The Wolf Of All Streets - Bitcoin Wins, Pepe Plunges, Trump Surrenders | Crypto Week In Review

Episode Date: August 25, 2023

Let's break down everything important that happened this week: from Bitcoin's and Ethereum's performance to FTX and Tornado cases updates, Pepe rug pull, and more!  ►► JOIN THE FREE WOLF DEN NEWSLETTER, DELIVERED EVERY WEEK DAY! 👉https://thewolfden.substack.com/  ►►MELD MELD will bring to bear the full power of decentralized financial instruments to the masses. Banks are at the heart of the economy, MELD will become a new set of banking tools that are by the people and for the people. 👉 https://bit.ly/meld-early-access  ►►OKX Sign up for an OKX Trading Account then deposit & trade to unlock mystery box rewards of up to $60,000!  👉 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 #trading  0:00 Intro 1:20 IRS proposes new crypto rules 7:00 Bitcoin: market manipulation? 12:00 Bitcoin poised for growth 12:50 Bitcoin holders are underwater 13:50 Ethereum 16:00 Arthur Hayes 17:50 Jerome Powell 19:00 Nvidia, NASDAQ 21:40 Trump 25:00 Bitcoin candidates 29:00 Trump NFTs  31:00 Curve liqudation possible? 34:45 Tornado Cash 38:00 Pepe 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.

So much happened this week and so much is happening right now at 10.05 Eastern Standard Time in exactly one hour. Jerome Powell will be giving his speech at Jackson Hole, which will be live streaming on Twitter spaces. So you guys don't want to miss that right after. But we also just got breaking news this morning from the Wall Street Journal and now from every other publication effectively that the Treasury and IRS have proposed new tax rules for Americans and have finally really defined the word broker for companies in the United States. And most of these rules you're not going to like. We're going to start digging into those today and review everything else happening this week, including the fact that Pepe is falling off of

a cliff because seemingly the team might be pulling a slow rug pull. We got a lot to talk about today. It's just me. It's been a long time. Can't wait to dive into this with you guys. Let's go. What's up, everybody? I'm Scott Melker, also known as the Wolf of Wall Street. Before we get Let's go. next week to start that new show, which is going to be basically the top five most important stories that happen each week. But we had a long, hard journey trying to get down to five today, so we just gave up. And I'm going to tell you about a whole lot of things that are happening. It used to be rant Fridays. I don't know that I have anything in particular to rant about. Although, I mean, if you're going to choose something to rant about, even irrationally, maybe it should be the IRS. IRS spares crypto miners and validators in new broker reporting requirements. Effectively, I can give you the greatest hits of what's happening here. It is now also, of course,

in CoinDesk. It's being written about, broken in the Wall Street Journal. But what we have here is that the U.S. Treasury Department and IRS have released their proposed cryptocurrency regulations. A lot of people were very concerned that miners would be deemed brokers and they would basically be unable to be compliant. Well, the good news is that's actually been left out. This is all coming from the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, but they're finally defining these things. So here's what we have. Proposed definition of digital asset brokers includes trading platforms, payment processors, and certain wallet providers. Individual miners and stakers exempt from broker requirements. That's actually very, very good news. This was the biggest fear, if you guys remember

roughly a year or two ago when we were talking about how they were going to define a broker. But certain wallet providers include a lot of decentralized DeFi, DEXs, wallet providers. This could be wildly problematic because that means that they are going to have to report your transactions to the IRS by my understanding from the first reading of the article. Here you go. Crypto brokers will need to follow rules similar to securities brokers, filing information, returns, and providing payee statements. In other words, your exchanges will 100% be sending the IRS much like an E-Trade or a Schwab, so I can't get that mad at this, but will be required to submit all of your transactions and your capital gains directly to the IRS, Treasury Department, et cetera. Kind of a big deal,

but you're all paying your taxes and reporting those transactions anyway, right? We've seen even four or five years ago, Coinbase was forced to send certain reports to the IRS. We know that that's happening, but now this will likely become official if these proposed rules are passed. But how a, I can't, I don't know specifically which wallets, but how would a Metamask do that or a Trust Wallet or any of these other Web3 self-custodial wallets? How will they ever be required as a company to report to the IRS? I think it's literally impossible. So let's hope that that comes out, the industry pushes for more sensible rules. Remember,

this is just proposed. And more importantly, guys, if passed, these rules will become effective in 2026 for the 2025 tax year. So we have a very long time to worry about this, even if it happens. There will be a public comment period until October 30th, 2023, and the public hearing is scheduled for November 7th, 2023. So I'm sure we'll see major pushback from the crypto industry against this. We know who is behind this, by the way, Elizabeth Warren. She was the one urging faster action due to looming deadlines. If you look at the headlines on this, it's all like, finally closing crypto gains tax holes and disasters, and they're all criminals. And finally, we're going to get some sensible regulation to stop these wealthy

