The Wolf Of All Streets - Bitcoin Smashes $78K As Investors Go Risk On! Real Breakout Or Bull Trap?

Episode Date: April 22, 2026

Bitcoin just surged past $78,000 to an 11-week high after Donald Trump announced an indefinite Iran ceasefire extension—fueling a global risk-on rally across markets. With strong institutional demand, including continued buying from Strategy, and $80K now acting as the key resistance level, traders are watching closely for a potential breakout and short squeeze. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Bitcoin is back above $78,000 as investors go risk on across the board, leading many to wonder if this is yet another bull trap or if we're actually going to see a major breakout and a move into the 80s. But there's so much in the news today that it's hard to really care about price. So I'm lucky that I have Noel here to discuss all of it with me and more. We're going to get into it right now. Let's go. Good morning, everybody. And welcome to the show. It is hump day.

happy Wednesday to all of you who celebrate. We have been given quite a few massive stories to discuss today. Noel, I was lamenting yesterday that there was no news. It's like, what are we going to do a show on? What are we going to talk about? And then I flew to the moon, apparently. And the crypto gods gave us a lot. So with you, I just thought of, yeah. I can't even imagine what no news looks like these days. So there was a time. I don't know if you remember, Scott, it really wasn't that long ago when there was really nothing going on and the prices were bumping along and so organization was simmering, not exactly boiling. And we earlier were searching with this was what two years ago? It feels like a lifetime ago. Yeah, I mean, now the news cycle

is insane, but we were given some major crypto-specific stories today, which are blowing my mind, Justin Sun suing World Liberty Financial, New York Attorney General suing Coinbase in Gemini, Cal Shia and Polly Market launching perpetual futures. It's out of control. But I want to start with where we are with Price and obviously how we're being impacted by macro because I know that that's sort of where you focus. Bitcoin jumps over $78,000.

It's 11-week high amid Trump's Seeks Fire Extension. So, I mean, I don't even know how to talk about the war anymore, to be honest, because I get accused of having TDS and I feel like I'm losing my mind. But so now we have an indefinite ceasefire. Not really sure what that means. And markets love it. But last I checked, there's no negotiation going on publicly.

I have no idea what's happening behind. And we still have a blockade, right? And the oil price is climbing Brent is up at 101 now. And the stock market, as you pointed out, is behaving as if this doesn't matter. I mean, all markets seem to be behaving as if this doesn't matter. I mean, ironically, it was kind of gold, which is the head you're supposed to go to when a war starts that's performed the worst probably of every major asset class since the war started.

Bitcoin's up 12-ish, actually probably now 15 or 16 percent. That was yesterday that I looked at a chart. It was up about 12 percent as being war. Stocks were up four or five percent. They're probably six or seven now, and gold was down eight. It's probably down six. I don't know, but we live in the upside down. None of it makes sense.

Yeah. The bond market has generally been labeled the intelligent market because it just trades on macro data and big fiscal data doesn't get involved in AI narratives and things like that. And so generally the bond market has the reputation of being the intelligent market. And so it's where the macro traders tend to focus. And that has been signaling squeeze coming up. I mean, yields for the 10-year are up at 4.23%, 4.3%. That's high when you consider that the Fed actually started a cutting cycle quite a while ago now.

And it's also high considering yesterday we had the hearings on Capitol Hill of the Fed Chair nominee who is known to be a dove and has the explicit task of bringing down interest rates, and yet yields are not coming down. So the bond market is sending a very different signal than the equity market. Gold is marching to its own drummer, as it tends to do. The Bitcoin move is curious and does have many of us, myself included, scratching our heads with a little bit of tentative optimism. Well, I pulled up a chart yesterday on the Yahoo show, but Bitcoin is actually outperformed in every single crisis since 2020, certainly. When you look at all markets, it's been in the green 60 days later after all seven major crisis events that we can look at. And some of those are very notable.

