The Wolf Of All Streets - BTC Dumps to 68K. Buy the Panic?#CryptoTownHall

Episode Date: March 6, 2026

In this Crypto Town Hall episode, hosts unpack intense market volatility from Middle East tensions, surging oil prices (Brent >$91), and the Strait of Hormuz closure sparking global panic. Bitcoin holds resilient near $68K–$70K amid risk-asset selloffs, while panelists debate bear-market bounces, recession risks from reversed wealth effects, and bullish duration trades in Treasuries. Key topics include banking lobby resistance to stablecoin yields/Clarity Act progress, Kraken’s Fed master account milestone, Ledn’s groundbreaking S&P investment-grade rating for Bitcoin-backed ABS bonds, AI-driven job disruption, and the urgent need for U.S. regulatory clarity to prevent offshore innovation loss.

So welcome to Happy Friday, or maybe not so happy here on Crypto Town Hall. I mean, Bitcoin at what? Well, I guess it's bouncing off $68,000. I guess pretty much everything else is all other risk assets are getting killed. And I see Mike, Joe V. Dan, and I guess that's it right now. All right. So go ahead. You're on a roll.

Well, not really. I mean, you know, it's like it's, I made the joke happy Friday. I mean, you know, we got Brent over 91 and West Texas crude at pushing $89 a barrel. And the Straits of Hormoneau is closed and people are starting to panic, which of course could make sense. And depending on where you are, you know, I hope we get some people from Dubai up on stage to talk about what's going on there. But, you know, the stuff I'm hearing isn't pretty. And, you know, at the same time, other indices are down. I mean, it looks like the NASDAQ has recovered a bit.

It was down a lot more before. But, you know, still over a percent down across the board. And that's pretty much dominating what's going on in terms of markets. You know, there's no two ways about it. When global trade, you know, you see people like was it, the Kuwaiti oil minister, said that the Gulf may be forced to shut down totally within a few weeks. And if that's true, oil will hit $150 a barrel. I mean, okay.

I'm curious. We have our resident expert on this. I mean, Mike, you know, does this sound familiar to you? You're dusting back to your 1991 playbook. Oh, man. Thanks for bringing that one back, Dave. I remember that period initially when the invasion started being caught off sides. I remember reading about it in Businessweek that Iraq was accumulating troops on the Kuwaiti border,

getting caught off sides and then catching the end of it. But it's what you said, Dave. It's so profound. There's panic. But panic in training is the opportunity. And I see what's happening around. right now is, okay, so if we open up Monday morning, the straight of homoenotes is still closed, yeah, that's a big problem. My key mistake and the key thing I got long is an optimistic

yank, because I thought the U.S. would have this covered and we would not let the straight of homeless be closed. But it is crude oil's pumped, and the key question is, is it sustainable? But I do love this pine and sky views. Just look at what happens. So crude oil is up 50% on the year. The front natural gas future in January was up 100% on the year, and now it's down 15%. To me, that's where Crudel is going by the end of the year, and that's the way we should think about it. Just think about Mr. Trump walking into the midterms. What's he going to have to, as we walk in the midterms, if we, the Iraq War has gone wrong, that's basically it for the Republican Party and potentially it for his legacy. I don't think he took this calculated risk with that potential.

So I fully expect that Strait of Homo is closed. This will be pretty much mopped up, hopefully by Monday morning. If it's not, we've got a big problem. The key thing is this is crypto town hall. And I think the bottom line is we are in a bare market in crude oil and it's bounced to extreme levels. Think on what that's going to matter for the end of the bottom line is. Why is in the bare market? Because massive supply out of the U.S., which will only increase now that we've pumped up prices.

And we are in a bare market in crypto's, mostly Bitcoin. We've had a bounce in a bare market. 74 is key level. 64 is key support. I think it's just more likely to break down. And the bottom line for me and everything this year is my base case, stock market vouchly will rise from basically. a 10-year low in NASDA 180-day volatility.

I stick with that base case scenario. I still think we're supposed to be selling risk assets on rallies. SEPB are starting tick over. And the bottom line is we haven't seen that there's been a major huge pumps in volatility and energy and metals and a lot of other markets and still not trickling over to the stock market. I think that's just getting started. So one example is 180-day volatility of gold is 2.4 times that of the S&P5.