crypto billionaires from killing the children and not letting them eat. If you read Biden's tweets, that's what it looks like. But the fact is, most of this is probably sensible, and I'm hoping that the industry can actually give them more clarity. Interestingly, we get our very own tax form, a 1099. Anyone knows if you're a contractor or something like that, you fill out a 1099 in the United States. That's basically when you've worked, you want to report income, but it's not being withheld. You don't have a full-time job, W-2, gig workers, et cetera. We get a 1099-DA for reporting non-employment income from digital assets. The aim is to curb crypto tax evasion. My God, I paid more taxes than anyone. I hate this. And closed loopholes, potentially recovering up to $18 billion. Cool. I don't know what you guys think of all that. It was a lot,

but that is the gist of it. So just to give you the very broad strokes, this won't happen until tax year 2025, kicking in when you report in 2026, if it happens. Validators, nodes, broker, miners, they've been left out of the definition of brokers. That's huge. There's going to be a big fight over what wallets need to report and how they're going to do that. And we get our very own tax form. We knew this was eventually coming. I would say my first gig, and listen, I told you I want to kind of go signal through noise. If we're looking for the actual signal here, we are seeing relatively sensible movement forward on something that we expected and there's no need to panic here. That's my answer. I know everybody wants me to

scream and yell IRS, but it is the IRS. They do deserve to get their taxes from American citizens. And this is a potentially reasonable way for them to do it if we're still under the same sort of taxing regime. I don't think there's anything to freak out about here. That is the gist of what I'm getting at. Let's dig in to the Bitcoin market, to the crypto market in general, and then we'll start to get into more of these stories. As you can see, and as you already know, because you're a human person who watches YouTube and reads Twitter and looks at charts and things, Bitcoin not doing that great. Gives up games, slips below 26K ahead of Fed's Jerome Powell at Jackson Hole. I do not think that the two are related at all. You know where I stand. I think we saw a flush from the 28,000s down to the 24,000, 25,000s

because of traders doing trader type shit because whales manipulate this market. That is how free markets work. They do it in the stock market too. And someone basically made a shit metric ton of cash by accumulating a massive position in Bitcoin, accumulating a massive short with leverage, selling it down, triggering liquidation, sending price down, then they're probably the buyer at the bottom. I think that's what happened. And I'm not really that concerned about $26,000 Bitcoin right now. Frankly, if you follow me, you know that I'm expecting a very long period of chop, probably no real significant bull market until a year from now in the next halving. That doesn't mean we can't go to 40 or back to 20 or up to 25 and 45 and down to four

and maybe 27,000 million. I don't know where it's going to go. I just know that if you look at the four-year cycle, if you look at the process with the halving, you know that about six months after the halving, we should be triggering a brand new bull market. By the way, interestingly, I interviewed Caitlin Long the other day, who we be triggering a brand new bull market. By the way, interestingly, I interviewed Caitlin Long the other day, who we all love. That will be out either this Sunday or next. I've got Robert Breedlove and Caitlin Long are the next two podcasts, both epic.

She pointed out that the halving cycle gains, the bull market will be kicking in right as we hit a United States presidential election. Holy crap. Can you imagine if Bitcoin is actually booming? It could have a real meaningful effect because people will actually care again on what's happening in that election. Pretty big. Let's take a quick look at the Bitcoin chart right here. You've got the weekly chart.

Of course, I cleaned up my charts. I got rid of Bitstamp. I moved on to Coinbase after all these years. But here you go, guys. You know the line. For me, it was $25,212. On Coinbase, it's $25,214. We're calling it that now. We've got $25,214, especially at $2,000 because that was dumb. Either way, if you zoom in here, well, let's take a look. You had the 69K high right here, lower low, lower high, lower low, lower high, lower low. That is a bear market by definition, a trend of lower highs and lower lows. So to break out of that bear market, you need to make a higher high and then confirm a higher low. We did that. Here,

we ran right into it. Perfect. Higher low, higher high, higher low, higher high, even if only slightly. Okay. So I'm not saying this is a bull market, but I will say that this is a bull trend and that the bear market structure broke. Look exactly where this drop ended, literally at the line, $25,214.57. I mean, it's like to the penny when you circle it, like within literally less than a dollar. Right. And now we have a potential reversal candle forming here, a nice little doji, at least a pause. So I'm not that scared. We are below the 200 MA. This was only the second time after losing it after three AC. If you zoom back, you can see that we've never for more than a week lost the 200 MA before. So that is different this cycle. When we say this time is different, never happened. And this is