Remember, the Silicon Valley Bank collapse. Obviously, Bitcoin was up like 30% or something when that happened. And I know that that was very specific because USC had questions. So a lot of people rushed out of USC and into Bitcoin. But as much as it gets a bad rap, in these moments of those two months after an event starts, Bitcoin actually historically has performed exceptionally well. So we shouldn't be surprised. I just don't understand why people don't see that. Well, the reason people are surprised, and I agree with you, but the reason people are surprised is that Bitcoin has come to be thought of as a risk asset. If you've got the big macro money wading into the market with their big boots on and they treat it as a risk asset, it behaves like a risk asset. And so that's the prevailing narrative.

I'm not saying it's the correct narrative, but it's a narrative that does drive price. therefore it's a narrative that can hold. And when you've got stocks surging, behaving like risk assets and Bitcoin behaving like the mature asset of the bunch, then that is a different story. Plus, and this is actually very significant, comes back to what you were saying. The derivatives market for Bitcoin is weak.

It is just sending a lot of really miserable signals. You've got bases down at, I haven't seen lows like this in ages. You've got skews suggesting a very heavy weighting towards puts. You've got the funding rate was negative yesterday. Today, I think it's tentatively positive. In other words, the derivatives markets are saying that, hey, we're not frothy. I don't know what you're talking about. There's no risk sentiment going on here.

You then look at the flows into the crypto, the Bitcoin spot ETS around the world, especially in the US. And they're positive. They were positive last week for the week in a row, which is again a very different environment of that which we've seen for most of this year. And so it starts to feel like there's spot accumulation. It's tentative. This is not the frothy risk asset narrative that we're a couple of.

to seeing in Bitcoin. And it could have to do with the hedge against crazy from those that actually take time to understand Bitcoin. For those that do so tend to buy the hedge against crazy narrative. I count myself in that particular bucket, which is why it tends to outperform when things are crazy. You explain that so eloquently. I wish I'd had you on my Yahoo show when I was botching the same argument yesterday. That makes so much sense, right? And when you look at where Bitcoin is, the way you just described it, it seems like there's definitely potential to go higher, right? I mean, you have Michael Saylor buying billions of dollars a week. That's become pretty transparent. I think we'll probably see a pause until STRC is back at par. A pause in the

size, right? Not billions per week, maybe hundreds of millions per week. With other financial engineering, you have eight or nine day win streak, as you said, with the ETFs and a billion alone last week. Those are back up. They're holding more Bitcoin. Their Bitcoin value may not be as high. I find it interesting that we measure them based on the dollar value for the AOM of these ETS, but they're holding more Bitcoin, right, because Bitcoin's down 40%. And then you have the derivative market, as you so eloquently put, where people are still short. And when you don't see negative funding very often for sustained periods of time in the perp market without price squeezing those shorts.

It doesn't mean that it's a move that's going to continue up to an all-time high, but if people are still skewed short and we're sitting at 78, you got to imagine there's a very good case for 82, 83, 84 here. Yeah, the shorts would probably be getting nervous around about 78, 79, and that's where we are. And it does seem to be some tentative momentum there. But the big takeaway, as you pointed out, is that this is not speculative. This is not frothy. I'm going to throw in another narrative that I was writing about this morning and thinking about. And I don't claim to this is not a well-thought-out narrative.

But yesterday was a, sorry, last week was a dark week for defy. And the Bitcoin Dominance Index, which is something that I keep an eye on as a gauge of risk sentiment in the crypto market, the Bitcoin Dominance Index this morning reached its highest point since I think November of last year. So what we're seeing is, in part, new money coming into the market, and Bitcoin is the obvious on ramp. It's tentative still. But I think we're also seeing some rotation out of other crypto assets into the safety of Bitcoin. Oh my gosh. I love that you said that because we were arguing this on Macro Monday and Mike McClone called Bitcoin beta to the crypto market. I almost lost my mind. Because obviously the

rest of the market is beta to Bitcoin. Bitcoin is the benchmark of the crypto market. And for anyone who is here before 2018 or 2019, you couldn't even trade all coins without doing it with Bitcoin as the benchmark asset. There was no real stable coin trading pairs. And so to your point, you look at Bitcoin dominance, that's the washing machine of funds going around in crypto. And it's showing actually a bit risk off in crypto while the world's going risk on, which I find very interesting. Yeah. Actually, that's a very good point.

