The Wolf Of All Streets - Bitcoin Will Surpass $100,000 In 2025 | Yoni Assia, eToro

Episode Date: September 10, 2023

"Bitcoin is USA, Ethereum is Europe, and Israel is Doge"! Join this long-awaited conversation with Yoni Assia, founder of eToro and the crypto OG. We covered Yoni's story in crypto, founding eToro, colored coins, regulation, tokenization, the upcoming bull market, and even why Yoni thinks Bitcoin is like USA and Ethereum is like Europe. Yoni Assia: https://twitter.com/yoniassia ►► iTrust Capital Invest in Bitcoin, Crypto Assets & Gold with Your IRA Using iTrust Capital. 👉https://bit.ly/itrust-scott ►► 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 ►►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 ►►COINROUTES TRADE SPOT & DERIVATIVES ACROSS CEFI AND DEFI USING YOUR OWN ACCOUNTS WITH THIS ADVANCED ALGORITHMIC PLATFORM. SAVE TONS OF MONEY ON TRADING FEES LIKE THE PROS! 👉 http://bit.ly/3ZXeYKd 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 #eToro Timestamps: 0:00 Intro 1:20 How Yoni started in crypto 4:45 Bitcoin & the fractional reserve banking 8:10 Sponsor 9:00 Assets tokenization 12:18 Colored coins 16:30 Tokenization & company formation 20:10 The future of DAOs 22:45 The missing part 30:20 Regulation 38:40 Bitcoin is USA, Ethereum is EU 42:35 Israel is Doge 45:50 2050 vision 48:00 Bitcoin cycles 52:20 2025 rally 55:20 Wrap up 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 US is the most similar thing I've ever seen to Bitcoin. And Ethereum is more like Europe. What is Israel now? Israel, we're like Doge. And in newspapers, you read the real news. Bitcoin is king and Ethereum is queen. The king dies, that's checkmate, right? Bitcoin is the beginning of the end of the fractional reserve system.

Wow, my money is in the bank is not really my money in the bank. Thank you so much. Perfect. Thank you very much, Srat. We talk endlessly about Bitcoin cycles, what it means for altcoins, what it was like in the past, what's going to happen in the future. Few people have been there for literally every single second of the cycle, every development, and Yoni Asya is one of them. He built eToro before Bitcoin was even invented.

He was behind colored coins, which were really the first iteration of altcoins at all. He's literally been there for every single cycle, building through all of it and has some amazing predictions on what's to come. I'm going to give you a hint. It's much higher prices and the entire world being tokenized. You're one of the probably original OGs in this space, of all the original OGs,

even to the point where I think people don't know your whole story. I've obviously heard it many times. People always talk about you in passing. But I mean, back to the point of color coins and, you know, really creating the whole altcoin market, everything. I mean, can you talk about how you got into crypto in the first place? Sure. So we started. This is. Do you want to start or we just start?

You just have at it. Go. We're good. So my first sort of glimpse into crypto was actually because I started writing about digital currencies prior to it. And then I started writing about like the need for a digital currency that actually sort of became the good dollar after. And then my brother sent me in 2010, a link to Bitcoin saying, hey, this actually sounds like the stuff you're talking about. And I jumped in, I downloaded the Bitcoin QT, started playing with it, started mining. And I was like, wow, this is awesome. Like this is how financial services should work 24-7, decentralized. And I was like hooked from the first sort of

second I started playing with Bitcoin and mostly excited by the fact that it actually works 24-7 because I actually, in eToro, we founded eToro in 2007 and launched eToro in 2008. And during the global financial crisis, I remember like two big things that sort of made me realize how broken the system is. One is, you know, we've been trading the fx markets which are the most liquid markets in the world euro dollar right so the actual currency traditional currency markets and everything just froze everything like the apis to the banks just stopped working so i'm like wow they can actually just plug like the banks are able to just plug people out of the system right which is like what you've seen the movies where people out of the system right which is like

what you see in the movies where people want to sell shares and they're calling their brokers and the brokers are like we're not answering um but it happens the same in the currency markets and then the second part this was like early stages of etoro first year of operation and my and we had no idea because this is like Lehman Brothers collapsing and you had no idea whether you're gonna wake up and the money that you had in the bank is still gonna be there is it still gonna be open tomorrow and I had investors calling me like where's the money uh you know where did you put the money that we invested in toro which bank says it in did you diversify it and that for me was like wow my money's in the bank is not really my money in the bank and the most sort of rudiment part of

trading currency euro dollar which is supposed to trade 24 5 always doesn't really trade if the banks sort of pull the plug and and then you know know, when I saw Bitcoin, I'm like, wow, this is like, this is really 24-7. This really works constantly and doesn't rely on any centralized entity. It's interesting because what you just described just happened again in the United States this year, right? Silicon Valley Bank, obviously, Silvergate. We saw it across the board, Signature Bank, where people literally weren't sure until the end of that weekend when the Fed came in with the bazooka and the backstop and said, we're going to backstop all these. People didn't know if the money in the bank was good. And this is 2023, right? You're talking