also the only time we'd ever gotten the bearish cross between the 50 MA and the 200 MA. But now we have both of those potentially pointing up. Other words, I'm not seeing anything to panic about. Now I made this joke the other day, right? That we kind of go sideways and then we hit October. I don't think it'll be exactly like that. I think we'll sweep and go up, but I do think that we are in for a relatively boring time for a little while here and it's time to chill. If you take a look, that had daily RSI down to 19 and we've been still oversold now for basically a week, which is a very long time. Looking at the daily, any dip below this level here, about 26,000 is going to give us bullish divergence with oversold RSI on the daily. That will below this level here, about 26,000, is going to give us bullish

divergence with oversold RSI on the daily. That will be a bottom for me if we see that clearly coming in. We already are very close on the 12-hour, never made the low. We had the bullish divergence here on the six-hour. Four-hour already had a massive bullish divergence, right? And so any low here is going to build that bullish divergence. In other words, guys, I don't think we can go much lower immediately until all of this shakes out. But we saw, I showed you guys. Look, go to the daily. We had bearish divergence at the top, which I pointed out. At 31, I said, I think we're topping.

Lower highs on RSI, higher highs on price. And we went down, overbought. Now we're oversold. We rarely get this oversold and we went down, overbought. Now we're oversold. We rarely get this oversold, and we rarely stay here this long. So I think we're going to get the pop back up to the upside, barring any terrible news. A lot of people starting to make their big targets. We talked about Tom Lee. We had on Sean Farrell from Fundstrat. Well, now we've got DigimegaChad, Dan Moorhead coming in and saying that we've seen enough.

Battered Bitcoin at 26K, can't stay down much longer. And he gave a grand, wild, big, huge price target, which now I'm looking for because I'm not reading my screen. But I think it's about 150,000. Yeah. April 2024, 150,000 by late 2025 in the next cycle. We've got Mark Yusko saying that. We've got Fundstrat Tom Lee saying that. Now we've got Pantera saying the exact same thing, that we've seen enough of this battering of Bitcoin. Maybe we continue this bear market. But like I said, when we get into the next bull market, a lot of people aligning for $150,000 targets. I don't think that that's hyperbolic or exaggeratory at all. I think that's very reasonable. Interestingly, nearly all short-term Bitcoin owners are underwater making rallies harder. No shit, Sherlock. What does this mean?

It means a bunch of people got really excited at 30,000 and above. They bought and now they're underwater and they're looking to sell when price goes back up. That's how this works, guys. When you look at like a double top on a market, things like that, the reason we look at charts is to understand what human beings are thinking, right? And so listen, I mean, we could probably just look at it on the daily chart here, right? So all these people may be bought up here, right? And so they're all underwater now. So what are those people looking to do? Most of them are tourists. They're not looking to hold and go above. They're looking to sell at either even or a small loss or a small profit here, which as this article very clearly says, and it is correct,

as this article says, it makes the rallies harder because now you have selling pressure, you have resistance. That's why 50 MAs and 200 MAs and different lines become resistors. That is how these charts work. But moving on from Bitcoin, I just think it's really boring, guys. I don't think there's that much to talk about, even though we did just dive in. Ether whale scooped up 94 million in ETH. By the way, that's not a very big number, to be honest. Not a very big number. As price plunged to 1.6K, Last Thursday's plunge in price drew the attention of a number of sizable holders. Yeah, guys, we know that on dips during the bear market and boring trends, this is when people are buying and selling Ethereum. These same wallets were all selling

at the top. They've all been accumulating for the last year. We've seen it over and over and over and over again. If you're looking for the evidence, this is from Look On Chain. Whales are accumulating ETH from the bottom. Four whales accumulated 56.1K ETH in the past seven days. These are the wallets that are doing it, if you're interesting. And these guys are buying a lot of Ethereum. Why are they doing it? I don't know. Do they know something we don't? No. But people who have been here a long time have massive wallets, have accumulated those over time. And they know that whether price is 1.6 or 1.4 or 1.2, if Ethereum is going to 10,000 in the next cycle, it doesn't matter which price you buy it at right now. They are slowly accumulating. Now we can take a look at the Ethereum chart. Let's take

a look first at Ethereum Bitcoin, which I haven't done in a very long time. I just pulled it up. Obviously that 1419 level remains key because that was the high of the entire 2018 bull market. Pretty crazy that we were basically up at $5,000 on Ethereum at one point here. But right now, I would say I'm literally charting this blind. I haven't looked at it in quite a while, but I can tell you this jumps out. Yeah, this is a cool. I mean, it's a little, uh, bear flaggy, you know, or, or it could be a bear pennant depends. This is where, uh, this becomes a astrology for men. You can draw it like that. That becomes more likely to break down. You can draw it like that more likely to break up, right? Bottom line. Now that I'm looking at this on a