And I'm going to jump to Mike's defense here. I don't agree with him on most of his crypto views. But he does understand it. I mean, he was one of the first mainstream journalists or reporters or analysts to be covering crypto, Bitcoin back in the day. So I think he gets it. and he's certainly a man of integrity and courage in saying these views on your show. But I think what he's doing is repeating to us the macro view.

Whether he agrees that or not is perhaps not as relevant as whether or not it drives the price. And if that's the big money, and arguably it's a much bigger pool of money than the crypto funds, then that is a viewpoint we have to take into account no matter how strongly we disagree with it. I love Mike. And I generally, I think, agree with a lot of the things. It's just sometimes there's these very little nuances within the crypto side that just drive me a little bit crazy. Yeah. There is no supply limit to Bitcoin.

It's kind of frustrating. I get that. But then it is the view held by many macro investors who just don't understand how Bitcoin works. We need to hear and understand that voice. I want to pivot to the Fed and Kevin Warsh's hearings yesterday. So in a minute, we can talk about what he actually said about crypto. But I just found the whole theater of it to be astounding. I haven't watched it entirely.

I've kind of read the summaries and watched the clips. But he literally had to stand there and say that he's not a sock puppet. Not Donald Trump's a sock puppet. Everything's theater in markets these days though if you think about it. Right. But so. So you, the McSock pocket means. I mean, that's just going to be hilarious. Right. But so do you think, A, there's some theories that Warsh won't even get confirmed. There's some theories that he won't get confirmed by the time Powell is out. And then there's obviously a wide variety of opinions as to what his policies will be when he comes in.

So I guess what I'm getting at is how much does this hearing matter? And then the secondary question, how much does the Fed matter? right now when you see that we're obviously in a fiscally driven market. I think that's an excellent question, and I answered that in order. The hearing doesn't matter, but the Fed matters a lot, not for its impact on monetary policy, but for its impact on the market more broadly. And, you know, hear me out here. It's a threat that I've been pulling on recently. And I wrote a lot about this yesterday, the building tension in the treasury market. Now, this is the safe asset. It is the treasury yields are the benchmark yields that pretty much all

global borrowing is established against. And things are looking very dicey. We don't just have increased spending coming from the US government for military replenishment, but also for social support should indeed gas stay above $4 for long. And we've got the budget increase kicking through. It looks like that will be worked through in a couple of years. Anyways, spending is coming through. Possibly revenues will be coming down because of lower corporate income because of how high. global oil prices around the world, not just oil, but other commodities as well. Input prices up, margins have to either squeeze or inflation will kick up. Either way,

revenues could be coming down so great a budget deficit, more debt issuance, and who is going to be buying in the market in which you have decreasing trust in the US government's integrity, I think is the right word here. You also have other assets that investors increasingly can choose from, I was reading in Bloomberg this morning that China's just issued a yuan bond in Hong Kong by the two-year at 1.5 percent or something like that. In other words, there's more demand for yuan bonds in Hong Kong at the moment than for the U.S. two-year bond, which is absolutely extraordinary. There was an F.T report day before yesterday showing that some of the big supranational issuances

from the EIB and the World Bank and others, they are at yields similar to those of U.S. reason. The long story is investors have more choice now. We have governments around the world needing to sell some of their reserves in order to just keep afloat. And we have at the same time greater supply coming through. If indeed there are no buyers for or not enough buyers for that supply, who's the buyer of last resort? Yeah. And we've just had a 15 billion buyback last week. and I think they just announced another $15 billion buyback. Now, these are big stories because it's more liquidity. It could be a signal that there's something problematic underlying

because the behavior is not usual. But that said, I think our debt service is $3 billion a day, so like $15 billion is kind of rounding it. Yeah, relative to the Treasury's, you know, a balance sheet. Absolutely. The government is borrowing to pay interest. That's just not a productive use. of revenues and interest is up at what, 6% of GDP, I think.

