The Wolf Of All Streets - Bitcoin's Quiet Bull Market | SBF Trial | Friday Five

Episode Date: October 6, 2023

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While it seems that SPF's trial is sucking all of the air out of the room, there's actually quite a bit of news. And of course, it's Friday, which means NLW and I are going to give you all the greatest hits. Our Friday five with a few honorable mentions as well. One of which, the fact that Bitcoin quietly just going sideways or rising during this major, major downturn for macro. Yields are absolutely ripping. Jobs just came in super hot. Stocks are seemingly crashing and Bitcoin seems to be traveling its own path. Love to see it. Here you guys go. We got the Friday Five. let's go what is up everybody i'm scott melker also known as the wolf of all streets before we get started please subscribe to the channel hit that like button gonna go ahead and bring on nlw

now because we've got a lot to talk about and not that much time to do it man you kind of said it i said it in the intro, but you said to me, SPF is just sucking the air out of the room, man. It was always going to be this way. We have a very short attention span in this industry. I'm sure that by next week, yes, people will be paying attention. We'll be checking in. When there's major soundbites, we'll share them around. But I think that we're probably peak focus this week. And I think it's dictated a lot of the news because, listen, if I'm in a marketing role this week, there's no way I'm announcing anything good.

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. Let's do these quick honorable mentions, just sort of talking about the macro and what's going on, because it is definitely worth mentioning. And this is something you and I have kind of talked about quite a bit, right? Bitcoin enters quiet bull market as safe haven from bond market turmoil, analyst says. The narrative here, obviously, Bitcoin still just held $25,000, right? Which I think everybody viewed as sort of the line in the sand, still trading around $27,000 while the world explodes around it. So the funny thing is, we always have these debates, right? Is Bitcoin correlated? Is it

not correlated? Where does it get correlated? And the answer is just yes and no and yes and no. And the reality is that it is a financial asset. Some portion of the people who hold it, who buy it are completely correlated to the rest of the financial markets, but others aren't, right? And so what we're seeing, I think, here is the supremacy of the long-term hodler base kicking in. There is a price floor set by people who aren't correlated in any way to the regular markets. And it makes sense that we have finally, after all the chaos, figured out where the cycle bottom is supposed to be. And it doesn't surprise me that in this weird sort of long in-between period, we're just kind of chuffing

along the bottom. But I guess it would surprise me more that without some major, major global catastrophic economic event, we're not seeing some big, big jump down. There's always places that it can go, but. Let's talk about the global catastrophic events. US government debt grows by 275 billion in one day, right? As you mentioned, yeah, it may be sucking a lot of air out of the room, SPF, but it really does feel like everything's on fire elsewhere. Yields are absolutely ripping. The dollar absolutely ripping. Stocks, I think, pre-market already down one or 2%. Of course, like I said, job numbers just came in. American economy added 336,000 jobs in August. That's double what was expected. And then the expectation of that was that it would slightly

miss by 15,000 or 20,000 jobs. So now, as we know, guys, if you have a high-paying job and there's a lot of jobs, that means Jerome Powell needs to get you fired and take your job away. Right. I always love the idea of Jerome Powell walking down the street and saying to people, just give up your job for the common good. Right. But this means that basically there's no reason for the Fed to stop tightening because they need to crush the job market and have been able to do that. And in the meantime, literally the debt is growing $275 billion a day. I mean, what is going on here, man? The same thing that's been going on for years. I think that the interesting thing will be, if we put it back in the context of Bitcoin and crypto, is these are the moments when

the narrative importance of Bitcoin in particular tend to rise up a little bit. And especially with the sort of jockeying and positioning of all of these sort of major financial institutions around Bitcoin over the last few months, I wouldn't be surprised if you start to see that CNBC interview that pops up with someone talking about Bitcoin again. You know, it's sort of. These are moments where people have reflections on how out of whack things are. And those tend to be, they accumulate in back pockets and in the back of minds until behaviors shift. Yeah, I totally agree. And once again, that makes me just circle back to the strength of Bitcoin relative to all of this, if we really are

starting to see these initial cracks for a major recession or a major downturn that could be coming. But now we can actually dig into our Friday five here. We got the SBF trial. We've got Patrick McHenry becoming House Speaker pro tempore. We have the judge denying the interlocutory appeal of the SEC on behalf of Ripple once again, downsizing of a number of companies in the crypto industry, including Ledger and Chainalysis. And of course, the lukewarm and extremely underwhelming launch of a number of Ethereum futures ETFs. So first, we got unpacking the first day of Sam Bankman Freed's actual trial. For anyone who hasn't been following, they did jury selection effectively, opening remarks, and have done now the prosecution, have brought up a few witnesses.