monthly chart, Holy crap. There's a monthly chart. Let's see what that looks like on the weekly. On a monthly chart, we have an exact to the penny support test of ascending support on Ethereum. I wouldn't be fading Ethereum unless you see a clear break of that to the downside. And I hadn't even looked at that, as I said. Now, I don't know if you guys are huge fans of Arthur Hayes. I've had him on. I think he's a brilliant dude. I still can't get past all the shit he pulled at BitMEX sometimes in my mind, but he's brilliant. He writes incredible blogs. Well, he wrote another BitMEX blog right here. Kite or Board is the title. We cover these all the time. He wrote about his kite surfing and brought it back to crypto and all the things and blah, blah, blah. But he made some really amazing points here and some amazing quotes as usual. And here was the kicker, basically. Bitcoin has a finite supply

and therefore as the denominator of fiat toilet paper grows, so will Bitcoin's value in fiat currency terms, Hayes wrote. Aside from big tech and crypto, the ex-CEO believes nothing will yield a better return for investors besides parking their money at Fed and earning nearly 6% yield. So effectively, we want to again have Arthur coming in and making the obvious points in a very, very, very long and well-researched blog post. As always, that Bitcoin's going to go up. Bitcoin's going to go up. That's literally the gist of the entire thing, that the Fed is blowing it. They've already lost it. They will inevitably have to go back to money printing. Fiat will become toilet paper increasingly, and we will see the price of Bitcoin go up. But it reminds us once again that it's not really about Bitcoin going up.

It's about the fact that the dollar, the denominator will continue with time over a very long time to go down. I'm assuming that since you guys are all here, you think that that is probably going to be the case with enough time. I'm not even going to start talking about BRICS. We're going to talk about that on a town hall, but we're seeing a number of countries join BRICS with the very idea of de-dollarizing. I don't think it's going to work. Have fun. But there you go. Now we have to look at the stock market, talk about what's happening because we have Jerome Powell at 10.05. Do you guys have any predictions? I would love to see in the chat what you guys think Jerome Powell is going to say. I've gotten really mixed reviews when I've said it. You've seen it on the show. My prediction is higher for longer, data driven, still kind of a hawkish tone.

I think David Young yesterday thought that he was going to be a bit more dovish. That was surprising to me. I think he's going to say, we're committed to this fight. Inflation is too high. We need to get back to our 2% target. I can't see any cuts in the future. And I think what we more likely get is maybe one or two more tightenings, if at all, but then a really long sustained period without them lowering rates at all. That's what I think. Yeah. So I don't really know what's going to happen here, but stocks wobbled hard yesterday. Let's take a look at a few of the darlings here. We've got 10 minutes till market open, but everything's seemingly trading flat.

We talked about this yesterday. I don't know why I'm getting this weird chart. Let's see if that's not letting me move it. Let me see. Okay. NVIDIA, right? NVIDIA obviously opened. I was on yesterday with Dan and I said, this to me was a gratuitous short until it filled that gap. It literally filled the gap back to the

dollar. I would have probably shorted that from 500 to 480. I don't know that I would have written it all the way to 471, but this is not a great candle. At least it didn't leave that gap up that we were talking about and we're starting flat, but you got to think that that looks very, very toppy. And we got this very, very sexy gap over here on the left that's likely to fill. But let's take a look. NVIDIA obviously is kind of driving the entire market, but you got the SPX, obviously the S&P 500. Look at that rejection yesterday at the 50 MA. It just broke recently. We've been above this 50 MA since March. So losing the 50 MA gives the 200 MA as a target. That'd be 41, 42 SPX. But it's not just that. Dow Jones lost the

50 MA. First bearish retest, massive drop. Not just that. QQQ, the NASDAQ, got slightly above yesterday. Absolutely dumped. Obviously, that's largely on the back of NVIDIA because it is the dominant company in there alongside the Meadows, Facebooks, Amazons, and the Apples. But not looking that great. Maybe we get some extreme volatility today based on Powell's words, but I continue to believe that the stock market has at least for a while topped. I said that to you. I did a whole stream on it a couple of weeks ago. I told you I sold. I showed you that I sold a lot of things. What I still continue to think will happen. That's what I still continue to think will happen. I have no idea. It could rally,

but that's what I think. Kind of what I think here. Okay. Now we got to talk. Unfortunately, I'm sorry in advance. I apologize. I still didn't get your comments on what I didn't look. What'd you guys think? Did anyone say what they think? Amazing that one guy can speak and the economy markets overreact, right? Data driven, literally ignores all the data. That's exactly right. Market will tank, changes the target. That would be, if he said 3% instead of 2%, that would rock worlds. He's going to say exactly the same things. Yeah.

