The Wolf Of All Streets - Black Monday - WTF Happened? | Crypto Town Hall

Episode Date: August 6, 2024

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Looks like we're getting a pretty nice bounce today. Dave, what do you think of the price action? Looks like it's a bounce across the board. Crypto, obviously, though. S&P, pretty much everything. Well, you know, as I said last week, and I said over the weekend, and I said yesterday, we don't know who, how many people or how many funds had unhedged yen positions and will be floating to the top. The panic yesterday was because people didn't know. And today, I guess, since there has been no bodies reported and no banks have had to do anything,

it's like, oh, well, okay. So we have some stresses, but it's kind of business as usual. And that's sort of normal. Now, what's amusing about this is how many people get shaken out. And the reason crypto reacts more than other markets react, I mean, it's not because of McGlone's nonsense about beta. Oh, well, it's the fastest. No, it's because the reason when it is moving, it moves up higher. When it does fall, it falls down.

It's because so many people are playing with so much more leverage as a general percentage of the trading. And as a result, yeah, you got a lot of people flushed out yesterday. So now you look around and you see what the hell were you doing. And the people who actually were buying are like, okay, well, we're going to slowly buy here. And they'll keep doing that until they realize there isn't enough left to buy and the price will start rising, which is why I thought we'd get to this level. And we're kind of exactly at the price that I said yesterday, we would certainly get to, and then we'll see what the drivers are. Two things, Scott. I'm trying to rush up the stage. You're not going to get away with it. Scott Melker put out a post, and I'm showing it to myself because it went viral.

For some reason, I retweeted it, even though I probably shouldn't have. And I'm going to read out the post. Let me try to find it. You know exactly what I'm talking about, Scott. I literally have no idea, so it's nice suspense. I'm going to advise you not to answer any further questions, Scott. My legal counsel is here.

I'm pretty i'm pretty confident you posted something that went viral had like two million impressions unless i had literally had a dream about it because i've been doing spaces for so long didn't you put out a post that we've a lot of indicators show that we've peaked that we could be in this bear market for a few months yeah i said that in march yeah you said that in march or today yesterday march yeah are you retweeting it i don't even think i did but it was in march hey i can find it and mario i can attest because obviously we talk about markets you know in depth every week on mondays uh and scott has been since march saying the exact same thing he and i have been agreed that we would go into a range bound market.

And when we peaked in March, he said, well, okay, this is probably the peak until the fall. And we'll probably go to the lower parts of the range. That's what he's been saying. So I have no idea which tweet you're talking about, but I know that Scott's been saying that. I found one of them above Mario, if that's what you're talking about. It's the 318. Yeah, I can't see it. I'm not sure if you pinned it. But I'm going 3.18. Yeah, I can't see. I'm not sure if you pinned it.

I'm going to try to find it unless I had a junior. I thought you posted something yesterday that there's multiple indicators, meme coin mania, et cetera, multiple indicators that show we've peaked right now. It will be a few months before the markets recover. Yeah, I said that repeatedly, but it was from back in March. Yeah. I didn't say it in hindsight. I didn't say it in hindsight.

I said it at the time, just for the record. Ah, okay, okay. All right, so maybe you were referencing it now. You're trying to get your, you know, trying to show off. Collecting my clout. My lawyers told me not to speak. Yes, but do you still have, are you still in the same position that you see the market? At the end of this year, the market will start rallying again?

I think so. I don't think that yesterday changed anything for the base case. I mean, it has to put you on alert that things could change. But one day doesn't really change much. If we see extreme sustained continued sell-off in global markets and panic, then I think that would take a lot for Bitcoin to rise in the face of that. But in context of the fact that we have an election still in November, and if this continued down through that time into Q4, that would be the end of the incumbent party. A hundred percent. I don't see it necessarily happening.

I wouldn't be surprised if everything crashed right after the election, but you know, I think we have a choppy Q3 and then Q4. And even at the beginning of the summer, I said, and many did, if they're going to sort of clean out the stock market, clean out this leverage, then the summer, the end of summer would be a good time to do it. And we've seen this in election cycles before where you have kind of a rough summer and everybody gets bearish and then things rise into the election,

which is constructive for the party. Nobody's talking, so I'm going to do it. No, no, I thought it glitched out. I thought it glitched out. All right, cool. Let me wait for it to come back. So I had another question. How did the ETFs perform after the sell-off?

I think it was... Did you see any fear there? I think Bitcoin was... It was pretty resilient. I don't have the exact number, but somewhere between like 100 and... It was either 120 or 150 million sell-off yesterday, which is very muted. You would expect much... Scott, I got the numbers if you want.

Yeah, please. to expect much. Scott, I got the numbers if you want. Bitcoin ETFs saw 168 million in net outflows. Notably, our ETFs saw inflows. There were no outflows out of BlackRock's ETF. But, you know, 168, given the plunge in the market, is not even the highest day they've seen. So all in all, not bad. Ethereum ETFs were the surprising ones. They saw 49 million in net inflows. So ETF investors definitely bought the dip on Ethereum, which was really interesting to see. Juan, I'm curious.

Can you say when you guys were seeing a lot of the flows on the ETFs yesterday? Because at least personally, I tried to go buy some ETF yesterday and couldn't because I couldn't get into my damn brokerage account yesterday morning when everything was bottoming since I'm sure everyone saw a bunch of the brokerages were airing out yesterday. What a coincidence. what a coincidence what a coincidence yeah has anyone seen because i was actually scouring looking for the conspiracy theorists all the gamestop guys and uh and you know whatever saying oh they're kicking the plug out so that

they can't sell i mean i mean honestly it's it's to figure out, someone's going to find out what happened, but has anyone seen, has anyone talked about why this happened? Because, boy... It was barely even reported, Dave. It literally was barely reported. It's wild. I mean, it's crazy, isn't it? I only saw people on Twitter talking about it. In fact, I just thought I

was having, because I was getting, so I'm at Schwab and I was getting an authentication error message, and I thought it was from like i don't know i thought it was getting locked down or something and then i saw other people being like why can't i get into my schwab on on stock twits yesterday that was on our app and on web that was pretty much what people were screaming about especially robin hood and and trust everybody's brokers were down and out and people were pissed. Yeah. These centralized systems need to need to go or adapt to the blockchain era. Alex, to your, to your question. Yeah. We saw the bulk of the, of the flows come in

through midday and early afternoon when things had stabilized. I guess when people could get into their accounts because people were shut out in the morning. I guess it was a good thing overall. Most people would have been worse off if they had sold in the early morning. Decentralized systems sometimes work a bit better. Worse off for now. I guess it begs the question of what comes next, right? We obviously, you know, we talk about this impulsive bounce that you sort of always get in one of these drops. We saw it and are seeing it, I think, still today. But usually when you see a massive, massive sell-off on the highest volume that you've seen in years, which was the case for Bitcoin, and you're breaking key levels down,

that's usually not a bottom. It doesn't mean it can't be. But usually when volume and selling are confirmed by one another, it's not the end. Maybe it is. I would love it to be. But curious people's opinions as to what kind of comes next. Nobody wants to take that one. Jonathan, I'm putting you on. Go ahead, Alec. I would say I have no idea what's coming next. Also, I'll say this is actually definitely partly my fault, guys. I'm sorry. I was talking to a reporter on Thursday, and she's like, hey, what do you think is going to happen in August? And I'm like, it's going to be super fucking boring. And the price is just going to float between like 62 and