Well, let's say a budget deficit is at 6% of GDP and that's not a productive use of GDP. On the buybacks, I don't think they're an issue. They were well-announced, well flagged ahead of time and it is actually a sensible move to remove some of the illiquid issuance at the long end, reissue it on the short end. This fits in with what Besson said he was going to do when he took his office. So that's not so much of an issue. I think a bigger issue is tax refunds have been reversed. record, much higher than expected. The tariff refunds kicked in on Monday. And all of this needs

to be financed somehow at a time, expenditures, not exactly going to be coming down. The bottom line also is this is where the Fed matters. Again, not so much for monetary policy, because we've seen that cutting rates isn't going to move the needle very much. It's will the Fed have the balance sheet to step into the Treasury market if it is required to do so. Now, Warsh has spoken out against this. In fact, this is precisely why he quit the Fed back at the great financial crisis. He was very much against the Fed stepping into fiscal policy by helping out the Treasury by taking Treasury bonds onto its balance sheet. He wants to reduce the balance sheet. He's not going to be able to. But will he be okay with the Fed stepping in? If he doesn't, then the Treasury market is going to

be in trouble and there's no way the administration is going to allow that to happen. You talk about the tariff refunds. I can't believe we're sending money back to China. Those sarcasm people, I'm already getting told I don't understand beta in the chat. You know, like some of us the whole time were like tariffs are just charged to American companies. You know, I understand there's secondary effects on foreign governments, but now the refunds strangely are going back to Americans, correct? Yeah, but it's very unpatriotic, we're told, to actually ask for them. That's right. You shouldn't ask for it back. How do you package all of this?

Markets are at all-time highs. I know this is kind of what we started at, but the S&P doesn't care. It had the fastest V-shaped recovery in history that I could find. It depends on, you know, for 10% down and back to making a new all-time high was the fastest. The Russell made a new all-time high two days ago, which is the ultimate sign of risk on, right? I mean, that's the small caps. How is this? Where's the money coming from?

I think there's a lot of leverage in the market, but also there's foreign money. coming in, perhaps not so much into the treasury market. Although, yeah, there is as well, not on the private side, certainly, because the rest of the world is kind of messed up as well. But there's a lot of leverage. Basically, I think what we're seeing, Scott, is just human emotions here. We're wired to believe that President Trump will back out of any measure that puts the stock market in danger because he cares about the stock market

and he sees it as a metric of a gauge of how well he is doing. I think he cares more about the bond market, but that's a different story. So I think the market is just betting on him talking the market up whenever it chooses to go in the other direction. However, reality has to step in at some stage because if it doesn't, then markets just simply don't make sense, in which case that's a big blow to credibility. There's also human emotion involved, Scott, in that there's just more career risk in staying out of the market at this stage than there is in staying in staying in. because if you do what I think would be the sensible thing and just get out into your security place, then you may be able to sleep better, but you're going to underperform probably.

And that could cost you your job. Now, if you stay in and the market turns and you're losing along with everybody else, well, hey, it's happening to everybody. It's not necessarily your fault. I agree. I want to go back to the rough week that crypto had last week that you mentioned without going into deep, into all of the hacks. We're starting to get opinions from Wall Street that I think are worth discussing. Sixty-four-year-old investment bank says Wall Street is losing crypto confidence.

So obviously, I love when we say a 64-year-old investment bank as if it's a monolith, not 10,000 or 20,000 people are more working there. But obviously, an analyst at Jeffries has said that after this kelpdow exploit and the Drift Protocol exploit earlier, that it's going to slow down the tokenization plans of Wall Street. And I actually have been thinking about this a lot, and I'm not sure where I stand. I think it's definitely going to slow down the trust in decentralized protocols. I think it might kick the can very much in the direction of highly centralized, deeply controlled usages of defy when it comes to tokenization.