I think that this is the gist of all of it. Yeah. Let's remember that the Fed's the one who did this to us in the first place. Okay. Now we're going to dig in a little bit to politics. Okay, let's first let's just talk about this first, right? Trump surrendered in the Georgia 2020 election subversion case. Okay. I don't really do politics anymore. As you know, if you were here a long time ago, you know, I was a pretty outspoken critic of Trump. I personally dislike him. I personally

dislike his family. I went to college with Trump Jr. People have probably seen my story that went wildly viral from that, which I don't discuss anymore because then people come to my house and I have to hide. And that was in the last election cycle. But I also, as I've said before, I once DJed a gig at Trump National for the Trump organization. I'm not saying it was him personally, but as with every vendor ever I've ever heard of, they failed to pay me. I just don't like the guy. I don't like his family. Fine.

I also don't really enjoy him as a politician. for being very moderate, I think, that it's curious that all of this is happening right in election season and none of this really happened before when it could be resolved. And I take no joy in seeing Donald Trump do a perp walk in Atlanta. And listen, maybe if these people all committed crimes, Giuliani and Sid Powell and him, maybe they deserve what they're going to get. But right now, I would rather see a clean election, get it done. We won't have a clean election. It's going to be deep fake city. But yeah, man, I don't, uh, I don't really want to talk about this that much. What I do want to talk about though, obviously. So, and everyone's saying he got 200 million views on his thing with Tucker. It's the dumbest thing ever, guys. Maybe I should show you

my tweet or my analytics. This is so funny. When we talk about views on Twitter, I don't think people realize maybe they do and they just don't care. But like literally, if you scroll past something in your Twitter timeline, and that's the most common thing, it triggers and it gives you a view, right? It gives you a view. So everybody, we're talking about these massive numbers that he's doing. Here's my, I had posted it and I do no numbers on anything anymore, but I had posted a podcast on Twitter on X or call it, right? Literally look at the audience retention. I kept everybody for zero minutes. By 1350, I was down to 98% of the people gone. Nobody is watching these full long form interviews on X. The notion is absurd. The numbers are absolutely ridiculous, right? It triggers. I've seen,

I have not watched the Tucker Trump interview, but I would say that it's triggered in my stream, in my feed at least 30 or 40 times, right? Such a, such a, someone calling me a Trump here. Yes, I, I, and it has nothing to do with politics. I literally disliked the guy. I've met him many times. It's a personal thing. It is what it is. I don't like Biden either. You know what I mean? The, I think we all know that I try to thread the needle. I am registered as unaffiliated, although I'm considering re-registering as a Democrat to support RFK against Biden, because I think that in the primary is probably where I could have more of a sway. But anyways, it doesn't really matter. So he's surrendered.

But what it does lead us to is that people are saying that Ramaswamy is potentially his most formidable challenger. But then more importantly, then you can see that in the betting results, by the way, on Polymarket. You can now buy Vivek Ramaswamy, 17 cents chance of getting the nomination, 71 cents for Trump, obviously high odds. DeSantis, 13, Haley, seven, all the way down. But interesting that DeSantis has fallen so far in this. But what you really want to talk about here is that now, besides that, we'll talk about that in a minute. But where does everybody stand on Bitcoin?

That's the big question, because as I said, we could be in a raging bull market the next time we have a cycle. Right. But here you go. Where do they stand? So I think the consensus right now is that RFK very much gets it. He's not a Republican candidate, but I think he very much gets it. Trump does not like Bitcoin. We know that. He's said it many times. Biden does not like Bitcoin. That's very clear. Caitlin Long, you'll see it, but she came

on my podcast. She obviously had her master account by the Fed rejected. It's very deep down this rabbit hole. She made the claim, you guys have to watch this podcast, that the directive to crush crypto and to send Bitcoin to zero, I quote, which failed. They wanted to send Bitcoin to zero, came directly from the White House, but not from Joe Biden, because he's old and has no idea what the fuck is going on. But from the White House, an Elizabeth Warren staffer plant in the White House sent this directive out over last Christmas, basically, to Gary Gensler and all to crush this industry. And it effectively didn't work, obviously, which I've said they pushed too far. But you have to listen to the interview. She basically lays it out. But my point being, we know that the older candidates, the two main candidates, they are not

going to support Bitcoin. We have DeSantis, who I think is just like the kind of dude who finds a catchphrase and jumps on top of something. It was like, yeah, cool, Bitcoin. But then I think we get down to Suarez, who didn't even make the debate stage. Vivek, who I think really spoke at Bitcoin. Miami is really starting to learn. Ryan Selkis, a lot of guys I respect in crypto, they're really jumping camp to Vivek, even from RFK right now, really deeply believing that he's going to be the candidate. But the point here is that every candidate has had to outline their position on Bitcoin, which is insane, which is insane.

