The Wolf Of All Streets - BREAKING! MicroStrategy Wins Fair Value Accounting! | Crypto Town Hall

Episode Date: September 6, 2023

Crypto Town Hall is a daily Twitter Spaces hosted by Scott Melker, Ran Neuner & Mario Nawfal. Every day we discuss the latest news in the crypto and bring the biggest names in the crypto space to share their opinions. ►►OKX Sign up for an OKX Trading Account then deposit & trade to unlock mystery box rewards of up to $60,000!  👉  https://www.okx.com/join/SCOTTMELKER  ►►THE DAILY CLOSE BRAND NEW NEWSLETTER! INSTITUTIONAL GRADE INDICATORS AND DATA DELIVERED DIRECTLY TO YOUR INBOX, EVERY DAY AT THE DAILY CLOSE. TRADE LIKE THE BIG BOYS. 👉 https://www.thedailyclose.io/   ►►NORD VPN  GET EXCLUSIVE NORDVPN DEAL  - 40% DISCOUNT! IT’S RISK-FREE WITH NORD’S 30-DAY MONEY-BACK GUARANTEE. PROTECT YOUR PRIVACY! 👉 https://nordvpn.com/WolfOfAllStreets    ►►COINROUTES TRADE SPOT & DERIVATIVES ACROSS CEFI AND DEFI USING YOUR OWN ACCOUNTS WITH THIS ADVANCED ALGORITHMIC PLATFORM. SAVE TONS OF MONEY ON TRADING FEES LIKE THE PROS! 👉 http://bit.ly/3ZXeYKd  ►► JOIN THE FREE WOLF DEN NEWSLETTER, DELIVERED EVERY WEEK DAY! 👉https://thewolfden.substack.com/    Follow Scott Melker: Twitter: https://twitter.com/scottmelker   Web: https://www.thewolfofallstreets.io   Spotify: https://spoti.fi/30N5FDe   Apple podcast: https://apple.co/3FASB2c   #Bitcoin #Crypto #Trading The views and opinions expressed here are solely my own and should in no way be interpreted as financial advice. This video was created for entertainment. Every investment and trading move involves risk. You should conduct your own research when making a decision. I am not a financial advisor.  Nothing contained in this video constitutes or shall be construed as an offering of financial instruments or as investment advice or recommendations of an investment strategy or whether or not to "Buy," "Sell," or "Hold" an investment.

All right, Scott, I think you've been shadow banned, man. I can't find you to invite you. Please request because I can't find you. Actually, are you on stage? I'm up here. Oh, you are now. Yeah, I had requested. You didn't see it?

No, but I can't see your... I think you've been shadow banned. It'd be funny. Let me check in a bit. I'll check in a bit. That would be hilarious. That would be just hilarious. I'll resend you a co-host invite

how do you check if you're shadow banned I've seen all those little things but none of them seem to be so convincing Ben's jumping in now he just messaged me so we'll have to find him in there as well cool man I'll read out the news read out the day we got a read

out the day's news after the the chat with ben because i know ben has 15 minutes so i'll try keep it short i just for anyone listening ben will join from his new account so um if you do want to follow ben make sure you do so from his new account right i've sent you a co-host invite. Are you there, Ryan? Cool. Okay, I see Ben in the audience. So Ben, I just sent you an invite but you can also request. Same as a listener. Yeah, I think, Mario,

I think we might be in the glitch. I don't know if that was a shadow ban or if there's just weird things afoot here. But it's the usual. We got Penn up, though. All right. I'm here, guys. What's up, man? Yeah, Twitter Spaces, it's always a roller coaster, an adventure to try to get people on stage.

Yeah, I hear that. And also, it gives me a list. So just want to be clear, I don't have a list. Thank you, everyone. It's like the camera adding weight. Twitter Spaces adds a speech impediment. Never heard that one before. But now I'm tempted to go listen back to myself.

Oh, everybody tells me. So I just use ATHs. All right. I'm trying to get. Hey. I'm getting ran up. Just for anyone listening, this is Ben's new account. I had to check. When I first saw it come up, I'm like, this is another lookalike Ben account. But then when I watched the video

of Ben, you say, hey, this is my new account. I'm like, cool. And then I think your wife retweeted it. So this is Ben. This is not Ben AI. So everyone could follow him. And this is... Yeah, not ben ai so everyone could follow him um and this is yeah ben i've been like the first day all the news broke i i messaged your uh you know your old dm obviously your old account was like hey man is this real and then i got like a patent response from someone on the team and i was like oh shit i guess this is real it's wild but i mean listen

maybe i know you're on limited time um and you know a lot of people listen to this on playback anyways but i mean maybe like just give us the tldr walkthrough i guess uh of what happened and then i definitely want to talk about more focused on what you're going to do moving forward and what that means for you and what it means for bitboy you tweeted you know killing bitboy you you've committed murder right it's over you're being armstrong now yeah yeah exactly and i think i think regardless of what what goes forward um i mean this is you know i've been armstrong now guys you know it's time bitboy is great branding and it was uh you know it was always a little weird being a 40 year old man people call bitboy but you know what?

At this point, there's reason to kill it. And just before I go into kind of what has occurred here, I'm meeting today with TJ, who is my business partner, former business—I don't even know what to call him at this point. But we're meeting today. It's going to be our attempt to mediate and, you know, we'll, we'll see where it goes. And there's still, you know, there's still a chance that we can salvage everything and, and get over hurt feelings and try to move forward. But either way, regardless, no matter what happens going forward you know, I am now in ownership of my own accounts. And, you know, if we go to court, I'll win these accounts.

There's no question about it. Like, I will win the YouTube account. I will win the Twitter account. That's not even a question, really. I know they think that they can win that, but they can't. I've talked to several lawyers, and I don't know who they're getting their legal advice from. But there's no way that I lose my Twitter account and my YouTube account. So those would be coming back to me no matter what, um, what would I do with them? I don't know. I hope it doesn't go there. I hope it doesn't get

there. I hope we're able to somehow figure out a deal today. Um, but regardless, I am going to be moving forward with my own channel, um, and my own socials, uh, going forward. So what, there's still a chance, like I said, we can salvage everything. So, you know, I just tweeted on, well, I used to say tweeted on Twitter. I just posted on X, I guess, about that. So, you know, thoughts, prayers, good vibes, all appreciated today as, you know, we go to kind of hammer something out. This is the first time TJ and I have spoken in two weeks.

This seems like a massive improvement or at least a step in the right direction over the vibe, you know, we were getting over the past couple of weeks. And it all seemed so fast and overnight. Yeah, I know. You were like in Denver hanging out, posting pictures of you at a conference. And then all of a sudden it's like, you know, the conjecture was wild. I've got a lot of questions. Ben, how are you? Well, I just want to be really clear about what happened

what happened is i had an affair i had an affair and everybody knows who it's with at this point it's it's public um and uh you know that you know cassie and that's who it is everybody knows it's cassie and um you know she's still going to be in charge of Ben Coyne. Her position with the Ben Coyne Foundation is not going to be changing no matter what happens today. And she's not, you know, a lot of people at this point would do what, you know, you see this all the time where people get kind of thrown out like a piece of garbage. They were involved in something and they were involved in it and then they get everything taken from them. And it took two of us to tango. And that's not fair. That's not fair to her. And so I'm trying to make sure that she is that she is taken care of as well. But there are a lot of people in

the office that did not like that when they found out. And for obvious reasons, I mean, look, I take responsibility. It wasn't the right thing to do. I take responsibility for it. That drove this entire thing. 100%. Anything else that is being talked about, um, are other issues that, that got brought up, uh, because of this issue. Um, there, there was certainly no relapse. That's, that's false. Um, I admitted I had some diet pills that I was taking and, um, you know,, I also had they were prescription. They're not crazy insane. It's not cocaine. It's not Adderall. You know what I mean? It's it's it was so I can maintain my weight. And so also, you know, like, you know, testosterone, obviously testosterone. I mean, you know, you don't get this manly naturally, I think. I'm just kidding. Kind of.

But the point is, is that, you know, those are secondary issues and there was no relapse. And, you know, I'm not going to I got to be kind of careful what I say about I don't want to say anything right now about the other people in the situation because we're trying to work things out and I'm going to be respectful of the deal we're trying to make. But, you know, there's there we're in a situation here of, you know, throwing throwing stones and glass houses, we're in a situation here of, you know, throwing, throwing stones and glass houses all the way around. And I've been involved in it as well, throwing some stones and glass houses and everybody

that has been involved in this has. And I do want to say that there are two people that are getting a lot of hate and they need to be excluded from it. Um, Frankie candles and AJ, they have both been great. They, they've not said anything bad. They haven't turned on me. And so those two people, AJ writes crypto, like those two people deserve, you know, they don't deserve any hate is the long and the short of it. We could get into who's involved in it, who's not involved in it, who was involved in my overthrow, how long it was going on. Those are questions i hope to have answers to there's a lot of speculation even on my side about what

that looks like um but at the end of the day i'm hoping we can we can you know hammer something out ben i have a few questions i mean um it's very interesting i mean i've been following the whole story i actually i mean i did a segment on my show today telling people you're back asking them to join your channel follow your twitter account i really want you to get back up i think you know we've always had a very good relationship i mean we've often gone after each other for fun but i think it's always been very respectful and very good and i want to see you back up on your feet as quickly as possible regardless um just quickly like how did this happen what was your were they are they your partners are you joint equity holders in the business like yeah well well where they could take the business away from you?

Well, like I said, I still don't think legally they can. I just haven't challenged it yet because I'm hoping we can work something out before we have to turn this into a gigantic public lawsuit. And it'll be a gigantic public lawsuit, and it'll go for months and months and months, and it'll be ugly. Well, I'll say terrible things about them. They'll say terrible things about me, and it'll be for months and months and months and it'll be it'll be ugly well i'll say terrible things about them they'll say terrible things about me and it'll be all out war and you know it it is it'll be what it's going to be i hope it doesn't come to that um but i mean do you got i mean who owns who owns the bit boy right right right well these are things i've learned these are things i've learned um i've learned that i was never included in the trademarks for my own logos. All of that was done by TJ.

He owns 100% of the trademarks, his name alone. His dad was installed as CFO. His dad is an IT guy who worked on machines at Wells Fargo. No, Wells Fargo. I'm sorry. Wells Star Hospitals. And he was installed as the CFO. He's the one that lost $3 million for us on Celsius. And I didn't fire him. But he, you know, he's the one that lost three million dollars for us on celsius and i didn't fire him um but he you know he's not actually the company surely you guys are operating through an llc or some kind of c right right we have of course we have we have a partner who has a company i i am 67 owner of the overall company i'm 67 owner of the overall company i've been removing the trademarks yeah should be the trademarks be registered while the company was active? Correct. Correct.

Yes. So, so right. Even though I'm not on it, that's what I'm saying. Like we really start breaking down legally what they can and cannot do. You really start understanding that all of this is reckless and they don't really have the standing to do so. Basically what they've done is, is they were, they were holding threats over my head of, you know, we're going to release this, we're going to say this. And, and it basically boiled down to the affair. So last Thursday, a third party operating on behalf of them contacted my wife and released all these text messages. So by the night, by that night, when everything went public, uh, when everything went public, my wife had already known and my wife had already,

you know, decided to, that she was going to, you know, stick it out, obviously, and that we were going to get You have an amazing wife. I mean, I must say,

I've been watching the interaction. I think it's so good of her to be by your side. That's, I mean, I'm sure she's been through hell. Ryan,

let me just, yeah, go ahead, bro. I kept telling people that, you know, we're going to draw the line somewhere and when the kids and the wife are involved, you've got to stop talking about this football story.

