The Wolf Of All Streets - BTC Drops 6%, SOL 10%—Is the Crypto Party Over? | Crypto Town Hall

Episode Date: November 26, 2024

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Good morning, everybody. Happy Tuesday. We're here for another episode of Crypto Town Hall. A little bit more of a dreary day this week. Of course, Bitcoin's down about 6%, Solana's down about 10%. And the news from the weekend was really about Pump.Fun and the really need for moderation there. But also just a bleed in the crypto markets at large. My thesis is definitely that the market's going to rebound here, but we're also without Scott today. So unfortunately for Alex and Noodles, you guys are stuck with me for today. But we're going to be talking about everything to do with the macro market, especially micro strategy. Also, the Pump.Fun news as well.

And we'll go for about 45 minutes here. So, Alex, I want to throw it over to you. You were the first one on stage. Let's kick it off with discussing what's happening with Pump.Fun. What do you think about that? And do you think that it was a smart move for them to bring down their streaming? Can you hear me now? Sorry, I am having nothing but trouble with Twitter tech right now. I can hear you, but oddly enough, it doesn't actually show that you're speaking.

But I can hear you, so that's good news. Yeah. Yay, Twitter. It's definitely not going to rug us on the space today. You know, I don't know exactly what to think about it. I think there's still, you know, we've been talking a lot, obviously, on these spaces about regulatory and what the SEC and everything is going to look like. And the meme coins have obviously been very popular from a builder and a launching perspective for the last couple of years

because they're the one thing that exists in actually a pretty clear regulatory space from an SEC perspective. But on the criminal side and on the sanctioned side, there's a lot of still question about like the people who get involved on these things about potential fraud and scams and that kind of thing. So my understanding is like, you know, they do not want to end up on the eye of Soron. You know, and the feds can really fuck your life up pretty good if you end up crossing any lines or if they just get kind of pissed off at you and want to focus too much. And again, I'm speaking here from like the DOJ and the criminal side, not from kind of I should say, they did not implement appropriate barriers

to keep U.S. people off of the site. And that got them targeted by the feds a couple of years ago and once again now. And so I think there's probably just a lot of expectation that even if the civil regulatory environment improves over the next couple of years, which it almost certainly will already sink in, the criminal one is not going to change that much. And so you have a lot of folks who are just trying to make sure that they don't end up on the wrong side of that.

It makes sense. I mean, for those who are listening in, I mean, it would have been hard to miss this, but the news on Pumped.fun was basically that, and I will find a thread that I found to be pretty informative to pin up into the nest here, but they had a pretty huge issue with people on their live streams doing some rather unethical things and just things that I don't really want to see on the Internet. And it kind of bleeds into Web 2 of how do you actually moderate these channels? And yesterday, Pumped Out Fun came out and just said that they're taking their streaming down

and they're not going to put it back up until they can actually hire the proper moderation team to make sure that only content that's aligning with their vision, whatever that may be, is being posted on the site. I find that to be very reactionary, because if you actually look at the Pumped Out Fund Twitter, they were leaning into a lot of this content. And I want to throw it over to Noodles. Like, do you think this, what PumpedOutFun put out yesterday, do you think it's very reactionary just to the public's perception of what was on their site? Or do you think that they are actually doing this

for the betterment of the community? Mic check Noodles. Hello. Hello, nice to meet you. And thank you for the opportunity to share my thoughts here. I'm not really caring about the pump fund because I would like more to talk about the technical side of the market, but we know Solana ecosystem is truly saturated and this stealing liquidity from measure caps are going and as we can see now the measure caps the blue chip are reacting very well

and that's good to see come back the liquidity over the legit project, I mean. And that's good. I think also what Cheats had said is good. We really need to stop this saturation because it's truly too much in my opinion. I love MemeCoin, but we are at the point that we don't have more liquidity for all of these places. I saw a data like a few days ago,

there's like 65,000 tokens for all day in Panfano, right? Yeah, yeah, definitely. Dave, I want to, yeah, definitely. Dave, I want to head over to you. I see that you just got up into a speaker slot. I haven't had a chance to speak with you about Pump.Fun yet. I'd love to hear your take on everything that was going on there. And if you think it's a smart move or not to take down live streaming. I mean, I think it definitely affects their virality

and they were leaning into it a lot on social media. But do you think this is a smart and necessary move from a regulatory perspective? A hundred percent. I mean, they didn't really have a choice. You know, if you think about it, the entire pump.fund ecosystem is built upon something that is problematic from a market's point of view, i.e. infinite ability to create memes. And that's why 98% of them don't end up doing anything. And the question is, is attracting critical mass, etc. And so they need to do that. But when live streamers are doing things that are effectively illegal, and in many cases, that was the case, or threatening to do something that's illegal.

