next day or two. Yeah, just on a note on Vanguard, I agree that they've been conservative historically, but they offer GBTC and BITO. So here's a question about that for the TradFi people. Has there ever been an example of this before where something has been offered as an ETF that a brokerage house has just flat out refused to list, you would think that this Bitcoin ETF is investing in cocaine. I mean, they have traded far more volatile things over the course of their history, even as a conservative brokerage house. Is this

an anomaly or is this something that you've seen before in TradFi? I'd have to go back. I think it's not that uncommon that it used to take a while for products to get permission and things like that. So where this stands, it's probably unusual in today's markets. I'm not sure that it's But Peter, they're not saying we're going to look at this. They're saying we're not going to offer it. Like a lot of the others, I understand, like to your point, they're saying, hey saying we're going to look at this. They're saying we're not going to offer it. Like a lot of the others, I understand, to your point, they're saying, hey, we're going to give this a little time to simmer. We're going to figure out how many of these are going to survive. We're going to do due diligence now that the products exist,

and then we're going to look into offering them. Vanguard just outright dismissed, and I do eventually think they'll come around, but they outright dismissed the concept of even considering it. Before telling people and making it go viral, Scott, and plan to get sued to boycott Vanguard, have you looked at whether they've done this to other asset classes? I think, Carlo, you gave the example of cocaine.

I think it's for medicinal use. Love it or hate it, I think it's easy for these people to understand. They didn't do it to crypto. That's the point. They offered a Bitcoin futures ETF trading since inception, which now they've pulled in this backlash, which is a huge FU to the industry, which was a far inferior product that didn't track the underlying spot,

the price of the underlying spot asset. It's absurd. It makes no sense. So hold on. They pulled their futures etf rather than than reversing their ban on the everyone said you've been offering the futures etf since the very beginning what the hell are you guys talking about conservative and for the protect your people and they said okay no more futures etf for you so what do you make out of this since you've put so

much effort into what do you think they did this did they just not believe in the asset? Or was it a bit more strategic than that? I don't really like the typical hat. I think that they're playing off a narrative that's very popular with their overlords. I won't name names. I think that, you know, the government. I think that there's a certain aspect where they decided early they weren't going to file for their own spot ETF, while every one of their competitors did. And now they're in the unenviable position of only being able to offer competitive products when they didn't create one of their own. And seeing that money disappear and see, I think they're just keeping dickheads. So just going back to A, listening to their overlords,

why wouldn't that apply to Larry as well? Larry is their overlord. Larry Fink is more powerful than any of these people. If he's on a road show talking about, we're going to get an Ethereum spot ETF, this is flight quality. The future of everything is the tokenization of assets. I don't know if Larry is a orange pill bully or crypto pill, I guess,

since he goes beyond Bitcoin or not. But he certainly sounds like someone who is, and there's very, very, very minimal incentive for Larry Fink, who now once again has 10 trillion assets under management. Even if Bitcoin becomes huge, this will be a drop in the bucket for BlackRock. So either he believes this will become so massive.

Bruce Fenton gave a great example this morning. He said BlackRock carrying, even if this went to 25, 35, 45 billion today, their ETF, it would be he would like someone would tell him the news and he would be cool and move on with his lunch. It's like the same as, you know, I think what Bruce said was the Mandalorian being popular and Bob Iger being like, cool, I have a show that's popular on one of my networks. Great. That's, but that's like saying, that's like saying, like, if I hadn't invested in the internet when the internet started, you got to start somewhere. This is a revolution correct i'm saying so i think he's truly orange peeled and it's not just about the percentage of aum that it will be because he can go on tv and literally talk about anything and this is what he's spending his time on right and we've seen countless billionaires come around to this and so i'm actually going to give the benefit of the doubt and think that larry fink uh is actually becoming a believer uh and that's why he's out on this roadshow. And I think that every time

you'll notice that when Gary Gensler, for example, who clearly Larry Fink doesn't have much respect for, Gary Gensler sues Coinbase and Binance. The industry is dead. It's all over. We're all finished. Everybody's capitulating. And BlackRock files for a spot ETF. And Larry Fink starts talking the opposite book of Gary Gensler. Gary Gensler finally approved the Spot ETF last week, goes on TV, says it's only because of the courts,

we don't support these assets, it's only Bitcoin. And then a day later, Larry Fink goes on TV and says, F you, Gary. You think the printing's still looking incredibly strong. No, it's because of God's cost. I shouldn't have muted him. Shit. If Fred was giving shit to one of Rand's employees then have muted him. Shit.

If Fred was giving shit to one of Rand's employees, then I muted him. Oh my gosh. I thought Rand was talking. I was going to say, so like a day later, Gary says, listen,

we only did Bitcoin, even though we don't support Bitcoin. It's a non-security commodity, whatever the, whatever catchphrase he comes up with a week. And literally the next day, Larry Fink goes on TV and says, Ethereum spot ETF next.