And man, is it damning for SBF? Yeah, it's I think that if we're trying to sort of reduce this to one clear takeaway, it is that it doesn't look good for for Sam, right? So we got more information about how the prosecution and how the defense were going to try their case. Now, the prosecution wasn't really a big mystery. We had a pretty clear sense that what they were going to say is Sam built this whole thing on a foundation of lies. It was all lies. By the way, he's a liar. Right.

And that's what we heard. Now, the defense, it was more of an open question. We've had a bunch of different sort of indicators of what they might choose to pursue as a strategy, how much it was going to be. Sam just got in over his head. That was one question. How much it was going to be, you know, he was just following the advice of counsel was another question. And the third question was how much it was going to be blame Caroline. In the opening statement, we got the sort of first and the third of those. There was a lot of, hey, Sam never meant for any of this to happen. You know, look at him. He's a nerd. There was a lot of actually just basically trying to, I think, frame him for the jury as this sort of, you know, nice geek who just got in over his head.

But then there was also a lot of blame Caroline. There was a lot of, hey, he told Caroline Ellison to put on hedges. She didn't put on hedges. It was the market's fault. Crypto is volatile. And what there wasn't was any of the, that he was just following the advice of counsel stuff in the opening statement. However, the judge had explicitly prohibited that. So that doesn't mean that we won't see that as part of the strategy going forward, but where things got really dicey for Sam is exactly where everyone expected it to,

the reason that people have had a very hard time understanding why Sam would want to take this to trial is the fact that Gary, his CTO and co-founder, Neshad, for all intents and purposes, a co-founder, but the head of engineering, and Carolyn Ellison, the CEO of Alameda at the time of the crash, all turned, did deals with the Department of Justice and were basically very clearly going to say, Sam knew about this. There were intentional decisions made to allow customer funds to flow to Alameda. This wasn't just oversight. We were part of a conspiracy. Sure enough, that's what we heard. So the first witness was actually Adam Yadidia, who is a developer who lived with them in the big $30 million apartment. And he basically talked about how much,

you know, was, was clear to Sam and members early. And, and, you know, the, the other way witness that was notable so far was Gary,

the CTO who literally said, we did crimes. I mean, it was like, it could, he's like, we did crimes and Alameda had a $65 billion line of credit with FTX. Yeah.

Casual 65. Actually, next time I'm in financial trouble, I'm going to give myself a $65 billion credit line. Just, I try to do that emotionally every day. No, I,

I just, I think that the, it really has been surprising, especially after all three of those folks decided to do deals that, that Sam has pursued this line, you know, psychoanalyzing it a little bit. I think that, I think that part of the problem and what got us into this situation was Sam's utter conviction that he knows better than everyone else about everything. I think that some of the documents that have been produced by his legal team read more to me like he wrote them than his legal team did. And I think that he still has this idea that he can just convince people that he was right. So we'll see. It doesn't look good so far.

It sounds like Michael Lewis is trying to help him. I heard that the book Going Infinite is a very, let's just say, friendly tone towards SBF and not particularly critical. Let's rip into that for a minute because I haven't gone all the way into this on my show. And I did subject myself to reading the whole thing. And obviously, I was there for a lot of it. It's lazy. The number one critique of this thing, if I have to sum it up, is laziness. It is very clear that Lewis went into this trying to do what he does with all his books, which is find a surprising figure that you wouldn't expect to be a hero who becomes a

hero, right? That's the template for his stories. It's also very clear that when it became clear that that wasn't who Sam was, rather than inserting himself as a representative of everyone who feels duped by Sam, which is all of us at various degrees, he instead decided to say, maybe I'll be the defender of Sam, or maybe I won't just shift this narrative. And the reason that I say lazy is that one, it feels like the book wasn't really revised after the crash, other than to add some chapters. Two, again, as someone with a lot