That's first the highest in 20 years. So I think that's what's happened. We're going to trickle over the stock market. And by the time the dust sells from this, we'll see that this is probably helping spark a next recession, which is the only key thing to really kick in a recession is just a bit of reverse wealth effect. To me, cryptos are leading the way. Prove me wrong by staying number one, staying above 74,000. I just like to see one of these markets prove me wrong. Silver stay above 100.

So far, it's going lower. Copper stay above $6. It's going lower. to me, this is the best trading opportunity year ever. Just don't be cut overweight long risk assets with volatility and the NASDAQ and SNB 500 is near 10-year lows. Well, you and I can unpack a lot of that this on Monday. First of all, silver, it's going lower. 100, no, 100 was the pop.

The range for silver to watch. And I think even, you know, I can't even imagine that anyone would disagree with this is the 70 to 80 range. it's still over 80. Actually, there's a bearer story on silver out, a pretty big one. People haven't figured if people don't, don't connect the dots, which is that BYD's new battery, the new blade battery, which may not be quite as impressive as the Samsung battery, but it's pretty damn close. Doesn't use a lot of silver. And so that definitely decreases the likelihood of solid state batteries being a massive driver. But, you know, whatever. You know, you could get into the minutia on a lot of this stuff. If you believe, however, that this is going to, that this war will tip us over into a recession caused by lack of oil.

Remember, the U.S. doesn't, the most interesting thing in the oil patch today, by the way, I think, Mike, which I was hoping you would get to, is not just that the price is up, but that the spread between West Texas and Brent has collapsed. I mean, it was like between $7 and $8 a couple days ago, and it's like less than $3 now. So it's across the board, meaning that U.S. inputs are going up too. So there is that. But if you believe there is a recession, then the government can't afford a recession. You know, you're right. That's very important to understand. I'm glad you brought that out, Dave, because, yeah, 88 and WTI and 91 in Brent is a bit of a shocker.

That just shows it's pretty significant cleansing of shorts in WTI. But my key point is to make it clear as the next recession is going to come from one, key factor, reversed wealth effect. Now, we're seeing that in cryptos. The stock market is the key guidance for that. To me, this is a matter of time that kicks in. That's why I keep pointing out is I just, you know, stock market value is too low to consider buying risk gases. But that's a key thing. We're covering no shorts, but again, straight hormones is close. This has never happened. Crudell should be up. But again, to get one thing, natural gas was up twice as much at the beginning year. Where is it now? Because that's the key. The bottom line is the whole world has shifted from

1979 when you and I remember when we had the Iranian revolution when U.S. was the largest net importer. The U.S. is running net exports running four million barrels a date. With that in context, in 2008, when crude oil peaked at 1.45, we were importing 12 million barrels a day. So this is win, win, win for U.S. producers. And what are they doing? They're selling forward. We saw what happened in natural gas. They're going to bring on more supply. This is really bad for the rest of the world. And remember, most of that oil from the Strait of Moose goes to China. Remember how this all got started. This all got started between Russia's invasion to Ukraine that pumped up prices. They're still heading lower.

And what's happened since then? We've had the unlimited friendship. You can see things just ticking down. Russia and China have lost as allies if it's Syria. They've lost Venezuela. Iran's down. Trump just said Cuba is next. You see the trend there?

This is all bad. This is all that geopolitical bid for gold, I think, is over. And I just simplistically look at it. Yes, I was early last year calling for a. peak in cryptos, but that peak in cryptos last year, I think, is going to trickle down to a peak in metals this year. And so far, what's been the worst performer, so far this has happened, the Bloomberg All Metals Index is down 4% on the month. That wasn't supposed to happen, but to me, that's what's going to continue to happen. The bottom line is when things like this

happen, stuff that's really expensive reverts and stuff that's really cheap reverse. And that's why one of the best performing assets was micro strategy. It's just, you know, it was way oversold. Dave, you're Mike Corkin. I'm not sure if mine is. I think we can go to the any body's opinions here on obviously the price action. We were very excited when Bitcoin was at 74 on Wednesday or Thursday, but now 24 hours later back down at 768. Mike, we talked about this yesterday. Literally, you said 74 obviously was a level to fade

and we showed it on a chart. Right. I mean, is it the chart, Scott, or is it the fact that look what's happened since then? I mean, since the war started, Bitcoin's up 10%. Right? You know, let's just go right there. Now, now what,

of what has been the performance since the war started of the S&P? Down what? I don't have the number, Mike. It's about 2%. Right. So 1.6. Right. So, you know, stocks are, so when you make the statement, X is starting to roll over from the war,