You may have seen some posts. But, Ben, how long was the affair going on for? Like, how long was the affair going on for that your team was so upset about? And why were your team so upset about it? Before we jump there, I do want to just real quickly wrap up the last question, which is, I'm not on the trademarks.

I was removed from the building because of a there was a very specific reason that I won't get into publicly right now. But this would come out in a lawsuit where I was removed from the building and I was told I was going to it. Very shortly, I was going to be placed back on the building deed and the, and our individual real estate company to own the building. And it never happened. And so when you start, when you start looking at those things and also the I have all of our legal documents now, I had to go and get them in a certain way. But and they've been withholding all the, they locked me out of my email address. So I don't even have access. This is where their high grunt is. I don't even have access to my own documents.

I don't have access to the operating. 67% shareholder in the company. If they registered a trademark whilst the company was in existence, any judge in the world is going to deem that they were acting on behalf of the company or they were acting fraudulently. Yeah.

Or they were acting fraudulently. So last week I had a lawsuit and I was going to drop the lawsuit. And that is why they knew I was coming with a lawsuit. And that's why through this third party, they leaked all this information. And basically they put me in a corner to where I had to say, like, okay, I need to reevaluate and see what's happening here and try to get a handle on, you know, what is the damage going forward? And so, you know, I think that, you know, publicly humiliating my family and stuff like that, it was definitely a very, you know, crappy thing to do obviously and going forward um you know i i think that if if we want to drag families in and we want to drag family situations and you know there's a lot of things that i could come out with as well but i don't want to do it i don't want to do any of

that so how long was it going on um i will say uh less i i don't want to give specifics here because like i don't think that's really fair to my wife but i will say it was less than a year less less than a year for sure and and why were your team so upset about the fact that you're having an affair i mean well you have a line between your personal life but on that on that on that on that particular question ben when were the trademarks registered the reason i ask if that was a long time ago, then, you know, I don't want to speculate, but it just seems like it was pre-planned if that's the case. Like, why would that, and your name being removed from the building? Yeah, look, I'm, like I said, today I'm meeting with TJ and we're going to go over some kind of mediation plan. You know know my baseline for mediation and for you know

whatever is me not losing my ownership of the company and um if if we agree to never you know i never come back to the studio again um but that's the baseline is i don't lose my ownership and i don't lose the company then you know i'm not gonna be and you start again and you want i can start again there's you want to start another channel. I can start again. There's no problem with me starting again. The thing is, I'll probably grow. I'm not going to say probably.

I'll grow way bigger than I was before. And I'm not saying that from an egotistical standpoint. I agree with that. And I'm being humble in all this. I want everybody to know this is a new me. You're not going to get the brash bravado, the bit boy. You're not going to get it. I'm just me now. And it's not like I was playing a character. But being bit boy kind of gave me it gave me a pride.

It gave me an ego, you know, and so I'm trying to lay all that stuff down. What I'm trying to say is, is that my when it comes to what were we talking about? What was it? What was the the question the question is that how i was going back to how so so i was talking about about it being pre-planned and my next question was how did you find out about it like how did the message get to you was it publicly like everyone else or you got a private message no well what i was going to say is that um you know going forward like things are going to be be different i'm trying not to throw people under the bus i'm trying to give them you know the benefit of the doubt is I try to regrow everything.

What's going to happen is I'm starting with 100% engaged followers. This is not something we've really seen before in crypto, which is someone who's, well, we have actually seen it for a few people that had their channels removed. We have seen it a few times, but not in this way to where, you know, someone gets removed and stuff like that. And now I'm coming back. And now all of my followers are going to be watching my videos. My engagement and my my retention numbers are going to be insane. And I think that how long it was going on, it's hard to say when you look back at a lot of these moves, they certainly could have been chess moves. But overall, as I'm 67 percent owner, like they're they're not the best chess moves that will hold up in court.

And that's why all this other pressure has been put on me reputationally to motivate me to make a deal that benefits them and doesn't benefit me. And so when I look back and I say how long it was going on, I believe most likely that this plan to overthrow me started in probably the middle of May. There was something that occurred in the beginning of May, um, to where I know there was one person who definitely found out there was one person who found out. Um, and this person started telling people and, um, told people. And I think that it kind of in May, June, there was a plan to, you know, to start tracking me. I don't want to get into the specifics. Like I said, there's a lot of stuff that's been done that's illegal. And absolutely is defamation,

including the relapse statement. I mean, I passed a drug test. There was not, you know, there's not anything I can do that, you know, would nothing I could do that could, you know, show that. But the point is, is that, you know, like I said, I don't I don't I don't know what happened. I don't know how exactly it all occurred. But what I do know is that – hold on one second. I think he's getting out of the car. Yeah, I got to get off here in just a minute. But I don't think that – I think that's about when the plan began, but it could have been much further than that. I think there's a lot of hurt feelings in my office and that's really what all this boils down to but why were the team why were the teams upset about like like why what's i mean listen i get that's not the nicest thing in the world to do but isn't an affair something between you and cassie and your wife and and not really a part of your team

i mean i'm just i'm just trying to play devil's advocate here. You know, you say that the team broke up. Right. Yeah. But that's why it wasn't brought up is the reason. That's why something else was brought up is the reason for it. So my wife and I got into an argument. We got into a big fight a couple weeks ago.

And it was, you know, it was was a big argument it was not over the situation it was over something totally different it was just it was just a a thing married people fight about and and so that was what kind of triggered i think that the action for it to all take place so um but i just want to be clear like i've got to run here i would love to answer more questions but i just you know frankly i I don't have the time right now. But what I would say. Brother, I've sent you a Telegram message. I've also sent you a WhatsApp.

Get back to me. Let's start on this discussion. I also sent a lot of people to channel out. Thank you. I appreciate it. Yeah, and I think my main point here, I just want to, like, my final statement I want to make is that it is between myself and TJ and all the other parties involved. It is still a possibility that we can work it out. And I have been I have come to them from a very humble position.

I'm I'm the figure. I'm I'm the face. I'm the one that's out in the public. And I'm willing to make concessions. I'm willing to think, do things differently. I'm willing to make sure. I think, I think one thing going forward is, is that, um, you know, we need a better corporate structure, not in terms of ownership, but in terms of, uh, different kinds of, uh, you know, people, HR people, like, I think we can have some things that can prevent something like this from ever happening again. Um, and you know, I, I, no matter what happens, no matter what happens at this point, um, I, I do, you know, I'm going to be successful. My channel is going to be successful. I'm still me. I'm going to keep

moving on. Um, there, there may not be as much bravado, but there's still the entertainment. There's still the dad jokes, you know, there's still the honesty the raw authenticism it's it's all me 100 um and if if we if there is some last question ben yeah i know you gotta go but last question um diet pills and specifically the ones that they claimed that you were on i think you you may have spoke about they full of i'm the one i'm the one who said it i'm the one who publicly yeah i mean those diet pills are those diet pills are are filled with amphetamine, right? And amphetamine is, I mean, it takes you up and brings you down. Now, a lot of your behavior has been like kind of crazy and erratic.

I mean, you know, I mean, you know, I mean, some of it, some of it, I know, some of it, some of it, some of it, some of it, I know Ben and I know that Ben, like going to SBF's house is something that Ben would do. But there were times where I think that you weren't Ben. You were a lot more aggressive than Ben. You were a lot, like, I don't know, you just didn't seem like yourself. Do you think the polls changed your personality?

Do you think that made you more volatile or not really? Absolutely not. Absolutely not. Like, these things of me being more volatile, I mean, go look at the history of my channel and go look at me and there's not a change i've always been fiery i've always been feisty dj and i have always been we've always gotten into arguments um but on both sides of us that we joked about on the show all the time because people know me and tj we got into it a lot um and um you know it it is it is what it is going forward and um i i i disagree with that

that you know i i think that that's something that's been used uh against me um obviously but i i think at the end of the day like i said i think we can work it all out and we can figure it out i'm not taking the diet pills anymore they're they're gone i'm never it's all public now i'm never taking them again for sure like Like that's over. And going forward, I think I think we can still salvage this. And that's the message. Like I want people to lay off it network while we try to get this negotiation done and see if there's a way that we can we can come together. And it may look like me doing my own thing for a long time. But I just want everybody to you know thoughts and prayers and well wishes and uh let's see if we can work something out today and i'll keep you guys updated

thank you thank you man uh guys i thought we had the i thought we had cassie cassandra trying to get on the stage i don't know if she's still around if she is around i mean and you still want to come up on stage obviously the invitation's uh pretty open you know we love to hear if there's anything else if there's anything else to add here i do i do want to make a quick statement as well like just for all the rumors that we're you know we try to avoid talking about all the rumors when we covered the story last week scott remember we talked in the back channels and you know the whole relapse or the sec stuff or the fight and all that stuff is good to you know there's a good example of why everyone should wait before starting with

rumors or starting to kick someone when they're down and, you know, all the best wishes to Ben and Bethany and the rest of the family, as Ryan said earlier, but just a good reminder, look, we're in a bear market and everyone's trying to look for something to talk about,

but I think it went a bit too far last week. It always does. Things that were, that people were tweeting and all the rumors that were flying around yeah i think i think look i was i think i and i think on the show and also on my show i kept saying guys it's all fun and games until the family's involved and when the family's involved um when the family starts getting involved we all got a layoff like it's you know i'm sure i'm sure the situation's pretty tough for them as a couple i'm sure the situation is very humiliating for his wife you know she's she i don't know what the ins and outs of the relationship is but i can tell you that you know he's a very public figure

and i think it was a big move by her to actually stand by him i think it was a very a very big you're back yeah you cut out for a bit i think we heard what you said yeah and i saw i saw beth in his uh uh tweets and and that's that's the reason i followed ben's account because she legitimizes it um and uh yeah there's some lines you know we're all gonna get attacked me scott ran ben everyone else but there's some lines everyone in the space should not cross and if you see someone crossing those lines it's never okay it doesn't matter what the reason is um that's probably the most important thing out of all this. And, you know, hopefully the meeting today between Ben and Hit goes well.

And if it doesn't, I'm sure we'll have two entities and we wish them both all the best. But guys, let's move on with the show. I'll take that as a yes. Sure, go for it. Yep. Cool. I've got a bunch of, you know, there's a lot happening. It just sounds quiet. And sometimes we talk about how quiet it is but it's really you know in the back end there's

there's a lot of news going on especially today so we're gonna dig deep into the metamask news we're gonna dig deep into soul news as well um but there's a few other things i said i've never been in a period in crypto where where the the price movement and the fundamentals are so misaligned because we're getting so much fundamental news and we're not getting any price movement on the fundamentals. Imagine all this news in a bull market. Just imagine what the market would actually be, how it would be responding to it. Imagine Solana after the announcement by Visa. So yeah, I mean, this is what I spoke about on my show. I spoke about how the fundamentals,

we're all being subject to short-term noise and we're not listening, we're not watching the big picture because we had MetaMask. Let's look at the three bits of news that have broken in the last 24 hours and how they changed the game. You have MetaMask providing on-ramps and off-ramps directly into DeFi from your MetaMask wallet. Okay, no need to go through a centralized exchange,

no need to go through an OTC. You literally go from MetaMask into PayPal and out of PayPal back onto MetaMask. It's crazy. I mean, that's a game changer. That's number one. Number two, you've got Visa partnering up with Solana. Now, a lot of people will say,

well, that's not big news because they did partner up with ETH. But this is the first time they've partnered with a cheap layer one blockchain that settles transactions directly on the chain as opposed to a layer two.

