The Wolf Of All Streets - Bitcoin Plunges In A Massive Sell Off | What's Next For Crypto? | Week In Review With Mark Yusko

Episode Date: March 3, 2023

Did Binance commingle customer funds? What’s going on with Silvergate bank? What triggered a massive sell-off in crypto? I will discuss this and more today in a review of the week. Tune in at 9:30 am EST.  ►►GET UP TO A $8,000 BONUS IN USDT AND GET MASSIVE DISCOUNTS ON TRADING FEES! 👉 https://thewolfofallstreets.info/bitget   ►►NORD VPN  Get Exclusive NordVPN deal - 40% discount! It's risk-free with Nord's 30-day money-back guarantee. 👉 https://nordvpn.com/WolfOfAllStreets  ►►CoinRoutes Trade spot & derivatives across CeFi and DeFi using your own accounts with our advanced algorithmic platform. Save tons of money on trading fees like the pros! 👉 http://bit.ly/3ZXeYKd ►► JOIN THE FREE WOLF DEN NEWSLETTER https://thewolfden.substack.com/   Follow Scott Melker: Twitter: https://twitter.com/scottmelker  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/wolfofallstreets   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.

The price of Bitcoin dropped over $1,200 in under 30 minutes yesterday, largely, presumably, on the situation with Silvergate Bank, whose stock itself also dropped 50% in a single day. Alongside that, we have the $1.8 billion in question that was moved around on Binance. We have reports that DCG lost over a billion dollars last year and basically a whole lot of fun. Now, you know, Friday is the day that I rant and rave generally by myself reviewing the week in news because we don't do news every day anymore. Well, I know you guys couldn't get enough of Mark Yusko yesterday. So we brought him back to rant and rave about the news with me today, which makes it a lot more exciting than when I was just going to show up myself. You guys don't want to miss this one. Let's go.

What is up, everybody? I'm Scott Melker, also known as the Wolf of All Streets. Before we Let's go. without hearing about all the bad things that are happening in crypto. Well, finally, funny, yesterday I was talking to Mark Yusko, Dan Gunzberg, and David Young from Coinbase. We were talking about how resilient Bitcoin price had been, how we'd see no dips in the market on any of the news, how Silvergate had dumped 50% overnight and Bitcoin hadn't dropped. And then, oh, right, we saw a pretty sizable, I mean, listen, a $1,200 Bitcoin move in crypto. We just call that Tuesday. But it was a sizable move, a lot of liquidations, which we'll talk about in a

bit, and some pretty serious volume. And it happened very, very fast. I'm just going to go ahead and bring Mark on. What's your take on that drop, man? What do you think happened there? You know, Scott, it's so hard to pinpoint single causes, but I think your analysis was spot on in that somebody got liquidated or some buddies got liquidated. And the funny thing is, $1,200, it's a big move, except it's like a little under 5% on a $24,000 price, $23,000 price. So yes, it's a big deal, but I love it. That's just Tuesday. Yeah, I really think it that way. And here's the article, Bitcoin either drop over 5% in massive sell-off as market continues to digest Silvergate. Generally, though, when you kind of take a look at the chart in this situation, I mean, I can do that. But to me, it is the daily chart. We're still just kind of ranging, right? I mean, you get this quote-unquote dump, but we're just kind of trading between key levels.

I mean, I would say the only concern here for people who use them is that that pretty much nuked the 50 MA here on the daily, which you don't usually see in a single move. Usually it would hold his support, but we have the rest of the day to see if that's going to happen. But really, I don't view anything between like 21.5 and 25.12 as particularly significant anyways. Right? If you wanted to draw a cup and handle pattern, you couldn't draw a better cup and handle pattern than that, right? I mean, it's now, I like the range you have on the handle in that, yeah, if it breaks down below that support level. Yeah, right around there. You get a little bit nervous. But I don't know.

I still contend. You know, we're in spring. We're heading to summer. And the momentum's coming back. But look, the FUD is reaching, I don't know, epidemic or epic proportions? It is. I was just on Twitter Spaces with CZ, like literally right before we came here.

I'd tell you, Roel. I didn't invite him. I was just there. I was on Twitter Spaces and CZ showed up, to be more accurate, for Ran. But he said that in no uncertain terms, which is very rare of him because he's obviously on like a positive PR campaign.