But these hacks were a little different this time. One was social engineering, and one, they took. the tokens that they stole and moved them into defy and took loans against it, which caused a contagion we've never seen before. So something different is afoot here. And when you add the potential of mythos and AI coming into this, it's going to get very ugly or it could. Yeah, I think the mythos risk is very overlooked. By going back to what you were saying, I totally agree with you that this is going to hurt the defy story. It's not going to hurt the tokenization story at all, because to be honest, that's not really on defy. You do have some issuers.

testing public token on public on public blockchains, but most of it is going on permission blockchains. And that's, to be honest, where it's going to be, not because I think it should be. I don't think it should be. I think public blockchains are a better marketplace, but because it's what institutions will be comfortable with. It's because it's what their lawyers will let them do and their compliance department, their compliance departments will sign off on.

And it's what the regulators will be happy with. We are blessed with an SEC and a CFTC that understand the promise of public blockchains. But let's face, that institutions have to be cautious, as they should. should be. Again, this isn't what I want to see happen, but I do think it is what will happen. Now, an overlooked factor here is what this means for stable coins. And Circle is currently facing a class action suit for not intervening in a hack. It could have frozen the tokens, but it chose not to because it didn't have a court order to do so. Now, this is going to open up a whole new

regulatory can of worms for stable coin issuers. And I'm not sure where the, where Congress is going to land on this, because should they be enforcers, should they try and prevent crime, or should they just follow the law and only freeze tokens when they are meant to? And if we don't sort this out, if this isn't clarified, then that could keep large institutions just away from stable coins, period. I mean, this is now the big topic, and it's not just for stable coins. You look at what's happening in this specific situation. Ave freezes W. ETH markets after Kelped Al-Exploit. Then this one was a real head scratcher. Arbitrum Security Council freezes 30,766 ETH, worth 71 million linked to Saturdays, Kelped Al exploit, recovering roughly a quarter of the stolen funds via

governance controlled wallet. So once again, torn, right? This is exactly what you're talking about. yes, I don't want people to get away with stealing the money. That's great. But the flip size that this is supposed to be decentralized, I didn't know that there was a judge, jury, an executor who could make these decisions on the other side. And they're freezing Eath. It's not like they're freezing arbitram. Right. There's a layer two that's freezing Eif. I'm glad, I think. Yeah, we don't want someone else to get away. Where are we on this gray scale of decentralization and how much is it going to matter?

And what I would say to your point about tokenization, I agree with you, I don't think it affects tokenization directly or tokenizing stocks and moving them, but how those become their own financial system with yield and work into someone's portfolio, that begins to get interesting because a lot of that happens in DFI. Yeah, indeed. And what is the point of tokenization if you can't interact with DFI protocols? Basically, you've just got an asset sitting there on a different sort of database. I mean, the whole thing about tokenization, the only advantage, really, it's not speed, it's not even fractionization, it's the interoperability, and having your security on the same rails as the money, and then it can flow around and get extra yield by plugging into various Legos, if you want to look at that way.

And when that is taken off the table, then seriously, what is the point of tokenization if all we're doing is issuing real world securities in a different format? So organization was always going to be about, blockchain was always going to be about doing things we've never been able to do before. Yeah, I can't find the image now, but on my Yahoo show, I brought up the composable Legos, and then I just said it was actually Jenga, and you're playing a guy with a flamethrower on Jenga,

and it was a picture like a North Korean hacker, just flaming the Jenga setup, right? Because- That's such a good image. Composable Legos is great. It's so aptly described last week. Yeah, I just didn't. didn't, you know, I never thought about the composable Lego contagion that we saw.