And now you have an investment platform where people are putting money in. That's a toxic brew from a government point of view. The government will put up with a lot of crap from sites that ultimately claim, well, we're neutral, and so someone's going to kill themselves on the site or do child traffic on the site or do other things that might be very bad. They'll go after them quietly. But if people are able to buy memes based off of those things, that is one level of directness that none of the authorities, I don't care what political party, I don't care what country you're in. The fact is, authorities are going to say, wait a minute, you're telling me that people are doing things that we would probably want to ban just on their own and

allowing people to invest in it. You know, it's from a crypto point of view, from a market point of view, there are many of us who think that what's going on in memes, with the exception of projects that actually are building communities or things like, you know, look, I'll admit it. I hold Tooker, not a huge position, but, you know, I love the content and I think that's kind of interesting. perspective, when the average normal person on the street doesn't know the difference between Dogecoin and Bitcoin and some other Catcoin or this coin or that coin, and now all of a sudden there's a site that's allowing people to do things in the name of selling those tokens that would otherwise in all likelihood be not considered protected speech, that's a real problem. And I don't think they really had a choice, to be blunt.

I mean, I'm actually, from the community's perspective, I'm happy they did it so quickly. Reactionary or not, it's just the kind of attention that we don't need. Yeah. And for David, who I just see that you got up into a speaker spot as well, David Towle, just so that you're aware, we're kind of talking about the Pumped Up Fun News yesterday and how they banned live streaming to get some better moderation on their platform. We'd love to get your thoughts on that, what we're talking about. Does it seem very reactionary? Dave W.'s comments were that even though it's reactionary, it's for the betterment of the market. And I agree, these are not memes to me, but we'd love to hear your take on that. Frankly, I know a little bit, but I don't know enough about the situation to go ahead and give a deeper or different perspective than Dave gave.

I apologize. Yeah, no problem at all. I do want to transition as well because we're kind of seemingly just all on the camp that, hey, pump funds got to moderate their platform and not allow for illicit activity there. Dave, I want to transition to micro strategy and get your thoughts there, just your background in corporate finance. I mean, a lot of what I'm seeing on the more degen side of crypto Twitter is that why are people actually just paying what can be a 10 to 15 percent of buying spot Bitcoin and buying micro strategy shares instead? A lot of people on the degen side questioning if this is a bubble, borrowing money, buying Bitcoin, make the price go up. What's your stance?

Is this a really innovative corporate finance strategy or is this a bubble that's deemed to fail? I mean, the answer is neither, but closer to the first than the second. Look, when you look at what MicroStrategy is, and we've talked about this many times, and the average human being doesn't understand this. They don't get it. So what has MicroStrategy done? Effectively, simply put, taking advantage of very clear things in corporate finance. Bitcoin has volatility. Bitcoin on their balance sheet is now obviously the critical mass of what's going to be their value. And so taking advantage of the volatility of Bitcoin to package it into bonds that effectively

people who say, well, look, Bitcoin is not going to zero and it's not going to do more than an X percent retracement here. I think your collateral is good. And getting an upside call on Bitcoin slightly, or fully in the case of MicroStrategy equity, allowing it to package that into a managed platform that can be done in an IRA is is easy. And it's simple. And it makes sense. And look, I'm not gonna lie, I mean, I've owned MicroStrategy for a while now, not a huge position, again, although it's gotten much bigger, I'm not going to lie. I mean, I've owned MicroStrategy for a while now, not a huge position again, although it's gotten much bigger. I'm not selling any. So it's a way to have a leverage play in a brokerage account where you don't have to worry about the things that come with crypto. Now, look, I may be titularly a boomer. I obviously self-custody. I understand the risks with regard to and how to do it and, you know, etc. and spread

my wealth around. But most of the crypto degens don't understand that the average person, which is the vast majority of the wealth in the world, doesn't want to have to worry about, well, what happens if I die? Does my wife know my seed phrase or, you know, how do I pass this on and that kind of stuff? And so there's going to be demand until all of those problems are solved from more traditional financial products. Now, in my mind, in the end, traditional financial products are going to end up being all on chain anyway, and this problem will be a solved problem, and you won't have these products in the end. But in the end, it could be 10, 20 years from now. So when you look at MicroStrategy, they have basically packaged an intelligent way of doing

things. And if you don't know this in traditional finance, arguably one of the most profitable businesses in every house is called structured derivatives. Most of structured derivatives is Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, UBS, et cetera, putting together options and bonds, et cetera, into a single note, which clients can own. So MicroStrategy has done that at scale. And they've done that at scale in something that will probably end up in the NASDAQ within the next couple of weeks. And so, yeah, I mean, you know, he's done something now. He's done something that he's filled the need. And he's done it in an intelligent way

by DCA-ing into his purchases. And if he gets too aggressive, now, the question is, is that pyramiding going to be a problem if the market does something different than we all think it's going to do? I kind of ran I think he I think he has $30 billion more at his disposal to to double down on this strategy. And I saw something interesting as well that I pinned up into the nest. The UK as of last week, where you don't actually have access to buying the BTC ETF, MicroStrategy actually became their most purchased shares last week. But David, you've had your hand up for a while. I want to go to you and then Alex on your thoughts there. Yeah, so I think MicroStrategy is discussed a lot, and I think it, a systemic issue for the Bitcoin ecosystem.