about the great financial crisis of 2008, but we're seeing the same thing again 15 years later. I think it is inevitable that we're going to continue seeing it. And Bitcoin is the beginning of the end of the fractional reserve system. So if you think of how banking works, the fact that most people, probably like 99% of people people maybe down with bitcoin it's less but you know historically people think hey i have money i'm getting paid i put my dollars or shekels or pounds or euros in a bank i own that money that's my money and it's there and reality is one no it's not it's not there something they lent it to somebody else um and no like again today more and more people understand what's a bank run but you know if everybody in this bank withdraws

the money it's done the bank's done right and then you're basically relying on whatever country you're in on making sure that they actually backstop that process of the bank run. So bank runs are generally inevitable. And I think the other thing that a lot of people are seeing is sort of the controls over your money. I remember one of my friends depositing funds in eToro and then the bank called them and said, hey, eToro does something in crypto as well. This was, I don't know, 2017. And they're like, we are not allowing you the transfer to eToro because it's related to crypto. And he was like, what do you mean you don't allow me to transfer money? This is my money. Let me transfer my money. And he was just, he was going, you know,

just bazooka over them saying like, this is my money. You can't tell me what to do with my money. But I think all around the world, people are seeing this more and more that, you know, they're trying to transfer money from their account somewhere. And it's actually getting much harder to do that simple thing, which is just transfer my money out of my account. Yeah, because it's not actually your money, you come to realize. It keeps coming up in my podcast conversations, but it has really stuck with me, those videos of people in Lebanon literally holding up banks to get their own money out, not to rob the bank, to get access to their own money, right? It's, you know, people, again, people need, I think people need to understand that the money

in the banks is not really their money. In certain circumstances, sometimes political, sometimes, you know, sometimes it's very specific to a bank. Sometimes it's political anti-money laundering or for some reason they can't do it. And they need to understand it and diversify where their money is. A part of that diversification, maybe an ideal part of the diversification is crypto in my view. Crypto investors in the United States face some major challenges. One of them is that there's almost no way to get exposure to the asset class inside of your traditional investment vehicles. The other thing is the taxes. They are absolutely atrocious. What if I told you there was a way to solve both of these problems? Well, there is. And it's with a self-directed IRA from iTrust Capital. Guys, not only can you open a new self-directed IRA and fund it with the limits

each year but you can actually convert over from your 401k your Roth IRA any other IRA that you already have and you can do that tax-free just transferring over the balance and then you can go to cash buy as much Bitcoin and you want and not pay taxes when you sell it you absolutely have to try this if you are in the United States. Use the link down below. What are you waiting for? Go take control of your retirement. You've been here 13 years. So are you surprised at where Bitcoin is? Because obviously you understood from the very beginning what the promise of it was, and it's come a very long way in 13 years, or are you actually in any way disappointed that it hasn't gone farther?

Somewhere, I'd say I'm not surprised. I'm definitely not surprised where Bitcoin is. And I'm also not disappointed because what I've learned over the past, so I founded eTorrent in 2007. I've been doing this for 17 years. And our customers from 100 countries can trade stocks and commodities and crypto. And we went into Web3 in 2022. And now we're going into bonds, which is another completely broken system. So I've always seen in technology that things take longer than expected. So I fell in love in capital markets in like 97, 98 around the internet, around the dot-com bubble. And I remember

seeing these, you know, all of these stories about what can happen and how the internet, and I was like, wow, this internet, this is going to take everything. Everything is going to move to the internet. So I invested in a lot of these companies, right, that also went 10x and then afterwards went to zero. And what I've seen there is like great technologies, and the internet is a great example of that. They have that huge promise.

People understand that promise. There's a cycle of hype where people get excited, but eventually things actually take time. It took probably like, I think it took 15 years for the NASDAQ to reach the peak of 2000. So these cycles take time. Technology takes time.

Technology takes time. And in the case of financial services i think it takes time because of regulation because how well protected financial services banks are the hyper national hyper local sort of part of that financial services ecosystem um so so i think when we think of, again, when I saw Bitcoin for the first time, for me, it was, well, the entire financial services industry

needs to move to this technology. Like, this is how I want to transfer my stocks. I want to transfer my stocks and my currencies and my bank transfers. I want all of that to move as efficiently as Bitcoin. And that's how we sort of started tokenization back in 2011 with colored coins in 2012. So I'm a big believer of all assets become digital, all assets transform into blockchain assets, into public ledgers or some public, some private. And everything becomes as simple as transferring crypto assets

through that technology. But I've also been doing fintech for the past 17 years before the term fintech existed and before the term blockchain existed. So unfortunately, I sort of learned to become patient and that big things take time. Colored coins have become sort of part of the lore or antiquity of crypto. And even though you kind of described it was only 12 years ago, most people like myself got in in 2016 or 17 or even in the next cycle, 1920. But I have to imagine that when you came up with the idea of colored coins and started to build them, that had to be very, very controversial. I mean, we can even see now how the early Bitcoin maxis view altcoins or anything else being built on Bitcoin. So I can't imagine what it was like to be a trailblazer doing that in the very beginning when you were still in the chat rooms, you know, with the original sort of Bitcoin OGs?