of knowledge of this, the number of casual inaccuracies is so overwhelming. And it's stuff that maybe isn't super germane to the narrative that he's pursuing, but is really basic stuff like stuff that your average crappy crypto reporter wouldn't get wrong. For example, apparently LeBron James was one of our endorsement partners. News to me. Surprising because that was the department that I was running. But who knows? And then over and over, there's these things like that where the numbers associated with

things were wrong. I mean, just so much of it was factually incorrect, not in terms of big, important details, but in terms of little details, again, that suggest to me utter laziness. So I don't know. Who cares? But it isn't meaningful because I think that it's part of a public perception game that Sam is very clearly playing as part of the legal proceedings as well. Yeah, it's a part of this sort of whitewashing campaign of the entire thing that his defense is obviously going to take, that politicians have clearly taken. And now you have Michael Lewis with this highly anticipated tell-all book that ended up just being the story of how Sam

Baikman Freed got super rich and powerful. Yeah. I will say that to the extent that anyone wants to have some sort of okayness about this, if you were just coming in and reading this from the outside, maybe it wouldn't be extraordinarily damning to Sam in the way that we might have imagined someone who spent six months with him, But it also doesn't make him look good. It doesn't really make Sam look like a sympathetic guy. Well, there is a story here that I love in the midst of all this that could be extremely beneficial and sort of unwind a lot of the damage. And that's that FTX customers may get a full payout thanks to Google and Amazon. I wrapped this in with the SBF trial because I just think it's the all FTX things bucket. But for anyone who wasn't paying attention, FTX obviously made

investments across the board, effectively every industry taking all that customer money and throwing it into things. But one of them, it seems they got right. And that's with Anthropic, which is an open AI rival, launching Claude and raising at a massive valuation right now. Apparently, Amazon considering putting $4 billion right in at a $20, $30 billion valuation, which makes, as you can see here, potentially FTX's investment in this worth $3 to $4.5 billion. I think it was only a couple hundred million investment. And this could literally fill the entire hole for creditors. You've got to love this. So I mean, it's as someone who is constantly paying attention to sort of big patterns of history, the fact that there were these two massive things that happened

in November of 2022. One is the crash of FTX. The other is the launch of ChatGPT. And it looks like the tailwinds from that latter one might actually clean up a big part of the mess of the former. Now, people have asked a lot of questions like, well, can Anthropic actually command this valuation? If they tried to sell it on secondaries markets, would they actually be able to liquidate it? I think more than basically any other venture category that you can imagine, the amount of demand there is out there for credible competitors in the foundation model space, of which there are less than five, I think, is so high. I wouldn't be surprised if it's the right idea for them to hold on even longer, at least for a couple months, and try to get that next round, which is 4040 or $50 billion. OpenAI is reportedly trying to raise right now at an $80

to $90 billion valuation. Now, their revenue is about 10x Anthropic at the moment, but Anthropic Steel with Amazon is a big, big game shift. So I think that unlike some of these... There are a lot of venture investments where you can just write off the valuation and say it's paper and you wouldn't be able to do it. This is not one. I think that there's a meaningful chance that this money could actually end up in the hands of FTX creditors. There's some irony there because Paradigm, now I'm blanking on the name, but the guy from Paradigm took the stand yesterday in the SPF trial and they asked him about their investment. He said, we've written it down to zero. Maybe a bad idea. Listen, to your point, even if this doesn't make them completely whole,

if FTX creditors end up with 70, 80 cents on the dollar because of this investment rather than 20 or 30 cents like Voyager or maybe what happened with Celsius, you got to view this, I think, as just a huge win. Yep, 100%. Yeah. The next story, obviously, here, and nobody's really talking about this to any great degree, I don't think, but crypto-friendly Congressman McHenry temporarily takes over US House. Obviously, we don't go deeply into politics here. I think everyone knows that Kevin McCarthy was surprisingly ousted as Speaker of the House, but that made Patrick McHenry, who we talk about all the time, the House Speaker pro tempore, and maybe even the biggest story, not their crypto-friendly leanings and the few policies that they've tried to put forward actually have an impact if they become speaker on the crypto industry? Yeah. So there's a couple of things about this. One is, Emmer's not just in the