70 for the whole month. So yeah, sorry, my bad. I don't know, like, especially if we're looking like Bitcoin right now. I tried to buy at 50, ran into fucking problems because I was definitely buying at 50. I'm not buying at 56 right now. At 56, I'm kind of sitting and waiting and seeing what happens because I think, as everyone has noted, like, I'm kind of sitting and waiting and seeing what happens. Because I think, as everyone has noted, I didn't think yesterday that this was the big one. But there's a lot of times where you get the big drop, the recovery, dead cat bounce, whatever you want to call it, and then something happens. So I'm just kind of personally sitting back and waiting to see what happens. But I've got a bunch of cash that I've been sitting on for a minute expecting better prices at some point okay buffett good

good what's crazy to me scott he's like the last man with cash he's buying the dip lucky him um what's crazy scott is seeing how memes have performed in this cycle it's it's wild to me that i'm seeing meme coins currently pretty much either equally or outperforming both equities and major cryptos so that's wild to see yeah a lot of look at name coin performance yesterday was it wildly yeah i mean everything had like a pretty much, everything pretty much had like a 50% or greater haircut, but then rebounded with a vengeance, it seems, like as far as the major meme coins that people are trying. Yeah, like PayPay is pretty much, I mean, it got back to where it opened yesterday. A lot of the meme coins did, but the real like winners in the alt coins

were the privacy coins. They did phenomenal yesterday. Zcash, Monero, what's the other one with an M, I forget. Mina, a lot of the privacy centered coins did very well yesterday. But even fast forwarding into today, you've got some of the other lower-cap altcoins like Algorand

and others that have returned to where they started, where they opened yesterday, maybe slightly below it right now as I'm talking, but pretty good recovery for altcoins. In fact, the total market cap, excluding Bitcoin and Ethereum is outperforming the total market cap and the altcoin market cap with Ethereum. Altcoins are outperforming everybody.

Isn't that just because the sell-off was driven by risk assets being liquidated and the people who are participating in that liquidation don't hold privacy coins because no exchanges sell them and they don't hold small meme coins and they don't hold obscure alts and so it was the things that like people were actually holding that sold off a lot of the alt coins like zcash went down to like 18 bucks across two different exchanges and because a lot of the supply of zcash is held by digital currency group which is like that's one of the supply of Zcash is held by digital currency group, which is like that's one of their sort of favorite portfolio things. And they had to sell off like Monero. I mean, look, I think Monero is good technology. The truth is,

though, it's mostly held by criminals and not by funds. Yeah. Like, I mean, if we were going to talk about privacy coins, I think Zcash out of the two is probably the safest bet because at least you can attach identifying tech, you can attach identifying information to comply with regulators and such. Monero is just totally 100 privacy centered. And I think it's the only crypto that has had a bounty put on it by the IRS to try and crack it. Unless I'm wrong. I think they're the only one. Yeah, but similarly, there's not a lot of like institutional

funds out there that are holding pepe right like no no i wouldn't i wouldn't say the fact that those didn't sell off in the same way that like bitcoin and eth sold off is necessarily like fundamentally bullish for those tokens i think it's really just about the technical structure of the sell-off we have yeah and i I'm 100% on board with the technical explanation. And also, Peter Brandt, he was in here or is he still in here? I think he's in here. I mean, if you've been watching. Oh, he's out now.

He's been making a point for a while about paying attention to the lower lows and lower highs. And that's that apt warning from a technical perspective. Peter, that's a perfect segue for you to give your opinion on what's happening with the market. Well, I mean, my broad opinion doesn't change.

It's been the same for years. That is 50% chance Bitcoin goes to $100,000, $250,000, $500 million. You know, name your price your price 50 it basically becomes worthless and i i can create the macro the make macro case for both i actually put on my twitter feed here this morning uh posts that i've done on my blog that create that look at the binary picture. But hey, I'm looking, I got friendly yesterday. I just, we broke

hard. And I also posted a table that I put together here yesterday and it shows where we are in the halving cycle compared to previous halving cycles. So we're 26% off the

highs. We went down're 26% off the highs. We went down 27% off of the highs in the 2015 to 2017 halving cycle. That is, you get your halving date, then you have a sell-off after your halving date. How big is that sell-off? How long does that sell-off last before the market launches into new highs? And we're not extraordinarily in bad shape in this current halving cycle. You know, the last two halving cycles after the halving sell-off, after the halving period, you know, both were 24 and 25 weeks before we saw a new high. We're only 17

weeks after the halving. That's not bad. We're only 26% off the high. You look at the 2015-17 cycle, we sold up 27%. So, you know, we're perfectly in line with what happens in halving cycles. Now you go back to the 2011-2013 halving cycle, there was no sell-off. I mean, it was just a moonshot from the halving. But that's not the case in the last two halving cycles, not the case in the current halving cycle. So I, you know, I am not negative. I'm, you know, again, I create this 50% binary case from a long term point of view. But I look at the market, and we just had a sell-off that almost perfectly met what I believe to be the parabolic curve that's in control of this current bull market.

And so, you know, I bought Bitcoin. I buy Bitcoin here. I mean, my risk in Bitcoin right now is defined. that you can make the case that what we saw yesterday is the low that we will see in this halving cycle. If we now go bullish, we will, I think, be able to look back and say during this halving bull market cycle, the low was made on August 5th and the market went up from there. So, you know, that's my view of Bitcoin. I think the other thing on the institutional accumulation and going back to Dave's point earlier is, you know, whether we're out of the woods or not in both crypto and broader markets, TBD, if there are more shoes to fall to be seen

on who's who may if there's any big players caught in the in the yen uh train that's unwinding uh in crypto there's you know there was a big uh talk about and looks like from the wallet movements that jump crypto uh had to liquidate uh and uh and are sort of exiting the system and who knows if there's more contagion where it's tbd so i think people are holding to see if there are other big shoots to drop but But outside of that, I would say in the institutional accumulation of the other Bitcoin ETFs, we just saw the approval from one of the first major wirehouses from Morgan Stanley last week that they're going to start offering. They approved initial two of the Bitcoin ETFs. And there's, you know, some restriction on who they can offer it to. But that's the beginning of the wirehouses. They're going to open that even

further to all of their clients eventually, and then more are going to pile on. So and I think that that money is going to start flowing in, into Q3, Q4. And for those advisors that are now able to allocate for the first time, I mean, they're looking at prices now and they're able to get in essentially at the same price when the almost the same price as when the ETFs first launched. So it's a great entry point. So I think that makes it very attractive for another wave of capital inflows into these ETFs. Yeah, I love, Peter, that this doesn't seem to concern you much at all as far as the price action. But when you put it in context of what happened with the yen carry trade, and you know, 6.5 trillion, whatever the number was, 6.5 or 4.6, whatever, wiped off the stock market in a single day. Does any of that concern you in a broader sense?