So first, actually, a lot of it is public. So a lot of those dialogues were on Bitcoin Talk. And actually, there's a Google group called Bitcoin X, where you can actually see dialogues. And in my view, you see there the spark of Bitcoin maximalism because Vitalik was at that group. Right. So we wrote the Colored Coins paper. I started writing in Bitcoin talk about colored coins and about the concept of tokenizing real world assets. Right. So that was my passion still is how do we tokenize gold and euros and dollars? What today is stable coins and eventually stocks and bonds and

everything so using this technology to actually tokenize real world assets and create atomic transactions and when we started writing about this in bitcoin talk then vitalik i think back then was probably about 18 he actually answered answered back and said, hey, this is super interesting. Can I participate? He wrote the first web client of the Colored Coins Protocol. And there was like a Google group where people were talking about the protocol, how to implement this and and then you actually saw that Vitalik already started thinking about sort of tokenizing like Alice coins right so I think I don't remember what was the first dialogue there but like okay let's create another crypto on top of Bitcoin or he started talking about maybe we

built a new blockchain and the bitcoin community the colored coins bitcoin community just went like banana you like you see these toxic like this is blasphemy we should have only one blockchain if we'll have a lot of blockchains uh a lot of sort of networks then we lose the network effect and that And that actually led to the protocol eventually forking to like three or four different directions. Because everybody like thought that their obviously sort of fork was the ideal fork. But I think that restarted the process of other blockchains that are more sort of, you know, purposely built for tokenization and for alts eventually. It was a very interesting sort of time between 2012, where we launched a protocol, to 2013,

where assets started appearing to where we actually built in eToro a decentralized exchange. This was like pure hard-coded decentralized exchange on top of the Bitcoin network, but we could do atomic transactions on the network to eventually Vitalik sort of forking into Ethereum. And then I strictly remember every person i talked to about and asked about like the ethereum white paper they were like this doesn't work like don't don't invest in it doesn't

make sense even when the network started people like were still telling me like this doesn't work. Like this is just, you know, it's a toy. It's going to break. And the pure sort of Bitcoin community was very toxic versus Ethereum very early days in 2015, 16. So then seeing that evolve into the current altcoin market, obviously, I think you have to be proud, right? Because proud because it was the predecessor to all these things. Then there's also the side of it where because it got so big, we see just these endless, useless memes and tokens created with no utility, literally thousands at a time just with profit. How do you think we thread the needle, bring it back to the important ethos of actually tokenizing assets and maybe rid ourselves of some of the excess that we've seen?

So I think there's a lot of criticism about sort of meme coins and why are there 12,000 crypto assets? Or maybe, I don't know, it's probably 20,000 at this point. There's probably 100,000 NFT projects at this point. And people are like, thousand nft projects at this point and people are like why do we need it why do we need it but i would sort of compare that to you know being on the internet in 98 99 and sort of you know my parents friends were like why do you need why do you need like blogs and people writing shit on the internet? There's newspapers and in newspapers, you read the real news and you're just reading junk and sort of

pictures and BBSs, which is from their point of view was bullshit. And eventually you need that sort of, you know, when you create something that enables a lot of people to create content like the internet, there's a lot of junk content in the internet, right? So eventually social networks help you organize all of that information or Google helps organize all of that information. But the amount of junk information on the internet is mind blowing, right? But you wouldn't say junk information on the internet is mind-blowing, right? But you wouldn't say, oh, the internet is broken because there's so many junk information. If you think of small, medium businesses, just as an example, last time I checked, I think there's like 60 million companies in Europe and the US, right?

So there's 60 million, are people complaining? Why are there so many companies? Because if somebody wants to open a lemonade shop or a falafel shop and he wants to open an entity, then go ahead and open a company and you open the company and then neither it works or doesn't work. You close it, yes, no, right? So nobody cares.

Nobody is asking why are there so many small medium businesses actually most people think it's a good thing i think tokenization and crypto assets in general represent a new form of company formation um that company formation still very much lacks to some extent uh and regulation, which are important, right? So governance, shareholders, et cetera. I think DAOs potentially fix that over time. But I think if you think of digital ownership of sort of a company, right, of a group of people trying to do something together, I think it would make sense for eventually us to see hundreds of thousands, millions of these formations. And once it gets embedded a bit

better into rules, regulations on one end, maybe, and on the other hand, just DAOs being more effective to make sure that there's treasury and real voting and the definitions of how do you run a DAO, how do you invest in a DAO and really trust the people to basically govern it properly, govern the joint pool of money together, then I think it makes sense for company formation to become digital. I agree. So where do you think we are on that evolution then? Because obviously, that dismisses a lot of things that are just created for fun, right? But when we start talking about DAOs and governments, this is for more serious projects, things that could become really