He likes to be compliant with regulators. He said, I don't remember the number. He was like, there's been 73 negative articles on us. It was on. I can't remember which publication now the Forbes article, obviously I'm Reuters.

And he was like, this is, he's like, this isn't coincidence at this point. He's like, this is a nonstop FUD campaign. And he wasn't saying specific to Binance. He was just saying that he thinks that a Binance obviously is taking the brunt of it, but against the industry. He's like, and it's so coordinated and obvious at this point, it's laughable. Well, OK, so first. Break out the tinfo, politicians to basically, you know, slow. I won't say stop because they can't stop the technology. The technology of truth

is superior to the business of trust. It just is. And replacing trust with truth is what blockchain technology is all about. So that isn't going to stop, but they can certainly, certainly slow it. And that's what they're doing. And this attack on the banks that have facilitated crypto businesses is the latest step. So first it was, let's go after the lenders.

And they did that with surgical precision using this front. And I use that term intentionally of FTX, which was simply a front to attack crypto, was never real, was never, you know, it was the second largest exchange in the world. No, it never was. Not even close. So anyway, and then this attack on CZ, I'll actually say totally intentional and totally targeted because he gets the added bonus that he can be labeled China. Right. And which is funny because he also just addressed that when speaking there, ran wisely asked him, well, what does offshore even mean? Everybody says you're an offshore exchange.

I can give you my answer. I think it's a derogatory term for anything not American, penned by American regulators, right? Because offshore is nonsense in the global economy. It's nonsense with the global asset class. But CZ said, actually, to me, offshore means anything. He said, first of all, wherever I am, they call everything else offshore. I'm in France. Right. But he said be branded. Look, I've seen his name and Binance's name linked to CCP. Of course, people always say he's a puppet of the Communist Party. I mean, show me the evidence. It's really interesting in that, look, if you want to go back to the roots, right? CZ was engaged with, and Binance was engaged with the beginnings of FTX, right?

And Alameda. Okay. And then there was this transaction and then there was this kind of fight. And then there was the basically declaration and uncovering of the really bad money laundering, all the bad, the bad stuff that was going on. Now those people are unhappy because they've been exposed. So they're trying to turn the vitriol on him. And I'm like, guys, I just called a spade a spade. And I admire his resilience in the face, some pretty powerful people coming after you. And I always admire his, I don't know, positive energy, I guess. I mean, he is a—

It is incredible. And I can tell you, yeah, when I was in Dubai for the Satoshi Roundtable, obviously he was there. And it is not easy to be him. I believe he spends, you know, 80% of his time now not running an exchange and probably talking about regulation with regular regulators. And the other 20% is literally smiling and taking selfies with people

he has no interest in talking to. Right? Like I, we talked for a second, but like, I was like, I gave him a pound from afar and I was like, I'm going to, I didn't want to bother him. Literally, he just gets everywhere he goes he gets absolutely mobbed like and that's

that's the nature of being a celebrity but he doesn't have to do that right he's on a positive pr campaign trying to do the best that he can for the industry and for the exchange i think that that's a really hard life probably for a guy who just wants to like oh it's a super hard life look i you know i'm sitting here in in chapel hill it's the day before Duke UNC and everybody's buzzing. And it's literally like being MJ. And when you are super, super famous and everybody knows you, even if they don't know you, they act like they know you. To your point, they just walk right up to you like you're their best friend. And you don't know who these people are. And it's funny. I spent a lot of time in Chicago and lived actually up near where Jordan lived. And there was this funny story from a restaurant that he used to go to all the time where he was just having dinner with his family.

And, you know, this guy walks over and and it's like talking to like you say like he's his best friend and and it's like dude i'm having dinner with my family come on i mean give me a little bit of privacy and and people and he recounted the story and people like were on him like you don't deserve privacy you're a public figure yeah yeah are you joking but that's how they i can tell you that that's 100 how they view him in person just really want to click quick on the on the actual news story just for clarity there was it says there was 62 million uh bullish long futures liquidated that's the highest level since august i just want to tell you i find that really surprising because in the old days we would see like 800 or 900 million in a 24 hour period on these big moves.

Yeah. I don't really see that as huge. I saw someone in the comments saying that they saw that it was one whale dumping a huge position. One whale market sold 40 Bitcoin in one lot. And then somebody conjecturing it could be the Mt. Cox liquidator. I don't think so. I think the Mt.