No, I mean, you know, day to day, week to week, you know, everyone's trying to figure out correlation. You know, how does Bitcoin correlate it to this? How does it correlate it to that? I just think that's the wrong way to look at it. I think ultimately we will compare everything to Bitcoin. The question will be how the stock market correlates to Bitcoin, not the other way around. I mean, again, in the most bullish case that I can create, Bitcoin becomes the ultimate store of value. And so I think at some point, it delinks from everything. I mean, no matter what you name, it's going to delink from because it will gain in purchasing power.

I mean, just looking at the, just one other comment here, Scott, too. I mean, if I'm looking for a place to be short in crypto, it's ETH. I would, I'm not short ETH. I'd like to be short ETH. I'd like to be long Bitcoin short ETH. So no, it doesn't, it doesn't bother me.

I think at some point in time, Bitcoin ignores what the stock market and gold and everything else is going to do. I found the strength, and Bill Barhyte brought it up yesterday. Dave, you can go ahead. But I found the strength of Solana to be pretty notable.

Yeah, I was actually going to comment on two things. First, to respond, I mean, Bitcoin-Ether ratio, the Ether-Bitcoin ratio is at 0.045. I mean, that is, just to put this in context, it reached like 0.047, something change, before the ETF announcement. It ramped all the way up to 0.059, or 0.06, which is a huge move. It then settled back down and was like banging against 0.048. And now it's down, it's broken down. And now, you know, look, I'm not a technical analyst,

but I can understand from a technical perspective why Peter is saying what he's doing. From a fundamental question, the question is, we know that there are these huge sales forces that are going to be pitching ETH as the tech platform for crypto, and a lot of people are going to buy it. So I just wonder, the idea of shorting ETH into that seems kind of difficult to me, but in terms of a relative performance, I totally understand it. Now, Solana, on the other hand, I mean, Peter, you tell me, but I don't think I've seen a chart that looks more like an inverse head and shoulders than Solana does right at this instant, as we are literally at a price that is on the right shoulder. You know, well, depending on how you want to look at it, but you know, the one that if it breaks

above this, I would say that my guess is you think if Solana gets over 150, it's shooting right back up to the 180s uh you know off of that I mean I don't know what you think but I'm kind of curious what you think because that's what it looks like to my untrained not necessarily believing in technical analyst eyes love Solana I you know I like Solana here I mean I like Solana against these recent lows, yesterday's lows from a pure chart play. But, you know, we get in the new highs for this trading range, which means we go back above the March high in Solana. I think Solana, you know, starts with the number three. So, you know, we go to 300, 350 and higher. I like Solana.

I've always liked Solana. I've not been a fan of ETH. I've been a fan of Solana all along. So, yeah, I like Solana. Is there a fundamental reason you like Solana, or is this just price action based in general? Well, I mean, I dealt with both, right? I mean, you try to use ETH.

The ETH world is a difficult world to navigate. I mean, it's complicated. Fees can just be outrageous. It's awkward. It's just not clean. Solana is just a cleaner world to live in. I just think ETH is cluttered with with with garbage stuff it's you know i i just don't like i don't like the eth world so but i like the solana chart

i don't like the eth chart i like the solana chart so yeah if i'm not in bitcoin it's going to be solana is really the horse i'm going to want to bet on because I don't really play the altcoins and I don't play the memes and I don't do that stuff. So I like the Solana chart. I think it's very attractive. On the fundamentals... Wait a second. Go ahead. Wait a sec. Go ahead. Please, Zach. Oh, I was going to say, sort of on the fundamentals between the two, I don't personally have a view one way or the other between ETH or Solana, but I think they're trying to do pretty different things, right? The philosophy behind Ethereum is that you're going to have a more decentralized base layer that certainly is less fun to use for base layer transactions, sending funds on ETH, trying to buy, you know, NFTs on ETH,

trying to speculate on ETH based meme coins is slower and more expensive and more annoying than doing so on Solana. But that's because, you know, ETH is meant to be more of a modular blockchain, right? It's meant to push stuff into roll ups into layer twos, and then have sort of specialization where you're maximizing for, you know, some combination of security and composability at the base layer, whereas Thalotta makes different trade offs, right there, rather than being a modular blockchain, they try and be much more of a monolithic blockchain, where the sort of costs are pushed off on the L twos, and the base layer is very, you know, fast and cheap to use, which is why this

cycle, it's been so popular for trading meme coins, because compared to trading meme coins on ETH, trading meme coins on Solana is so fast, and so cheap, and so easy. But in terms of sort of which will be valuable over the sort of longer time horizon, at least in my view, it's too early to tell which sort of broad architecture is better for building sort of Web3 stuff like decentralized finance and DAOs. Yeah, from a chart perspective, I just found it, what I was going to say, Zach, pretty informative to see how quickly it bounced and how high it bounced. I mean, it was the first of the majors that I saw that was really getting bought. And certainly that retraced the entire move down yesterday. Not sure that Dave's able to lift his mic and speak. I didn't hear you.

No, Dave is fine um i was just waiting for you i just don't like him i don't i talk too much so sometimes i just want to make sure that it's okay uh there's one question that i have and i don't know the answer uh but i think it's extremely relevant uh when you look at the eth underperformance there were rumors that a pile of eth was getting sold out of uh I guess, effectively, you know, one of the arms of DCG that was going under, et cetera, you know, that has to sell stuff that there were hedge funds that were selling it. You know, Jump was the specific rumor on Jump was ETH.

If in point of fact, what we experienced was a huge chunk of force selling in ETH, then the thesis there should be a compression bounce and ETH will outperform in a bounce. If that is not true and it's just general malaise, outperformance, less demand sort of thing, then that is not the case. So whoever understands what force selling was happening uh it gives you a very strong key to what will happen if markets normalize and i think that's extremely important because as as we all we could talk about which is the best blockchain until we're blue in the face we can talk about technical patterns but the end of the day liquidity is what drives markets whenever

there is a clear liquidity deal and if in fact the liquidity in Ether was there was a lot of selling, and that's why it went down as it's no different than, well, we've all seen many examples that so I'd be curious if anyone has if we've gotten to the bottom of what was actually sold over the weekend. Well, at least the jump thing you can see on on shame, they unstaked a huge amount over the last two and a half weeks and sold. So at least that part is true. Well, the question is, were they doing it for themselves? Were they doing it for someone else in one of their bipartisan agreements because they had to take collateral from somebody? That that's the question. And I don't obviously I don't know the answer. Or I would say I did. That's interesting because the conjecture was that jump likely had to cover a margin call on some other trade they have. But you're saying they could actually be liquidating someone who had a margin call with them.