viable companies. The problem with DAOs thus far, obviously, has been that you can buy a larger stake in it, right? It's based on how many coins you own, so you can end up with somewhat of one liter anyways. And also that when price goes down, we've seen them sort of break it down into these Lord of the Flies sort of environments where it's a kill or be killed. So do you think the DAOs can get to the point where they are viable for actually running these very large real world businesses that these could become? I have no doubt it eventually gets there. The question is, how do we get from point A to point B? One thing is you really need

real money and real money connected to real world rails. One of the biggest problems in a DAO right now is you can have USDT or USDC, but USDT and USDC still have their own risks. It's not really money you can use. Second is you can't connect a DAO into a bank account, right? And it doesn't need to be a bank account, but it needs to be a way to sort of spend money, right, in the real world without trusting somebody to take money out of the DAO and actually spending it sort of externally. So I think those two parts are very important for DAOs to be, to sort of gain significant skill. That's one thing. And the second thing is just, again, this technology, in my view, smart contracts, DAOs, mind-blowing technology, huge opportunity, but still very relatively nascent, right?

So if you think of programming, I mean, my father was a programmer in the army 30 years before I was a programmer in the army. He used to have these, you know, sheets where you do the holes. Hole punching and stick it in the slot. Punching holes. When I was in the army, there was already a rapid development of Vibrance. In my case, it was Delphi and C-sharp, I think, early days. So we're going to see progress.

But again, smart contracts and blockchain development is very early stage to say, okay, let's sort of run a billion dollar, five billion dollar, hundred billion dollar business. You had basically the first exchange, you had the first DEX, you created effectively the first altcoins, and now it's all coming back full circle, right? All of these things now have become some of the most popular businesses for people to start. And now we're seeing somewhat of a return to building all those things back on Bitcoin again. So we talked about, obviously, you're doing colored coins 10 years ago, but it feels like you were literally 10 years ahead of the curve because now we have BRC20s and ordinals and people trying to effectively build everything that's on Ethereum and these other blockchains back on Bitcoin.

Do you think that that is the right approach? Do you think that's necessary at this point, now that we have these other protocols? Do you think that they can exist on any blockchain? I think it's not necessarily a winner-takes takes all in the world of blockchain assets. I would generally segment it to three, but you can probably segment it also like split each three to another three, right? So you'll have nine and then sort of do that again and again and again. But generally, I'm very sort of passionate about real world assets. And real world assets, that means it's gold and it's bonds, it's real estate, right? So how do we tokenize the world, the existing world into blockchain technology?

The biggest gap there is how do you create that connection, right? So how do you create the physical to digital connection and that physical to digital connection should be secured by either laws regulation courts a new type of uh you know uh blockchains that somehow connect and i think that that part that that missing part is is still here, right? So we still don't understand what's that missing part to be able to say, hey, I want to buy 1% of a real estate of an apartment in probably 20 different countries. It's better or 5% from an apartment in 20 different countries probably better than buying one apartment in one country, right?

From an investment point of view. I think that's going to take time because we need that connection between physical to digital, liquidity, etc. Then there's crypto assets, the jungle we all love and live in, right, which is, I love it. It's experimentation. It's like BBSs in 98, 99. Everybody's experimenting. Everybody's building things. Things actually constantly break as well. You build it out. There's a protocol. It's getting hacked. It's a jungle of experimentation that actually for some parts of the world might eventually become the real world, right? Maybe I think there's a slight chance developed world like the US and Europe are

going to say, hey, you know what, let's move the government blockchain on Ethereum or Bitcoin. But if you're a small country somewhere in Africa or Latin America or Asia, and you don't necessarily have your own currency, by the way, a lot of countries still peg to the dollar. And you say, hey, you know what, let's peg it to Bitcoin. And you gradually say, hey, you know what, our voting system right now is based on these computers and the Internet is still very centralized. Let's use DAO voting system, da, da, da, da. So it might translate into sort of the real world, right? So if in the first part I said we're missing the physical, the digital connection, the second part is this world was this jungle of what we call Bitcoin, Ethereum,

the crypto market today, I think will continue to run much, much faster than anything related to traditional financial services. And there's a good chance that actually the smaller, more developing countries are going to win that race. And that's where BRC is super interesting, right? I think there's a good chance. I think we're very far from understanding where the end game is of this entire ecosystem. I always say I believe in Bitcoin as king and Ethereum as queen of crypto. And the king is the king dies, that's checkmate, right? And queens sometimes get replaced. So there's still a chance that they get replaced. What you're asking me is, do I think the king can also be the queen? And I think it has to be a layer two on top of it. There has to be some type of layer two on top of bitcoin the question is what is that

technology so i looked at rsk in the past at um master coin colored like i looked at a lot of those in the past played a lot of those in the past i i think it makes sense and then the question do you need that token do you need the theory of the Ethereum token in order to accelerate that path of developing more things and developing faster? Yes or no? And again, I've always said, I don't know who's going to win that blockchain smart contract space. I am a big believer in ethereum because I think they're you know very very very smart people that are still running the show it's decentralized but they're still running the show and the third which I have no idea how it's going to develop is the whole nft space digital asset space like my kid for his birthday like I asked him what do you want for it? It's all digital. All my kids, they just want me to buy them digital assets.