There's no reason not to. So I don't know if it's a pissing contest between Gary Gensler and Larry Fink, but my money is on Larry Fink. Hey, Scott, I just wanted to jump in real quick. And, you know, because we're all not big SEC fans over here. And after the disaster of the rollout from the SEC, especially from that fake ex post, our firm is investigating all claims. Anybody that got screwed over on that, liquidated one way or the other, we're investigating it. We want to sue the SEC for the negligent supervision of

that ex account. So if you guys go on to my handle and either shoot me a... Ran, that was your answer. Ran asked that question the other day he said is there any recourse for people who lost money as a result of that did you hear that right they should be i mean they should be because mario your sound is uh you're roboting on us yeah so you know if anybody shoots me on a direct message or sends an email to our firm's contact, it's contact at HODLLAW.org. I'll follow up with you and, you know, see if what happened to you is grounds enough to take that case forward. But, yeah, we're investigating it. We're looking into it. And, you know, on a side note, everybody should send goodwill to Utah. The SEC is also in a case there in a crypto case where they got caught lying to the court.

And now the court's trying to decide how hard they're going to sanction the SEC. So I'll put updates on that on my handle as well. But I mean, you see some of the things that came through about how the actual people suffer guy got literally stranded in africa when the sec shut down the uh this company's bank accounts i mean they're just off the rails as a government entity sorry for my rant rant over no no i've got more questions actually no i've got i've got more questions on that rant but first david jump in my question david after you jump in is what do you need to prove? Just trying to speak generally on this.

What do you need to prove to be able to do the SEC? If they didn't have 2FA, is that enough grounds to them, for example? Well, I love that Fred's doing the case. I'm wishing the best of luck. I'm going to not be part of that one. But, I mean, God bless. If Fred can prove this and do it, I mean, it's going to be fantastic. Everyone knows the SEC violated their own protocols by not having the 2FA. But I think that, you know, I don't speak on markets or anything. So the only thing I'm going to talk about a little bit is tomorrow is SEC Coinbase Day.

And, you know, some of the geeky lawyers are all going to be in New York together there for SEC versus Coinbase to see if Coinbase, with their PR campaign, can actually knock out the SEC with what can only be described as a haymaker on Wednesday. I don't think it's going to happen. But as John Deaton and I say all the time, I've been wrong on everything I've said for the last year about what's happening with the SEC. And if that trend continues tomorrow, it's going to be an exciting day for crypto and yet another pendulum swing completely against the SEC. It's crazy that… What's happening tomorrow?

What's happening tomorrow? The trend is dismissed. It's a full day hearing. It's the motion to dismiss the complaint from the SEC against Coinbase in New York in federal court. And what do you think is the likelihood that they'll succeed? What do you think is the likelihood that they'll succeed? So this is the David Silver likelihood scale. David Silver has been wrong 98.6 percent

of the time over the last year about the sec and crypto so i say the chance of them of the of coinbase succeeding and knocking it out is less than five percent so basically that means 95 percent that means it's 95 to the kramer effect i guess i have to agree with that i have to agree with that mario because the the burden is so high to win a motion to dismiss because you're basically saying nothing should go forward and be vetted out and be be judged on the merits so more than likely there might be a a denial or a consolidation of the claims with respect to the staking side of coin base that's one that i can see probably surviving here. It's a big day, and I think I'll be probably streaming it. It's available to stream via Zoom, and I'll be checking it out as well because it is a big day for crypto law.

Yeah. What time does it start? Is it nine? Let me double check. I think it is. Thank you. Thank you. I'm on central time, so that always screws me up. 10 a.m. EST, David. Yeah, but it's going to be a boring day. I think it's like eight hours of argument tomorrow. Each side gets four hours. And this isn't even a typical motion to dismiss. It's a motion on the pleadings. Coinbase has been incredibly creative. Their PR campaign is fantastic. But their legal, I mean, I think, you know, what he just said is completely true. The bar on them succeeding is really the only way Coinbase wins. And it's

actually a pretty good argument is if the judge buys the belief that the SEC lacks authority from Congress to regulate crypto exchanges. And that would be a knockout punch if the judge delivers that. It would set everything up for the appeals court as everything is moving towards appeals anyway. But it would be a knockout punch for Coinbase. And it would totally drive if the court says the SEC lacks authority. When people are looking for a movement in the markets, I think that'd be a fantastic movement in the markets, I think that'd be a fantastic movement in the markets. But again, David Silver is a terrible investor. Guys, I would totally love to see that outcome.