Anything's possible. I mean, unless you're actually sitting there and, you know, the thing that people always forget is just how interconnected the financial system is. And when you're talking about crypto, it is more thing everyone she people should understand this because of the nature of the business collateral is expensive to place in multiple places so there are a lot of hedge funds out there that don't want to place collateral all with a counterparty that they don't trust so they but if they spread it out then they don't get nearly as much utility and they can't trade nearly as much and so they're looking for counterparties no i don't get nearly as much utility and they can't trade nearly as much. And so they're looking for counterparties. Now, I don't know if Jump is providing collateral, although I suspect they were.

And so we don't know if it was for their own trades or for somebody else. But it does matter because we just don't understand whether there's more behind it. Peter? Yeah, I have a question for people a lot smarter than me. Quantum computing, the ability of quantum computing to get involved and mess up the crypto world. Can someone speak to that? Perhaps there's someone smarter than me, Peter. Yeah, go ahead.

Go ahead, Lloyd. perhaps someone smarter than me peter yeah go ahead go ahead lord yeah i was just going to say that my understanding is that that's like it's virtually impossible but to the extent that there's a possibility that they say crack bitcoin this can be upgraded by the miners and they can deal with it and the incentive to do that i mean there's there is nobody with incentive to destroy the the blockchain but anyways, my understanding is that if we get close to the ability to somehow magically crack this encryption, we can upgrade the encryption. This is a super long standing topic, right? Ever since the beginning of Bitcoin, I do actually think this is a not likely but meaningful existential threat that we should be taking

more seriously than we take now. On the one hand, the thing that makes me feel better about it is that if, you know, quantum computing gets good fast enough that it's a threat to the type of cryptography that Bitcoin and crypto run on, you know, e-commerce is toast, right? Banking is toast. Yeah. The nuclear codes are toast, right? On the other hand, like industry is on this, right, broadly speaking. And I think that like, those banks, sort of e commerce, you know, the back end, and God knows the NSA have good contingency plans. I do think this is something we become complacent on in Bitcoin. And if you think about what you'd have to do to create a hard fork, right? Because like, you have pushing over to that system would take a while would be really messy. And I would love to see sort of an organized effort to get ahead of this that I don't think is happening right now.

Yeah, makes sense. I think it's a problem for the future that will likely be resolved. But Zach, I think the most overwhelming point you made is if it's a problem for us, it's a problem for literally like every system in the world. So we have much bigger problems, I think, if quantum computing becomes a problem for Bitcoin. Vinny, I would love your opinion on what happened yesterday and what you're looking for now moving forward. Yeah, I mean, I think the bounce back was interesting. I'm not too sure, to be honest. I think this is a very, very difficult market to try and trade. And so, you know, sorry, I'll tell those messages.

So I'm just looking at this from a global liquidity standpoint. It seems like the market's adjusted to the Japanese carry trade. I guess the real question is, like, you know, 24 hours ago, I mean, 36 hours ago, we had, you know, everyone calling for emergency rate cuts from the Fed, i still think was it would be a bad idea and i think those calls are probably supersided right now and i think the fed is they're going to be pretty stoic about not making anything any big moves until um the next fomc meeting in about five or six weeks time so i i think uh the most important important indicator for where the markets go is actually next week with CPI and I think PPI as well coming out.

If CPI even creeps up a little bit, I think the rate cut is under threat. If CPI drops, I think we'll be probably closer to – Powell ruled out 50. I think he may backtrack on that. They may do 50 basis points cut in September after this kind of road bump the past couple of days. But the problem with cutting rates right now is that you basically exacerbate the unwinding of the carry trade.

So this is like the most complex situation I've ever seen in my years watching the markets and being both an investor and a commentator. I just don't know how this plays out, to be honest. I don't think anyone knows. Anyone who says they know, they don't know enough.

Yeah, I agree because nobody knows everything and nobody knows what they don't know. It seems ridiculous, but I don't think anybody can get to the bottom of exactly what's happening here at this point. There's so much data so so so you know how i i would play this is um and how i'm playing it right now is uh you know i mean i've got a whole bunch i agree with peter on the theorem i've got a bunch of i've got a bunch of put options on ethereum at like i think 2200 right now um and i'm basically playing this

market with options and i'm keeping capital in, you know, capital basically is cash. So I think if you want to trade the market, trade options, because you can just put small amounts of cash into an options trade, at least relative to your portfolio, and not risk the whole bankroll on something. If the market goes the other way, you know, you don't lose all your cash. Trading the underlyings right now, I just worry about a liquidity crisis yanking the floor from underneath you. If you have a long-term plan to acquire more Bitcoin or Solana, that's probably fine.

You can keep stacking those up. But not touching any alts right now. No effing way. I think stay out of the alt markets for sure. And obviously when it comes to stocks, Apple might be a good time to buy it right now. But I don't want to be the guy counter-trading Buffett. I was going to say, do I want to be buying Warren Buffett's bags? Yeah, exactly.

Someone buying Warren Buffett's bags is probably mostly the worst trade in history. Is it just what he was selling or what he was buying? You probably don't want to be on the other side of those trades. So I just don't know enough about the entire market. No one does in its entirety. So my advice is long cash, accumulate your core positions, and use options to hedge your risk. This is pragmatic. I mean, Dave, would you view this as one of the most complex situations you've seen in your years? Peter, I'd love your answer on that after.

Well, I mean, I don't think it's as complex as it is as people are just misunderstanding what the Fed really cares about. I mean, I think that the Fed kind of, you know, take politics out, which, by the way, you can't, because I think politically is the only reason why I think there'd be a red rate cut. There's no chance in hell that if it wasn't for political influence that Powell would be cutting rates in September. Why? Because what does he actually want? He cares about the 10-year. He doesn't care about the stock market. I mean, in fact, if the stock market, you know, kind of went down another, you know, we still haven't even had a major correction, you know, in terms of the wealth effect. I mean, you know, I don't think he has a problem with a 20, 25 percent stock, you know, peak to trough stock market correction.

I don't even think he cares about 30 or 40 percent, given how far and how long this rally has moved. But what he absolutely cares about is the fact that Treasury can't finance a deficit if yields get back toward 5 percent, which is where they were. Now that it's under 4 percent, it's almost mission accomplished. But he'll never say that. So, I mean, I think that you have to understand, I mean, the unwinding of the carry trade, when bond yield, when it became more of a flight to safety to U.S. bonds, that was kind of like the, oh, okay, well, the world's not going to hell kind of moment for people at the Fed. That's why I thought when Jeremy Siegel said that, I was like, oh, my God, has he lost his mind? I mean, because literally, unless the bonds went down, unless the long bond in the U.S.

went down at the same time as the stock market market because Japan was selling it, then I don't think the Fed cares. So but that said, I agree with Vinny in terms of it's a tricky market to trade because it feels like at least for the next month or so until the election takes full shape and we really know what the policies are that that we're kind of toward the bottom end of the long range that we've had. It feels, I thought 56 was equilibrium. And until a new direction is established, that's what we would see in Bitcoin. So I'm kind of agreeing with a lot of what Vinny is saying, but I think it's really important to understand what the Fed actually does care about. They care about inflation and they care about preserving, keeping the bond, the U.S. government's ability to borrow cheaper under control.