I think that describes risk assets on the stock side. When you say that about Bitcoin, maybe not. The data doesn't show that. So, you know, we got to be careful about our timeframes. But yes, I mean, I agree. agreed with Mike, by the way, on 74. You heard me say it. I thought it would be the time. I actually thought it was a short, you know, in terms of trading. I still think. Yeah, fair trader, that that's the most gratuitous short on the chart because obviously your risk is well managed. You go to 75,

you cut it, you lose a little, and you move on. Right. Exactly. So, you know, look, my, my base case has been and isn't changing that I thought we would chop around and grind higher. Grinding higher kind of doesn't happen when the entire world is, is worried about going up in flames and everyone's panicking. So, you know, whatever. But panic looks like, this is what panic looks like and Bitcoin's performing extremely well considering panic. That's really the point that that I would make here. And I'm talking a lot. 99 is pretty crazy when you consider what's happening with. Yeah. I mean, it, well, but it makes, but it's not crazy. It makes sense. I mean, the people in the cryptosphere have sold.

And, and the, the idiosyncratic value proposition of Bitcoin is still ridiculously good relative to what people believe is the product is going on. But look, there's, there's, carnage going out there in financial markets that hasn't actually happened yet. I mean, I mean, I see Robert who's joined the stage. Robert, you know, from your perspective, forget, forget the moralisms and let's not talk about, you know, whether we should be or any of that stuff. But from a pure pragmatic point of view, from a capital flow point of view, there's some pretty major things happening right now, right? Yeah.

Yeah, so higher energy inputs are going to pressure rates. It's also going to pressure the current account of creditor nations that have been a big buyer of U.S. treasuries, you know, Japan, South Korea, Europe. Yeah, I mean, I could talk for 20 minutes on this. No, I know you could. Which is why I tried to restrict some of what you would say. But pull on that thread for a bit because that doesn't that matter quite a bit? I mean, you know, if you start talking about, like, you know, people have talked about the TLT trade. I mean, you, and I'm not making fun of you because the war is obviously different.

But you and Mike McGlone both have talked about, you know, how rates, you know, rates were at 4.2, give or take, between, you know, 4.15 to 4.2. And, you know, it collapsed below 4. And guess what? We're right back to where we were before all of that. And I think what you just, and that matters because that's the people don't understand. understand, you know, Robert talks about this all the time, but people don't understand that when the long bond rate goes up, that that means that's the risk-free rate that people believe, or they call it risk-free anyway, that people compare other investments to. And so that definitely depresses what's going on. So when you see an economic incident where bonds, which are considered the safe haven, goes down at the same time as stocks, that is indicative of significantly more financial distress. And that is, actually what we're seeing, right? Yeah, to some degree. I mean, you know, I would I would also say that it's kind of like the first order effect, you know, the short, short term read. Yeah, you get, you know,

$90 crude. You're going to have higher rates. But like I personally to see, you know, all, what is going on in the energy market as extremely bullish for TLT. I know that sounds crazy. But if you can look through the kind of short-term sell-off it's going to cause due to higher inflation concerns, then I think, you know, look at what oil did going into 08. You know, look at what oil did, really going into the vast majority of the past 10 different recessions we've had, including 2022, which, by the way, we had two consecutive quarters, negative GDP and bear market in the equity market. you know, oil, I think that the American consumers already so stretched that 80, 90, $100 crude is just going to result in demand destruction. So, you know, we got an already very weak NFP second worst going back to the pandemic.

And so, yeah, I think I still, you know, I'm adding to my TLT calls here. I still think that, you know, this is kind of the short-term reaction. Yeah, you know, like, is there a conclusion? concern that the safe haven, the sovereign debt is not getting bid during a geopolitical conflict like this. Yeah. But, you know, it's due to what's going on with oil, natural gas, heating oil, you know, the whole bit. I think if you can look through that, though, I think it's actually very bullish for bonds. Have you guys ever seen the movie Stepbrothers Brennan and Dale? And they have that moment where they go, did we just become best friends?