So it's huge news. It's huge news. This is big and it's huge for Solana. I would have expected Solana to jump at least 10-15% on the news. Solana jumped 4%. Then the news, which I think is big, but I'm actually very, very, very worried if this actually happens, is that the Grayscale ETF legally may actually be approved already. And let me tell you why I say that. that um the reasons why the court why why the sec declined the grayscale etf were were deemed um uh

they were not allowed by the courts i don't know what legal world is but but they were deemed not to be uh valid reasons for declining an etf now in the absence of there is an opinion that says that in the absence of the SEC coming up with more valid reasons why they can't approve this ETF, the SEC is deemed to have already approved the ETF. I'm trying to find the legal terminology for it. I did have it on my show. Any filing. I don't know the legal term, but when people do file, it's actually I'm not saying you're correct or not, but

it's up to the SEC effectively to reject it or it just passively becomes approved. Exactly. So it's called is approved absent affirmative dismissal. They don't actually get approved.

That's kind of a misunderstanding by people. You apply for an ETF and as long as it doesn't get rejected, it ends up getting listed. Well, exactly. Disapproval is vacated, which means that actually, since the disapproval of the ETF is invalid, is vacated,

it means that technically the SEC, unless they come up with another reason, it means technically the sec may have already approved this etf so i've read two two lawyers comment on this and both of them said that if the if the sec doesn't come back with some kind of valid reason to decline the etf the et, the ETF is deemed to be approved. Now, the problem is that at this point, if you read the Grayscale letter, which was sent to them to request an urgent meeting, it says, with each day that passes, the listing of the trust shares is another day where the trust existing investors bear unjustified harm in the form of shares that traded a substantial discount in net asset value. This harm could be avoided if the trust's existing investors bear unjustified harm in the form of shares that trade at a substantial discount in net asset value.

This harm could be avoided if the trust were treated the same as a Bitcoin futures ETP. This is, to me, sounds like a big legal threat. This, to me, sounds like a big legal threat saying, hold on a second, you know, if you don't act to give us what we need to get to, you're causing people harm and basically against the, basically against the court order,

so to speak. So I think it's big news. And I think it's beautiful to see like, it's just like tables are turning so well against the SEC, but then if, so the SEC is not coming back with a valid reason. What does that really mean for all of us? Well,

now Grayscale want to, to engage in, in, in dialogue with the SEC pretty urgently. They sent them this letter. The SEC, from what I understand, and I'm not a legal expert, and I'm sure there's a million and one caveats here, but from what I understand here,

you've got the SEC having to make a very quick decision. But now this is the part that I want to actually talk about because this is the scary part for me. The worst thing that can happen to crypto right now with this much liquidity in the market is the grayscale etf the grayscale bitcoin gbtc trust being converted into an etf why currently in the grayscale gbtc trust there are 625 000 bitcoin give or take those bitcoin have not been able to hit the open market because the trust has been closed. And you haven't been able to redeem your shares for cash. And when you redeem your shares for cash, then they would have had to sell the Bitcoin. These

shares have been trading at a discount. Now, if this becomes an ETF and you want to exit the ETF, you can sell your shares back to the ETF. You can redeem your shares, basically. And that means they would go and sell Bitcoin. I lost Rand there. Yeah, they would go and sell Bitcoin on the market. They would go and sell Bitcoin on the market. And that would mean that a lot of Bitcoin would hit the market.

So this is a big thing. I think the worst result that could happen right now is that Grayscale gets converted into an ETF. Grayscale doesn't want to be converted into an ETF, by the way. They are pushing. They're pushing publicly. But the worst thing that can happen for DCG and Grayscale right now is to lose their cash cow, which is GBTC. And the very fact that they're making so much, charging such incredible fees on a closed-ended fund that can't be redeemed is literally floating the entire DCG business right now. So I think this is a lot of public money.

So why would they? Because they have to. I mean, an ETF is inevitable, so they have to effectively hope that if they get approved, that when the discount closes and obviously their fees have to go way down to be competitive, that the sheer amount of volume that comes in could compensate for it. And also just publicly facing, this is what they have to do. An ETF is coming, GBTC will become useless. So it's sort of like… happens what happens to dcg guys because what happens to dcg when it when it does become an etf it makes less fees well well they make a hell of a lot less money initially yeah but they're way but they're financially they're not in a good place at all to to be able to bear that yeah but but there is also can i can i hop in yeah sure go for it because i have

i have just a thought on this so um, yeah, so I think probably the cynical interpretation is they applied for the ETF filing because they're facing like legal suits from holders who are saying, since we can't redeem, you basically have our money trapped in here and you need to like make efforts to try and like get it so that we can redeem this. And so they're doing this even though they don't want to, and it's actually bad for their business. And the argument there is like, they're charging 2%, not on market cap, but on NAV. And since there's no redemption window, they could do that forever. And even if ETFs are approved, that doesn't mean that GBTC converts into an ETF or that unit holders get to redeem. They could keep that thing running legally in perpetuity, earning 2% on the captive assets that are in that fund. So I think the reason that they're doing it is because they're taking like a glass half full approach, or they're taking like a maximalist approach at the

opportunities. So, you know, would you rather earn like 50 basis points on $100 billion or 2% on 10 billion or $15 billion, right? So I think the thinking here is, by being the leader with the most assets under management, even if other bigger players come into the market, that they're still going to have a head start. And I think that as a second point, we know when it comes to the redemption

and how much BTC is going to come out of grayscale like for sure what's going to happen is the second it's approved arbs are going to pile into this thing because the the premium the discount is going to shoot up to like two or three percent arbs are going to pile in they're going to buy people out of all of their units and then the second that um it turns into an etf they're going to redeem en masse so mario is totally correct about that and that could be billions of dollars but But on the other side of that, you have to consider how much net buying there's going to be of the units of the biggest ETF, when all of a sudden, you know, RIAs and other mainstream investors can buy. We don't know the answer to that.

But that was the question that I had. The next question I had is that will the selling pressure be greater than the buying pressure that will come in now that we finally have an etf along with the news like doesn't the approval of grayscale it's not really approval but if grayscale does become an etf then it doesn't that mean that all other applications will eventually be approved because now we have an etf and we have a path towards becoming etf it's like the positive seems to outweigh the selling pressure that comes with it so that i, there's two different ways to look at that. So one is from a grayscale perspective is the positive greater than the negative? I'm not sure because there are other competitors who might gather assets. But from a net market perspective, like what does this mean for

Bitcoin? I think that the positive is going to outweigh the negative because, you know, with BlackRock and others in the market, there's just going to be more options for mainstream investors to buy into this. So I just think i think like those are two distinct questions that we should answer separately my personal view is that it's going to be good it's definitely going to be a net inflows for bitcoin and it's probably going to be good for a gray scale as well but i think the second point is far less certain at this point what do you think alex what do you think of the deemed approval if the SEC can't

deny it? Have you heard any opinions in that regard? Has anybody heard any opinions in that regard? Dave, I see you. Yeah, there are people on this call I'm sure better suited to answer that question. Yeah, Carlo and David, maybe we can add on to that. Yeah, I think the deemed approval as a matter of

substance is what – He's speaking. David is speaking, man. David is speaking, man. Oh, sorry. I can't hear him. Do you want to – Yeah, I'll drop you down.

I'll drop you down. Yeah, bro, bro. With absolute pleasure. Go ahead, David. So in terms of the substance, in terms of deemed approve, yes, I agree with that. Absent another SEC objection, people have been saying, well, now the SEC could go ahead and object on other grounds in terms of custody issues and not being comfortable with custody issues. But again, I think that that percentage is quite low. And but nevertheless,

the deemed approval is one thing, but there needs to be you need to get some sort of, you know, official pronouncement, although, you know, in order to start, in order to get the wheels turning. By the way, the one thing I do want to say, we keep talking about this conversion of GBTC to an ETF as if it happens overnight. There has never been a trust converted into an ETF. Nobody has ever done this before. So in fact, how this works mechanically, how long it takes, what papers need to be filed, what approvals need to be gotten is a big question mark. I frankly think that that works in favor of the SEC, because if the SEC is going to be forced to approve an ETF, if I were the SEC, I'd much rather go ahead and bank on BlackRock and Fidelity rather than on Grayscale. I assume

the people at Grayscale are smart enough at this point to be thinking about how their business strategy has to change. I assume they've been thinking about this for quite a while now, because clearly, not only is the, you know, the ETF, you know, going to happen, I think, according to, you know, almost everybody, it's just a question of how much time, but also, you know, they're under enormous fire in a pretty big lawsuit that was started by Firthree, but now has been piled on by a bunch of others regarding the fees that they've charged in the past. And there's actually merit to that lawsuit in terms of how you know badly they've gone ahead and essentially but surely risen but that was part of the offer document and the fees were part of

the offer document and you agreed to invest given those fees no no why not no no no because that there are certain rules surrounding the trust. You're not allowed to go ahead and just put anything they want in a trust document. I'll send you the Quinn Emanuel pleadings, but it's a real lawsuit. This is not a dart at the board and see if it sticks. Because I was an investor in the trust. I was an investor in the trust. I was an investor in the trust. And I remember

when we went through the documents of the trust, you know, they charged a certain fee and they charged, I think, if I remember correctly, it was 2%

plus all costs as they relate to the trust. And that's what every investor agreed to. I'd be very surprised if the court could say, okay, well, now you can go back on it

even though we all agreed to do that when we signed the documents. We'll have a more fulsome discussion on this when I have better, you know, understanding of it. How's that, Ren? Yeah, we can. We can. And if anybody has an insight into this deemed approval, to me, sounds like a big thing. The one thing that I can't see legally, but I'm not a lawyer, but I think I understand the legal process to a certain extent, is I don't see how the SEC makes Grayscale go through the whole process again. That to me doesn't sound like it's a feasible

or viable option. I mean, can you imagine that they say, okay, well, look, the court said that we can't decline it based on this. So what we're going to do is we're going to push you back in the line. I mean, come on. It doesn't make sense, which is why I think, if you remember, a couple of days ago I came out and I said, everybody's written off 2023 and they've all gone to 2024. I think the big move is actually going to happen in 2023 and shock everyone. I don't know if it's going to be a positive news or a negative news. I don't know which one it's going to be, but something's

going to happen here. Either the Grayscale ETF gets approved and we get a dump, or the Grayscale gets approved and we get a massive pump. But if it was actually approved or deemed approved, as you said, it would be listed. I don't know what the new opinions are, but we've litigated this a thousand times with a million lawyers here and read 50 articles, and every single one until now has had the same take. I think that maybe they're conflating the fact that now it's not rejected means approval, but I think we all know that the SEC can come up with a new reason to reject. If it was approved, they would have listed it. Then they need to come up with a reason to reject. And then what I understand happens.