Pierre? Yeah, I think the Fed's, I mean, if you look at the Fed, people want to know what the Fed's going to do. I don't think the Fed knows what it's doing. And I think the Fed is absolutely a bunch of idiots. I mean, they were late raising rates. They denied that we even had inflation. Yeah, I think they've blown it every step of the way. I'm a Fed fader, quite frankly. I'd like to know what the Fed's going to do because I want to be on the other side of that trade. They don't think the soft landing is a real thing.

I mean, honestly, I don't think there's a possibility of a soft landing. I think it's going to be a hard landing. There's just no way they can bring the plane down without stalling the engine. I just don't see it happening. And a lot of it's to do with, like, you know, as they drop rates,

and so Japan has to raise rates. They don't have a choice. They've got domestic inflation. They've got, you know, an aging population that has fixed income. If inflation creeps in more there, and this is why they're so aggressive about it, the cost of living for their retirees just keeps going up. And inflation is going to eat away at their way of life.

So I've spent a lot of time in Japan the past couple of years. And I can tell you now, I see why the market's freaking out there, because they need to protect their own, and they will, and they will raise rates. And if they're raising and the U.S. is dropping at the same time, man, that's going to be a shitstorm. Huge. Their debt is $1.4 quadrillion. It's like 12 zeros. How do you even tackle a number like that? It's like close to 300% of their GDP.

I mean, you mean trillion, not quadrillion, right? In yen, it's, it's 1.4 quadrillion. Oh,

sorry. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's cooler to say it in yen. Cause it's quadrillion. It's just, it's just,

it's a nightmare that has no way of getting fixed. It's just not going to happen. They don't have a growing population. I think it's negative. This is just a catastrophe. Sounds bad, but it is. And that's why I'm curious. People seem to have some confidence here that we're bouncing in the bottoms in and that the Fed has done their job.

But usually these sell-offs are not just a very quick bottom. confidence here that we're bouncing in the bottoms in and the Fed has done their job. But usually these sell-offs are not just a very quick bottom. I mean, it certainly could be, but I think it's going to be interesting to see. Let's talk about that. Let's talk about that. I mean, Bitcoin tanked from, I mean, after the Trump speech, it was 69,000. We're at 56. We went down to just, I think, $48,000 or so yesterday.

And it hasn't gone back to the 60s. Even though the market's kind of rebounding and confidence is coming back in, it's still struggling to get back into the 60s. And it's been down here before. You know, with all the ETFs and everything else, you would think that is going to be this was a blip and everyone's like oh it's over but one thing I'm noticing recently is Bitcoin is kind of the canary in the coal mine for the stock market when you know you see it's kind of stalling out and grinding and then the market catches up so it's in the past has always been whatever the market does Bitcoin follows and I'm noticing recently it's more like if the market's going to tank, Bitcoin goes first. And then Ethereum this weekend was just weird. I mean, it was sitting at 2,800 or 2,900 last week, Friday. And it was

just weird because it was sitting there and the market's saying, look, there's a crisis brewing in Japan and just sits there and then it just tanks. So there's weird delays between crypto and the overall market. I haven't gone ahead around it yet, but it's different from what it used to be. Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if Bitcoin in a vacuum had a drop like this and bounced and the bottom was in. I was

just, you know, getting to your point, it's like in context of it happening everywhere, seems a little different. Right. It's just not just Bitcoin. Has anyone heard or seen anything? Because the other the next big piece of I don't know, we'll call it news, you know, crypto specific news is will the Democrats ever, first of all, will they have a platform? Great question. The Republicans obviously put a lot of stuff with crypto in the platform. We understand what it is, et cetera. With someone who Bernie Sanders campaigns for as the VP now on

the ticket, it's setting up to be much more likely to be a binary again. Obviously, Ro Khanna is having his thing on Thursday. The real question is, is there any, you know, does anyone have a clue what the policies will be or what they will say, or are they just going to leave it unsaid and hope that people just don't notice? I do not think they will ultimately leave it unsaid, but it's in flux. And the big question is, who is going to get to be sort of the senior policy advisor for the campaign? Definitely, Ro Khanna is in the mix now. That's sort of the best news in policy circles. I think there's an understanding that like that is the point of contact you want with the Harris campaign.

But, you know, like worst case scenario is you pick someone like Elizabeth Warren to be the head of Treasury. I think sort of the who has Harris's ear and who is being floated for key policy positions that affect Bitcoin and crypto. You know, look at OCC, Treasury, you know, and then specific like FinCEN, OFAC, like that's the type of announcements I would pay more attention to than the vice presidential candidate. If it was someone younger, that might be a different story. But I don't know how impactful Walls is one way or the other. I live in Minnesota. It's my home. I'm in Minnesota right now. I will just say the old saying is that people is policy. The dams have declared their policy by picking Tim Walz. He is turning Minnesota very, very quickly into another version of Southern California, the Los Angeles, California. Yeah, the choice of Tim Walz is a declaration of the

policies that the harlot has now declared. But how do you really feel, Peter? yeah i think that uh but but to zach's point i don't i think we're gonna get it down the road i don't think anyone knows any of the policies yet so crypto can't be very hot on the list as much as well i mean look if people want to pussyfoot around it as much as possible i mean i still haven't decided what i'm voting for because we don't know all the choices at this point. We still don't know where we're at. I'll wait until the fall. But the simple reality is that if you believe in economic freedom and one ticket is for government control over all things, you have your answer. And that certainly, certainly seems to be the case. But, you know,

as I said, it'd be really important. To me, I agree with Arthur Hayes in one thing very clearly. Anyone who thinks that Harris-Waltz aren't effectively running as an incumbent, they're smoking something. You know, obviously, any policy that they want to do, they could start now. They don't have to wait until after an election. And if you delude yourself by saying that they do have to wait until after the election, then, you know, well, you know, people can delude themselves. My father used to say the easiest person to lie to is yourself. But that's what a, right? I mean, I think we do not know yet whether and to what extent they're going to run as an incumbent Biden administration part two. To the extent that they start doing policy now, that would be explicitly running as Biden administration part two because the Biden administration is currently still in power. I think this is subject to the same waiting game that Scott was just talking about. Oh, no, I agree with that. I understand what you're saying. I'm just saying there's no reason in the world why they couldn't start their policy stuff now. The issue is the reason why they won't. If they're breaking from Biden, right?

Like Kamala Harris can't fire Garyary gensler no but she could but she could make a statement that says that she doesn't believe that that these this policy this policy this policy makes sense totally and we might and we might well get that i think it's just too early right they just picked their vp and like look the the criticism of kamala that i think is totally right is that she's a blank slate she doesn't really seem to believe in anything in particular. And she kind of blows with the political winds. But the flip side of that is like, they haven't decided what kind of candidate they're going to run her as. And so I just think it's a little bit too early to like, have a firm view of her policy or likely policy positions and what that means for crypto. And like, I think specifically for this industry, and I spent a lot of time in policy stuff, there is a danger in presuming that she is going to be just an extension of the disastrous policies under the Biden administration.