contenders list. He is increasingly one of the two at the very top of that list, which makes it even more kind of ripe for speculation, right? I think that anyone who's hoping that this means that, you know, Emmer gets gaveled in as a House speaker, and the first thing he does is push through crypto legislation is going to be disappointed. I think that the hands of anyone in this role are extremely tied. It is going to be an utter battle to get funding for the government through. We have another 40 days or something like that before the next deadline comes. So it's very clear what his agenda is going to be if he does become speaker. And it's not really in his control all that much.

Now, the flip side is having someone who is pro crypto in this way, in that role, there's no way to think or argue that it's not better than it is bad, right? It is a massively positive thing. It increases the legitimacy of the space. If it's one squawking, crazy congressman who's the one advocating for crypto, who cares, right? There's no influence there. If it's the actual Speaker of the House, especially one that comes in through sort of a nascent civil war and is a consensus candidate, that's a much more powerful spot to be. And then, for example, McCarthy was who only came in after 15 rounds of voting. So I think there's a lot to be optimistic about, not necessarily in terms of, hey, are we going to get good policies in the next three or four months, but more in terms of the long term trajectory of where this issue sits relative to

Congress as a whole. Yeah, I agree with all that. I mean, I think that it can only be a good thing. It certainly can't hurt us if we have someone who actually understands this industry and is pushing for it, but nothing's getting done regardless of who Speaker of the House is at this moment, in my humble opinion. This is not going to impact policy, but at least it may give more influence to the industry or those speaking on its behalf. Now, there was a small sub story where it appears that there may be some conversations going on between McHenry and Sherrod Brown, the Democrat head of the Senate Banking Committee, around a sort of horse trade for advancing some legislation that Brown cares about around

cannabis banking in exchange for some part of crypto being able to move forward. So that's irrespective of the whole speaker drama. So that's one thing to keep an eye on is that I think that the best hope if we want legislation in the short term is that one very discreet part of this agenda, for example, common sense stablecoin rules or something like that, might sneak through. But listen, I think that would be extremely good progress. There is a lot here that if you put aside politics, basically everyone agrees on. Everyone agrees that stablecoin should be fully backed. That's not really controversial. So if we can get rules like that, I think it would be a great place to build from.

Yeah. Anywhere that we can start from is good. And of course, a lot of that's going to require getting rid of one Gary Gensler at the SEC and they continue to lose. We have XRP rallies amid Singapore license approval, SEC appeals rejection. For anyone who wasn't paying attention this week, Judge Torres and the judicial system once again dealt a heavy blow to the SEC. We all know about the Ripple decision. We know that the SEC filed an interlocutory appeal, which is a word that literally nobody knew about until this happened. And once again, the judicial system came in and said no. And you're gonna have to wait till April when there's a trial and that's it.

The court just continues to slap them down. The SEC can't seem to get a win against the crypto industry at the moment. Yeah. So with the caveat that obviously none of us are lawyers here, basically what happened, there's a lot of procedural stuff about this. The decision that Judge Torres had handed down before was a decision that was a partial decision, right? There were things that she ruled on and things that she said had to go to trial. In particular, the thing that she said had to go to trial was around the executive's culpability in promoting unregistered securities. And so when the SEC wanted to appeal the parts of her decision that had been made, that's where this interlocutory word comes from, right? They had to apply effectively to appeal to a decision that's

only a partial decision instead of appealing an entire decision after the trial ends. She said, no, you can't. And the reason that she said, no, you can't, is that their reasons for wanting to appeal weren't based on her misinterpreting the fundamentals of the law. They were based on the SEC disagreeing with her interpretation of the law, which is not a basis for an appeal. So basically, what the SEC didn't say was, you didn't rule on the basis of the Howey test. The Howey test is the basis for this rule, so we need to appeal. They said, you ruled on the basis of the Howey test, but you disagreed with our assessment of the Howey test. And it turns out that that's not a basis for an appeal. So Judge Torres went to pains to articulate exactly what