And yeah, do they have a deadline? Do they have a deadline for that? No, they don't. But it has to be within reasonable time. And then hold on. There's another thing here. If the SEC come out with another reason for not approving, then Grayscale can go back to take them to court and say, if this was the case, why didn't you include it in your original denial?

But that'll all take forever, right? So that doesn't get the instant listing, I think, that we'd be looking for. Yes. But don't they have to move? They have first mover advantage if they go first. I believe some of the money that is tied up in SEXs would go to the ETF just because it's safer

because then they don't have the risk of having their money with one of the SEXs where you can't see. Like Binance, for example, it takes away some of the worries. And they'll eventually have to go to ETF because if other ETFs open, they're going to lose that first mover advantage.

So aren't they kind of... It's not about... Hold on. It's not about having it in sexist because isn't the custodian Coinbase, correct me if I'm wrong, guys? Yeah, Bitcoin is two separate issues. The custodian

is a centralized exchange, so if that's the issue, then that issue is not resolved by the Bitcoin ETF. But it just operates different than it sucks. I question the first mover advantage in this case, which I normally wouldn't. I mean, obviously with the futures ETF, we saw that Biddo was listed just days before

BTFD or BFD from Valkyrie, and it was a billion dollars went into the first futures ETF approved and tens of millions into the second. So normally that matters. But I think if it's Grayscale and then BlackRock comes in second, it's very, very, very different. This is BlackRock. So I do think there's a first mover advantage to Grayscale. But if BlackRock is going to get approved, I would say that is going to be a much bigger ETF no matter what happens. Yeah, but does Grayscale stand a chance if BlackRock moves first? If BlackRock moves first,

nobody stands a chance. They'll all get approved and de facto, BlackRock will become the ETF, I think. You know, they'll all get their little bit of A. I don't think...

I don't think... I'm about to reinvent it. ...if BlackRock's advantage outweighs... Yeah. Oh, shit. Let me go through these guys. I'm just going to... I'm not sure who's speaking.

Whoever is speaking, Udi, your mic is really bad, man. But I will move on to the next point in the meantime. If you can fix your mic, Udi, because we couldn't hear. It's really, really robotic. Can I be heard? Briefly, go ahead, Udi, because I do want to move on to the next topic. Go ahead, bro. All right.

It's good to be here. Mario, thanks for giving me the opportunity to speak. I think that is the reason why, as of yesterday, Grayscale actually sent a letter to SEC asking them to move quickly and also give them the green light for them to start converting their trust fund to spot Bitcoin ETF. So it looks like Grayscale also knows that BlackRock wants to make a move. And it is also best in the interest of grayscale for them to make a move and start converting their trust fund to spot bitcoin itf i appreciate that ud um let me i want to go to the

visa the the visa solana visa news uh scott do you want me to read the news of the day there's a bunch of other things let me do that in a bit let's kick in yeah i think you should do that quickly and then i i really want to talk to ter talk to Terry Angelos on stage about what's happening with Visa. Dig into Visa, bro. No, we'll do that later on. I'll do my news later on. So let's dig into the other big piece of news, and that's the partnership between Visa and Solana. Maybe, Scott, do you want to give us a quick update on what that news is?

I think we should actually have Terry. Terry, we've got you here. I would love – you're going to do a much better TLDR and summary than I am, since obviously you're at Visa working on this very, very project. So hang on, just a clarification here. I'm actually, I left Visa in 2022. So I think Mario pinged me to kind of just get my thoughts. Yeah, yeah.

So I don't- It's not official yet. No, no, I know. It's not an official statement by Visa. Just to just to be clear everyone just your knowledge having worked at visa yeah so i don't uh this is not like a you know uh you know a visa position um uh but the but the news is interesting i um i certainly worked with that team and and kind of led that team in the sense that what is happening here is, remember, the card networks are kind of these complicated payment networks and have multiple stages to them.

And what's happening here is on the settlement side. So when you go and tap your card at a cafe or a merchant, there's this authorization step that happens. It says, okay, Mario, you now are authorized to buy that cup of coffee. But behind the scenes, money, actual fiat has to flow from your bank account through the visa and from visa to the merchant's bank account and that settlement step is what um you know is what we saw this week where uh some merchants will now have the option of receiving that settlement still in fiat it just happens to be usdc running on a public blockchain um and so you know i think that's a terry hasn't that's hasn't that been the case already since the since the proof of concept that visa created in 2021 on ethereum haven't they been able to do the same thing using the eth blockchain yeah so that's a that's a great point so when i was at visa we ran this pilot on the issuer side

so remember um that is the funds flowing from your bank account to visa this is the second leg where this is the funds flowing from the network to the first step, which is maybe a crypto wallet who already has USDC that's settling with Visa in fiat. So it's the second leg of the settlement component of a typical transaction. And I think it's the right use case for a stablecoin, right? There's like billions of dollars in settlement happening. If you look at stablecoin usage today, a lot of it is for trade settlement, right? I mean, that's basically being the number one use case.

This is now settlement of a different form and, you know, pretty interesting. So, yeah, that's, you know pretty interesting um so yeah that's you know that's the any touch is there any significance to this being on solana like should we should we read into it that here's what i'm looking at and tell me if i may be looking at this the wrong way this is the first partnership that bees has announced with a fast cheap layer one blockchain that settles directly onto chain. Yes, they did do the proof of concept on Ethereum, but ETH is expensive if you want direct settlement on chain. Am I reading too far into the... Am I reading too far?

Am I looking for the hopium? Or is this... Or am I seeing this correctly? Have Visa done these calculations? You know, it's probably a question for the Visa team. I don't really know. I don't know if there's anything significant about this particular partnership, and I doubt it would be something exclusive. I you know if you're a network i mean settlement is

a commodity you settle over wires you settle over ach you settle over swift you settle over blockchains and and for sure you'll settle over multiple blockchains probably more significant is not the blockchain on which it's running it's's the fact that USDC is, you know, is being, you know, is the, is the fiat token that's being, you know, that's being used. And there'll probably be, you know, be other fiat tokens. So, yeah, I don't have any comment on that and i i don't i wouldn't read too much into that as a as a sort of um awesome awesome significant part of the of the uh of the anyone else got any views around visa partnership with solana anyone on the panel has anyone got any any views

yeah i actually had a question for terry it isn't just the writing on the wall like it you know visa and mastercard have been making taking a middleman cut out of every transaction uh with blockchain you don't need that middleman anymore if the vendor would accept usdc for example so isn't this like I see what X is doing. This is what I assume X is doing, is an alternative to the Visa MasterCard network. Isn't this kind of the same? So they don't, they continue to play in this, like, middleman game

without it actually having to go through Visa at all, just going directly to the vendor and have same-day supplements. So that's what Anatoly... Which is, like, the dream of payments. That's what Anatoly actually tweeted. He tweeted something. I want to make sure that I quote the tweet correctly.

I want Solana to be so cheap that it saves Visa money to use it over their own in-house infrastructure. I want Solana to be so fast that it improves the user experience as well. You can kind of see where he's going for it. Honestly, I think that's, sorry, just interrupt.

I think that is not the conclusion that I would reach, you know, at all. I mean, I actually agree with Anatoly that Solana is a super efficient, super fast blockchain that can carry these USDdc tokens or other tokens um and you know companies wouldn't use them unless they were they were useful but that doesn't replace what what the networks are actually i think i i wrote something about this um yesterday you should think of the networks as an authorization network and not a payment network. Payments are actually a commodity. Moving a token or moving a dollar isn't that hard.

What is hard is, hey, Rand, do you have that dollar? Like, can I actually, before you leave this cafe, can I give you this cup of coffee knowing that the dollar or the euro or even the Bitcoin is going to arrive in my bank account? And almost by design, like at least for consumer, like retail payment systems, you want that to be an instant decision. You want to be like, all right, I just want to get through this turnstile and get on the tube i don't care that the actual settlement happens later so you know i think this is where crypto will first have an impact on the settlement layer and the settlement layer just to be clear it's it's a commodity like a wire is pretty cheap a ch is is pretty cheap so so what you're getting is i don't think you're getting any replacement on the tap and pay type experience now over time

there are lots of places on the on earth where like maybe tap and pay doesn't exist yeah and and also so sorry go ahead i just i just want to also jump in guys like this for me this news is it's more of a solana news whether anyone that has a just guys always mute any hot mics terry if you could mute i'm not on my phone and just because the feedback sound but guys and this news for me is important to the solana ecosystem it's's been through a lot since the FTX collapse. And I want to give an update for everyone on the good and the bad of Solana. I want to see what Scott, we've got Adi here as well, and anyone on stage, but mainly Scott and Ren, what they think of this. We've talked about the good thing, this partnership, and we'll talk about more good things in a bit.

But some of the bad stuff or some of the negative things when it comes to Solana, they've been losing momentum for, what, two years now? Almost two years, a year now since FTX. Daily users are at a two-year low. The number of daily active addresses using the seven-day moving average plummeted to around 204,000. That's on August 31st. That's the lowest since 2020. I've got over $1.5 billion worth of Sol and wrapped Bitcoin and FTX Solana addresses that are shifting, potentially selling. Things are not looking too good for Solana on that front, especially with the selling pressure coming from FTX. But I'm pretty bullish. I've been a fan of Solana. I think ran not long after FTX, you did a whole special on Solana. You went to some Solana event

from memory. And this is the other. Let me mention some of the positive numbers because i'm a i'm a i'm i'm pro solana so i don't want to seem like i'm bashing on them but the the um the defy ecosystem is doing well i think the amount of um the tvl if you look at the tvl of solana compared to other blockchains right now solana is at 310 million avalanche is at half a billion polygon is at 800 million and ethereum is at 21 billion which is crazy difference between number one number two but if you look at the tvl on solana it does look like it's bottoming right now but d5 is doing well but hold on tbl is a met is a method is a measure that's only important if your metric is around value on the blockchain if your value if your measure is around a blockchain that can do fast transactions at low rates then what tvL is not what you're looking at.

Daily transactions is probably much more important, no? Yeah, but the daily transactions is looking good, though. Well, yes, it's high. Oh, no, hold on. They're the highest. They're the highest, though. They're the highest, but that's not – Daily transactions, yeah, yeah.

If you're looking at Artemis, that's not the right metric because i think that there's vote and no vote transactions and they're not um i think that the metric is slightly wrong look i am kind of once they're concerned but daily active addresses of solana has dropped quite a bit it used to be the highest daily active addresses and now it's it's not as high as it used to be. But then again, look at all the other blockchains. You know, I don't think there's any other blockchains. Yeah, I was just going to say, that's the nature of the cycle. Correct. Yeah.

Correct, correct, correct. Yeah, I don't think that that's a point against Solana at all. I think the FTX thing might put pressure on the token. And I don't really have a dog in the fight. But fundamentally, I think that it's mostly positive news for solana i don't know if you guys saw the tweet yesterday from austin federa who is on a plane but was going to join us from from the solana foundation but it seems to be completely unreported that base effectively went offline yesterday did you guys see that 45 minutes yeah 43 minutes okay so did anyone care when it was base or do when solana goes off for 45 minutes, yeah. For 43 minutes. Okay. So did anyone care when it was base or when Solana goes off for 45 minutes?