Because, you know, I think she has a very good chance of winning and we can't afford to completely alienate that side and back them into a corner where people like Warren and Gensler will have the same influence that they had over the last four years. Like that would just be terrible for the industry. Well, the conclusion that you just reached, I think everyone on this call, everyone on this space should be at your conclusion. I think you're 100% right. The industry should not burn bridges to work with a potential Harris administration. That is absolutely true. It would be crazy to do that. That said, the industry should be putting their time and effort behind pushing that administration, potential administration, in the direction we want. I also agree with that. But if you have to put your money where your mouth is, when push comes to shove, it's also

pretty damn clear that unless they're willing to say something very, very specific and start taking policy positions that they absolutely can take, which would cause changes in the short run, then I think that kind of teaches yourself. I mean, let's be blunt. You don't have to fire Gary Gensler to put enormous pressure for him to drop the cases that effectively make against the good actors, the Coinbase case, the Kraken case, the Uniswap case, et cetera. I mean, there's no accusations of fraud there. It's extremely clear that you could have, you know, you could have multiple judges will come up with different things. They themselves recognize that, the SEC, by getting rid of the, you know, saying Solana's

a security and one judge, and they'll probably not get rid of it against a judge that might be more favorable. At the end of the day, that sort of uncertainty, the only people who think that's a good idea are people who want crypto to be killed. It's that simple. And so, you know, they could take action very, very easily by forcing the SEC's hand on that without getting rid of Gary. And Gary would, you know, I don't even think if he were on this call, he would disagree that he's kind of been backed into a hard place by being pushing this process. So there are things they can do.

The question is, is do you trust them if they don't do them? And my answer is no. But trusting them doesn't mean you don't work with them, Zach. I mean, you got to. Well, it's not just about working with them if they win. And look, I think I have a little bit of, I get a little bit of credit. I spend a lot of my time working specifically on crypto policy issues, specifically around the courts, both in terms of the securities law issues.

And then the one I honestly care about more, which is can you use this, you know, technology in a freedom oriented way? Can you self custody assets? Are we going to throw developers in jail for creating neutral technology that then gets used by criminals in ways that they have no control over? Right? I think this is a hugely consequential issue. But I think our focus right now, and like, look, we've done a really good job talking to the Trump campaign. I'm very confident if Trump wins, we'll have a lot of influence in that administration. We'll be able to sort of place people, we'll be able to vet people similar conclusions, and not to sort of prejudge or start from a place of skepticism. If they get into power, and then they start behaving the way that the Biden administration did, there's all the time in the world for us to, you know, plan

lawsuits to get into a defensive crouch, and to, you know, raise the alarm. But like right now, I think we have a limited window of opportunity to give them political cover that they can reach out to the industry and they can make different decisions. And like, to me, that is more important than sort of the question that we'll have to face eventually in November of who do you trust more? I think that's a valid question. I just don't think that that is the most pressing question right now. The most, again, and the most pressing question right now is how do we give Democrats political cover and give them the education that they need to make these kind of policy signals or announcements that the industry desperately needs? Is that fair? Yeah, I mean, let's hope that they go to industry leaders for their opinions.

We did see the first Ro Khanna roundtable. And Dave, as you said, I think the second one was supposed to be yesterday, but now it's potentially going to be on Thursday. So this is their chance, right, Dave? Yeah, I mean, look, it's very interesting because all that they need to do, honestly, from an industry perspective, is not break tradition. I mean, Biden, make no mistake, Gensler was a very big break in tradition from Obama. Obama had a political independent, Mary Shapiro, as his SEC chair. By the way, Trump had a political independent, Jay Clayton as his SEC chair. And so having an extremely partisan SEC chair was a break with tradition, not tradition. And so it would be really simple for Harris to say, you know Y, Z. And there are a lot of them that they have and leave this alone, which I think is the outcome that as the industry, we're perfectly happy with. I mean, I think the industry would prefer partisan being, yeah, rah, rah, push us.

But, you know, the fact is a level playing field is what we really want. I think we can be even more specific, though, about what happened with Gensler, right? It's not just they chose someone randomly who happened to be a partisan. And in fact, like before he got into office, Gary Gensler seemed like someone who might be good for crypto, right? Statements he'd made on securities law issues, the tokens while he was in the private sector, while he was at the CFTC, were much friendlier. Specifically, what happened here, and I think the real lesson we need to draw from what happened with the Biden administration, is the power that was given to Elizabeth Warren as part of what it looks like a political deal for her to drive out of the race and endorse Biden over key appointments,

right. And what Peter said about people is policy, I think is completely true. And that's why like in this particular moment, we need to be really focused about who the people are around Harris. I don't think that Walls is someone who was added to the campaign to make important policy decisions, especially around technology and crypto. Like he's he actually looks older than he is, but he's still old. I think he's there to sort of be a steady hand and be a sympathetic figure. I think we need to really think hard about who is talking to Harris about these issues, who will be in a position to staff up the administration and like, let's all collectively hope that's Ro Khanna.

Yeah. Awesome conversation, guys. I know Mari, you want to, you and I want to chat to Bernd Banksy here and Zion. Perfect timing for that. someone let you run with that yeah if anyone doesn't know zion is the guy if anyone heard a crazy story back during the nft hype of a crazy guy that decided to burn a banksy um well he's with us on stage now um zion how are you man i'm doing good i'm doing good. I'm doing good. How are you doing today? Thank you for having me on. Pleasure. But you're not doxxed, are you?

I'm kind of doxxed. I mean, you could just Google Burn Banksy and now my face shows up everywhere. My real name is Anthony. That helps. Anthony. Well, now you're doxxed. Good to meet you, Anthony. Now it's all over.

Yeah, but can you just tell me what that was in the last cycle? I know we're going to be talking about Zion, but can you tell me more about the strategy of burning at Banksy? What did you do? How did it go? What was the goal of it? And then also maybe I want to ask you a question unrelated to Xion and then we'll dig into Xion is what happened to NFT since? We'd love to hear your thoughts on NFT market now. Yeah, absolutely. So I mean, to set the stage for everyone, this is I think, February 2021. I think the highest average or the highest NFT sale was probably $100,000. And so me and two friends bought a Banksy for about $90,000. You know, at this time, a lot of people were making fun of us for buying, you know, CryptoKitties and, you know, CryptoPunks at the time. And this

was a time where CryptoPunks was a very normal thing. You know, and with that being said, we pretty much said, well, this thing, it's not going to be in a living room anymore. It's not going to be in the digital world. And let's see if the value maintains. So we bought the actual Banksy, we digitalized it, sold it as an NFT, and then lit the original on fire. And then that NFT sold for about, I think it was $400,000, which for most of 2021 was the highest average price NFT sale. And it kicked off what we see today. And talking about what we see today, what do we see today? How do you compare today to what we had in the previous cycle?