And it also becomes incredibly important in the conversation of if Bitcoin becomes a strategic reserve asset for corporations and for nation states, you know, clearly MicroStrategy was the first mover. And obviously, the creative financing that goes along with it is important, too. So, I think it warrants, you know, continued discussion. And I think most people that listen to this space have a really good handle on all that it's about. Obviously, on the way up, it's incredibly powerful and it's incredibly valuable. Similar to Dave, I have a position in MicroStrategy as well, a pretty large one at that, both personal and in our fund. But I come at it a little bit differently only because I'm also in the process of creating a similar company or structure for other layer ones other than Bitcoin. So I control a listed entity

in Canada that also is listed here in the United States. And we've announced that we're going to make our treasury asset Ether and then go ahead and buy other layer ones along with staking. process with the Canadian Stock Exchange, or in this case, the Toronto Stock Exchange, you know, to go ahead and get this off the ground. But I think that there is justification, you know, Saylor started this in a different world and time, where, you know, he was the only option other than GBTC for people that wanted to go ahead and own crypto through a structure that they were previously very familiar with. high sense of confidence that eventually Bitcoin would be structured in passive equity-like structures and he would not be the only game in town. And I don't think in his wildest dreams, he believed not only would he survive, but succeed and thrive through that. And he has, and I think at this point, he has, you know, obviously the convertible debentures issuance is a brilliant financial, corporate finance move because it satisfies a type of investor that can't otherwise invest in microstrategy,

can't otherwise invest in Bitcoin, wants, can't otherwise invest in Bitcoin, wants exposure to cryptocurrency some way, somehow. And this allows for it. And I do believe that Saylor has got to be thinking not only on his own, but certainly with the likes of lots of financial professionals that have helped him until now to go and think of other ways that he can go ahead and use his stash of Bitcoin that continues to grow in order to do other interesting things as it relates to structuring and allowing access to different types of, you know, value propositions inside of Bitcoin. And I think that it will continue to be an enigma. There will be copycats of different parts of MicroStrategy's strategy, but I don't think there's going to be anyone that comes along that's able to go ahead and fully replicate it. And for that reason,

it's a really, really important piece of the Bitcoin ecosystem. I tend to agree that diversification here is going to be incredibly important. I think last week it was the statistic, Dave, maybe you can correct me if I'm wrong, but Saylor now has almost 1.5% of the total supply of Bitcoin. And when you actually look at the underlying business of MicroStrategy and their software company and take a look at their graph, and I'll pin up a tweet into the nest as well. But it's a linear decline for almost a decade in terms of their actual revenue. But I do want to circle back on just the business model on the topic of diversification that you were looking at. I'm not sure if you're familiar with tokens.com. I think they recently rebranded to

Realbotics Corp. Is that a similar business model that you're setting up to Tokens.com? All we're doing is simply, I mean, the entity already exists. It's already public. We're in the process of getting permission from the exchange to go ahead and execute on the plan. But we'll go ahead and we will, you know, the stock, like I said, is listed in Canada and in the United States. Primary listing is in Canada. So in Canada, until, you know, maybe the Trump administration takes over, they're are more embracing of Solana. XRP, stake those and be able to translate to our investors, which, like I said, not only does a stock trade in Canada, but it's also listed here in the United States. And so, therefore, it will allow U.S. equity investors to get the benefit of layer ones with staking benefits, which is something that is different than what any ETF

can do. Obviously, when the ETFs get approved here in the United States with staking capabilities, well, then, you know, we could go ahead and, you know, put on the sailor play and start to go ahead and raise capital in different ways. As a matter of fact, our first capital raise is not going to be an equity. I mean, the company already has a considerable amount of equity and is buying, but we're going to go ahead and do a raise. And the raise that we're planning is actually going to be a debt raise um it's going to be a fixed coupon with a piece of the upside um on the uh on the gains on the tokens that we buy that that's always been one of my my gripes with the ethereum etf is is my thesis and just kind of being a super user of lido is that if you're if you're holding spot

eth and you're really not participating in a validator or participating in liquid staking, like you're kind of just forfeiting 3% in inflation. So I definitely respect that model quite a bit. But Alex, I know that you've had your hand up for quite a while. I'm not sure at what point of the conversation kind of sparked your interest, but want to go to you just to throw the mic around a bit. so i'm just in terms of like micro strategy in general like there's no question and i think dave understands this stuff better than i do um but like there's no question to come up with a very let's just call it generously elegant uh corporate finance structure for this and like i fucking hate it i absolutely fucking despise it um for a couple reasons one um i don't like that sailor controls one and a half probably soon to