No, but Scott, there's no token for base. There's no token. So there's no token holders to mow. That's right. But my point being, did you see Austin's tweet? Because it was the funniest tweet I've read all year and went so largely underappreciated. He said, it's only an outage if it comes from the Solana region of San Diego County. Otherwise, it's just a sparkling stall in block production. I mean, I thought that that was the wittiest, funniest shit that I've read in so long. Basically saying that people will call it an outage if it's Solana, but if it happens to dear old Coinbase, nobody cares. And it's a good point, right? So if you're going to make the point, we're going to make the point against Solana goes out.

First of all, I haven't checked, but that feels like it's been well over a year since that was an issue. No outages since March. Yeah. Okay, okay. And base is having them. So why aren't we on here shitting on base for their outages and saying it's going to be useless?

It's exactly the reason that Rand said, and it's because, guys, of tokens, which always comes back. When there's bag holders and investors and price goes down, you get nothing but negativity, regardless of the fundamentals. And that's just the nature of this. I don't think it's just that, Scott, to be honest. I don't think it's just that because look, I made the most money in crypto on Solana. I love Solana. I built on Solana. I met Rand because of Solana and his team.

I really like Solana, but if I'm going to be critical of Solana, it is its marketing team, right? And partially Austin. They don't let other, they don't really, they play favorites, let's say, where they help out some projects, other projects they ignore, unlike I've seen on other chains. And that's actually their achilles heel is they're not really good at being inclusive and bringing everyone who's building on the chain up they play favorites and it i think i think i agree with you group of people i think i agree with you doesn't get pushed i think i agree with you and i think specifically i would have agreed with you a lot more in the days of FTX because, you know, you either, either FTX invested in you and then, you know,

there was a very close relationship between Solana Foundation and FTX or they didn't, in which case it was very, very, very hard for you to get into things like the DevCon and get up on stage and things like the DevCon and everything else. So I think I agree with you, but I think we're witnessing a new kind of Solana now, which is, I think, much more humble. I think that they've been through a lot.

And I think we're witnessing a – I see it in how they behave. And I think what's going to be really telling is the DevCon that's happening in Solana at Breakpoint, which is happening in Amsterdam at the end of October, beginning of November. And I'll be there. But I think it's going to be telling. The reason why I'm going is because I really want to see which projects are still around, which investors are still around. And I also want to see kind of like what kind of spectacle they put on you know like is this going to be like a big thing or are they going to actually

go down to to to the nuts and bolts of it you know what i'm saying yeah and does anyone know the the amount of projects still building on solana i haven't checked in a long time id hold on i want to jump in id where do you stand on this and maybe you can answer that question as well like the the i remember solana at one stage, every fucking game was building on Solana. Then we saw that interest start to shift to other blockchains, other protocols like Polygon. Where do you stand on this? You mean in terms of like favoritism? Yes. Well, just to give a little background, I've been involved with Solana for the past few years, since about May of 2021. And I would definitely agree that Solana has a lot of, I guess you could say, tribalism within their kind of inner click. And my kind of theory on this is because of the way that Solana was started and formed,

in the sense that, you know, most people don't know this. And I'm someone that's very critical about Solana regarding this fact, is that Solana's token distribution is one of the worst designed tokens ever in the sense that when- Hey, Adi, I am really sorry to interrupt, but actually we have some breaking news. We always do this. We can go right back to it. But just seeing from Walter Bloomberg, MicroStrategy crypto companies win fair value accounting. I don't know anyone who, what this means to all of you,

but this is absolutely huge news. You guys might have seen when Microsoft added. This is fucking huge. Huge. This is huge. This is top five of the year news. Yeah, this is huge. Top five of the year news.

What's the price? If anyone doesn't understand, yeah, I don't know. I haven't looked, but I can tell you that the reason, obviously, we all saw Bitcoin added to MicroStrategy's balance sheet at the end of 2020. That sparked a bull market. We saw Tesla Square add. Michael Saylor sat down with 2,000 CFOs that February and explained to them how to put Bitcoin on the balance sheet, and absolutely nobody did it. It was one of the most disappointing sort of developments. But what came out is the way

that they had to account for their Bitcoin was basically to mark to market to the lowest point in the entire quarter. So basically, they had to report a loss every single time they were holding Bitcoin at the lowest point, right? That's the juvenile definition. But now at fair value, they can effectively be able to count crypto like real money on their books or like anything else. They don't need to market to the lowest price, which now allows any company who wants to to not have to take that risk in adding Bitcoin to their balance sheet. Literally, this has been the single biggest problem for the adding Bitcoin to the balance sheet treasury narrative that we've had. And if this is true, we had to look into it. This is just absolutely massive. Yeah, and this is coming from Walter Bloomberg, so I'd consider it verified. But the market is

not reacting, guys. I'm not sure I'm looking. I don't have a trading view. The market's going to 25,500. This is crazy. Do you remember what I said the other day? And we argued, and I said, there is nothing that can make this market move in this part of the cycle. And it has nothing to do with the fundamentals or the news. And every narrative we see pumps and dumps in two minutes and we go sideways. There is nothing that can meaningfully move this market now outside of maybe a block rack ETF, in my opinion. Yeah, but this is really big news, guys.

I mean, change the title. And Solana should have moved more than 5%, right, on a Visa announcement. Change the – Scott, add it to the title, man. I'm not on the space for it, but add it in. Let me bring up Hector on this. And, guys, anyone that's on the stage, I just want to get your thoughts on this particular announcement because it's not on the agenda, but it's pretty major.

Scott, would you say it's bigger news than PayPal, Ryan? Because I know you were very excited on that. Yeah, I mean, bigger, yeah, bigger. Bigger news than PayPal. You know, people don't understand the barrier of how big this barrier was. This was like the single biggest barrier to any company putting Bitcoin on their balance sheet. Because it meant that if you had a great year, but the price of Bitcoin came down, you'd look like you had a bad year. And

if the price went up again, you couldn't write it up and actually reflect the real performance of the company. It is, I mean, this is, I think when the market processes this news, what we've done here is we've opened another use case for Bitcoin, which is really to hedge a balance sheet, which you haven't been able to do up until now. Which is its real use case. Exactly. This is the hedge against your dollar holdings losing value with time narrative that really, whether you believe it or not, it's the entire last run. Hector doesn't seem to agree. Joe, before you jump in, Hector, do you disagree with what Scott just said?

Scott and Ryan? It's not something you can disagree with, to be frank. Microstrategy, that is why Michael Saylor did it. You can agree or disagree to do it, but that is the reason that people were adding Bitcoin to their balance sheet instead of cash, factually. Yeah, but he's also down lots of money on his buys. And if you do it on a risk-based basis, he's also down. of money on his own on his buys and if you do it in a risk basis it's also down so yeah but but hold on but but come on i mean let's let's keep this

to intellectual argument how is that relation he's down less than inflation but hold on how is that related this is how is that related sorry i really need to understand how what you just said is related to this ruling that came out no no i'm not I'm not saying that. I'm saying that what Scott is saying, that this is a way for people to go against inflation and basically hedge against it. Like 60% of like, there's someone just did an analysis on the UTXO spends. 60% of all UTXOs right now are underwater

in the sense that the majority of people who are saying this is a store of value is people who bought pre-2018 or have UTXOs from pre-2018. So the majority of people are not experiencing the store of value narrative. Yeah, but they might be in a year. I don't know. I got it in 2015. You can't say that's the case if it's not actually. Hold on. I got it in 2015. I agree. What I said, I didn't say that it is a hedge against inflation. I said that was the

reason that those companies were adding it to their balance sheet. I was in since 2015. It's hedged me very well against inflation. I'm going to be honest. Exactly my point. Yeah. 60% of all UTXOs are not in that case. That's what I'm saying. So the majority are not experiencing what you're saying is the thing.

But you're taking a snapshot at one point in time and probably not a great point in time. Take it over a prolonged time period. And Bitcoin has been the best performing asset since 2010. Right. You must also concede that you can only say it's a store of value when the price is

majorly up. So today, you can't say that. You can say that, yeah, when it was 69 maybe. Not right now. Yeah. Would it be fair

for me to say that this industry has created more millionaires, dollar millionaires in the shortest period of time in any other industry

in history? I have a sense. You could also say the opposite it's also this also has had like the more in a racial sense you could say there's been more fraud and deceit in this industry than there has been the most right but this industry has created more millionaires than any other industry in such a short period of time 88 200 actual chain millionaires today i don't know that's really true like you could you look at the finances? Does anyone know? Does anyone know? It's true. Did more people make or lose money?

More people have lost. The majority have lost. More people have lost. More people have lost. The Pareto principle is playing a factor. The majority lose and the minority win. Yeah, I think the point on that particular statistic, I'm on your side, Rambo, on that particular statistic,

is again, more millionaires have been made, but that's been taken out of more people that lost more. So in other words, the people that had less money lost more, and the people that made the money are the – oh, no, actually, it could be taken the wrong way. It's like some institutional guys, some big players lost a lot of money, and then some people that were not millionaires were just made millionaires. So maybe the argument that Ram makes is that it created more millionaires. There has been no industry in history that has created as many millionaires on a per year basis than crypto has created. That's all you need to know. I think we're moving away from the announcement, though,

the importance of this announcement. Hector, I want to get your thoughts because you usually have a contradicting take before going to Joa. Your thoughts on this announcement is it as major as us three are making it out to be um i haven't really looked into it uh i was more so had a comment on solana but if you guys want to go there we can just go there no no go ahead man we're just a lot of things as well we're going to talk about we haven't even we haven't just you guys tell you how how active today's been we haven't even talked about the

metamask news and other pieces of news that we'll mention in a bit. But yeah, go ahead, your point on Solana, Hector. Scott had brought up that it hasn't been down since March. Well, the reason it hasn't been down since March is because this activity has gone down substantially. Like it's at one-tenth the transactions that it had in like the all-time higher, even like the previous last year.

So the reason it's not going down is because there's no stress for it to go down. When there is stress, it goes down. And we've seen it go down various times. I think I've counted like 10 times on my Twitter. Hector, when Solana went down, why did Solana go down? Well, it goes down because of lack of resource, right? It can't handle the resource or the ability

or basically the pinging and tapping on the network that for it to be able to process the transactions in a timely fashion. Therefore, it starts falling over and nodes start falling over. And why was it... Yeah, but the funny thing is... Let's go back.

I want to make sure we keep this, again, intellectual and honest. When Solana went down, the reason why Solana went down is because it was attacked because the transaction fees are so low. They started getting these attacks to attack the network because it was so cheap to attack the network yeah that's why it's not because it's

not because there's been no there's been no use of the network it's because that's what i've said they found ways to mitigate against those attacks which they implemented no but ran i'm telling you you're essentially describing a ddos attack or a spam attack but you're saying that but the reason i'm telling you the reason why it hasn a DDoS attack or a spam attack, but you're saying that. But the reason I'm telling you is the reason why it hasn't gone down since March is because the non-vote transactions every month since then have only been down. And you're at this month at 80 million compared to like billions of transactions in the past years per month. The network can handle, the network can scale a lot more. It's a theoretical handle because it hasn't been able to handle it. When it reaches those thresholds, it falls over. The only fact we have is that it hasn't gone down.