Cox wallet is still completely intact. They were just talking about that as well. But yeah, sometimes there's literally just one person with a whole lot of money who decides that that's their moment. Well, but also, Scott, this is what's interesting too. We all want this market to be robust and healthy. But here's my take. When you have the vast majority of an asset completely illiquid, right?

I mean, there's the super illiquid, the stuff that's probably lost or stolen or locked or can't get a multi-sig name or signature. Okay. Then you got the piece of the, I'm a hodler and I'm never, you know, pry it out of my cold dead hands. But then you've got the people who are actually accumulating and they're actually in a buy mode, not a sell mode. So you get this increasing foundation of just illiquidity. So the marginal trading, and that has to cycle through over and over and over again. And that just creates these really volatile markets. And people look at that like, this is the myth of market cap, right? If you put a hundred shares traded of Microsoft stock on NASDAQ, whatever the price is, I don't

even know what the price of Microsoft is, 200 bucks, call it. And then you say, okay, well, because there are 10 billion shares, the market cap is X. What are you talking about? If you tried to sell a million shares, you wouldn't get that price. If you tried to sell a billion shares, you wouldn't get that price. And so this idea that a 5% move because 40,000 coins shifted hands, I don't. I have a hilarious anecdotal story about that. I was on another Twitter spaces last week with Mario Nafal and there was a guy, Shib something. It was like the biggest Shib whale who was on there. And he told a story how he bought $8,000 worth of Shib, like right at the intro. And it went down to eight bucks,

like in value. It went down to $8, in value it went down to eight dollars but then at the peak was 5.6 billion dollars from eight dollars 5.6 billion dollars now currently worth over one billion dollars and everyone was like what is wrong with you he said he's never sold a penny of it of his shib he's an old school bitcoin guy i think he's got billions in that anyways but said i've never sold any. And people are like, what? Like, what is wrong with you? This thing has no value.

He was like, well, A, it's part of the community. But B, you don't realize if I had even sold $10 million at the top, my $5.6 billion position would have been worth $2 billion. And then another $10 million, it would have been worth, you know, I'm not saying that's not awesome, by the way. But there was zero liquidity for him to ever realize the $5.6 billion or even $100 million of that position. Oh, exactly. I don't believe that math, by the way.

I don't remember there being a rise from $8 to $5.6 billion, but that's what he said. Yeah, yeah. 3.6, whatever it was. We trust people. But to your point, zero probability that you could realize that money. And, and, but, but that was the other part of, of the FTX debacle, right? Is you float 1% of these Sam coins and you get a price. And then you say that the rest of the 99 percent that doesn't trade is worth so much money and you pledge it as collateral and you borrow real money like like actual money against that. That is fraud, right, of the highest nature. And now I heard this morning, once again, 8.9 billion has gone missing from the FTX thing.

That 5 billion they recorded of liquid assets, that wasn't real. That was FTT and serum and stuff that isn't worth what they think it is to this point. So I, I don't know if, if we can just get past this myopic focus on a bad, some bad people did some bad stuff. They did. And, and that, that's tragic. But the thing that I'm struggling with, Scott, and I think I may have said it yesterday, is there have been 538 banks that have gone bust since the global financial crisis. Not during the global financial crisis, not before the global financial crisis, just since. Do we talk about, we should all just get out of banking. We should all get our money out of the bank. This banking thing is broken. It doesn't work. That proves it. No. One exchange goes down. Two exchanges, 10 exchanges. There are 500 exchanges. Well, we don't need exchanges. But we need some and we need the ability to transact, you know, between ourselves until such time as the world is completely on chain and DeFi, which is not tomorrow. Yeah. And speaking of banks, so we obviously we kind of touched on it yesterday.

The Silvergate story, we all know what happened, right? Silvergate obviously had investigations happening and clients pulling out and liquidity issues, and they were inextricably tied to FTX. There's a kind of sadder side to this story, right? Obviously, they're losing Coinbase, Circle, Paxos, Crypto.com, Bitstamp, CBOE, Galaxy, Gemini this week, right? After losing Kraken recently, and obviously FTX went over. What people might not remember is, I think it was like in 2014, 15, this was the only bank that would bank crypto customers, all of these names. And I get it, it's business, but it's sad that they're all leaving. No, Scott, that is so, so accurate, right? Is when the shoe was on the other foot, probably a bad analogy, but true, right, when you were the pariahs, because you were the upstarts and in the sketchy,