They want to buy Roblox. I talked to the largest companies like LVMH, who's owned by the, I don't know if it's first or second richest person in the world. Depends on the week. Yeah. So they're investors in eToro. So they invested in eToro a while back because they had gained interest in blockchain and Bitcoin. And when the NFT craze started, I was like, hey, guys, like, I really want to tell you about blockchain and how you can use that in luxury goods and in LVMH.

And I came there all proud of myself. Hey, I'm an OG. I'll tell you about blockchain. And suddenly they were like, you know, we have our own blockchain already. We are already running. Here's a game of like they were like they were so engraved into it. And when we started digging up why they were like, because we know the gen alphas, right, are not going to buy, they're going to spend money not on physical like luxury goods, but on potentially digital luxury goods.

And we need to understand how that actually works. And that's what we saw with NFT craze, like Nike coming in, Adidas coming in, Puma coming in, like all the big brands came into the space. And that's a third completely different, the whole space of digital goods, gaming, NFTs, that's something completely, you know, that's completely parallel tracked to all the rest. And by the way, and I think that part will continuously surprise us because apes surprised the hell out of me, right? They still surprise me.

Yeah, they do. I 100% agree with you. And we talked about, obviously, then DAOs and the creation and formation of capital in these ways and self-regulation. But you can't talk about crypto at this point without talking about real regulation, right? Obviously, nation state regulation, everything that's happening. So you started eToro before there was even crypto. You were one of the first, obviously, to add Bitcoin and then to develop through these assets. What challenges do you have now in the current environment that maybe

you couldn't have foreseen back then? I have to imagine it was pretty easy to add Bitcoin at that point because nobody was watching. Maybe I'm wrong. You're saying no. I just mean from a regulatory perspective, but clearly not. But now you can't just list all 20,000 assets, obviously, and allow them for trading. How do you select what you do, where you do it, how you do it when it's different in every single country, every single state? So first, you know, eToro has today 30 million registered users. We're regulated by 12 different regulators around the world. We, you know, from Europe, UK, Singapore, Abu Dhabi, Australia, the US, at some point South Africa. I mean,

so we're very widespread and we're across sort of, you know, securities. So FX commodities, indices, derivatives, and then crypto. When we started crypto in Toro 2013-14, we explained, this is actually funny. So we were a regulated financial institution. We went to the regulator and we convinced the regulator, this is a hard asset like gold. And I told them, listen, we are a broker dealer of securities, but what if a customer wants me now to buy them a boat?

Am I allowed to do that? Because they can send me money. I'm a broker, right? I'm allowed to do that because they can send me money i'm a broker right i'm allowed to broker deals but these are not securities and they were like yeah in theory that's an ancillary service you can do that so i was like okay so that what that's what bitcoin is it's not a core business but it's something new that we're adding into etoro and they're like that's fine as long as it's not becoming a significant part of the business. By the way, for my auditors, EY, back then,

when we bought crypto, I had to convince them it's like chairs. It's like I'm buying a disc. They were like, how do we account for this? How do we make mark-to-market, et cetera? I'm like, hey, i buy like a chair to to etoro you don't ask me to to mark to market it right so just let me hold it on the books and you know it's i'm just holding it for for etoro just like i would buy a painting you wouldn't mark to market it and they were like at some fine. And then everybody gets smarter as you progress, right?

So you are very fast sort of starting. I was going to say, Ernst & Young is heavily, heavily into crypto. Probably your fault, but they're one of the, I mean, as far as huge institutions go, they're as forward thinking as anyone. They're very, very smart. They became very smart around crypto to there are auditors today they actually go to our cold storage right not into the cold storage but look at all the addresses and then they ask us to move money from the addresses so we prove we have to prove

to them right that we control the addresses they like, you can't just give me an address. I need to know you control it. So move 0.1 here, 0.1 here. Show me your control. They're very smart about saying, you know, money in crypto exchanges, we don't count that as money. Because if it's not,

if it's an unregulated crypto exchange and you want us to audit you, you bring your money back into a cold storage. We audit that cold storage. Then you can send it back for your inventory, which is smart, right? Which is what we've seen. I would be sweating every time. And I'll tell you that from my perspective, like many people in crypto, I'm a libertarian. You know,

I used to really not believe in regulation. And I thought that regulators eventually just sort of stifle innovation and create harm to bring to smart people tools. And to some extent, by the way, I still understand that logic that I had, which is why I think it's important we have this jungle of unregulated crypto, because I think for a person like myself, I should be able to do smart contracts, DeFi, because I can afford to lose. I can afford to make mistakes. Unfortunately, what I've learned through both crypto and generally financial services is if you don't have regulation, there's for some reason a tendency of of, I don't know if it's necessarily the right way to sort of say, but for scammers to gain so much power and influence in an unregulated space, right? And then they scale, and then they bring in the most vulnerable people into that space, right?