I think you and Mike just became best friend. But what Robert just pointed out of the fact of one of my, you know, just when you look back at a trade that work, and you try to, you know, remember the ones that didn't and not to do that, but 2008, I just remember July. I was so bearish on everything and it wasn't working well. When I saw that national average price go to four bucks in gasoline, I'm like, that was it. And it's like, Robert, I just download it up on gold and T-bonds. And it worked great. Now, the gold was trade last year.

That's the difference. Gold's already too expensive. To me, the only big trade left is T-bonds. And if I'm wrong on that, that would be okay, because you're still clipping coupons. You're getting almost 5% of 480 in that long bond. So to me, this is a duration trade. And this is the moment. Just look at this back from the future. What's this going to look like by a time we get to midterms?

Just think about Trump's legacy. If we're near where we are on the screens right now with Correll 50% in the year and the war going bad, he is toast for history. I don't think that's going to happen. A lot of technical issues here. I'm sorry. Yeah. Dave, any specific stories beyond obviously the macro that are on your radar?

There's quite a few, but I think mostly people want to just talk about what's going on with the market. Well, I mean, look, I wrote an article. Actually, arguably, it may be the highest reach article I've ever written by the time it's all done on how absolutely absurd the banking lobby's arguments are in terms of this whole debate. I mean, I mentioned this morning on the finance show, Scott, that if you put on my my 2026 bingo card that I would be violently in agreement, almost word for word, with Eric Trump, I would have been very surprised. But yet here we are. It is exactly the case. I mean, the core of the article, obviously there's a lot in here in terms of data, but the data effectively says that the banking lobby is lying. I mean, you know, you can manipulate statistics wherever you want. But, you know, when you have the banks telling people that, oh, well, we're going to lose deposits and it's going to hurt community banks, and they drum up the interest, the image of George Bailey from It's a Wonderful Life, you know, saving the community. You know, that sounds great, except for here's the, here are the numbers. The community banks pay dramatically lower interest rates than the

Money Center banks, yet they make substantially higher margins on the loans that they do originate. Now, both of those numbers take the banking argument and flushes it down the toilet, but it doesn't stop them from anything. So, you know, and all of that is, of course, irrelevant to the fact that they also say, as Austin Campbell would put out, and he joins us every once in a while, that they are completely mischaracterizing how the banking system works. And a lot of the politicians are too damn stupid to understand it. So they make statements like stable coins could have runs on the bank, you know, they could fail. but they're fully reserved, right? So the reason a bank run happens is because you have a million dollars of depositors, you know, money in the bank, but the bank is only holding on to 50,000.

And so when $52,000 are withdrawn, the bank goes... It's magic, Dave. It's magic. I was just writing... If it's a million, they hold a million. So it's like it's beyond belief, but it matters. I mean, the thing that really is this is where the tip of the spear on this, on this act is. and it matters.

And like, you know, Simon, you know, asking me this morning, Simon Dixon, you know, why does it matter? Well, it matters because if you want to unleash the entire financial system to embed Bitcoin and be able to use and crypto inside the system, compliance departments just, they don't operate the way you think they do. They don't take risks. And when there's a chance that the rules could change, they won't make investments. And so the fact that Morgan Stanley has done what they've done recently is, it's actually

staggeringly bullish. People don't understand how bullish it is. But getting a law matters. And, you know, we'll see whether it happens. I know you and I keep talking about it. I think that it is the size of the catalyst, given the fact that people don't think it happens a big deal. Yeah.

Dan probably has a whole lot of insight. Yeah. Go for it, Dan. Yeah, no, great to see everybody again. And I'm just getting back for paternity leave. I've been off based on the last two months. So I'm getting back here, getting caught up. Great to see everybody.

Thanks for having me, Scott, Dave. Mike, good to see again. Yeah, this has been a wild week here in Washington. I think the president's truth social post really was pretty damning, I think, for the banking industry, essentially backing us, our industry over the banks. And his son, of course, Dave, as he pointed out, Sweet was pretty telling. And I actually completely agree with you on that. we've had no less well actually three so summer mercensuree you former c ntc commissioner

our CEO has been in those three meetings at the white house over the last two months you know crypto on one side uh and the banking lobby on the other and it's it's you know i think there's been more than enough concessions uh on our industry i mean candidly honestly genius itself was a concession last summer before it was signed i mean it was it's rewards that was the concession thanks we're asleep at the wheel they were in the room but I don't think they expected it to happen. And so that's why they're stalling clarity to reopen what they call this loophole. But it is a problem because, well, good news for Cracken this week.