dodgy business, and this was a, quote unquote, a real bank, they made a strategic decision. Now, look, I'm not a fan of the actual people that run this particular organization. And, you know, I'm not as adamant about them being evil as Mr. Cohodes. And by the way, never, ever tussle with Mark Cohodes. I mean, he, he is not someone you want to be on the wrong side of. And, um, so yeah, I, I, I find the story very sad to your point because in the end, we collectively need the interoperability between the old financial system and the new financial system until such time as the new financial system is the financial system, which is as inevitable as it was five years ago, 10 years ago, but it's going to take time. And, and Haley Lennon, who, you know, she's pretty active tweeter. And yeah, she tweeted a couple years ago. I think she actually may have worked with Silver Bank or for, I don't know. I can't remember the exact things, but, but she tweeted, look, if, if the regulators want to take us down, right, if they want to take the industry down, it's the on-ramps and off-ramps of the banks. And so-

Caitlin Long has said the same thing multiple times, including a year ago to me in person in Bitcoin Miami. She said, worry about the FDIC and the Fed, not the SEC and the CFTC. Yeah. And that's where we are now. And look, that's why I believe, and it's just me, and you might agree with me a little bit, but I know that I believe that everything in the past year highly concentrated effort to cause pain and suffering in this industry. And I said, it wasn't Sam and Caroline. They were not the masterminds of anything.

They were the useful idiots. It's way above their pay grade. And some really, really powerful people are pulling the strings. And they're not done, right? The then they fight you phase, it started last year. It's probably going to go for a few more years, which is- Yeah, I agree. It started last year, but the last month has been an insane uptick, right? I mean, enforcement activities from the SEC, you know, seeing every major international agency starting to have an opinion.

I mean, we talked about this quite a bit yesterday. It doesn't all just coincidentally happen at once. And remember, I mean, January was like an epically bullish month for the crypto market, actually. So it kind of started in February. Yeah. No, no, look. And that's kind of an interesting dynamic, right? Which is you had this, you know, massive campaign, FTX, the crash, you know, we're going from 24 down to 15. And they're like, yes, okay, we're winning. And then, you know, we made the bottom and then epic short squeeze. I mean, one of the great short squeezes of all time. In fact, I think it is the greatest short squeeze in Bitcoin in all time. And so now those people are like, hey, what the hell? We thought we killed

you. OK, not dead. So what did they have to do? They had to amp up the game and they are amping up the game. And I think, you know, this is a casualty of war here. Yeah, I tend to agree. Next story we have here, we're putting Mark on the spot to some degree. Three Japanese banks start stablecoin experiment institutions evolved our tokyo kiriboshi financial group mina no bank i wouldn't call my bank no bank personally and the shikoku bank uh unless it was a crypto bank of course um yeah are actually like testing with a jap japan open blockchain which is fully compatible with ethereum and complies with Japanese law, to start utilizing stable coins in their actual banking transactions. And so where does this fit?

Everyone here watched yesterday. Where does this fit't full evil right this isn't this isn't like you know evil corp evil but look this is another acknowledgement that 70 plus year old technology, Swift at all, needs to be replaced. And stable coins actually are pretty good. I mean, it's a silly experiment. Actually, I'm going to do,

I'm going to do a quick, I'm going to do a quick, I didn't get to do my sock reveal because I didn't do my on the margin. So I'm going to do it for you. So I have the green candle pants on today, but I want to show you the socks. So I have the green candle. I have the on chain monkeys rise on today. And so I was, I was sitting around just the other day and I was like, you know,

I have, I have my, my PFP monkey and I'm going to buy a couple more. And a couple clicks, I was moving Ethereum from wallets and into and bam. And the whole thing was five minutes. I didn't have to go stand in line at a bank. I didn't have to get a confirmation email. It was amazing and so fast and so secure. And I could see it in real time. And it was just so much of a better experience of using my money to buy assets that now are mine. And that's the future. And we talked about this yesterday too, is, you know, my little granddaughter, right? Six months old. She's never, ever, ever going to have a leather wallet. Ever. Not ever, right? She's never going to know what paper money is.

And that's so cool. The Zoomers, as we call them, the Gen A's. So I think that's what Japan is saying here is they're like, look, it's inevitable. So let's get out ahead of it. And I don't know. Does it go down the slippery slope to pure evil, CBDC, constant surveillance, programmable money. Yeah, unfortunately. Look, fiat. Yeah. Fiat is bad. Fiat is bad. I mean, that could probably be said for any stable coin just because it's basically digital fiat.