That was, that's the part that just gets me because I had no idea, you know, that if one thing, I never envisioned a hacker taking a loan, right? And basically running away with the money and then creating toxic debt in all of DFI. And the thing about blockchain and so many of the deflates, they can do it in a matter of seconds. I mean, that's one of the advantages and what benefits us will benefit criminals as well. This is even before we bring Mythos into the equation. This was social engineering.

When Mythos gets going, and apparently I was reading this morning, it actually is out in the wild now. Some unauthorized users got hold of it. Then, yeah, the Defi protocols must be feeling pretty nervous now, and institutional interest is going to be taking a step back. Yeah, and I don't know what the final number is at this point of how much money has flowed out of Defi as a result. But, you know, last I saw it was over $13 billion.

So even the people who believed in this and have been deeply in it are taking a wait-and-see approach, I think. So your most ardent believers are now pulling their money out of defy. That's not exactly a vote of confidence. No. Meanwhile, Bitcoin keeps doing its thing, totally unaffected in its lane, moisturized, that kind of thing. But the defy ecosystem around Bitcoin is still relatively nascent, thin, if you like. Yeah. So I want to go all the way back to war.

in what he said about crypto because I'm curious your opinion on whether his passion for the asset class or deep belief or understanding of it will matter. I don't know if you saw, but it came out that his net worth was $192 million. Personally, his wife is Estee Lauder's granddaughter, so obviously it's in the billions when you blend them, but he had over 30 investments in crypto, many of which I have never even heard of and I've been here a while. Right. So it's almost like you have this vision of him in pump fun on the trenches, launching mean coins, right? this guy definitely gets it and this is what he said on the senate floor we have the video here sir no do you believe that digital assets should be incorporated into our financial industry

so americans have new investment opportunities and consumer protections uh senator digital assets are already part of the fabric of our financial services industry in the united states yes thanks mr walley uh not him saying he's a sock puppet um but does it matter that he is a crypto guy. I don't think it matters at all, to be honest. And as for him getting it, I've seen other investment portfolios similar very much as spray and prey.

You don't necessarily get it. But listen, one of these will work out. So I'll just invest in, you know, the top 30 or whatever names happen to take my fancy. That's a risk portfolio. And that's often how they work. So let's not credit him with understanding all of these things. Maybe he does.

Maybe I'm not doing him justice here. But I don't think it matters at all. What the Fed needs to be able to do is just figure out market liquidity, not get in the way of stable coins, should indeed Treasury want to emphasize that. And this brings us to a fascinating potential split coming up. If Warsh gets confirmed, and he is indeed a crypto advocate, you do have Scott Besson saying pretty much that he wants the world to be using dollar stable coins because that will put more power in the hands of Treasury at the expense of the Federal Reserve.

He wants to take some of the economic stimulation power away from monetary policy and put it into fiscal policy because while the Federal Reserve controls how much banks feel comfortable lending, stable coins are backed by U.S. government debt. I love the spray and prey part because it gives me a great segue into this part because I don't know if you saw this, but SBF spotted to someone showing how FTCS's investments would have performed if the bankruptcy hadn't sold them.

Anthropic, obviously, would have probably plugged the entire FTCS whole. I am not supporting SPF here. As if this was an exonerating factor. I mean, you know, like $40 billion. And then I don't know if you saw this yesterday. They had a 5% stake in any sphere, which is cursor. And then SpaceX announced a plan to buy cursor for $60 billion, which would have made FTCS at stake a fifth.

15,000 X return and worth $3 million more. And this is interesting, and I'm sure there are many people who lost money on the FDX that are wishing that things have gone otherwise, but it's got nothing to do with the fraud. No, obviously. Obviously, it's cope on his part, but it just shows how that spray and prey portfolio can do. We didn't see the other 200 investments that went bad on that list. And by the way, that was with their customers' money, that they were making those investments to the point of the fraud. So it doesn't make sense.