north of two percent of all bitcoin for the same reason that i don't love like people being like yeah it'll be fucking awesome when the u., you know, 2 million Bitcoin. Yeah. Because what I want of like my decentralized, you know, non-government fiat currency is for the largest government in the world to own and hold 10% of it. Like it's insane to me. And, you know, when I look at micro strategy and the amount of, it's not just that they're doing weird financial, it's not just that it's leveraged. It's that it's leveraged in this insanely complex way, in a huge systemic way to where Bitcoin sits today. And again, as someone who's not a deep finance person, I just can't look at it and not get some of the same feelings I got looking back at people telling me that fucking algorithmic

stable coins were the future back when Terra was going up through the roof or fat or rewinding all the way back to um you know 2005-06-07 and you know 87 re-hypothecations of the same mortgage market and because at the end of the day like there are certainly very interesting financial maneuvers that if you don't overextend can be incredibly powerful right the entire the core idea of tranching bonds uh you know or tranching a risky asset to create both safe stable and you know lower yield and higher yield higher risk assets is really cool and can absolutely work. We've seen it happen many times. I think it's great. But when you really start pushing that and doing it too many fucking times and making it too systemic and integral to an industry or

something, that's where, like I said, I'm not a financial expert here. There's other folks who know more, but I look at it and I just don't fucking like it. I tend to agree. I don't like it as well. It's just like when I look back at when I first read the Bitcoin white paper, what enamored me with that was not, I mean, of course, I love $100,000 Bitcoin. But what enamored me with that paper was not about interesting corporate financing structures of taking loans against your Bitcoin to buy more Bitcoin.

It was really that decentralized nature. But I did pin up into the nest for any listeners tuning in. There's a great website I'd recommend looking at, sailortracker.com, if people actually want to track his buys. I typically use that site quite a bit. But Dave, I want to go to you. Let me throw one more quick thought on there there too, just because you brought up the Bitcoin white paper. I think one of the other things that the Bitcoin white paper and Satoshi deserves credit for

is it is such plain English, right? It's dealing with these extraordinarily complex and advanced mathematical concepts and explains it in such a straightforward way. And I think that's actually a really big hallmark of something that has a fundamental underlying sturdiness to it is if you can explain it clearly and in plain or rather, if you can't explain it clearly and in plain English terms, you're probably doing something that you don't understand the end ramifications of. I love that take. I love that. I think that in order for us to actually move forward as an industry, it's so important for people to actually understand who the participants are and those

parameters. But Dave, I want to circle over to you because one thing we were talking a lot about last week was just our optimism that Bitcoin was going to crush through 100K. And a lot of people thinking like, OK, we're going to liquidate a lot of shorts here once Bitcoin breaks 100. 107 is really short in sight just with the amount of liquidations. I mean, a lot of people probably saw those tweets about just the density of the order book on the sell side at that 100K level. With the amount of Bitcoin that Saylor did buy, I think it was yesterday. I think it was over 55,000 Bitcoin that he bought yesterday. Is this a pretty bearish price action here for Bitcoin kind of dipping down into that 92 range when you have the biggest whale doubling, tripling, even quadrupling down on his conviction, and we're still seeing these large dips? No, not even slightly. First of all, the way he buys it is

using, it's not using CoinRoute, the company I co-founded, he's using Coinbase's algorithms. The fact is he doesn't buy it all in one day. He buys it piecemeal over the time. And yes, it's indicative that there was selling pressure after there was a breakout of a tree. We had a trading range. It was $50,000 to $70,000 for eight months. We broke out of that and immediately went in a straight line to damn near hit 100,000. That's a big move. Trees don't grow to the sky. There's lots of things that happen in markets. So the fact that we're consolidating now at what is a 30 plus percent rally from the middle of that range, now that we've broken out of it, in period of time, you know, where we have Thanksgiving holiday in the U.S., we have still over a month and a half before we get a new administration.

You know, we're looking at what's going on and we're going to get into the year-end rebalancing season, which could create some very interesting dynamics as we move into next month, which I actually expect, but I always expected it to pause around here. In fact, I said it on our Macro Monday podcast a couple of times. I do want to go back to a couple of things Alex said, though, because let me put your mind at ease. If a portfolio manager had enormous conviction in NVIDIA five years ago and started buying up to 5%, you know, get up to the 13F thresholds of NVIDIA. Nobody would bat an eye. And then that person would be a celebrity now, because their fund would have been the best performing fund over the last five years.