Because these are the people who can't tell the difference between something that's a complete bullshit scam and something that potentially is real. And I think, you know, and I've seen it so many times happening in both in crypto and financial services that I now understand very well why for the protection of retail investors, you do need clearer and better regulations. Do I think they're doing a good job at it? The answer is no the reason for that by the way do I think Central Banks are doing a good job the answer is no as well and in both cases the the it's very clear like I I was invited to one of the largest Central Banks in the world to talk about uh blockchain crypto with like a team of people trying to understand how everything works, how will it work, CDBCs.

And I'm like looking around the room and I'm asking, is there anyone here with a computer sciences background? And they're like, no. And I'm like, no one? Like, can you bring somebody that has computer sciences background? And they're like, no, this is a high level discussion. We don't invite them. So I'm like, if you, if, you know, if when regulators, when you,

you'll have in government, in regulators, regulators, central banks, you'd have people who really understand the benefit of blockchain technology and how this can actually reduce risk in the entire system. How can this potentially enable faster, better clearing costs, et cetera, across the system?

I think then we'll see smarter, better regulations. Because again, smart contracts are brilliant for regulating transactions in multi-party environment, much better than auditors, right? I just think it's going to take time for that process to happen. And until then, in a lot of spaces, we're in, you know, high level of uncertainty. I think Europe and the UK are positioned well. I think the US right now, a bit of a, you know, a bit of a shitshow. Although we have some progress now with the courts over SEC.

But, you know, I think, again, it's the same as the, you know, same as what we've seen on the internet. No, I mean, it's going to gradually improve and change. And, you know, where the jungle is, is where you really see where the innovation is. And then where whatever gets regulated and cemented into regulation is where you'll see sort of a significant scale. Yeah, obviously, we know where the extremely favorable regulators are for crypto. And then

you kind of mentioned that the UK and Europe are well positioned, talking about Mika. The United States, obviously, woefully behind, but I'm actually pretty optimistic. I know most people aren't, but I think that the pendulum is swinging back to your point with the courts pushing back against the SEC. By the way, the way to think of this, which is maybe optimistic, I think the US is the most similar thing I've ever seen to Bitcoin. So. So, so, so, and Ethereum is more like Europe. Europe are like, okay,

we need to do something. Let's do rules, regulations. Let's do something, you know, maybe we missed a couple of things. And, and,

and the U S is like, Hey, we're not doing, or no, no new rules. Like we're not doing any new rules. Let's just use what, you know,

what it is. And then the system is, you know, it's very hard. Like the most magnificent thing about Bitcoin is it's, you can't change it. Right. It's the like, it's best thing and worst thing. Like you can not change it. It's so hard to change Bitcoin. It's so it'll move slow, but you can trust that you'll still have 21 million Bitcoins.

Right. I trust in 50 years from today today i know there's still going to be same process 21 million bitcoins no doubt about it maybe i'll you know ethereum 50 years from today maybe he has deflation inflation maybe you know vitalik is here he's not here 50 years from today um and it's the same so so i think that's a generally net positive for how the US works, right? The fact that there is between regulators in every other country in the world, to the best of my knowledge, if a regulator says, hey, I think you can't do this, boom, you can't do this, nobody can do this. In the US, the regulator says, hey, you can't do this. And then the companies are like, oh, yeah, we're going to sue you.

See you in court. And they actually win, by the way. Right. People outside the US are shocked that when a regulator and companies actually go into battle, right, to a lawsuit, the SEC can lose. Right. That doesn't happen in any like. They didn't lose.

They didn't used to lose very much, by the way, but they're losing a lot now. But by the way, this is, because I know this from traditional financial services, right, from the brokerage industry, it has always been the case that the SEC lawsuit sometimes loses, right? The difference is people didn't see it before like who would read

there you know i saw today mario had a i don't know 250 000 people listening into the uniswap defy case i'm his co-host on that yeah i'm the mario's co-host yeah and and it's like crazy who who do you how many people do you think have ever read a case of, you know, financial services, Wall Street financial services company versus the SEC that won? Where did it gain interest 10 years ago? Nobody. And the answer is like 15 people in the world. Now it's, I don't know, 150,000, maybe one and a half million people. So the scale of interest, and by the way, it's interesting because it's going to change how things actually work, right?

Because for most people, they would assume if a regulator says, this is what I think, this is how things work, that's it. There's no way around that. And that's how it works in most countries outside the US. And in the US., there is this very interesting sort of balance between courts, regulators and Congress. Right. That I think, you know, maybe we're seeing it potentially proving itself. So the United States and Bitcoin are both the grumpy old men who refuse to change. What is Israel now? Where does Israel stand on the regulatory front? Because I know that it's also been quite difficult there at times.

It's like, I'd say we're like Doge. It started as a joke, but it might be interesting. No, there is no like, the thing is, it's not, we are one of the largest fintech companies, you know, top 100 in the world, so in the world, but like by far in Israel. And we're not even considering doing business in Israel because the regulators think like they are large regulators, like this is a large opportunity, which it's not. It's a very small country with a very small business opportunity. And there is no real balance between the regulator and courts.