Yeah, Carlo, isn't it fair to say, though, even if we don't get the outcome, which we think is unlikely that they win, some of the most impactful moments for the crypto industry have actually just been judges' statements during these things. Exactly. And Coinbase has an elite legal team, Paul Graywald, and that legal team at Coinbase are top notch. I would love to see that victory tomorrow. But I think any commentary that calls into question the administrative reach and the regulatory enforcement actions by the SEC is probably a win for the space. Yeah, that's what I'm looking for. I mean, even when the Voyager bankruptcy lawyer pushed back against the SEC and said, you guys are nuts. That was huge news. And it wasn't meaningful

or impactful on the actual bankruptcy proceeding. But it was one more crack sort of in the foundation here of the SEC. I really keep harping on this, but earlier this year, our entire industry lived in like daily terror in fear of the SEC. Like it seemed like what the SEC said was law, that they could do whatever they wanted. And since then, it's been nothing but beatings for the SEC in the court system. And frankly, like in the court of public opinion nobody is afraid of the sec at all anymore at all and i think that that is just a huge paradigm shift nobody's afraid of the sec if you're a small project and the sec come after you and you're not and you're not uh as well capitalized and as well funded as a coinbase or an xrp you're in big trouble though i mean

right i i agree with that part i'm just saying people are saying the quiet parts out loud on social media and such and in the news that they would have never said especially when they're regulated by the sec themselves it's just been a major major uh pendulum swing and a lot of pushback i think they just become wildly unpopular and that was not necessarily the case. Fair point. I think the SEC under Gary Gensler has always been like that. I mean, under Jay Clayton, I remember they got some criticism, but I don't remember

it ever being as bad as this. Probably the last thing, Scott, you'd want to bring up, unless Ryan wanted to jump in on this point, is Elon. His comments, I think Doge blew up. He's talking about progress on the rumors of X incorporating payment systems and being a better version of PayPal. And everyone's kind of assuming that Bitcoin and other crypto will be integrated. So I'm just going through the article there. Did anyone hear what Elon said?

So he said now Tesla, Elon Musk said that he's making progress in adding payments to X that would include Bitcoin and crypto. Okay, explicit that that would include Bitcoin and crypto. Do you think that will bring the masses to the industry if that happens? Because we saw Instagram add the verification for NFs um but that didn't do much for the industry i don't think it didn't do anything long term and i think they pulled it now no twitter pulled it twitter added the verification for nfts and instagram twitter pulled that from from their platform a few days ago instagram still has it um so do you think that could be another

another um just kind of failed attempt to to bring crypto to the masses anyone could jump in on this yeah someone jump in yeah i think um i think it'll be amazing if it happens and how it happens and you know before elon uh took over and changed it to x you know i don't know how many people remember this, but there was actually a growing popularity of something called the XRP tip bot, because that was a little bit of a faster way you could send crypto on the platform. And then it was eventually actually shut down. But that was back when, before the law. Did did it get adoption fred before it was shut down yeah so it was fully functional on the platform and because it was fast it was really easy to use

and you know like um like some of the other uh cryptos out there it's very divisible and people you know were just sending fractions of a penny and it was just you know so easy to do and then um it got shut down this was a long time ago before elon took over and you know so easy to do and then um it got shut down this was a long time ago before Elon took over and you know that was still that was before the SEC lawsuit and it was um it was growing in popularity I'm not going to say it had completely caught fire by that point and like everybody was using it but it was steadily growing and then it got that killed in its tracks but it was just a really fun I mean this was four or five years ago, maybe maybe three years ago, probably four or five years ago. And, you know, it's just if anybody use it, it was so fun because, you know, somebody could say just something hilarious.

Think about all the meme posts and then you're like, all right, tip on, you know, a few fractions of a penny. And, you know, it just kind of went on like that. And if and sure Elon would get it right too on X. It would just be very easy to do and be probably one of the best real-world use cases for the masses that I think we've seen. So I would be really bullish on that when it comes out. Scott, as an influencer, do you think that could – you're pretty active on Twitter. You're on Ryan. Do you think that would be – Nothing matters. I've seen it too too early but there's something that matters what happened what happened to paypal's anyone know what happened to paypal's stable coin it's uh paypal stable coin still trucking along or they're still working on on getting it launched uh i think it's that's just a sign how slow tradfi institutions typically work even though paypal's a fintech company is they take a long time to get an initiative going

once they announce it. I mean, you see the announcement and then many months go by before the follow-up is there. I don't really think, I kind of agree with Scott. I don't think there's one thing in particular that is going to drive crypto into the next 10 million, 100 million users. I think it's a bunch of little steps the industry has to take.

So Twitter launching some kind of crypto payments mechanism, PayPal launching stablecoin, spot Bitcoin ETFs, BlackRock putting up a flag in the ground for Ethereum ETFs. I think that's all great. But these are all just a bunch of little steps forward that in the long run add up to many yards gained for the industry. But it's nothing, it's not any one item, I think it's going to be the major catalyst that everyone's looking for. And it's, I think that's why it's so important to zoom out, look at these cycles over many year

period, look at, you know, the life, the life cycle of crypto in general, and it's only been around for a few years. And, you know, relatively speaking uh compared to some of these industries we're going up against and uh you know the coinbase judgment is really important the the fact that we're i'm losing ryan is that just me yeah i'm losing yeah i think we're ryan we'll bring him up on on the next base i think he's on the move ryan we just lost you i think you dropped out as well um but i think this is we've covered everything well i know we could talk more about vivek but i just don't think it's that important because we've got eight percent even though he's a crypto evangelist um so i think we uh we've covered everything scott your thoughts

you're back tomorrow yeah cool we'll see everyone tomorrow bye everyone