I mean, that was a massive milestone for our industry. You know, the banking news out of Cracken. But as soon as that dropped, of course, the banking industry, the American Bankers Association settled this rules and progress. This is a classic land protectionism from the banking lobby cartel, essentially. they're applying impropriety where none exists. As many of you may already know, the Kansas City Fed, any of Reserve Bank really can approve master accounts today.

This pending skinny framework is referring to future guidance. And Cracken has an SBDI. I mean, this requires 100% reserves, zero lending, you know, strong, strict oversight already. So in a way, this is materially lower risk anyway than a fraction reserve bank. And then the other one, the ICBA, that's a trade association for the community bankers. They came out with their deeply concerning press release about the situation. And they're pulling the same argument, unlike traditional banks.

And, you know, I'm not too concerned. I actually think this is a big domino effect. I'm really excited to see crack and get this. I think there's going to be definitely more in the hopper. I mean, they're almost certainly will be. But it goes back to the whole conversation around clarity. It really is a major, major milestone for our space. And I do think it will pass.

I think it's going to pass. My hope is now before Memorial Day. We're hearing a few different sources back and forth from Patrick Wood's office that this has now become a top priority for the president domestically. Now, in terms of the other topics, I just want, and we can stay on this topic too, but there's a few other, like, ancillary topics that I think are on our mind that are affecting the industry. this private credit conversation that's really dominated the news this week. You have these big lenders.

It's rattling Wall Street. Private credit loan spreads are tight. This jobs report that came out today, I mean, it was terrible. 92,000 jobs plus were lost in February. That's way under what the estimates were. It's in the negative. And that was before the whole Iranian attack. So we'll see if this leads, maybe puts back into play.

The Federal Reserve rate cuts in the first half, 26, I don't know. And then this AI layoff boom, you know, what happened with Jack Dorsey and Block. I was in a meeting or a roundtable two days ago at the Milken Institute, and somebody from Block was there. I'm not going to name who it was, but they were spared. They were not included in that layoff, 50% of whatever it was of their workforce. But they said that this is a canary in the coal mine.

And from what I was told, Dorsey is at the remaining employees there are now every week. they're going to be taking AI, like an hour a week, are dedicated to focusing specifically on artificial intelligence for the workplace. So I think this is another big outlier, not an outliner, but a big problem, I think, for greater industry and the economy as a whole. So the Iranian situation, the private credit troubles, and then these layoffs that are incentivizing companies, that's where I'm at.

My mic just will not work. Sorry, Scott. I want to ask you to take the lead. Yeah, no, it's not your, I'm trying. And I have specific questions for Dan based on that. So, Dan, I mean, I'm more pessimistic on clarity, but you're closer to it. So I like the optimism. If we're still stuck on stable coin yield and can't even get past that,

it's like the other bigger issues that actually will be points of larger contention politically have not even been addressed, right? So it's kind of like we have the banks versus crypto, but then we also have the Democrats versus the Republicans, and we haven't even gotten to Defi or ethics or any of those things. That's what's holding it up. Yeah, well, the defy ethics. So out of all right now, one of the big problems is Senator Tillis,

other North Carolina. You know, he's on the way out, so he's able to do a lot more, he's able to go a lot more rogue, I think, than obviously he was facing the voters again. We saw a similar thing with Mitt Romney in the past. I do think he's going to come around and sign on to it, but we can't afford to lose him, because even if we lose all the Democrats,

in terms of the Senate banking and this overall Senate vote. And once that, let's say how hypothetically it does pass the Senate, it's going to go back to the House again. People forget that. And the House is a lot more radioactive now than it was six, seven months ago. And so I'm a little concerned about the fact that it has to go back to the House again because of everything that we've seen just generally with World Liberty and with some of these other projects that are tied closely to the President's family.