she meant with the first decision. Now, one thing that is interesting for people who are watching in terms of the precedent here is that she made it very, very clear that the specifics of this case were going to be different than the specifics of other cases. And so it did not mean that under any circumstances, this type of token couldn't be a securities offering. She said that in this specific case, the facts did not support that under the Howey test. The bad of this is that it doesn't mean that it's likely to, you know, we're going to see a wave of rejections of future cases on a Howey basis because the cases, you know, the facts of every case are going to be different. What is positive about it is that she very clearly said this makes your whole regulation by enforcement strategy very stupid because you're not going to get precedent either. Even if I had ruled the other way, it still wouldn't mean that every case that you had tried, you know, that you didn't want to try. So you wanted to create a precedent would, would be

that, you know, so there's a lot in here. It's very dense, but overall it does amount to a continued rejection of the SEC strategy and approach, even if, uh, even if not a full rejection of the way that they look at the actual Howey test. And I think that that's a very positive thing, especially for congressional allies who do want proactive, positive guidance rather than this regulation by enforcement strategy. Right. I guess the best case scenario here is that at some point, the SEC just backs off and licks their wounds a bit and says, we're going to cool it on the regulation by enforcement. I have my doubts that that will happen. But either way, it's really have my doubts that that will happen. But either way, it's really good to see them taking these losses. But circling back sort of to the

previous story, none of this gets addressed. And this even is in defense of the SEC to some degree, but none of this gets addressed until there's clear legislation. Right. I mean, at the end of the day, I don't defend Gary Gensler. But if his view is that I have one tool to hammer, this entire industry is a nail. And that's really his only tool. And he has the sort of legal backing in his mind to do it. He's going to continue to do this regardless come hell or high water. So I think that any clear legislation is what could stop this in its tracks.

Yeah, I agree. Yeah. So then the next story we've got here, crypto custody firm Ledger cuts 12% of staff, Chainalysis cuts 15% of staff. And while that's all happening, crypto fundraising hits three-year low as firms struggle to raise capital. This is from Asari, the amount raised by crypto firms in Q3 fell to just under 2.1 billion across 297 deals, the lowest on both counts since Q4 2020. I see a lot of people pointing to this as it's dead, it's over, the crypto industry is in decline. I point to this as a massively bullish signal that we've reached the bottom. Yeah. I mean, listen, so one,

going back to where we started with SBF trial, if that wasn't happening this week, maybe you point to these things and it's like, oh, look, it's a trend that wasn't happening this week, maybe you point to these things and it's like, oh, look, it's a trend. People were saving this news for a week that they knew it would get buried. Sorry for ruining it for you guys. I apologize. But, you know, holding that aside, listen, the reality is that to survive, that the entire game for any crypto company right now is just survive. And we tend to look at cuts as really negative indicators that things are bad, but we already knew that things were bad.

If these things allow companies like Ledger to survive because they've trimmed down to minimum capacity, that's a net good thing in the long run, right? Companies have to do what it takes to survive. There obviously isn't any capital out there, really new capital for these companies. Everyone who's raising is raising at a down round. I think I saw it might have been Ari Paul the other day, someone was tweeting about how people had been presenting these sort of rumors that companies had been raising on down rounds of 80 or 80, 90% decreased valuations as entirely negative. And he, and I'm sorry if it wasn't Arian, I'm missing who it was. He basically said, look, that's responsible. If someone can figure out how to like humble themselves, take that round, get the money in the bank, survive

until it gets good again. Yes, it sucks. It's bad for investors. It's bad for the people, but it's better than dying. And not dying is the entire game right now. So this is definitely a Rorschach test, glass half full, glass half empty thing. It sucks when people lose their jobs. There's no way around that, but it's going to happen as we sort of, you know, we have no idea how long it's going to be bad. And so people have to account for that. Yeah. And I want to be bad. And so people have to account for that. Yeah. And I want to be clear, this is not unique to the crypto industry. It wasn't so long ago that we were talking about the mass cuts at the Facebook's metas of the world and huge tech companies. This is just the world we live in right now. So I don't even think it's a story to see crypto companies cut 12% to 15% of staff. I think that's actually