Like you can't do like it's the regulator said x you need to do x and that's it that that's it and in a lot of cases x just doesn't make sense you're like who wrote this like they don't understand how this is supposed to work so unfortunately but but again most israelis where do they trade do you think they trade with an israel company like most israelis don't trade with israel you know they trade with offshore, right? Because you can't enforce from Israel offshore. It's not an agile regulatory environment in Israel, like let's say UAE and Dubai. I think UAE and Dubai are very, sorry, UAE and Singapore are very impressive sort of small ecosystems that do manage to sort of bring in innovators to try to be on the cutting edge of the next wave of financial services.

Yeah, when they say just come in and talk to us, they actually mean it. I mean, imagine a company in the United States in crypto just showing up and getting a meeting with Gary Gensler. It would never happen. But in Dubai and Abu Dhabi, these places, almost anyone can go get a meeting with the top regulators and present to them an idea. We saw it. Listen, you and I were in Dubai in February. I think probably 20 or 30 people at that conference met with the Dubai regulator while we were there. Yeah. And they're very open about it. They're like, we want to learn from you. How does this look in five or 10 years? Right. And even like one of the few places around the world where I talk to regulators and they're like, talk to us about 2030 and 2050. How does this look in 2050? And I'm like, ah, by 2050, like, I don't know how you asked me, where do I think things are in 2025?

I'm like, it's unclear. You're asking me about 2030. I'm like, I'm starting to feel I have a good answer to that. You're asking me about 2050. I know, you know, I have a very sort of clear view of where this ecosystem is by 2050. Where is it? Give me that vision 2050. I think it's, again, it's inevitable that every stock exchange in the world, right, when they issue stocks, it's digital native assets that trade 24-7, right? I think it's inevitable that these blockchains, whether the Abu Dhabi exchange and the Israel exchange, are they going to work on the same blockchain?

Probably not. But am I going to be as a fintech company if I am a member of both? Are these assets interoperable through interoperability of blockchains? Of course, no doubt about it, right? So I can think of the use cases where I'm moving an asset from an Australian exchange to an Abu Dhabi exchange, where I'm holding a bond of US treasury that's also a blockchain asset and that US treasury is held sort of,

I can use that as a collateral to my Australian mining company, right? So, and then I can use that as a collateral to my Australian mining company. And then I can do these structures between all of these assets and multi-party agreements. So by 2050, the vision of everything around blockchain will have been manifested into reality, right? So most of the white papers you read on ICOs and you said, wow, this is great. And you invested in the ICO and then the team disappeared and went to zero. That white paper is reality by 2050, right?

So fractional ownership of diamonds, indexing of assets, real estate, like it's inevitable. It's inevitable. It's going to happen by 2050. Do I know necessarily how to exactly make money out of it now? No, but if I'm a government and I understand it and I'm saying, hey, I want to invest because I want to be in the sort of cutting edge of this technology that transforms the entire global financial

services industry, that it makes a lot of sense to make those investments. Absolutely. And you're one of the few people who's been here through every one of these cycles. We talk about the four-year Bitcoin cycle based on the halving, but people seem to be surprised every single time we get to the bear market, then we get to winter, and then interest sort of dissolves. Well, we had 2015, right? Four years later, 2019, absolutely miserable and silent. Well, here we are four years later, 2023, every time Bitcoin price goes up, it immediately retraces. Every time we get good news, it doesn't matter. Google searches are at an all

time low. Is this just cyclical? Do we see another halving and go right into another major cycle a year from now? And what is the price of Bitcoin when that happens, if so? So it's funny you say 2015, 19, and 23, and I'm like... You say 11. 11. No, no. I always look... yeah i i look at like uh 12 13 right so the rally in the drop is where like 21 22 17 18 right so there's always a rally in the drop a rally in the drop a rally in the drop and uh and there was a previous uh and and by the way funny stories we launched bitcoin uh i was like you have to launch it we have to launch it running a mock i was just And there was a previous, and by the way, funny story is we launched Bitcoin. I was like, we have to launch it.

We have to launch it. Running amok. I was just visiting Mark from Mt. Gox from Japan. I came to Israel. I'm like, we should have all the infrastructure in place. It was $1,200 when we launched Bitcoin. A month later, I think Mt. Gox collapsed. It went to $150.

Everybody around me were like, you were driving us nuts about Bitcoin. And now it's dead. The second cycle came in. The second cycle was Ethereum, right? So we launched Ethereum when it was like $4 on eToro. And then suddenly you had like XRP and all the rest joining at the end of the year. XRP, I think, launched on eToro, maybe it's like five cents, went all the way to like $3 in December. Everything was like shaking. That was a real, real rally. And then sort of everything collapsed

in 2018. And again, everybody thought like, this is the end, this is the end. In both cases, Mt. Gox was a hack that created fake leverage, right? So you had fake Bitcoins that basically pumped the price. In 2017, you had ICOs, which are also sort of pumping the price, right? So ICO, somebody's investing in ICO, and then there's only 1% circulating supply. The market cap is gazillion billion. That's basically leverage, right? So ICOs created that leverage in 2017. And then interestingly enough, in 2021,

you had the combination of both. You had Mt. Gox's, several of those, raising money as ICOs to leverage those ICOs as collateral to actually lend bit, right? So you had the combination of both and you had like multiple Mt. Goxes that all did ICOs plus NFTs, right? So now we're sort of at the down cycle was 2022, now sort of we're in the recovery phase. But think of where we are compared to where we were. You have BlackRock, you have the owner of BlackRock managing I think $10 trillion. $10 trillion

talking about Bitcoin, launching a Bitcoin ETF. You have the owners of Fidelity investing in everything related to crypto, Bitcoin, blockchain. Those are like BlackRock and Fidelity together is like they manage most of the money in the world.