The fact that Saylor's doing that at Bitcoin is you really shouldn't bat an eye, because what he's doing effectively, even more so than that, is he's providing a publicly traded vehicle for others to invest. The best analog I can give you to this concern is I was involved in program trading. I actually built the first program trading system on Wall Street in the days of yore when there were dinosaurs walking on the New York Stock Exchange. And we all watched Vanguard. And at the time, what's now BlackRock, but was actually, believe it or not, Wells Fargo Asset Management and Northern Trust and State Street, those four firms go from basically being small, you know, kind of asset managers to the largest asset management complex in the world, going, taking, you know, index funds from nothing to effectively holding somewhere around 15% of the capital stock of the world, which is dramatic. And everyone at the time, a lot of people at the time, as this stuff started

to happen, were saying, oh my God, this is going to screw up all sorts of corporate structure. It's going to create all sorts of calcifications. It's going to have all sorts of bad effects, none of which have ever materialized or very little of which have ever materialized. So it's not like there is no precedent for innovative financial products that people find to be valuable to suck up more and more assets and And I just don't see this as a problem because the reality is Bitcoin We all believe it's underpriced by a factor of 10 and sailors is putting his money where his mouth is and giving a vehicle for people to put their money where their mouth is and

While we don't love it, it is what it is. And there's lots of parallels in finance. Yeah, I think there's absolutely tons of parallels. But I don't think, I think it's the combination of two things. It's the combination of getting potentially a little too creative with the financial product creation and the scale that it's achieving. If you had someone who was deploying a billion dollars of private capital or half a billion or a billion dollars of private capital in a hedge fund using the strategy that sailors using, which arguably you can't because part of the whole strategy is the fact I was

financing on the public markets, But let's just ignore that. Right. But just with all kinds of crazy, weird leverage and whatever the setup is, it's fine. It's a billion dollars. It's constrained into one thing. Right. And on the flip side, if you deploy 100 billion to 500 billion dollars through unleveraged straight public market ETFs, that doesn't scare me either because that's basically just, you know,

a more convenient boomery way of holding Bitcoin. It's the combination of those two and centralizing that much Bitcoin under one entity using, again, I'm just going to call it weird financial things like that. It's the combination of those two things, which is where I start to get like kind of the itchy and like, fuck man. If people don't diamond hand this.

I understand, Alex, but there's a difference. So like in 2008, in 2007, I knew what was happening and saw what was happening in the financial crisis. If you want to boil the financial crisis down to one thing, it is an incredible horde of people all throughout the financial system claiming diversification when diversification didn't exist. So the easiest example was in commercial real estate. So basically, a builder who built my house that I was living in New Jersey at the time, told me that he used to finance shopping centers. And because of all the financial packaging, he was able to go from 300 basis points over to 60 basis points over the

prime rate to finance shopping centers in New Jersey, which when you think about it, it's like, okay, well, how'd that happen? Well, the answer is, the people on the other end of the phone, the Goldman Sachs's of the world, were saying, okay, well, how'd that happen? Well, the answer is the people on the other end of the phone, the Goldman Sachs's of the world were saying, okay, well, this shopping center is different than this shopping center, different than this shopping center. They take 20 shopping centers and they package them together and they say, what are the odds that any one of them, that all of them will go under? Well, the answer is if there's a structural event that makes shopping centers less valuable, of course it's going to go under. And that is literally what happened with subprime real estate. So you had all this crap that was correlated to each other. That was

financial engineering that relied on a broken premise, the premise being that things were not diversified. Well, Saylor's case, he's relying on the premise, two pieces of the premise. Premise number one is that Bitcoin has a value. It's not going to zero. And if you don't believe that, then definitely don't buy micro strategies. Premise number two is that volatility could be monetized. When the price goes up and down and up and down and up and down, there are people who are willing to pay for that. And that is a fact. And those sorts of options, the exact same thing is how Amazon built their distribution method. I mean, maybe you don't know that, but at the time it was an enormous deal. They floated a $2 billion convertible bond, which sounds quaint given the size of Amazon now. But at the time, it allowed them to build out their just-in-time

distribution capabilities. And the way they did it was by financing at a rate that was way below where they could borrow by selling convertible bonds at, you know, at the time, and it was 35% above the current stock price. So effectively, they monetize that volatility. It is not this is not the first time this has been done. It's probably relative to Bitcoin, it's at a scale relative to the asset. It's at a scale that we've probably never seen before. But relative to financial markets, it's really it's not. That's kind of my point. Yeah, no, I totally get it. I really appreciate you walking through it on that. And yeah, like I said, I think ultimately my concern comes exactly what you said there is. It's about the scale to the asset, because it's the asset is the thing that I care about in the long term.