But what's interesting is that this is not so new. When we were under Clayton and Brian Brooks instead of Gensler and friends, they were already, I mean, Brooks especially at the OCC, they were making very bold statements, writing letters, saying that banks would be able to custody these assets, that banks could start experimenting with stable coins rather than SWIFT. We've just seen that paused under a new regime. But that was already a narrative in the United States, even up until maybe a year ago,

that stable coins were going to be a superior way for Legacy Banks to operate well and that because okay so and this is this is a deep rabbit hole I mean under Clayton's leadership the SEC was balanced measured consistent prudent intelligent I mean I don't know about you, but I don't hear those adjectives attributed to that organization today. And something changed and we all know what it is and we all know how it happened. And the interconnections between politics and the current regime. And look, I shouldn't criticize the organization that regulates me because I don't want a proctology exam.

You're not going to do it anyways. But I mean, but here's the thing. I can acknowledge good leadership and I should, in a free world, be able to point out bad leadership. And I should, in a free world, be able to point out bad leadership. And the U.S. right now has bad leadership in a lot of ways. And we're making our position that should have been at the forefront and leadership role really weak. And that's sad and i think japan and korea and china and russia are gonna come out on top i i don't know if you have to leave but i'm gonna i do i i i

i appreciate you letting me come come hang and riff with you um i now i have to go do some some work work um but i'd rather do this. You and me both. This is work work, I think, technically for me. Not like I'm getting paid. No, this isn't work. Look, if you get to do what you love, it's not work. I hope so.

It's fun. And so every time I get to hang with you is fun. I got to go talk about logistics of travel planning for our China fund. But that's not fun. That sounds super fun. No, no fund. But that's not fun. That sounds super fun. No, no, no. It's not fun. But anyway, we'll do. I will see you soon.

Again, thanks for having me on. And I wish the continued riffing to be even more fun than this was. It will. Thank you, man. See you, man. Have a good weekend. Yeah, Mark literally hit me up like 10 minutes. He was like, you want me to hang out for 30 minutes?

I said, hell yeah, why don't you hang out for 30 minutes? Makes my job so much easier when someone like Mark Yusko comes on and is able to talk about what's happening here in the news. Now onto that Binance FUD that I mentioned earlier. Binance moved 1.8 in stablecoin collateral to hedge funds last year, Forbes. This meant that over 1 billion worth of tokens called BPEG USDC, no one wants to get BPEG'd, digital replicas of dollar peg stablecoin USDC were uncollateralized despite Binance's claims that they were 100%

backed. Now, this is so much to unpack when you dive into this. First of all, it's largely FUD, the way that it was presented. Forbes basically, in their article saying that this was exactly what FTX was doing, they were moving $1.8 billion to hedge funds, blah, blah, blah, largely to Cumberland, a bit went to Alameda, actually, and to a number of other hedge funds, that was the claim. First of all, totally different than what was happening with FTX, because FTX was moving the money to their own hedge fund, right? So Binance has no ownership in Alameda, had no ownership in Cumberland. So it's an entirely different story, even if it is true. So that is a false equivalency, just to throw that out from the very beginning. But if it is true that these assets became unbacked, that is problematic.

But when you dig in, what's more likely, even if that is true, which I have my doubts about, it seems that likely what was happening was that they were then backing the access with BUSD instead of USDC. Now that's become problematic. But we all know, and it's been very transparent, that Binance was taking all of their USDC, getting rid of those pairs, and pushing all the customers and any USDC into BUSDC. So that would not be a surprise. But Binance's chief strategy officer, Patrick Hillman, told Forbes the movement of money among wallets was common practice and not a problem. There was no commingling. There's going on. And as long as we're backed and people can withdraw, no problem. Now, I would say anecdotally, we've all seen Binance suffer arguably the worst stress test in history after FTX and all the FUD. And at no point has there been any question mark as to their operations or how they were able to redeem and able for users to get their funds out. So we

haven't really seen any of this realized. To me, this seems like, yet again, another major attack. Binance has admitted in the past that they had some issues with these things and were cleaning them up. So I think that it's hard to pin this on them right now from what I've read. Binance can't give its story straight. A misplaced 1.8 billion USDC. The FUD is coming from inside the building. Yeah, there's been sort of different, slightly different narratives coming from different people.