Because no one's using it. Because there's one-tenth of the traffic that there was. Therefore, it's going down. So if it gets the traffic back. That's the stress test. That's what I'm saying. If the traffic goes back, we must then see are the measures that were implemented, are they going to mitigate or basically sustain it? So you can't say

what you said. What I'm saying is, factually, the only reason it hasn't gone down is because it hasn't been tested. I'm moving my money to Tron. I'm telling you. I'm moving my money to Tron. There you go. Joe?

And DB Crypto, I guess. Yeah, I think this news is really big and I don't know if everyone understands why it's so big, but these corporations basically have three options. Either sit on cash, well, four, sit on cash, pay out a dividend, or invest in new technology for their company to keep growing. Now this adds a fourth, which is put it into Bitcoin, which allows them to speculate somewhat also, or to hedge against the dollar. That's big.

They just added a fourth option to what these companies can do, which they didn't have before. That's really, really big. And companies aren't investing. Remember how we celebrated when MicroStrategy bought Bitcoin? And the problem is that our celebrations were killed when people realized the accounting treatment of it.

Now we can really celebrate because they've moved that accounting treatment. But can anyone explain, DB, I'd love to get your thoughts on this, but why is the market reacting the way it is? I understand we may be in a bull market, maybe in a bear market. Everyone disagrees on this point but like it's it and i understand when the market is in the bear market it doesn't react the way we'd like it to be it doesn't react as it should when there's good news but this is to another level like this is every piece of news gets either uh you know we the gains don't last long or the market doesn't even react and we'd love to get your thoughts on this db and forth on the announcement as well.

Yeah, sure. And I'll just say what everyone already knows. The market's immune to news at this point. There's really nothing that's going to move it except for what Scott was saying. So my question, then, before you continue, DB, then, Ryan, going back to your point, how can we be in a bull market when you see things like today?

Sorry. Ryan, that's for you. You there? I'm sorry. I'm trying to unmute him. The way the market reacted now. Yeah, I think… You heard the question.

The market is immune to any piece of good news. Yeah, I remember this period. I remember this period from end of 2019, beginning of 2020. We're in exactly that period where nothing that you say moves the market, but then all of a sudden when the market moves, everything that you said starts to move the market and you get a massive decline, a massive increase. And I think that that's kind of like...

Exactly, right. This is exactly... I remember this. This is the part in crypto around 2019, 2020, where I was almost exited because I just realized that nothing's moving the price. There's no point in being here anymore. And then luckily, I didn't exit completely and I managed to catch DeFi yield farming because that was the narrative that actually got the market to explode. And when the market exploded, it exploded with all the news.

It was like, all right, now, let me remind you of all the things that have happened in the last couple of months that you didn't respond to. You know, and that's,

that's the kind of bull market that we got all over the place. That's right. That's why it's kind of like a part of the meme that all the good things are built in the bear market when everything flows down,

right? So all the things that are being built that are loosely reported on now all of a sudden become big news in the next cycle as if people had never heard just just i mean let's just get perspective here we may get an etf very very very very soon companies can now keep bitcoin on their balance sheet you can unramp and off ramp directly from defy into a bank account without going through a centralized exchange or OTC.

And that's the Metamask announcement that we haven't mentioned yet. We'll mention it in a bit, but continue. Yeah, I'm just saying you can't deny that the things that have happened. Let me give you another one that we haven't even spoken about today, but Hong Kong opening up to crypto. happened let me give another one that we haven't even spoken about today but um uh hong kong opening up to crypto hong kong and beijing collaborating on rules for web3 i mean and not only this g20 nations so i'm gonna read out directly here from financial juice there is a need of a so the g20 member countries will decide on a modus operandi for regulating

crypto it comes in from india pushing for this that was announced today so there's a need of a – so the G20 member countries will decide on a modus operandi for regulating crypto. It comes in from India pushing for this. That was announced today. So there's a need of a common template for regulation of crypto assets. India wants the G20 nations to understand the macroeconomic implications of crypto and seek a G20 consensus on common crypto norms. So you've got that movement not only in the US, not only in the East. You've got India pushing the only in the u.s not only the east you got india pushing the 20 nations to adopt yeah mario we also had i mean it was two days ago or yesterday and

nobody's talking about the london stock exchange uh came out and said that they wanted to start testing basically tokenized settlement on the blockchain and there is good news like you've got you've got rick edelman he's got he's a he's a an asset manager of 200 a fund that's uh 241 billion dollars on the management predicts that bitcoin reaches 150 000 by summer 2025 and you do have bernstein the private wealth management bernstein says that crypto spoils for an epic i'm gonna call it exactly what they said on cnbc an epic rally so it's just not us crying there's a lot of smart days we talk few days we talk about... The difference between the London Stock Exchange thing,

Scott, and this, is that the London Stock Exchange is, we're going to do this in the future. I agree. And we talk about what we've got here. This rule, I'm assuming, is being changed now or in the beginning of the new financial year. I don't know how accounting rules get changed in the

United States. You've got the Visa-pal partnership happening the visa solana partnership happening now paypal stablecoin is here now you've got the xrp news well the xrp news great i mean you know ideally we shouldn't have the sec shouldn't have called them securities in the first place but you know that's happening now. So I think the difference is you don't need to look too far forward. This is stuff that's happening now. And that's the part that – Would you still say that the U.S. is not that crypto-friendly or this is changing pretty rapidly over the last couple of months?

I think the courts are going to – I think the courts are going to overrule the decisions of Elizabeth Warren and her cronies and that's just the way it is but we have to unfortunately we're going to have to wait for the court process right which is taking years like the SEC could still appeal Ripple you know that's

one of the things that they said they may do in fact I think they've already done it they've tried to get an interlocutory appeal which you know so there's I so there's, I think there's a long process. Anything that happens in the courts is a long process, unfortunately. Yeah, but guys,

after where we are today, and DB, I'm going to give you the mic back, just to point out, where we were when the Coinbase, when the SEC sued Coinbase and labeling all these tokens as securities versus where we are today, in my opinion,

it's a massive shift over the last few months. And it was difficult not to be bullish. And I like that comparison that Ran and Scott made to 2019, 2020, where the market ignores the news, but the investors don't ignore it. And they're waiting for the right time, potentially waiting for the right time to enter. And we have, even today, funny enough, we've got ETH Wales purchased a half a billion dollars in the last few days worth of ETH. That's one of the largest in 2023.

Just to exhibit your point, to amplify your point there, Mario, this is the same price that Bitcoin was at when we got the Binance and Coinbase suits effectively back to back and this is also the same price it was at before then the blackrock etf uh that them filing for an etf came out and we're just back at 25 000. all of that news both retracted everything yeah but both up and down all of the bad news 25 26 27 000 is the area that bitcoin trades is exactly like 2019. We took the mic from you, man. I must say, I'd be very demotivated. I'd be very demotivated if I hadn't seen this before. If I hadn't seen this before, I'd be completely... Anyone, all these NFT people that just entered crypto in the last bull run, they're out. Like those PFP are changing on a daily basis.

I'm seeing people that I know, that I follow. And those PFPs are changing. So unless someone's been in the market for a few years, I made the mistake. So Ryan, you didn't exit the market. I pretty much exited, but I had personal reasons when I got scammed in 2018. So I had many reasons to like, fuck the shit. But I exited and I learned the lesson the hard way. And this time I'm doing, I'm obviously tripling down. We're doing this we started the show together in the midst of what many many people are calling a bear market so it gives you an idea of how how much we're doubling down on all this um but db uh you know we took the mic from you bro yeah no worries i was actually just going to chime in more on solano but we want to move on and get to the mad and mad stuff or whatever that's not it but you gotta fix you you gotta

fix your mic yeah you gotta fix your mic though bro can i answer a question ran remember when when uh micro strategies first bought bitcoin and there was rumors that apple was going to do the same yes was there any any was there ever any evidence of these rumors because now there's garbage you do have apple sitting on a ton of cash okay it was tim cook effectively saying he liked bitcoin once right i look at and again i think i ran with it i think that i don't i can't see apple doing it i just i i don't but guys just guys before before this on that question ryan and scott um and before we go into db poor guy but the question i have is this rule this I just, I don't. But guys, just guys, before, just on that question, Ryan and Scott, before we go into DB, poor guy.

But the question I have is, this announcement, the win by MicroStrategy, does that mean institutions, a lot of institutions are more comfortable holding Bitcoin on their balance sheets now? Doesn't that mean there's going to be a lot more buying power? That's 100%.

Nobody would have ever done it. Think of it this way they say you're a really successful company your stock is doing great you're making money in your core business but you put bitcoin on your balance sheet it has one of those massive wicks down 30 on a day and comes back to the same price at the end of the quarter you now have to count that 30 percent wick down the lowest point that it was on your accounting and take a loss against the actual earnings of your company that is doing well. And you might actually have a bad quarter because at some point Bitcoin was down during that quarter. That was effectively

the old accounting rules that is now gone. I'm horrible at accounting, but like, can you, and for anyone else in the audience that's horrible at accounting and hates numbers, can you explain to me, like, how is that logical? Like, for me, if it went down 30%, but it went back up, that gain from that 30%, Mark, how is that added to the balance sheet? Well, they didn't treat it as the cash that you're trying to replace.

I mean, Rand explained it pretty well earlier. I mean, Rand, maybe you can give a more thorough explanation of how the accounting rules work. It's mark to market at the lowest point during the quarter. Okay, so let me... We have the accounting rules where it's mark-to-market at the lowest point during the quarter. Okay, so let's say you own a company and your company

makes a million dollars worth of profit, okay? And the market values your company on a P-E ratio of 10. It means that on the stock market, your market cap

will be $10 million because the market will say, we're willing to pay 10 times the earnings of the company. So while I'm making a million dollars. The market cap will be $10 million.