And yeah, obviously, I don't think Bitcoin is going to zero or anything. And my solution to this is I'm just not going to buy like a strategy but i wasn't going to buy in any way so i'm going to um sit there and you know with my nice cold storage multi-sig hobbling um but i just uh yeah like i said it just it's still i'm not sure i'll ever feel not a little bit like sketchy about it and i obviously certainly do not want to see anything bad happen to it because i just that would be bad for adoption overall um but i also really would not mind not seeing any more bitcoin centralized under one person's control

same same sort of uh sentiment for me there but uh dav, I did see that you had your hand up. Did you have any thoughts there? We have a couple minutes left before we're going to transition to our sponsor. So I just want to get people's last thoughts on the topic. Yeah, I just think people should be prepared for the short thesis on microstrategy to kind of never go away. And so you will have value investors, short activists, constantly coming up with the same, it's going to be the same argument. I don't think there's going to be a difference in the argument because the strategy, at least at this point,

in terms of just the accumulation of the Bitcoin on a leveraged basis, you know, the thesis on the short side is not going to change, but I think every once in a while we will see people come along and offer up that short thesis. I don't think people should get particularly troubled by it, even if it comes with a notoriety of who the short is coming from. We've seen one from Carisdale Capital. I happen to know if you,

I happen to know those folks from other unfortunate situations that I was in tussling with them. And now most recently, you know, we saw, you know, Andrew Left get involved. I think that it will come and go. I think people just have to kind of, you know, be accustomed to the fact that it's going to come, there'll be a hit piece, you know, maybe things will gyrate. A lot of those folks have their trades structured so that, you know, they effectively can go ahead and run a hit piece and then immediately take whatever gains are available to them and they're gone and, you, and the damage is done. But in this case, I think whatever damage gets done, it kind of gets diluted into a much stronger narrative.

It's not like hitting a management team in between the eyes with something like accounting fraud or some other, I guess, misstatements and stuff like that. So that's all. Alex, any final thoughts there just before we transition? No, I think I'm personally a big fan of short sellers. I think that they provide a really important moderating force on the market um and like the you know you don't want to wait till something's too big to take it down so not to say that they're all wonderful ethical people who don't do things they shouldn't be doing but overall i think short sellers are a really important uh force in the market uh and

the final piece there is you're also insane, I think, to be shorting MicroStrategy right now, because as much as they might have issues with it or be suspicious of it, there is an important, important maxim in investing. The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay liquid. And I think that is 100% the case, even if you are short MicroStrategy philosophically. That is a a meme stock and I never short meme stocks. But Alex, you know that everyone that short micro strategy is long Bitcoin to some extent. I don't know what their ratio is, but that's the short thesis. In other words, it's just on the premium.

So yeah, you're just shorting their strategy and hedging it against. That makes a lot of sense to do it. But I still would not run that way. Because again, I just think that the market's going to do what the market's going to do. And I don't know how to predict the psychology of giant groups of psychotic investors.

David, is that what you think they're doing? They're shorting the strategy and longing? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. No one's naked shorting it. And to Alex's point, and I know he realized, and I actually still agree with Alex, I would not short MicroStrategy even with that, because frankly, I don't know if I was not heavily involved, although everyone had some involvement with everything that went down with GameStop and a lot of the meme stocks at the time. But I don't know if folks have read The Trolls of Wall Street, which was written by Nathaniel Popper. I think he's a reporter at the Journal, maybe. In any event, it's a great look inside that world. And I believe that, you know, getting involved in any, potentially even, you know, meme stock is really, really dangerous. You really can get your face ripped off,

get carried out, you know, and frankly, you know, it could be whiplash and you'll be out before, you know, some recovery happens or your thesis, you know, comes to light or the frenzy wears off. So, yeah, I generally agree with Alex to stay away. The mob is a very more powerful force in markets now than it ever was in the history of the street. Well, speaking to this mob, so just last week, MicroStrategy had $136 billion of trading volume. Putting that into perspective, not even GME has had a week with volume even remotely that close. So I think I'm definitely just seeing just the top layer of the onion there just due to volume on the stock, something that I would run away from as a short

seller personally. But I want to thank you guys for coming here. It was a good conversation. We are going to transition here over to avacoin so i believe it is uh tony that's going to be speaking on behalf of the project he's the ceo and co-founder so so tony as we transition here just at the top of the hour for the ama why don't you give uh listeners an overview of what exactly avacoin is if they've never heard of it you hi guys I'm just a very interesting discussion about bitcoins and maybe I will change my speech because it's more interesting to speak about Bitcoin our coin this is one of the big telegram app with 12 million users right now and it should be my question guys for you so many smart guys here

and next week we will launch the university section for our telegram app i don't know guys you know what is telegram app or not because right now it's like in this year it's many different telegram apps with 10 million users 50 million users 100 million users it 50 million users, 100 million users. It's going like crazy. And we prepared a three-month university section because we believe that we need to bring the more mass adoption for the people to understand more what crypto is because many people, like we know in our app, more than 7 million users don't understand what is gas fee,

like ton, why they have to pay for the transactions and maybe you can recommend something for us because he and me and bory and boris um he will speak a little bit later he created all the program which he learned in crypto last 10 years and we want to bring more um smart people who will understand about bitcoins because mass adoptions and this is millions, millions, millions, hundred millions people in telegram they should to know how to use correctly crypto where they should to buy bitcoin. Not only micro strategy, not only BlackRock, okay they will be rich but we need to educate the most of the people what is cold storage, how to save their passwords, seed threads, everything.