Brian's leaving, guys, in case you were wondering. Buy him a drink on the way out. Rise the door, slaps him on the ass. Anyways, anyways. Thinking in, though, I mean, I did have to watch. I do have to show this video. I also don't like DeSantis much, and I live in Florida. I'm sorry.

Just don't like the guy. But anyways, did you guys see the facial expression? Did you guys see this? I mean, this is the most uncomfortable thing. Listen, I'm sure if someone zoomed in on my face at any given moment on this stream. So take this with a grain of salt, it would be terrible. But I mean, this is like, not let you down. Again, and I will not let you down. All I can think of when I saw this, by the way, is never going to give you up. Never going to.

Will not let you down. I'm going to give you up. Never going to let you down. I'm going to give you up. Never going to let you down. Good. It's so good. It's all I could think of when I saw that.

But man, that face. I mean, look at it. Like, is he a robot? I think he's one of those NPCs I've been reading about. One of those people that's not an actual human person. But I do think that it's really, really encouraging that he and other political candidates have now outlined their positions on Bitcoin and that they are generally favorable positions. But hey, you know, what's going to happen in crypto after you get 200 million fake views? Guys,

I'm being transparent. It was probably the most watched interview in history. I'm sure that's true, but not those numbers. Anyways, and probably a 10th of it, maybe, or less. But Donald Trump NFT surge after Tucker Carlson interview. Of course they do, because this is crypto, bro. As of European afternoon hour, the Polygon-based Trump digital trading cards were selling for over 0.13 Ether, 2.15 up from 0.1. You take a look at this on OpenSea. Guys, look at this. Look at him. He's a football player. I had never even looked at these. That is amazing. Is that real? Why does his face look like that? This, by the way, he has millions in ETH as a result of selling this collection. People are like, he's an ETH bull. They're like, no, someone on his team got the royalties.

When you dig into this, let's look at the analytics here. You can see, this is crazy, right? It was trading into the day yesterday when people knew he was going to get arrested. So it started about 0.1 ETH. As people knew he was going to come in 0.14 and then absolutely skyrockets to 0.2 ETH and now kind of flattening out. But this is the most crypto shit ever, right? I mean, what are you going to do? You're going to buy and sell his NFT. I mean, look at this collection. Oh, wow. There's a boxer. Patriotic hat. Cowboy.

Soccer. To the moon. Stars. Number one. We got the finger. The big foam finger. You gotta have that. I like the big foam finger.

Sunglasses. Moon with blurry face. Head. Lego. Moon and cowboy. Wow, these iterative. I mean, NF guys i'm gonna be honest they are so dumb but like i i would kind of like want to project one of these behind me on the show i would anyways so now that we are done with politics, I would rather not see, I'm just going to say, I would rather see a real election, no indictments. I mean, honestly, at this point, like here's my take, just give Trump a pardon and maybe he'd go away and give like Hunter Biden a pardon and agree that maybe Joe

Biden has to go away and then we can have a real election. That would be awesome. We already looked at this. Curve crisis shows pitfalls of decentralized risk management. Oh, we're calling it risk management now. Guys, I'm sorry if you hear noise in the background. I don't know if you do. There's a little construction going on around here. Can't do much about that. But yeah, guys, I've talked about this sort of ad nauseum, but I can't stop coming back to this story. We all know that the CEO, Michael from Curve, took out a massive loan using his own tokens that was over collateralized, seemingly safe, seemingly a very safe loan, safe, safe, safe loan. And basically he gave like 350, 320 million in collateral for like a 70 to $100

million loan. We've seen different reports. And then they got hacked. Got hacked, people started running for the hills, they started selling their curve and shit went down. Okay. Not a crazy story when you think about it. I mean, look at the curve chart right here, right? 44 cents. But the crazy part is that when you dig into what happened here, this loan is big enough that if it gets liquidated, there's a smart contract. You can't negotiate with the bank and call them and tell them you'll put up more collateral, whatever. If this liquidates, the smart contract will liquidate this and it will have massive consequences across all of DeFi, selling off all kinds of things to make up for

these loans, even going through potentially the emergency funds of Aave and other big name platforms. Basically, this guy took a big enough loan and was able to take a big enough loan that it put all of DeFi at risk. Think about that. It's not like we haven't seen this in the legacy banking system, but imagine that a small regional bank gave a loan that was bigger than their entire book. And if that loan went bad, it would shut down 20 banks because that's what we're basically looking at here. So it's a pretty big deal, even though it may not seem like it is. And on the back of that, we're obviously seeing DeFi shrinks to multi-year lows, a crypto-fueled future of finance falters. That was a fuel future finance falter. Say that six times fast. Fuel future finance falter. Fuel future finance falters. That was a fueled future finance falter. Say that six times fast.