So the customers of every right to be pissed off about that. Absolutely. So where do you stand on where the markets are headed? You know, we've kind of talked about the fact that people ask me all the time and I say, I'm just buying Bitcoin. But because, you know, we're making all-time highs. Usually a blue sky breakout is a huge trading opportunity to the upside. But I think there's still a ton of fear in the market and everyone's just waiting for

the next shoe to drop. But you mix that with the fact that everyone's, does believe Trump can always talk up the market. Maybe we're just, markets can remain irrational longer than we can remain solvent situation. This comes down to the career risk of do you really want to put sleeping well over your career projections? I do personally, and I'm so grateful I'm not a professional money manager. Right now, the only assets I'm comfortable with are Bitcoin, and I'd probably be okay with gold at this stage, although, again, preference for Bitcoin because it is supply resistant.

I mean, its supply doesn't move with its price, I'm like gold. But I've heard a lot of people talk intelligently, and again, if I were a professional manager, I'd be thinking of the barbell strategy. You want your security assets, and you also just want some play money, some speculative money just in case, because this market is

crazy and there's no doubt handsome profits to be had. We are also on the cusp of, I won't call it a technological revolution, because AI is an evolution, perhaps, rather than a revolution. But there are some interesting opportunities. I mean, the pace of the development there is absolutely astonishing and there's probably more money to be made. Is that going to be enough to keep investors invested in the S&P 500 more broadly?

Or are we going to see continuing concentration, which in the end only enhances the vulnerability? I don't know. War is impossible to trade because it is impossible to know what is happening. We have no idea what's going on in Tehran. We have no idea what's going on in Washington, D.C., and we're told conflicting things which probably can all be true at the same time. I mean, we even have these insane claims about insider trading going on with the Trump organization, which could rock markets, I think, have proven true to some degree. And then obviously the Trump involvement in World Liberty Financial. I don't know if you saw this one.

Maybe we can touch on it just very briefly. I'm definitely going to talk about it later. But, I mean, Justin's son is now suing the Trump's or suing World Liberty Financial, I mean, to be more specific. But very clearly whether the Trumps were deeply involved in this or not. And Justin Sun continually says, by the way, in his strategy, he's like, I love Donald Trump. I love Donald Trump. It's the people running his company.

I love Donald Trump. I support Donald Trump. But, I mean, these guys have a whole lot of money and took that into Defi and took massive loans on their own platform and effectively ran away with it. It's hard to take any of this seriously at this point. Yeah. Yeah. This is a fascinating one. Yeah.

This is a fascinating one. Normally, I just scroll right past anything to do with Justin's son because so not interested. But this will be interesting. If only for the discovery, should this actually go to trial? Oh, that's such a good point. I mean, think about the timeline. I think in 2023, he was sued by the SEC, right? The charges for the SEC for market manipulation

and for paying celebrities to market the token without disclosures. In 2024, he put $75 million into World Liberty Financial. 2025, two or three months later, that suit is paused. And I think last month, And in the end of kind of beginning here of 2026, the charges were entirely dropped, paid a $10 million fine. And then within two or three weeks, he's doing them. The optics are just crazy. I'm not saying that those things are actually related, but it's hard not to look at that timeline and understand why people shake their heads at all of this.

Yeah. And there's two geopolitical factors to bring into this particular story as well. One is how much money Saudi Arabia and the UAE have invested in World Liberty Financial. And the second is Justin's son was earlier this week in Kyrgyzstan offering his services to the Kyrgyzstan government on how to make them a Web 3 haven for their region. A Kyrgyzstan is very close to Russia politically and as well as geographically and economically. So what is he playing at here? Do you think we live in a simulation? Yes.

Feels like it. This can't be real. We've been saying that now for quite a while, haven't we? I've given up. I exited with Artemis. Well, Noel, I always love having a conversation with you and your insight's so helpful. I really appreciate you coming on. I highly encourage everybody to give you a follow, and, of course, check out your amazing newsletter. Thank you so much, Scott. It's always great talking to. It's been fun.

And everybody give Noel a follow, and I will see you all at noon for The Daily Wolf on Yahoo. Thank you so much. Bye. Thanks, bye-bye. Thank you.