They're going to use that as leverage. But I think the president's tweet, the true social post was, again, that was a big deal for us. Big milestone means that he's drawn a line in the sands. And I'll give credit to Armstrong and the others that actually went and met with him. What did Armstrong say to that guy, man? I'm just kidding. It's not like Trump was always pro-cropos. I don't think this is a surprise.

And his family has literally been like railing against the banks here for months, right? The debanking stories. So I don't think it's surprised. But Brian Armstrong went into the White House and Trump. And when he left, Trump seemingly had a renewed. vigor. Yeah, I don't think the president knew, like, the, and Patrick Whittsav used to have been barking up the chain as long as he can, but it took somebody of Armstrong's magnitude to, you know, to show up. And I think that really absolutely made the difference. And I think that'll be a good

swift kick to the behind for some of these other senators in the Republican caucus. And I think we can bake in the ethics discussions, right? That's certainly what Booker and the Democrats want. And I don't blame them, especially with all the news that we've been seen. But if we can figure a way to keep to bake that in, get it back to the house and get it signed, then we then we don't have to worry about a post-Atkins SEC. I mean, right now we're in good shape. But this is a very, very long-term play that we need to make happen. And that window of opportunity is very, very much tightening.

I mean, that's why McHenry, he's the one that predicted Memorial Day. You know, that's the Custer's last stand. That's it. Because after that, then the summertime, then it's campaign season. I think the other saving grace that we have is our industry's got a lot more political muscle than even we did, even two years ago. I mean, the political action committees are stronger than ever. Bipartisan, too, by the way. So I think that will have a big benefit.

And that's in the back of the heads of a lot of these other elected officials that are running for re-election this year. They do not want to be on the wrong side of history. I mean, Dave, you had that wildly viral tweet yesterday, kind of the other side of this. I've been joking. It's kind of interesting that Brian Armstrong has. so much power being that he's not a senator and it's not voting on this, right? And you made the point yesterday that there's articles saying that the banks have rejected the White House stable corn rewards deal and how does the banking industry effectively have the ability to veto legislation.

I find it so interesting that both sides have so much power that we literally just write about it as if they're the ones who are deciding what happens. Well, it is insane. Well, but the dynamic is different, right? You know, the crypto industry is asking to be regulated. and people have to, and of course, if this gets conveniently ignored, the casualty of the Stablecoin debate, which is, it's not really a debate, the casualty of the Stablecoin propaganda campaign is allowing more FTXs and pushing innovation offshore. It is almost, the reason that clarity passed the House with such a striking majority is because at that point, there was none of these other exogenous political things to talk about.

And it's because it is so absolutely illogical to allow an industry to allow FTCs and Celsius to get away with the kind of shit that they do because we don't have a regulatory umbrella. It is ridiculous to me that people can't make the argument to senators that aren't like Mitch McConnell, who are drooling into their, you know, whatever and can't speak. But, you know, to anyone with even a fun with functioning brain cells, that October 10th, there's a very real chance it was from manipulation as the start, and that having a strong regulatory framework in the United States would allow the CFTC and SEC to at least have market oversight to be able to make those sorts of things more dangerous and less likely.

You know, I've written about that extensively. I mean, these arguments really wouldn't go very far. I mean, it would get passed. So it really is all the about the crypto industry is saying that. The banking industry is saying, you guys have paid me, you have paid us $580 billion since the global financial crisis in special stuff because that we can get interest at the Fed. The banking industry understands that they're making over $100 million a year

in net interest margin that would be under threat from competition, and it would put money in the hands of savers and money in the money in the hands of the economy. They don't want to position it that way. So, you know, they say that it's going to be, you know, it's going to hurt community banks. Of course, the data says that it won't hurt community banks nearly as much as the money center banks. But that's, and that's the article I wrote today. But the fact is, the banks are huge donors. They have made all this money. I mean, just think of the scale of the money I just said, literally just the decision from 2008 to pay extra interest when they deposited the Fed, which is risk capital, right, is $580 billion.

That makes for a lot of money available to donate to politicians' campaigns and hire politicians' kids, et cetera, et cetera. And so that's where the power is coming from. And it arguably is one of the most disgusting and most obvious use of financial power in politics that I've ever seen. That, I think, is why it's hitting a nerve. Dave, did you get a new handle, by the way? Yes.