Maybe you guys can give us some advice, what you think for your opinion, because all of you have huge experience with crypto. What will be the most super best target for the beginners? Beginners, I mean the people who never bought before the Bitcoins, but they have to start to think about this, and they have to start to buy some small amount, maybe $100 per month in next year, every month. Because we are trying to bring this information with AI in 20 different languages, it will be next few weeks, to our users our users from 200 countries from all over the world and they speak different language in our coin we're trying to give them

the solution not only gaming okay game is super they play different our interesting games you can download telegram if you don't have go Go to AvaCoin, check and play different interesting games, earn money. But the new type of the Telegram apps, it's learn to earn. They can be educated by our system. And if they finished exam in 24 hours, we give them $15. It's not too much, but for millions, millions, millions of people in the world, it's a huge amount. It's not easy, but we did it before when we did listing in the summertime.

And now our most hard mission is to bring tens, millions of people from the Tone ecosystem, from the Telegram to crypto, not only for Tone, only in Solana and different blockchain, of course, and Ethereum and Bitcoin. They have to understand how to work with this. What do you guys think?

What will be your advice? If you have a chance to tell the 10 million people in one sentence, what you can give them? Yeah, I mean, I can jump on that. I will do. Yeah, you can do this through me, through our system. Yeah. So to answer the question just about what I think is the most important things for new users,

like when I got into crypto, I mean, this is probably why I love listening to Dave so much. It was identifying the Bitcoin arbitrage opportunity in 2016 to 2018 era, cross exchanges and building a business around that. But whenever I onboard people to crypto, it's the first thing I'm doing is I'm getting them to purchase a Trezor or a Ledger, teaching them about dollar cost averaging, and also then getting them to download a MetaMask or a Rabi wallet and getting them the gas tokens that they need to participate in DeFi. So those are the main principles. But Dave, I'm sure that you, in your position, just with a corporate finance background, you're onboarding a ton of people as well. What are the top three core things that you're getting them to do right off the bat?

Yeah, I wish I had some magic to tell you. And unfortunately, I have to jump. I think the reality is most people, it's a question of safety of their assets. And so you start them on centralized exchanges. Sorry, hi. Spanish class. Sorry about that. I'm moving and going into my Spanish class, living down in Miami. It's one of those things. No problem. Enjoy the Spanish class, Dave. But I do think that what you said is exactly right. What I always tell people is start that way, understand DCA, and then experiment when they get to a critical mass with wallets and seed phrases. But like, for example, the biggest problem is, is like someone will say, okay, what, how do I remember it? How do I pass

it on? And then you start writing and then they say, oh, and they start taking notes and you're like, well, wait a minute, you know, now, now you've basically given a blueprint for people to steal it. So, you know, it's people find it hard to get over those humps. And that's when I talk about, you know, the kind of custodial solutions that are necessary for that. But the general idea of Bitcoin as an asset and the general idea of crypto as an asset, you start with centralized exchanges. You then explain to them, you know, what a MetaMask or a phantom wallet is and how you protect it. And you get them used to password wallet creations and seed phrases and understanding that. And if you do that, then people start getting comfortable with it. The reality is it's an age thing.

At a certain age, you're not going to get there. At a certain age, it's going to be easy. And I think that's the kind of generational change that we all expect to take place. Tony, are you seeing some of the same challenges in the content that you guys are creating? Is that sort of what you're focused on? Can we ask about this Boris Moller, he can explain Yeah, sure guys. Hi, glad to be here. So basically I do agree with all the things mentioned before because when you think about crypto you you basically think of, I don't know, like jumping out of a plane with a parachute.

You would probably like to take the parachute lesson first, don't you? And the market right now, in my opinion, is evolving in a breakneck speed. Because I used to be here 10 years ago. I bought my first Bitcoin when it cost like $300. And nowadays, the market is evolving. New technologies, regulations, projects, everything is coming up faster than we can blink. So without proper knowledge, you risk just getting lost in the chaos of falling to victims and to scams. So an education is just a guide, helping you not just understand the landscape, but avoid

the pitfalls. And in AvaCoin, we're going to focus on the basics and after that, develop them to more difficult things. So first of all, we'll focus on the basics for the beginners. People mentioned before that the basics of security, the basics of understanding the transactions, the gas fees. If you start your crypto journey, we'll begin with essentials from fundamental analysis to understanding how blockchain works in general. And we will prepare the first steps for people.