That's a big, big thing. And it's the owners and the founders of these companies that are talking about Bitcoin. And then you have a Bitcoin slash digital assets slash blockchain desk at Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Citibank, UB, like everywhere. It's nothing like what it was in 2021. It's way beyond. So if 2024 is the year where things sort of repeat itself, it's the new 2000. By the way, remember, it's the 2000, right? Because it's 2000. The halving was in 2020. Yeah, so we had the halving in 2020. So it would be 2024 would be kind of. So remember, that means the rally is actually 2025.

Right. The end of 20 is you get six months after you start. The end of 24 is where you start seeing this. Yep. And you start gradually seeing something going to 50, then back 40, 70, it doesn't go to all-time high. Only when it reaches all-time high, which is somewhere probably end of next year, only when it reaches all-time high, then people are starting to like space. That's where retail come back. And then in theory, the bull run should be actually 2025.

The same as it was 2021, 2017 and 2013. Right. That's the cycle. Now, there is a very famous saying, saying history doesn't repeat itself, but it sure damn rhymes. So I would be surprised if we don't see a rally in 2025. I'd be surprised if we don't see by the end of 2025 Bitcoin above at least $100,000 in Ethereum. So reaching basically at least king and queen of Bitcoin, sort of surpassing all times high. And then not only surpassing all times high, but to a point where you know you've surpassed it and it's not coming back again, which is what happened to all the back cycles.

It went all the way back to 15,000, but 15,000 was still sort of, the average is sort of the old scale. Yeah, and it was back to 20 quickly, and it was back to 20 quickly, and it took FTX to send it down there briefly. So yeah, I tend to agree with that cycle. I mean, actually, I think 100,000 is relatively conservative. I mean, I think that's a reasonable, because in previous cycles, we've seen 3, 4X the previous all-time high each time, right? I mean, we went from 20 to 70, that's three and a half times. But if you look at the time series, every time

it's less. And the reason is also it's very logical, right? Because going 100,000 is just a thing of the amount of money, right? Market cap. Yeah, that's the point. The market. So the bigger it is, it's harder to sort of scale. Do I think eventually if the cycle continues, then it also becomes sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

So more people invest. But at some point, it's going to be very hard for me to... I've almost never sold my crypto. And I prefer spending dollars than spending Bitcoin. But at some point, for every person who bought crypto, it does like, to some extent gets to a point versus his net worth. He's like, I'm going to start something. I'm going to start something. That makes perfect sense. Well, listen, I'll take a hundred thousand for sure. And I know that we're running out of time here. I really appreciate you sharing your story. Rarely do

you get to talk to someone who was literally there for all of it. So I think you probably have more insight than anyone. Where can people follow you? And then of course, check out everything that's happening at eToro. So follow me on Twitter. I'm not as popular as you are, Scott, but I share a lot of the stuff. Better stories. Our great analysts at eToro. So happy to sort of always collaborate, join spaces, Twitter talks, et cetera, or X as you call it now. I still call it Twitter, man.

I still call it Twitter. I can't get there. It's hard to change. And on Editoro, just, you know, would love to always see, like people can actually see my track record on Editoro. So I've been doing like 30% IRR on a roughly, like for me, crypto is what bonds used to be for my father and grandfather, right? So my portfolio is roughly 50-50 stocks and crypto, or now it's 60 stocks, 40 crypto.

And you can see my entire track record in every single trade that I've done on eToro for the past 13 years. And you can actually see all of the bear markets in crypto and how that impacted my portfolio. And even after a 50% loss in 2022, I'm still about 30% IRR for the last 12 years on eToro. So people can follow me on eToro, see what I'm actually doing in my personal portfolio, and see also what the other millions of people on eToro are doing in their portfolios. I'm going to check it out. I'm going to bet that you're starting to buy the dip. All right, man. Thank you so much. I'm now exactly trying to figure out whether I need to increase a bit for crypto versus

stocks again. I don't give financial advice, but that's what I would be doing if it was me. And we got to get you on Twitter Spaces with Mario, man. We haven't had you on yet for Crypto Town Hall. You got to come join. I was on Mario this week, actually, and would love to have you. I think you're on his other one. So we do that Crypto Town Hall, the one you were mentioning where we were talking about. You just walked this morning. Every morning at 10, 15 a.m. Eastern

Standard Time, you literally have an open invitation. That's a much better time. Every time I join Mario, it's like 1 a.m. in Israel. Yeah, you got to come join it. I'm going to send you a message offline afterwards to get you on there, man. Thank you so much. Perfect. Thank you very much.