Did you get banned by Twitter? No, no, no, no, Joe. What happened was Dave, at Dave Weisberger was. This space was downloaded via spaces down.com. Visit to download your spaces today. Packed and stolen. Oh, no. It was on February 1st.

It was reported immediately. It was a spoofed email that looked exactly like it was X claiming something about a copyright violation. You hacked it, got reported. I told them about it right away. They closed it down almost immediately because several people reported them using the chat feature to do the same sort of spoofing. And for the last month plus, they've told me they can't verify that I am the same person, which is funny because, you know, everyone who's a creator here knows you submit your ID. And so they have my ID in both accounts and they can't compare it to it.

It's like, oh, that must be you. It's pathetic. And actually, it matters. Just for those who are listening at home, if you believe that X will ultimately be a great platform because it's going to have financial, you know, the X pay and other stuff in it, be in everything app, no.

It has zero chance until they fix this problem. Because you can't lose that and take a month to get it. And I'm not the only one. We should talk offline. I can help with that too. We actually are in the same building. There's a lot of the folks from X and SpaceX, their team. And I'm really sorry to hear that happen.

because I was following you, but I hadn't seen you in a while, so I just, I just followed your new handle. That's good, good to know. Thanks, Dan. Everyone, follow Dave's new handle. Everyone right now. Pause, deep breath, follow days. Yeah, so, but.

Yeah, I'll text Elon for you too. Dan can do that. Thanks. Yeah, Dan, the big thing is, is I'm a huge supporter of X, and this is a huge thing that they need to close. They need to be able to verify. And by the way, just for those who care, you know, we always bitch, everyone on this panel,

bitches about proof of human and being spammed by AI bots. The other thing that this is all bound into, if you want to be a financial app, is you do need to know, you should have a version of proof of human. Not a human who is using an API that's different, but one person shouldn't be able to have 20 accounts that are associated with their ID, that kind of thing.

So it really is a bigger issue. Sorry. Yeah, AI is getting completely out of control, you know, in a good way and a bad way. Every founder and every CEO that I know in the last two months has gone from, you know, typing on their computer 95% of the time to just talking to it, like almost 100% of the time. Like almost no one's even like typing anymore. You know, the release of like 4.5 in December was a complete paradigm shift in the way that people are going to operate. And it's, we're seeing it, you know, obviously at Lunar Crush, we're, you know, pulling in 30 to 50 million posts an hour across five different social networks.

it's incredible the amount of AI generated content that's out there. And like you're saying, Dave, it's not even just API-oriented. People have a very simple ability to, you know, look exactly like a human. And there's nothing that can be done outside of some sort of liveliness check. You know, but even a liveliness check can be kind of passed and someone else can operate. So it's going to get weird out there, folks. And if you haven't, you know, utilized any of these tools. in kind of a deep way, you know, piggybacking voice with like a Claude Code.

I said, you got to start sprinting now. You know, you talked about Block a little bit. I'm surprised it's only an hour of training a day. You know, if you're not kind of utilizing the tools all day, every day, it's kind of like you're going to be out. So kind of get on it. One little thing, you know, about the Clarity Act, you know, I think there was a post the other day.

It was like, I think Patrick Witt, you know, he's one of the White House Crypto advisors. He said something along the lines of like, you know, crypto is really kind of come. to the table and the banks need to reciprocate and ultimately strike a deal. It's like why is that even like a thing, right? Like you said, like the amount of money that's being poured into this to just fight like lobbyists. Like if that doesn't tell you exactly how Washington works, it's like one side hires people to kind of like whisper into the ears of people that make that actually can vote and make the

decision. The other side hires other people. It's almost like, thank God, Coinbase is public and has enough money to pay for lobbyists. Thank God, OKX has enough money, you know, and Cracken has enough money to do these things at this point. It's almost like if we didn't have those things, we would just continue to be squashed. But that being said, you know, it's like when Trump took office, Bitcoin's at 110, you know, we're down, you know, like 40%. We've been down almost 50%. I would say Bitcoiners and, you know, the Bitcoin conference in Nashville, I'm sure you guys were all there. Like I think,