After that, we're planning to move to fundamental analysis and information management. How do you distinguish a solid project from an overhyped one? We teach people how to analyze the data, filter out the noise, and make informed decisions. After that, we would switch to technical analysis and strategies from drawing your, I don't know, first trend line to building robust strategies for managing trades and portfolios. And of course we will try to cover the hype areas like trading BN coins because the more hype the area is the more liquidity and the more market players come

there. And we'll try to catch every actual area which is happening in the market right now. So crypto in general, it's just not a number on the screen. It's in my opinion, it's an ecosystem where you manage your risks. You need to understand the market psychology as well and even play detective to separate promising projects from clever scams. So you might think of crypto, I don't know, as a jungle. There are lots of opportunities but without a map and probably without a match you won't get far. So education will guide people to onboard on the cryptocurrency market and to be effective in it. So Tony I think

that's basically all. Yeah, millions, millions, millions of course. you imagine, guys? We tried to give 4 million people in summer our token like Iron Drop. 4 million. Some of them not tried to took the tokens. Why? Because they need to pay gas fee in Tone and the people don't understand what it is. And they told me, oh, Tone is scummer because we have to pay Tone in our gas fee to claim our tokens it's free airdrop for four million people like millions millions dollars just take it go with we are like robin good and people

don't understand oh no of course we start to think okay we need to educate this is four million we need to educate this is 20 million for another telegram apps we need to educate the people from hamsters because they also don't understand and don't believe it's like more than 100 million users and we hit we should to help them and after this they will go to buy bitcoin and bitcoin will be 10 million dollars yeah i love that uh that optimism i mean i'm all with you i'm hoping that bitcoin reaches heights like that for sure but uh like clicking, and I do encourage the audience to, in clicking the AvaCoin profile, I think at first glance, I have to admit

even a few weeks ago when we all first met, when I clicked the profile, it looks like just a telegram tap to earn app. But there is a lot of education that you guys are building in. So how did you guys really create this ecosystem and what does that ecosystem encompass so there's the education side there's the tap to earn what else is part of the full ecosystem it's a lot of things we create we started with like tap to earn but then we became we create the marketplace where is 150 different another telegram apps we create section for the staking in crypto in USDT and now this is a new game in other games it's like around 10 different games our

partners create different games it will be part of our coin inside people can play they can earn through game much easier to educate people and bring them the crypto world much easier through game because they love the games and the game they can earn money small ten dollars fifty dollars one hundred dollars not too much but it's first money through the fun and education section for the more smartest people for example from can you imagine from 100 million users in hamster combat on another telegram apps we can find 1 million smart traders this is smart traders can create a new exchange and slowly slowly in our ecosystem we try to give

them different solutions first games marketplace not only tap to earn. Secondly, it is education program about how to earn money in crypto. This is everything together. We launched two weeks ago the crypto cards. We give them different solutions from our partners, virtual cards for Nigerian, Nigerian cards, for Asia, Asian cards, for Europe, Europe cards, different. Like marketplace, everything. Because Telegram, it's a new ocean with empty competitors. One billion people inside, and they don't use many things what the people use normally in America with iPhone and App Store. And in Telegram, one billion users, and they need these products.

Games, wallets, crypto and they need these products. Games, wallets, crypto, education system, everything. It's a lot of options. It is definitely a lot, and I have to commend you guys on taking on such a large endeavor, and also congratulate you on just the number of users that you guys have been able to achieve thus far.

But as we just have a couple minutes, just a minute or so left in the show here. There's a lot of people who are tuning in, we have over 400 comments in the comment section right now. What would your call to action of those people be like, is there an opportunity for them to purchase the token right now? Is it to use the tap to earn app, maybe just leave the audience with something specific that they can go do right now to get involved? I don't know. I don't know.

Ask this Boris. He's more smart than me. Maybe that's not true. But in my opinion, the main call to action is just educate yourself as much as possible because the bull market has already begun. And basically, you should educate all these two years educate yourself as much as possible because the bull market has already begun and basically you should educate all these two years because the capitals being raised on a bull market being made first of all on the bear market But if you have skipped the bear market during nothing you went out of crypto and you did some other stuff

That's okay. Normally, that's's okay but now actually you don't have lots of time left maybe the world market will last for two months maybe for half a year i don't know nobody knows but as more you educate now the more you will get from it because all the steps you do to to learn more about cryptocurrency will bring you more wealth in the future. So educate and even the exchanges, you mentioned centralized exchanges before. Right now, they're not interested in just not clever person. They're not interested in just money. They're interested in users who know

how to trade, who know how to analyze different types of projects because they want to be here long term. And as more people know more about cryptocurrency, the longer our market will last, in my opinion. Well said. Well, I do encourage the listeners to give Ava Goldcoin a follow so you can click their profile in the speaker panel right now, give them a follow. In their bio,

they do have the Telegram channel where you can use their Tap to Earn app as well. But I do want to thank Tony and Boris, both of you guys, for coming on the tail end of a very, very heavy Bitcoin conversation to introduce the audience here to AvaCoin. I'm sure that we will hear from you guys again. Feel free, as we're exiting here, to pin any tweets that you guys have up into the nest for people to explore. And I'll definitely be going through the comments and encourage you guys to as well if there are some lingering questions on there with AvaCoin. But have a great Tuesday, everybody. I appreciate

everyone for joining, especially all the speakers, but more importantly, the audience. Thank you guys for tuning in and making this such a fun show and experience to have. Thanks, everybody. Have a great Tuesday.