If you hold Bitcoin on your balance sheet and Bitcoin drops and the decline in the value of Bitcoin is $100,000. According to the accounting regulation, you've only made $900,000, which means that the value of your company will drop to $9 million. Okay, now let's say the value of Bitcoin goes up in the next quarter. You say, all right, cool. Well, I've made an extra $100,000. The accounting rules say, no, no, no, no, no. You can't write it up. You can only write it down, which means that for anyone holding Bitcoin on their balance sheet, it is the only thing that you can do is write it down, means that for anyone holding bitcoin on their balance sheet it it is the only thing that you can do is write it down which will make your earnings look bad and if your earnings look bad then the valuation of your company is bad and if the valuation of your company is bad it's very hard to do acquisitions and capital raises and stuff like that and that is why no

company in their right mind other than michael Saylor and Elon, would have done this. And Jack, there is such a massive disincentive to do it. It could destroy your whole company valuation because the price of Bitcoin was volatile in a quarter. And I think Scott said it very well. He said, you would have to mark the price of Bitcoin to the lowest point in the quarter. So, you know, let's just for fun and games, I'm actually going to open the Bitcoin chart and I'm going to look at the first quarter of,

the second quarter of 2023. The second quarter of 2023, the price of Bitcoin started, although I'm just going to get you the actual number, the price of Bitcoin started the second quarter of 2023, the price of Bitcoin started, hold on, I'm just going to get you the actual number, the price of Bitcoin started the second quarter of 2023 at $28,000. And the lowest price at the quarter was $24,000. But it finished, hold on, it's April, May, sorry, April, I'm just going to get you the right answer. So on the 1st of April, the price of Bitcoin was $27,000. And at the end of June, the price of Bitcoin was, hold on, I'll get you now. It was $30,000, okay? So you invested in Bitcoin at 27,000

and the price of Bitcoin is now 30,000. The problem is that Bitcoin hit 24,949. So on your balance sheet, you would have to account for the Bitcoin at 24,000. Even though the price of Bitcoin is now $31,000, on your balance sheet, you have to write down the Bitcoin to the lowest value. You understand

what a disincentive that is for companies to be holding Bitcoin on their balance sheets. And no CEO who's not the founder is ever going to do that. It's mind-boggling. It's mind-boggling to me how the market again i understand like if we had a pump and retraced it that would make sense but to not even get a

pump as we did before considering i will say though maybe maybe though it takes uh maybe now it takes a major company seeing this and actually putting it on their balance sheet again? But that's months away. That's months away. Yeah, but why is it months away? The win is now, but when does it get suspended? They're not like sitting on the sidelines waiting. Well, for one, you don't know when the rule change is effective. I know that in South Africa,

some rule changes are only effective at the beginning of the new financial year. So you say, okay, we've changed the rule and from the next reporting period, that's when the say okay we've changed the rule and from from the next reporting period that's when the rule change comes into effect so that would be the first thing the second thing is i don't think that there were companies sitting on the sidelines going okay as soon as this rule changes we're going to press the button and buy bitcoin i think it's more why not why not because i think it's more a case of companies would have evaluated buying bitcoin

they would have said we're actually not going to do this because it doesn't make sense because of what I've just described. But now in a new cycle, when they're doing their treasury management, they'd look at the treasury management and say, why don't we put some Bitcoin on the balance sheet? And the same people around the room who would have said, no, no, we can't put Bitcoin because of this accounting rule, will now say, hold on a second, it may be a good idea because you can write it up and you can write it down.

No, but I disagree because I think a lot of companies would have already asked the accounting department, say, hey, we want to add Bitcoin to our treasury for X, Y, Z reasons. These companies move so slowly. Yeah, exactly. But they would have done this a year ago. And the accounting department is like, hey, you can't write this up. We cannot do it now. It's too big of a risk.

We understand. And now that this is no longer a hurdle, then all these copies that are sitting on the sidelines because of that reason, and that's enough of a reason, could now get in as soon as the rule changes.

Like, hey, there's no more hurdle. If anything, we wanted to buy it when it was 40K, but now it's whatever, 20-something K. Dave, you've got a lot of emojis going on. He's agreeing. He wanted to press thumbs up, I think.

He missed out. They were down. I'm on team Rand this time, Mario. Sorry. I know I tend to agree with you more, but no. Look, I run a company and we have a corporate treasury. And generally, corporate treasury changes have to go to boards. And board meetings happen at most in the most ridiculous companies quarterly, and generally,

decisions like this are going to take a while. And also remember, this is a massively, I want to be clear, let me finish, I want to be clear, this is a massively bullish development. And people who are inclined to be aggressive will be aggressive. It is not a short term bullish development. It is yet another in that that ever growing pile of things that make you know, Mark Yusko's and other fair value calculations higher, because it increases demand. Top five this year? Dave, top five this year? Top five pieces of news this year? I mean, it's a big piece of news. Top five? It's not as big as it clearly.

The only other one that would be bigger is when a spot ETF is approved because that opens up even more. But there's a lot of money in corporate treasuries. Hell, if you're a crypto company, I guarantee you Coinbase doesn't put very much Bitcoin

on their balance sheet as proprietary. They have to for this reason. It's hard. It's really hard. And your board is going to get a lot of flack because it's going to make it look really bad. I mean, don't underestimate the importance here. But also, Ran is totally right. This is a board level decision to change your treasury policy. Let me... And it would never have gotten past that. Let me explain something, Mayra.

Mayra, let me explain something. On Dave's point. On Dave's point. One second. On Dave's point. Remember that a lot of these companies have debt. So he mentioned Coinbase.

Coinbase has debt in the market. By the way, the debt is actually paying 10% yield today. Probably one of the best, in my opinion, one of the best debt purchases on the market. Now, the problem when your earnings fluctuate a lot

because of the change in the Bitcoin price, it changes your credit rating. So in other words, they look at your earnings relative to the debt repayment, the annual debt repayment. And they take your earnings after the Bitcoin price fluctuations and don't add any price increases,

which means that for a lot of companies, it makes their debt very expensive because when the market looks at this, they hold on a second, they don't have enough money. There's a thing called the debt coverage ratio. And basically what the debt coverage ratio, they say, okay, let's take your assets

or your profit depends which debt coverage ratio people are looking at. They're saying, let's look at how much money they make and relative to the debt that they have to repay. Or let's look at the amount of assets that they have relative to the debt that they have to repay. Now, changing the price of Bitcoin reduces those ratios, which makes your debt much more expensive.

And that's why companies can't do it. I want to ask you a question, Dave, because you said you've got a company, you go through board meetings every quarter. So couldn't there have been board meetings months or even years ago, and the board decided to add Bitcoin to their treasury? As soon as the law changes and the fair value accounting applies to Bitcoin, and then now that fair value accounting is going to be applied, I don't know how long it takes for the rules to change, that means the decision has already been made or they have to

go through another board meeting and say, hey, the rule has been changed. Do we still want to move forward with what we agreed on before? Because they could have had that board meeting six months ago, 12 months ago. Yeah, it's not how it works. When that change happens. It's the latter. It's the latter, Mario. Because basically what will happen is the board will – what would happen is the corporate treasury department, the treasurer or whoever handles that, would make a proposal to the board that says they

want to do it. What I'm telling you is in all likelihood outside of micro strategy, probably the I'm telling you, I know because we have a tiny amount of Bitcoin on our balance sheet, right? You know, we have some clients who paid us in Bitcoin, and we just left it there. I have to go through extra agita with my accountants every single month. And so you know, to deal with it. The fact is, is no corporate treasurer was going to even go to the board to even ask the question when they found out the accounting treatment. So now the question might get asked. And so the clock ticks, right? And so so corporate treasurer wanted, who saw Bitcoin as asymmetric upside, who sees, you know, things the way they are says, Oh, okay. I want to put this in, uh, also keep in

mind not to be doom and gloom about it, but you know, now you corporate treasurers can get 5% risk-free in T-bills. Uh, that didn't used to be the case when all this started. So, uh, that doesn't mean that Bitcoin doesn't make sense for people who look at this as long-term treasury and understand what that means. But effectively, this will allow people to ask the question. They were never even going to take it to the board before because they would have been humiliated. The board would have asked about the kind of treatment they would have said, well, and yet no way. Sure. And they would say, well, yeah, no way. Drew? Yeah, I mean, I just wanted to say, just pause for a second and say,

Michael Saylor is such a G for what he does and what he does for cryptocurrency at large. I'm just appreciative of that. So I want to throw a few flowers to Saylor. That's it. Cool. Well, on that point, Michael Saylor, if you're listening, you got some flowers here from Drew. Guys, I think there's some other bits and pieces in you. You've got the MetaMask.

Actually, Rand, do you want to tell us, or Scott, do you want to tell us about the MetaMask announcement? They've got a direct way to turn your crypto to fiat through DeFi, which is pretty major already. That was enough of a topic. We wanted to cover the whole space on this topic alone. And then here we are adding it at the end as just a small add-on just tell you the amount of news we're getting but uh do you want to talk about the metamask announcement around i know you covered it in your show uh yeah so they introduced a feature called sell and sell a sell sell allows you to sell your crypto to sell your crypto and to convert the money straight into money into your bank account.

So what you do is, I'll actually read the steps to you just to make sure I don't miss anything here. So the steps are one, click sell, select your region, select the token in the network that you want to sell, example, Ethereum, select the fiat account destination available in your location, either your bank account or your PayPal, enter the crypto amount that you want to sell. And then you press the sell button.

And someone mentioned the following, within eight minutes, the money was in his bank account. That's a positive. That's a positive. That's incredible. The fees were pretty high though. I think that's 9% of fees. Yeah, but he said 9% fees. And the reason why he said 9% fees, it's almost like an ATM.

And an ATM has a minimum charge, like a $5 charge. And if you're withdrawing $50, you pay the $5 charge, you'll end up paying a very high percentage. But as you increase the amount that you withdraw from the ATM, the $5 becomes less and less relevant, right? Correct. And then there's four off-ramps that Metamask is working with moon pay transact sardine and banks but this is like as far as i know this is how many more or is there any more not deep in the d5 world but is there any more off ramps from d5 directly no no there's no such thing no such thing and this adds to the news that we mentioned a few days ago that d5 is actually doing pretty well

even today we talked about DeFi and Solana. We talked about DeFi and ETH. It's like a small piece of the market. Why are you calling it DeFi? This is directly... It's not DeFi. This is directly from your bank into Web3. It could be directly from your bank.

Well, it's in PayPal, right? Is it bank or PayPal? Bank or PayPal. Bank or PayPal. Bank or PayPal. Okay. Bank or PayPal. It's big. It's big.

I just wanted to throw in there that you guys are talking about this MetaMask news, but Solana actually already has, I believe, several applications that you can go directly to Fiat to your bank or vice versa. And it costs, you know, nothing, no fees. Which application takes you from a decentralized wallet to a bank account? Well, it's not a wallet, but it would be an application you use with your wallet. Such as? That goes directly to your bank. I don't know it off the top of my head, but I know they do exist.

There's a few of them. So you're saying the application allows you to move directly from your wallet to a bank? Yep. So imagine you have Cash App, right? In Cash App, you can buy Bitcoin and then move it to your wallet. It's the same thing except instead of cash app, it's a native app on Solana that allows you to do that. Do you know do you know the name of the app? I'm curious.

I would have to look it's it there's a few of them. It's not just one there's a there's a few hats off. Is there anything? So is there anything like that that exists for Ethereum as well? This already exists as well on other wallets. Guys, just some news regarding the FASB. The vote was unanimous, and the expected publication date is by year end. So that's why maybe the news is approved, but the publication date is by year end. That's why maybe the news is approved, but the publication date

which needs to be... I don't know if it's called the government gazette. I don't know what the equivalent is. It needs to be gazetted and that they said is by the end of the year. It's not going to be... Is there any more obstacles? That's it now. It's going to become law.

That's it. Okay, so being at the end of the year. And that's soon. That's very soon. That's exactly what I was going to say. Yeah, we were talking about the infrastructure bill and all the problems that we could have, and that's for 2025 when people start doing their taxes in 2026, right?

So this could have been a three-year thing. This is huge. That's in three months, four months. Yeah. On this news,'s uh there's other bits and pieces i think we've read most of them in the nft world i see a few pfps yuga labs launched a 12-fold puzzle they're trying to add more utility to their ecosystem as i think linked to their ordinal collection and then pudgy penguins are projecting so everyone when i say pudgy

penguins scott is probably cringing right now. Well, Scott, they're projecting $10 million in toy sales over seven months. I don't understand why you need to own an NFT, but at least they have toys in Target. I mean, I think that there are standout companies and projects in this ecosystem, of course, but you're not going to get me to try to figure out if I need to buy a cathartic cat or a dickhead dog to figure out which one it's going to be. But look, the people that made the most money in the past year or two, definitely not the NFT ecosystem, probably lost the most. None of us, that's for sure. Lawyers, accountants, consultants, and cryptocurrency analysts and other professionals. 700 million.