I think we are starving for something new. I think we saw a lot of innovation. I think we saw, you know, you look at a spark that was created and a revolution that came out of that, and then a revolution that is yearning for another spark, right? And so that's what I think we see today. But a ton of innovation over the last three years that requires more. Nice, man.

And what was your path to building Zion before we dig into what Zion is? How did you go from burning your bank seat to where you are today yeah uh i mean i've been in i've been working in this industry since 15 um and it was my nightmare for me to uh to mint this nft and uh i think that kind of got started this whole trend of well i want my parents to be able to use this i want my grandparents to be able to use this. I want my grandparents to be able to use this. If we want to democratize access for everyone, this shit cannot be so hard to use. And that started off by building a product and kept going and kept going

until getting to a base layer of infrastructure and saying, we're done. We just want regular people to use this complete Web2 experience. Yeah, so let's... Okay, it's pretty fascinating. Your whole story is pretty fascinating. The whole story is fascinating. Um, I'm going to ask the most, the question that ever comes to every mind that every VC loves to ask

is why another L1, especially at this stage? Yeah. I mean, and I think L1 is just semantics. Um, every, it doesn't really matter what chain you're on. We actually connect with every chain. Um, we just effectively need a ledger to support chain abstraction and be able to have a settling ground for whether it's USCC, whether it's ETH, whether it's SOL, be able to have one place where everything settles and we can mirror transactions

everywhere. So it's more functionally than anything. I'll tell you, I did not start this journey off wanting to build an L1. This was more of a necessity than anything. Sorry, I muted myself. Can you explain it a bit further? How does it work exactly? What are you guys offering? Just for an average

listener, it's not too deep into the ecosystem. We believe that the biggest obstacle to crypto is wallets. I think we're going to look back in three years and say, just look back at this concept of wallets and say wow what were we doing here um it is just the source of pain it is a source of misery uh and there's a source of a ton of friction and so the way that we also kind of look at this is uh you know the first and only

completely walletless l1 um that's collaborative with everything. I just realized that we're on your cap table as well. We're working with you as well. You just told me. I love it, man. I love it. Because I know you're working with Scott. I'm like, I swear to you, I got to start looking at your website.

I know you guys. I was going. Well, let me tell you, you make good decisions, my man. I will tell you, you make good decisions. I appreciate it because it's usually Scott annoyed that I got all the good projects and then Scott brings you on board. It brings you today on. And, and, um, and I'm going through your website and I'm going through what you're doing. Obviously I know your story when you burn a Banksy and I send your details to the team of guys. No, just speaking to Anthony.

I love the guy. I want to work with him. Please get them on. Um, and then, then Ned from the team replies already long, long, long, long time. He says to me long, long, long time ago, back in May. I love it, man. Made my day. Well, I'm glad now. I'm more excited to chat to you. So you started talking about wallets.

Can you explain more? How do you solve this? Because you seem to be, you know, you said L1 is just semantics. Can you expand on that, exactly what you're offering? And you started with wallets, which is part of your ecosystem, I guess. So yeah, everything is a smart contract account on the protocol level. And so if we want to take this back into the history of crypto, you needed to store a private key somewhere. And the internet is just not a browser is not a great place to do that. So you needed a wallet to store this private key.

And this is before we had the concept of smart contracts. And you're starting to kind of see smart contracts play into things more and more. But if we take an idea from like signal, I think this is the best way to think about it you take the encryption of signal mixed with the smart contract capabilities of the blockchain and that's exactly how our encryption works um and so with that we can then have smart contracts uh mirroring on any chain in the world doing anything that we want executing any code that we want all with um social logins or email logins so completely trying to remove every aspect of crypto for you know this next crossing the chasm moment of crypto would it be fair to oversimplify and say it's like the shopify of smart contracts i know that's an

overused term for anything it's pretty simple but it's actually making it very easy for anyone to create a smart contract that just is interoperable among all the main chains. I think that's a great way of thinking about it. I think it's the first time that you're able to have a total addressable market larger than MetaMask, which I think is a huge problem in this industry. All right, man. And you've raised a while ago. I think you've raised in the previous cycle. You've got some big names on your cap table.

You've got Hashkey on there. You've got Circle and Amokas Parton. This was a multi-coin. Yeah, Morningstar as well. So a pretty impressive cap table. And there's Scott Melker there as well. Wow, all right. Yeah, that's Scott and Amokas.

Those are our best names. Figments there. So tell me more about it. You've raised over $36 million. What have you done since? There's a fair bit of capital raised. I think it was in the last bull market before the bubble popped, to correct me if I'm wrong.

And then you've just had three years of just a brutal bear market. What happened in those three years, two, three years? And then what's your plan at the moment, when's your listing, et cetera? Yeah, so we raised, I think in total, I think we raised 11 million, 10 million, somewhere around that. Yeah, 11 million.

11 million in 2022 total. And then brutally, brutally took the bear. And I think the main thing that we realized with the bear was that we looked with the bear was that we looked around and said, wow, there's four users in this industry. And I know for a fact that this is going to happen again, and this is going to continuously going to happen. And so we shifted our focus to building the infrastructure and perfecting it so that the time that bull market came around, we were in this position to say, Hey, we've completely removed

the crypto if we want to onboard new users. And so heads down building the team obviously got cut. And then come April, we raised $25 million. You know, we had an ecosystem of probably about April, which year? This year. Oh, this year, this year. That's where we came in. All right, cool. Nice. Congrats. So we raised 25 million million men um you know we proved out that we could build a complete web 2 experience and now it's just about hyper scaling and launching as uh as best we can nice man um one thing you've said which is interesting you said you want to make crypto disappear do you mean just make the complexities of crypto disappear? Is that what that statement means? I want to make crypto disappear.

I want you to be able to use an application, you to not need to know that there's crypto on the back end, but for you to get all the benefits from crypto. Okay. And let's look at the metrics. How many users do you currently have? Any users, any projects? We have about 3 million users on our testnet.

We have about 40-something million transactions and about 200 ecosystem projects deployed. Yeah, we're moving very, very quickly. Thank you. How did you get the 3 million users? When and how? What was the strategy for that? And what are those users doing?

What are some use cases you could talk about? I'll tell you exactly what it is. I'll tell you exactly how we got the 3 million users. And I say this because I've been working in this industry for a very long time. And this was the first testnet that I've ever made that both my parents, my grandparents, and my entire family could use. It is completely Web2 experience. You don't need to know that you don't have to download a wallet.

All you do, enter your email, get a 2FA code and there's your account. It's complete web two. And so to answer the question on users, it's so easy and it is the easiest user experience you're ever gonna see in this industry. When it comes to what people can do, I mean, I think we had 20 apps deployed on this test net

that people were able to test out with. One of them, EarnOS, brought companies like Uber and Sunglass Hut and the NorthBase to testnet campaign. We just had a very big PR moment with that, I think two weeks ago. And then they committed to double their spend for our mainnet launch as well. So very, very excited about that. And everything that we do is, you know, we're not in the business of making yet another Perp stacks or NFT marketplace. We want to build things that people actually use that goes along with the ethos of crypto.