CZ saying it's flat out FUD. The other guy saying it's on a ledger. Another person saying that you can check the wallets. But to me, I'm going to just leave it right now as unsubstantiated, but always possible. Be careful. Bottom line, though, this all happened back in August, and there's no issue at the moment.

The money all came back. The wallets are fully funded. Everything right now, even according to Forbes, is fully backed. Goldman Sachs says it's open to adding staff to digital assets in Bloomberg. The investment bank's tokenization platform was used by Hong Kong to sell digital bonds last week. Very cool. And if there was any question as to whether the Goldman's, BlackRock's, J.P. Morgan's, banks, VC funds, private equity, you name them, was interested in crypto, they all continue to build in the space. You may have seen that Goldman has actually fired a shit ton of employees but are actually actively talking about hiring in the crypto and digital asset space.

That should tell you everything you need to know about whether they remain committed to this space or not. Next, crypto crime hit all time high of 20.6 billion in 2022. Kim Grauer, the blockchain sleuthing firm's head of research, told CoinDesk TV, sanctioned activity and hacking were the driving force behind the rise in illicit transaction volumes this year. Is that a surprise? Like, don't you think that every year that crypto grows will end up being a record-breaking year for crypto crime, just inherently, as each thing scales at the same level each year. $20.6 billion, yes, it's a lot of money. And we saw all the massive hacks, exploits, and wormholes. But we also know that, especially for Bitcoin, we've seen that less than 1% of Bitcoin, specifically, transactions have anything to do with any sort of illicit activity.

And that by many, many multiples, crime and illicit activity primarily favor the U.S. dollar, right? So it's a bit disingenuous to point out these figures in a vacuum as if no other asset class is subject to these problems. No other form of money is used for ransoms. I mean, what did they do before crypto? Was there no crime? I don't know. Very confusing. Very confusing. But on the flip side of that, this is still a huge problem. A reason that big money is scared to have their money in DeFi, right? All these wormhole hacks and exploits. So I think that we're just going to go ahead and use the good old fashioned term. We're still early and understand that these problems will always be there. But listen, I mean, like the DOJ websites and like servers get hacked, right? So no surprise that where there's money available online, we're going to see

hackers and criminals ramping up activity to try to get that money, which makes it all the more important that you yourself are exceptionally careful. You don't click on phishing links. You be your own bank, you self-custody, you keep your private keys safe. You don't click on phishing links. You be your own bank. You self-custody. You keep your private keys safe. You never share them with anyone. Very, very obvious things you can do. Crypto conglomerate digital currency group reports loss of $1.1 billion in challenging 2022. Yeah, you think? Think it was challenging for them at all? It was challenging for everybody. First of all, you remember that Craig Wright photo I used to make fun of? Barry's kind of got that, but Barry looks happy. Barry looks happy here. I'm not sure if he's going to remain happy. I can't speak to that. They've got some big, big problems, right?

They have cash equivalents of $262 million at the end of 2022, while investment assets amounted to 670 million and they lost 1.1 billion. Those are not favorable numbers. The question is, how well siloed are each of the different companies owned by DCG? I had Grayscale CEO, Michael Sonnenschein on the podcast on Tuesday. If you guys didn't listen to that, by the way, their court case with the SEC starts at the beginning of next week, suing the SEC for a conversion of GBTC to an ETF. Pretty cool. He made the argument that they are completely siloed from Genesis and from Coindesk and from the DCG is simply their umbrella parent, and they're all different companies. There's been some on-chain analysis that refutes that. Once again, very hard to know what you're seeing on-chain if you're not

an insider. But for now, the biggest question mark, I think, of the DCG portfolio would be the safety of Grayscale. And I think that right now we can assume that it's very safe. There's no reason to believe we would see a sell-off of those assets. It's a very profitable business. And a failure in Genesis, we've already seen the bankruptcy, not going to be problematic for Grayscale. That, to me, would be the biggest problem. We know that Coindesk is up for sale. I believe that's owned by DCG.