Fueled future finance falter. Fueled future finance falter. Yeah. It's a tongue twister. Cute tongue twister from Coindesk. But yeah, first of all, this is like if we're doing 2019 again, which I kind of think we are, guys, listen. Down. Twitter followers are down. Twitter followers are down, prices are down, news cycle's down. There's nothing to talk about. Although seemingly there's a lot to talk about this week. But we know that this is the very boring time-based capitulation part of the crypto cycle until the next halving. And so naturally, regardless of the curve low, and we're going to see TVL and interest in DeFi waning. But as you guys heard on Wednesday, when I talked to Josh Frank, DeFi has a lot of problems, right? A lot of hacks, a lot of exploits, a lot of broken tech. And then you have the very fact that a single person can take a big enough loan to effectively crash the entire DeFi market.

That's a problem. That is a problem. So we're going to see how that pans out. Oh, and then in order to save the price of Curve, so when Liquidate, he did all these OTC deals you guys might've seen. They were doing these OTC deals at 40 cents. Justin Sun, a bunch of other big people, Handshake. You guys won't sell, right? It's fine. Saying that they wouldn't sell for a very long time and price was back up. You saw that was here. 48, he sold to 40. They got a 20% discount price, went all the way back up to 70 cents. Now we're back below even where they bought, pushing towards here. You can't tell me these guys are going to hold it at massive loss. Yeah. Right. So I think it's a lot to be a little bit nervous about here, clearly with Curve. And

we know that I told you yesterday, Balancer deposits pulled nearly a hundred million in crypto after there was a vulnerability. We talked about this the other day too. Balancer, these are blue chips, guys. Curve, Balancer, we're talking about Aave, Compound, where these loans are involved. These are the best of the best that we have. And they basically said, hey, some of the funds here are at risk because of hacks. My God. This story, I'm having a little trouble unpacking, to be quite honest. So Tornado Cash devs charged with helping hackers launder $1 billion, including infamous North Korean attacks. Okay. So my first reaction, the one that I've had here, the gut check reaction, and certainly the reaction for the one dev who's already was in prison in, I believe, the Netherlands, is that people who create open source code technology should not be liable for what that code is used for.

Right. I use my iPhone. So do drug dealers. Right. Should Apple be in trouble because a drug dealer makes a call on their iPhone? No, because it's a usage of an agnostic technology. Should Bitcoin be banned because some criminals have used it? Obviously not. Same way that cash should not be banned because some criminals have used it. So these guys being charged and put on a sanction list, we're talking about Roman Storm and Roman Seminov, two Romans.

Two Romans. That's a lot of Romans. Right? Neither from Rome. Two Romans. Right? But they're being accused of knowingly assisting North Korea and other hackers to use Tornado Cash. So if they just built Tornado Cash to be private and to allow people to use this technology to obfuscate away some of their

transactions, so be private, they did nothing wrong. If they were knowingly helping North Korean hackers use it like a step-by-step guide, then they should be in trouble. But I don't really believe that's what's happening. DOJ alleges more than 1 billion in transactions moved through the mixing service, which tries to obscure who is behind crypto transactions. Okay, who cares? Right? This is basically saying that by creating it, they facilitated more than 1 billion in money laundering. That is complete bullshit. It could be used for laundering, but it can also be used just because I want someone not to see where I'm sending money. We talked about on CryptoTown

Hall the other day. You got to find it. Dopp. It's blocked here in the United States, of course, because the United States. But DOP, this is dop.org. There's a new platform that's really fucking cool. And what it does, it's not like Tornado Cash, but this is more interesting. When you use DOP, you can basically send a transaction to another person and hide the address that it came from. Doesn't that make a lot of sense? Think about this. And that doesn't mean you can hide it from the IRS. You can still give them access. This isn't to do any criminal things, right? But it's

basically like I send you money and now you, because it's a blockchain and because it's public and transparent, you can go into my wallet very easily and see literally everything I've ever done connected to all my other wallets, see what I've bought, who I've paid, how much money I have. Imagine if you could do that in someone's bank account. I send you a wire and now you can go look at every banking transaction I've ever done. It's absurd. So what this does is basically just make you be able to privately hit a button and it sends it to them. They get their money and they don't know everything about you. Makes a lot of sense. Is that different than what these Tornado Cash guys are doing? I don't know if it's massively different, but it's really, really, really scary to be honest with you.