They've made $700 million. Yeah, exactly. And not only 700 million total bankruptcies, just five, the top five major crypto firms that went bankrupt. I'm guessing FTS, I don't know what they are. You know, it's so crazy about that. Yes. When you look at the lawyers that make the money, it's obviously the Kirkland and Ellis and all the big names that we've seen in all these bankruptcy proceedings. But what I found crazy, I'm a Voyager creditor, obviously, was that Voyager had spent $88 million on their entire bankruptcy proceedings. And obviously, that included a failed deal with FTX, a failed deal with Finance US, and then finally just a capitulation liquidation.

But it was already like $328 million for FTX or something. And FTX started in November. Voyager, Selfish, they were at the beginning of last summer. Carlo. $128 million for FTX or something. And FTX started in November. Voyager, Celsius, they were at the beginning of last summer. Carlo. So, I mean, you're talking about, you're literally talking about, it's been, what, 200 or something days since the FTX collapsed. They spent $320 million. It's like $1.5, $1.4 million a day amortized since they collapsed.

And they're nowhere near giving people money. Yeah, Carlo. Man, like maybe sponsor the show for a week or two. Yeah, look, the unfortunate consequence of this is exactly as you articulated. The creditors that are waiting in line to get paid, unfortunately, what's left at the end of the rainbow is not what is anticipated because a lot of this money gets eaten up by the bankruptcy lawyers and the proceeding to try to unravel this mess. Did you guys see Tiffany Fong's comment? Did you see it, Mario?

Tiffany Fong's comment. It was just so funny. I don't have the quote. Your mic is bad, by the way, but go ahead. Weird. I don't have the quote. Your mic is bad, by the way, but go ahead. Weird. I don't know what changed. But basically the news was that Tiffany Fung, that the FTX lawyers had explored for 40 days or 70 days or something, potentially bringing suit against her because she had obviously been sort of a whistleblower with FTX and SBF,

and that they decided not to, but they put a price tag on it, whatever. Maybe it cost them a million dollars to pursue maybe pursuing a lawsuit against her and she was like this i'm a creditor you're literally spending my money to decide whether or not you want to sue this is ridiculous did she say did she come up with a did she say a million dollars you're just guessing just i'm guessing i don't remember what the number was but whatever whatever it was, he had a comment about it. That's crazy. I mean, this is crazy. We had the guy from Celsius and, you know, Celsius and him were in a suit basically over $4 million in assets. And Celsius spent more than $4 million to attempt to get the $4 million back from him on the lawyers.

That's mental. All right, guys, on that point, i just want to remind the audience um two things number one if you are a project or if you're a vc with the portfolio companies uh we're working very closely with an exchange with top exchange well i'm working sorry i'm working with a close exchange and um if you want to list on there you can hit it hit me up just got to be clear on that one hit me up um and um and we can connect you to a sandex to list pretty quickly at pretty good fees that's number one and number two is that sounds awesome and then the second thing is you can also do another thing is that follow that ugly ass

sorry that really good looking logo on stage the red logo on stage that's our crypto town hall logo we're going to be hosting shows from there moving forward. So make sure you follow Crypto Town Hall logo. Joe, Gary, final quick thoughts, man. On a pretty damn good day when it comes to the news. Pretty shitty day when it comes to the market. Any quick thoughts, guys, before we wrap up? Yeah, I had a question for Scott.

What happens first, the ETF or institutions buying Bitcoin? ETF. And they're buying Bitcoin through the ETF. Yeah, that's exactly the right take. Is that now they don't need to put Bitcoin on their balance sheet because they can just buy the ETF. That's such a funny and true nuance there, Ran.

And maybe it's already too late to care if the ETF gets approved. The ETF is approved. What are you talking about? The ETF is approved. It's just the sec doesn't matter guys guys this is this is guys just realize this is the first time ever talking about boring days this is the first time ever we changed the title three times we had ben armstrong initially then put the solana news visa solana and metamask and now we've got the micro strategy news so

there's three three titles in one space for the first time ever gary get your quick thoughts man and then wrap up the show yeah it's not justify it's web3 metamask is uh and gary just to be clear gary just want to give you a heads up if you say ens once i'm ending the show instantly yeah i'm not i'm definitely not going to uh metamask is interoperable with all of web3 and it's interoperable because it's integrated with sign with Ethereum. EIP-4361. You can learn more at login.xyz. Sign with Ethereum. If you are a Web2 company or a Web3 company and you want to have a connect wallet on your website, if you follow the proven audited way of doing it, Twitter can just do seven lines of code, sign in with

Ethereum, and it would be interoperable with MetaMask. If you want to be interoperable with Web3, you use the Web3 standards and that's signing with Ethereum, EIP 4361, at login.xyz, every website that wants to have a Connect wallet, and it's more than Connect wallet, it's authentication. It's a big, big deal in terms of crypto. And we're all having fun with defy and nfts but every web 2 website every web 3 website get interoperable get signed with ethereum it's blockchain agnostic we'll do it today and i brought up i brought up david just to kind of wrap up the space with you david usually i love having you as a guest. Today I'm having you as a guest for all the wrong reasons. Do you know why?

I did something wrong. $700 million you guys made over the past year from bankruptcies, from the top five bankruptcies. $700 million, David. Dave, what was your share of it? What was your share of it? Come on, be honest. He's not a bankruptcy lawyer, but he's building us.

I know, I know. But Chile's representing someone against someone? Come on, be honest. He's not a bankruptcy lawyer, but he's billing us. I know, I know. But Cheney's representing someone against someone. I mean, come on. I was part of the Celsius bankruptcy. I was part of the – I'm trying to think. The CRED bankruptcy was the first bankruptcy I ever did. No one talks about CRED enough because CRED was one of the first really, really bad bankruptcies. But look, I mean, it's an archaic system where the lawyers just get to salvage. But in FTX, they're doing a good job.

If everyone gets their money back, isn't it worth it? About 20% instead of an immediate liquidation? Maybe not. But David, you are right. You are right. These lawyers have recovered a lot of money that was not there. They are somewhat paying for themselves in that case. But is it the same, David? Is it the same? I'm actually curious. Is it the same in other countries? Is it archaic everywhere? Is that number one? Number two, why is it still so archaic?

When I say everywhere, I mean just a hidden process behind the scenes. And nobody ever knew about this. It really changed with Celsius, where the Twitter followers started calling the judge, harassing the judge. Voyager followed suit. FTX followed suit. No one ever knew about this and social media is going to change it i bet you the bankruptcy laws change because people behind the scenes now it is so ridiculous but in ftx i think ftx can be a lot more recovered than voyager

for instance voyager it could be it's still a lot recovered but could be a lot more like the cost is insane for anyone that wants to watch the show that me rand scott and david silver were working But still, it could be a lot recovered, but could be a lot more. The cost is insane. For anyone that wants to watch the show that me, Ryan, Scott, and David Silva are working on, it's similar to Kardashians, but with lawyers dealing with bankruptcies. We're going to be launching that very soon. Keeping up with the crypto lawyers. Keeping up with Silva and gang. Keeping up with Silva and gang.

I'll tell you this. Scott can validate this. I can tell you that news is going to break next week on Monday or Tuesday because I'm taking another famous crypto lawyer to Alaska to go king salmon fishing. Oh, it's over. So something's going to break on Monday or Tuesday. I'll have to be up at 4 o'clock in the morning to be with Scott. Guys, on this note, really appreciate everyone for joining rand scott any final words guys no i think you i mean you summed

it up very well by saying that we had changed the title three times what seemed like it was going to be a very dry day and you know that i don't like to do the tmz thing that we started with a bit even though i'm glad we gave ben a chance to speak. It really evolved into something meaningful. And now I'm just, I'm hoping we get more information on the accounting. That might be a really good topic to dig into further tomorrow. But I think that this is just, I mean, it's monster news, you know, and people expect that when we say something's big news, that all of a sudden price is going to change. That's not my view on it at all.

I think it's once again these are big things that are real developments yeah like the market's reaction surprised me to be honest um and and yeah i want to agree like the the day's been pretty fucking cool pretty fun i was so usually i go into the sauna during the show and i end like we end about 7 15 my time um and then gaurav sometimes waiting for me there he's like waiting for me the whole time he's still sitting there and the show took an extra hour because of all the news but it's been pretty exciting the market's reaction surprising Ran any thoughts maybe also comment on the market's reaction I think that we've got I think that you know we've got I'm going to call it inside information but I

think that two things are happening here one is a lot of people aren't that interested in crypto anymore so they're not paying attention to the developments that are happening here. One is a lot of people aren't that interested in crypto anymore, so they're not paying attention to the developments that are happening. And if you're still here, you're getting information quicker than anybody else. And I think that when the market actually realizes the... Another thing is that we actually understand the effects of this information in the long term, which I think a lot of people aren't analyzing. And I think in time, when people realize what happens when all of these puzzle pieces get put together, I think that's when they're going to start phoning in.

So I think it's just keep accumulating. When the market pumps and the news starts saying crypto is pumping out of nowhere, you'd understand that it's not out of nowhere and we're all waiting for it to happen. I'm not sure if it was. Did you have the same amount of good news back in 2019 2020 we did but eventually what you start realizing is this you know when the market doesn't move on good news you start questioning whether the news is really good so that you know like a bitcoin etf is great but if if bitcoin isn't going to succeed then the bitcoin etf is is not worth anything right and so i think it like in 2019, it was a case of would crypto even survive?

Would this industry even be a thing? That was like the question. And to be honest, when I nearly jumped ship, because I just, I got to a point where enough people told me that crypto was just for scams and I learned to the media hype. Now, I mean, I didn't get out, thank God. I slowed down on my interest, so to speak.

But yeah, I think it's exactly the same feeling as I had back then. But I'm smart enough. I'm much smarter now. Do you remember specifically what year backed BAKKT? I actually just interviewed their CEO, Gavin Michael, recently. But do you remember what year like that was the big story was that in 2019 or was it earlier i think it was around 1819 yeah because then you know backed was backed by ice and affiliated with the new york stock exchange and they were

going to bring institutional adoption and we were like why isn't price god you're bringing you're taking me back you're taking me back. You're taking me back. Yeah, and now we have 100 times the actual confirmation of that institutional involvement, and we're in the same kind of crap, sideways, apathetic market. I just think I can't wait to look back on this a year from now. Did you have – did more people – just kind of a last question. Did more people leave, like more of your friends and colleagues leave back in 2019, 2020, or now? More in 2019. As a perspective, more left.

2019, everybody left. Everybody left. Much worse. It was much worse. We didn't have the contagion of the collapses, but the general, I mean, Rand summed it up perfectly. Every previous cycle, even into the bull markets, we always had the Bitcoins going to zero narrative. And you just don't hear that in this market. This is impossible to make that argument now.

Yeah, but I think that that is a legitimately different thing because in 2019, as Rand said, you were mentally contending with the idea that you might literally be invested in Beanie Babies or Vaporware or Tulips. And that's just not the case anymore. All right, everyone. Really appreciate it for the speakers.

I apologize that the topic changed so much, but hey, don't blame us. And we'll see you again tomorrow, 10.15 a.m. EST. Please do follow the red logo on stage. Bye, everyone.