pretty minor. And I love your point about the down round because it's either be stubborn and pretend your company's worth 10x what it is, which you can't do, or go out of business. So what are you going to do? You're obviously going to take the money you can, survive, and then thrive in the next bull market. Yep. And then the final story that we have here, which kind of aligns with this one, and we predicted this. Ethereum futures ETFs garner lukewarm reception on first day of trading. We obviously discussed the fact that Valkyrie had converted last week the strategy that they had taken to basically blend Ethereum futures into their Bitcoin futures ETF product that already

existed. We talked about the massive numbers that BITO and the Bitcoin futures ETFs did in a bull market, a billion in just a matter of days. Well, here we're doing like $2 million. I mean, in the total across all of them, I think Valkyrie got 850 grand, something like that. I mean, there's literally zero interest here in these products for the moment. Yeah. Without trying to wade into a very classic Bitcoin debate, I think it's quite clear that supply doesn't create demand when it comes to financialized product, derivative products of crypto assets. Look, the valuable and important thing about an ETH futures launch was always that it's just infrastructure that should exist. It needs to be there. It needs to be allowed.

Frankly, it's the same with the spot ETFs. Now, I think that the demand for spot ETFs, even in a terrible environment like this, is a radically different thing than futures. Futures are a very specific type of product for a very specific type of investor, whereas spot ETFs are a much more broadly interesting kind of get exposure to an asset type of option. But even with that, if Bitcoin spot ETF was approved tomorrow, it would almost certainly underwhelm in terms of how much went in. But that wouldn't matter because the reality is it just needs to exist. It needs to be legitimate. It needs to be part of the puzzle as there is a shift back up into a different kind of era in the life of this industry that's more legitimized, has more options for investors, has gone through the actual amount of assets flowing in, but their purpose was never really about that. It was about a reminder that the trend line is towards more institutions being able to access these markets in ways that work for

them. And so that's still a net good thing, I think. Yeah, totally agree. I think that it's good that they're going to be there when we need them. Once again, these are all the narratives that next bull market people will be really excited about that were seemingly forgotten for six to 12 months. When one of these actually gets to a billion, it's going to be incredible. Absolutely. Well, is there anything else that we missed? I mean, we just knocked out the five. I think we're going to be talking about SBF passively as one of the five probably for weeks to come, unfortunately. But I've got to imagine that at each weekend, we're going to have pretty relevant and comprehensive updates

of what's happening there. And it will become more impactful and meaningful with time. I think that the... I certainly don't have anything else. I think that for anyone who's trying to figure out what to watch for in this trial, it almost feels to me like the beginning of a sports game where the runaway favorite is winning so much that people kind of stop paying attention. What I'm going to be keeping an eye on is whether there are indications of wobbles in the prosecution. Are there witnesses who end up not being as compelling? Cross-examination of Carolyn Ellison. I'm not sure when she's set to testify. That feels like it's going to be a very important thing, right?

Because a lot of this case hinges on he told her to hedge and do things differently and she didn't, right? Now, ultimately, that may not matter, but that's the type of thing that I'm going to be watching for is not like more pile on evidence that this is bad, but does the defense actually sow any amount of doubt? Are they successful at all in that? I mean, you have to think that their legal strategy is almost entirely convince one person on that jury to have just enough doubt about the intentionality of this fraud that it seeps in there and they kind of infect enough of the rest of the jury that they can't get to consensus and the thing is hung like i can't imagine that it's anything more than that so that's kind of what i'm going to be looking for i just find it a bit laughable

that his defense is that she should have hedged uh ignoring the fact that it was with ftx customers money that she was supposed to be hedging which should have never been there in the first place yeah the it has been like, it has been a consistent strategy of Sam to breeze over that fact since the whole thing happened. Yeah, she traded badly with stolen money. But let's not pretend

that it's stolen money. All right, well, I think we knocked that out of the park. Once again, good to get the quick review on what's happening this week. It was good for me, actually, since I was sort of off the grid

for most of the week. Once again, guys, you can find this on Nathaniel's YouTube and audio channels as well, of course, on my Spotify, Apple Music, etc. And I guess that's all we got. I guess we'll see you guys next week. Thanks, man.

Cheers. All right. Let's go.