But like Dopp, yeah, I haven't tried it. Can't use it. But we talked about it at length because we had a privacy spaces two days ago and I thought it was really cool. I thought it was really cool. Yeah. And Tornado Cash indictment fails to show clear violation of certain laws. So it seems like when you dig into it, according at least to them, that the clarity is not there. These guys probably just built code and are getting in a hell of a lot of trouble for it. And I think that that is really, really freaking sad. And finally, the story that you've all been waiting for. You've been dying to see.

PP! Weird Pepe transfers spook crypto investors and prompt MemeCoin's 15% plunge. Did you guys see this? Did you guys dig into this? First of all, my first take is why do I have to see Pepe in mainstream media? MemeCoins are embarrassing. Can't we just get rid of all of the meme coins? Cloud Casio says, I thought all new wallet make private ones use IDs for every transactions. No

one sees all your transaction anyway. No, I mean, anyone who knows how to dig into a wallet and sees the address it comes from can dig in or connect it to other wallets. Eventually got to put ETH in there for it to work and that trails back and connects everything. But here we go. The weird PP, weird PP transfers spook crypto investors and prompt me in coins, 15% plunge. Got a couple of threads on it. Miles Dutra did a great thread on this, but I'll give you guys the gist, right? Basically the Pepe multisig. If you guys don't understand this, these projects have multi-signature wallets. So if any of you use multi-sig, I use Casa multi-sig for my Bitcoin, for example, three of five. What does that mean? That means that I need to sign on three different devices out of the five that exist. So even if I lose two, I got three to be

able to send a crypto transaction. It's very complicated, very annoying, but very safe. So I have to go to three devices, check my email, do the thing, send the thing, go to the place. So with these projects, they generally have even bigger multisigs. So it's eight. So this required five of the eight people who hold these wallets to agree before they can send any coins out of the Pepe's wallet of the coins held by the team, held by the original team, right? So what happened? They sent 15.7 worth of tokens to various exchanges, a small 3%, 4% of what they were holding, not a huge number. It's enough though to rock the market for sure. They sent that to exchanges, right? Which means they're going to sell it. So 15.7 million, no big deal. But the crazy thing is it came out that the multisig had been changed from five to two. So for whatever reason, only two out of the eight key holders are now required to sign

a transaction to send Pepe anywhere they want and sell it, which makes it sound like it's going to be a very slow and painful rug pull, right? Now, in my perspective, you just stay away from this because it's just easy to stay away from it. But here you go. It's kind of the same story from Woo Blockchain. Taking a look at the chart, I mean, it's a huge area of support. So like if you didn't know this news and you actually want to trade meme coins, you know, this is your area right here, right? I mean, that's the support. We're in it. Nice bounce. But if you think these guys are going to dump mass and you're hitting oversold on the daily here, but if you think these guys are going to dump massively, boy, watch out below.

And also, if you break this area of support, 50% drop to even the next reasonable level. I wouldn't touch this. I don't understand why we have meme coins. I think it's really dumb and I wish it would all go away, but I don't want it to go away with people losing all of their money. That's what I don't. Yeah. Yeah. It's broken. It's bad. And we don't want this to happen, obviously. Guys, that's it. We plowed through a lot. In 20 minutes, we're going to be, like I said, we're starting Crypto Town Hall at 10 instead of 10.15. And we're going to be live streaming Powell at 10.05. So you guys should probably go check that out if you like punching yourself in the face and kicking yourself into the butthole. That's basically what it is. Going to give you up.

Never going to chew down. Never going to let you down. Look at this face. I want to smile, but I have no soul. Someone's saying to put a link in the feed. I can probably actually do that. One second. Do that.

We do have a link to the show. One second. I'll give that to you guys. We're freestyling now, guys. Freestyling here. Here's a tweet I can put in there. I think it should work. Yeah. Do you guys see that? Crypto Town Hall link. Yeah, guys. I mean, it's a lot. That was a lot. And now we're going to get Jackson right in the hole.

I really don't think that Powell is going to be giving like super good news for people who believe that. I don't even know what that good news would look like at this point. I think it's just going to be higher for longer data driven approach. Now I'm over here closing all these tabs so I can actually like pay attention to what's happening in the world. But yeah, I encourage you guys to join me over there. It was fun to be back on my own show. I'm sorry that we talked about politics. I don't want to ever do that to you again,

but I might because we're going into election season and it's about to pop off, right? So things are going to get super weird. Things are going to get super, super weird. That's all I got for you today. I will be back on Monday morning, of course. Good, man. It's the freaking weekend, baby. Y'all about to have you some fun. Peace, guys. Thank you for joining. See you Monday. Let's go.