So a lot of problems here. Barrie certainly could have a lot of problems moving forward. But I don't think at this point that's a problem for the market. And that's what we all care about, right? The Titans are going to come and go. Companies are going to succeed and fail as long as they don't crash our shit like they all did last year. Then that is the free market. And that is life. That is life. Jared Covey would like to know about spearfishing links. If you like to spearfish, that's good. But if you're getting spearfished, seems like a bad link to click on. Denner's declare massive shortfall in FTX assets. FTX US also in the red. Their books and records

are incomplete and in many cases, totally absent. FTX CEO John J. Ray III, who's getting paid like $4 million an hour, basically by creditors to do his job. It's not that much, but he's getting paid a lot. The reports were absolutely insane. These numbers are also absolutely insane. If you want to know, 2.2 billion of total assets have been located, according to the presentation, of which only $694 million are the most liquid currencies, such as fiat, stablecoins, Bitcoin, or ETH. Against these holdings and another $385 million in customer receivables are $9.3 billion in assets, only $694 million of which are liquid, and their liability whole was $9.3 billion.

My question here, which I do not have the answer for, is what happened to the $5 billion that was reportedly found recently? You guys remember that? It was in the news. We were talking about it. Up to $5 billion of assets have been recovered and found by the bankruptcy courts and the liquidators and blah, blah, blah. I don't know. Regulated liquidators mount up. So I take everything with a grain of salt. I'm taking this one with a huge, massive, monstrous grain of salt? I have no idea. But is anybody

surprised that just because SBF said FTX US is solvent and fully banked that it's not actually true? No. Nobody's surprised. I think we know that this is going to play out for many, many years, and it's going to be a long, bumpy, painful road for FTX creditors. And speaking of a long, bumpy, painful road, how about Voyager creditors? Yay, that's me. Yesterday, they had a huge court hearing in the bankruptcy proceedings for Voyager, and actually some, I would argue, good-ish news. Good-ish news. This is what they said. As of 2-27, 73% recovery. That is about 20% to 25% higher than I heard previously. Don't know, but this is what was said.

And if the Alameda claims goes through, you guys might have seen Alameda Research is trying to claw back a half a billion dollars-ish, just under, half a billion dollars from Voyager. So if FTX is able to claw back that money from Voyager because it was a loan to Voyager and they have their own bankruptcy proceeding, that would send it down to about a 48% recovery. Of course, market movement and the price of these assets will be largely impactful on the actual percentage since we're going to get paid back in dollars. And speaking of clawbacks, you may have seen Celsius creditors have been dealing with this for months, but a very quick ramp up in rhetoric about clawbacks from Voyager retail customers, which is holy shit painful if you are one of the people targeted. Initially, we saw this argument that anyone basically who had withdrawn money three months prior to the bankruptcy in July would have the funds that they withdrew clawed back.

Now, imagine a guy robs a bank, right? And he robs everybody in the bank. He takes all their money and then he takes the money from the bank. So there's a huge hole in the bank. He takes all their money. And then he takes the money from the bank. So there's a huge hole in the bank. The police come. And what they do is they go find everybody who is a customer of the bank that was not robbed. And they take their money back to pay back the bank. Oh, and by the way, you have to pay the police $50,000 an hour to do their job. That's what this is, right? That's what a retail clawback is. It's absolute insanity. The people who were not victims, who were able to get their money out, who luckily just happened maybe three months before, that was before Celsius even fell out,

right? Those people are going to have to give back their money so they can then get back 48% of it. Holy shit. Not so far from standard in Chapter 11 bankruptcy, unfortunately, but it shows you what an absolute travesty and scam Chapter 11 bankruptcy is. It's complete fucking nonsense. If Voyager or Celsius, but specifically I can speak to Voyager as a creditor, if they had just liquidated on July 7th, instead of going into chapter 11, which was restructuring, they've done chapter seven liquidation instead of trying to restructure and survive,

which I will say is code for the executives trying to protect themselves from going to fucking jail. Right? We would have gotten back 75 to 80% of our assets. Now we're talking about a potential 48%. 73% seems high. I'm not buying it, but I'll take it. Cloud Casino asks, are they going for clawbacks on Voyager? Yes. So they said it was 32,000 accounts that had withdrawn money in 90 days before. 32,000 accounts. But luckily, there's been a bit more specific. By the way, for me personally, I withdrew money from Voyager three months before the collapse to pay a down payment on a house.