What are the users using it for at the moment? There's about 20. I mean, there's 20 different applications. It ranges anywhere from it ranges anywhere from a art generation app to a direct marketing platform to a predictions market to a loyalty programs. trying to think of some more, to loyalty programs. I think we have 20 in total, and I don't think any, and then I think none of them are kind of financial, I guess I could say. Okay.

It's one thing when you talk about the abstraction, the generalized abstraction, the protocol level, you have different categories there. You've got it on the, we don't have much time, so this will be probably the last technical question, but you said you've got it on the, you know, spans accounts. You talked about the wallets, signatures, gas, interoperability, pricing, devices, payments, and more.

Can you talk about the gas aspect of it? Yeah, absolutely um you know and so the main thing one of the main hurdles for the industry uh is this concept of gas regular people don't know what gas is uh and then if you've ever tried to use another blockchain right whether it's polygon or eth whatever it is you need that native token and you need to buy that native token from somewhere before you can use it. And so what we wanted to say is, and we built this about a year ago, we wanted to say, I never want an end user to see gas ever.

And so whether that is something more like an eBay kind of model where you take off the top, you know, and everything's denominated in USDC. So complete looking like a web two experience. And then that pays for a transaction, or the builders able to sponsor it, or we're able to convert any token to Zion and be able to run the network. You know, the thing that we wanted to do there was a denominate everything in a fiat currency, ideally. B, make sure that anyone, whether you hold any crypto token, was able to participate. And then C, end user never had to see gas in their entire life

if they don't want to. Going back to the raises, what valuations do you do the raises at? And then do you have a date of listing? Do you have any exchanges, any launchpads you launch passing share I could say soon to that last one the most recent valuation was 500 million oh wow okay and then you don't have any dates for the listing or exchanges or launch pass to share another one is the you've got got liberto dritto e sano. I don't want to butcher it.

So is that, does that mean free upright and sound is your choice or did the chat GPT butcher it? It's written on your website. Absolutely butchered. We actually have the new update coming this week for that. Okay. Okay. It's good.

You were the first person to catch that. I have known that that has been an issue for so long. And you were the first person to have ever caught that. Yeah, I know. I was butchered Italian. I was just trying to figure out what it means. It's at the end of the website. So I just wanted to scroll all the way down.

But anyway, look, I appreciate it. First, I appreciate you coming on. I love what you built such a long way from burning a bank seat to building this. The last two questions I'll ask, the first one will be more of a vc question what would you say to someone that says hey everyone's trying to fix uh the the complexities of crypto has been the one of the selling points for the last you know since last two cycles even back in 2017 um what makes zion different to others and maybe you could talk a bit about the Burt team, what you guys have done. Talking about the team behind the project that allowed you to get to

this level and raise so much capital at such a massive valuation. Absolutely. I mean, my first response to that question is we've done it, you can try it and it's live. You know, and we can put our money where our mouth is with that, of actually having a Web2 experience. I think that's obviously the main differentiator there. Our team is absolutely phenomenal. We have been extremely fortunate. Our CTO was a person who built the first ever bridge from Cosmos to Ethereum, which has been an absolute, you know, lifesaver when coming to all the interoperability that we're doing. We have the head of DevOps from Terra, or the old head of DevOps from Terra, I should say,

which are the largest value transfer pretty much in all of crypto on the day that it crashed. And so being able to deal with all the traffic that we have, kind of ranging from that. The engineering manager coming from Flow, being able to kind of bring the experiences there and understand where a lot of the issues fit with what retail clients actually want. Another DevOps coming from Unity and honestly just a stack team. I think we're 17 at this point ranging from pretty much everywhere in this industry and just all kind of hardcore veterans of this industry that I could not be here without. That's well, congratulations on what you built. Congratulations on having Scott and us

along with some of the leading VCs, but most importantly, congratulations on your journey, man, from burning your bank to triggering the NFT hype to now having millions of users and raising so much capital half a billion dollar valuation by some of the smartest people in the industry. So I love what you're doing man and last question is unrelated

to the project and maybe a final message to the audience, a message about your project but also just about the ecosystem in general, a lot of people are talking about how the VC backed projects are struggling right now, a lot of projects delayed talking about how the the vc back projects are struggling right now a lot of projects delayed launch um and and some people saying just way too many projects and what's your response to those people and then maybe a final message about zion um i think there's always going to be a lot of vc back projects i think the ones that are trying to

launch quickly and get a lot of money quickly and then leave quickly should die. But I do think that there are a lot of people who have been building in this industry for many, many years and will be here for many, many more years. I think the issue with VC money, unfortunately, sometimes it's easy to come by, but I think it also weeds out people very, very quickly. And yeah, there's positives, there's negatives, you know, but I think a lot of the strongest companies and a lot of the strongest infrastructure that's allowed, you know, a lot of this to be kind of built, you know, unfortunately has been BC-backed, you know, and I think it is the name of the game.

But I don't, obviously, I'd be a hypocrite if I said I disagree with it, right? It's about how you want to run your company. It's about how you want to choose to scale and what you need to do. So if you got to get the money, get the money and then do what you got to do. I think at the end of the day, the only people who lose are the people who give up. I appreciate it, man. Yeah. What was the other question?

Last question. Last message for the audience. If your investors, I see a couple of your investors in the last message for the audience um if your investors i see a couple of your investors in the audience by the way um and your community and his final message for zion cool uh yeah i mean final message for zion is we have a ton of exciting stuff coming i hope i hope that people eventually use zion without ever knowing that they're using zion and the goal for zion is to be invisible, to have the next Facebook or to have the first Facebook and to actually build applications in this industry that people want to use that are different. And so anyone we are hiring extremely

aggressively, consistently putting job postings up every day, expanding our ambassador program, which is an awesome cult of people. And I see them in the audience right here and i have to thank them they're awesome uh our investors are awesome most specifically mario uh and scott again thank you for having me but i actually got a power back right in time for the back half but didn't want to interrupt you missed it scott scott did you hear did you just just to be very clear the most important part that i hope you didn't miss is that I'm also on the cap table, motherfucker. It's not just you. I didn't hear that. Hey, man, listen.

It's not only you. It was burnt at the beginning. I'm just saying. All right, but it's not right here. We can both. Can't we all just get along? Just in case you want to flex this. But no, I appreciate you coming on, man.

It was a great discussion. Really enjoyed it. And congrats on your success, bro. I can't wait to call Bert after this call and get you removed. I think Mario's calling me right now to get you removed. Don't

answer his call. It's spam. I don't know, man. I don't know why I wouldn't. All right, guys. Anthony, really appreciate it, man. Zion, congrats on what you guys have built. And for the audience, really appreciate having you today on a green day after yesterday's depressing day. We did like a 14-hour space yesterday. But today was hopefully good news.

Luckily good news. See you everyone tomorrow. Bye, everyone. Thanks a lot, Anthony. Thank you. See you, bro. Bye.