Imagine if I have to send back the money that I used for a down payment on a house months before there was even FUD against Celsius and Voyager. But that is not going to happen. Luckily. But I had a day where I thought it would, and I was pretty pissed off. So there's 32,000 accounts that basically had a zero balance. So in moving to Binance US, those people are of no value. So they're theoretically a part of the long story. But the people they're seemingly really going to go after is not that clickbait number of 32,000. It's 92 people who withdrew $100,000 after, I believe, June 20th, 21st, somewhere in there. Because at that point,

if you withdrew $100,000, or if you traded crypto and withdrew or withdrew over $100,000, you might have been in the know that they were about to limit withdrawals or go bankrupt. Which, by the way, is also fucking nonsense. You want to know why that's nonsense? Because people like me, by the way, I did not get $100,000 out. Why? Because they magically reduced my withdrawal limit to $10,000 and turned off my crypto withdrawals. There were people who were able to withdraw crypto, not from a bank. You could only get $10,000 in cash out, even if before you were able to get a million out in a day. But maybe you could still get all your Bitcoin out, which could have been over 100,000. So they're going to claw back those people, which is still pain trade. But for me, I couldn't get

more than $10,000 a day. So I basically couldn't even get there. So we'll see if I'm affected or not. But basically, it seems like they're going to largely go after those 90 people. It's less than 10 million dollars. It's marginal effect on the case. Seems like misdirection and a way to waste time. But what I really want to talk about in this was the court case, because you may have seen that the SEC, the NYDFS, Texas regulators, all opposed to this deal, filing complaints, saying for one reason that maybe Binance US doesn't have the money to do it. That was FUD. The SEC saying this will be an illegal transfer of unregistered securities and therefore it can't happen. Holy shit, what assholes.

But this is what a federal judge had to say about that. You're asking the debtor to prove that the cryptos being transacted are not securities, but you give a no regulatory guide as to what that is. Oh, reverse 360 slam into the shib of admit of the liquidator slammed it slammed by a federal judge for the same nonsense we've all been talking about endlessly you don't tell us what makes something a security you don't give away to register and then you're going to punish everyone at the end well imagine now imagine now punishing the only person you're punishing in creditors, right?

Because Voyager is not Voyager anymore. It's just my money, right? You want to pay the lawyers. You want to pay the advisors. You want to go back into chapter 11. This, if, if the SEC is allowed to say that a transfer of Voyager assets is illegal because it's unregulated securities, that basically means that we never get our money back. Right? So that's not going to happen. But it was amazing, amazing to see a federal judge say this. He went absolutely off if you heard about it on the SEC. So guys,

saw all the news I got. It was awesome having Mark here. I love the co-host vibes. Listen, next week, still going to be largely around, but I am going to be starting Twitter Spaces. Hope you guys are going to come. Hope you guys are going to come. Tuesday, we're going to do Twitter Spaces. Tuesday, not sure if it'll be at this exact time, if we'll stream or if we'll do Spaces at 11, but stay tuned because we're going to start doing Twitter Spaces,

and it's going to be awesome. Because at Twitter Spaces, you can have exactly what happened with me. I was up there to talk to Rand and then CZ just happens to show up in the audience and there he is. Yeah. Jeff says, thanks for getting me angry about Steve Ehrlich all over again. Oh, I said Steve's such a dick headed. Uh, let me see. I'm going to read it. I literally, I just DM him now every time there's bad news. I'm not going to show it because there's a lot of conversation there. This is what I said to him in DM. He doesn't respond anymore. You need to come out of hiding and explain to people what's going on because you're acting like a little bitch. That's what I DMed Steve Ehrlich.

Act like a bitch, you're going to get called a bitch. Right? So I DMed him that shit. He used to be my friend. Yeah, fuck him. He's fucked up. He's fucked up. Anyways, that is all.

Is Macro Monday going to be on Spaces? No. All right, Coin Routes. What's up? No, I think we're going to do it here. I think we're going to be on Spaces? No. All right, Coin Routes. What's up? No, I think we're going to do it here. I think we're going to do it here. Yeah, I very quietly enjoy dunking on people. I just can't do it public.

I guess I just did it public. Anyways. No, for now, we're going to do Macro Monday here. I think, you know, Macro Monday and the Thursday roundtables are so popular and do so well on YouTube, and I love the interaction and seeing people's facial expressions and such. Whatever, man. Whatever, man.

Yeah, I'll be here. We're going to move to spaces on Tuesday. That's about what I got for you guys. I will see you very soon. Peace. Have a great weekend.