I feel like Bitcoiners effectively put Trump in the White House and now are down 50% since he took office. And like, I don't think that's going to last. I think a lot of things are happening, but at some point that favor has to be reciprocated. You would think. And so I don't think it's really happened. No Bitcoin strategic reserve in any sort of big way. I think there needs to be something that happens, but I think this Clarity Act needs to happen first for that to happen. But I just don't think you can turn your back on this entire like subset of the economy that is Bitcoiners and crypto bros that, you know, basically put you in office. So that being said, though, sentiment, what we're seeing is sentiment is near like 52-week highs

in crypto. You know, it's like bad news isn't pushing price down as much and good news is a little bit. Is it highs? Almost, yeah, almost 8, it's 87% almost like, that's just how bad it is out there, guys. But we are seeing it at almost near 52-week highs, which is pretty cool. What is 52-week-hides? Because I'm looking at crypto-greed and fear, and it doesn't look like that even slightly.

Yeah, that's a small, small, small slice of the internet that they're looking at. We're looking, again, over a billion posts like a day. And what we see is, you know, across Bitcoin, all of crypto, all the meme coins. You know, Scott says we don't talk about meme coins on here anymore. Basically everything and just the way that people talk and the sentiment that they have. And in the last, out of the last 52 weeks, you know, we're like, you know, at 87% is like the positive sentiment compared to the last 52 weeks. Obviously, it's been much, much higher at different points. But in the last year, this is, you know, people are getting rallied again.

I think there's interesting things out there, you know, obviously we're seeing less, a lot less people talking about crypto, but the people that are here are more positive. You know, I think the ICE investing in OKX was huge. Obviously, cracking, getting the Fed payment rails is huge. but I think we're I think that the bottom is in and I think it's time I mean it's crazy that sentiment could even be construed as positive but I'll take it I mean I think I saw that altcoin sentiment is the lowest in history and so it was the lowest in three years but looked like it was even lower than post-FTX yeah I mean look at the all coins and what they've done it's bad but I don't know I'm sure I'm sure you guys talked about it

I was gone a little bit, but like the Jane Street action that happened out there and, you know, that lawsuit that kind of came in. I feel like like all-cointers kind of feel like, you know, I can kind of lump myself in there a little bit. I feel like we've existed in a completely fraudulent system, right? And like the fact that, yes, there was some things that are happening there, but ultimately like SBF did make, you know, if he still held Anthropic and Robin Hood and everything else, Everyone would have done a lot better if someone just gave them a loan and they continued

and brought it onshore than just paying the lawyers a billion dollars. And then who knows where we'd be from here? Well, that is revisionist history. I mean, look, the truth is that there are two aspects. One, he committed fraud. He literally stole client funds, replaced it with Samcoins, you know, FTT token, et cetera. And he used those funds to buy off politicians and do all sorts of other stuff. And yes, it might very well be that they could have been made enough money because of luck to have kept going.

But I mean, that way of looking at things, boy, that pisses me off for lots of reasons. But we won't go there. That said, the other thing he was doing was the DCCPOA might have had a chance of passing, which is bad as clarity people might think it is, that basically shut down defy. Would have would have annihilated it. So, you know, it's easy to look at it that way, but I don't want to get started. But the Jane Street allegations about Luna are very, very serious. And the allegations and the other allegations of manipulation are serious.

And that points to the need to be able to actually have teeth on oversight. And I think there are lots of regulators that want to do that. Anyway, we don't have a huge amount of time left. Tomer, you had your hand up. Yeah, sorry to roll back the conversation a couple of minutes that you get your hand up. One of the things that I kind of find, I don't know. lack the adjective to describe it, but it is with all the stuff that's happening with AI, the comment was made by the previous speaker, you know, at Block, for example, the surprise

that they're only putting one hour of their time a day into learning AI, you need to be putting in a lot of time where you're going to be left behind. And it's, the irony of this is the AI was supposed to free us up. Like two months ago, we were talking about, oh, we're all going to be unemployed. We're all going to have all this free time. because all the AI is going to do stuff. But what it's really looking like it turns out to be is it's a new skill that needs to be invested in heavily. And if you're not spending a tremendous amount of your time learning how to use this new skill, then you're going to be made obsolete.

But it's really, really hard. Everything that I'm seeing from people trying to use AI is that they're really struggling to get finished product out of it. So it's like you've got to do all your traditional work. We're in this ironic state right now where you've got to do all the traditional work. maybe you're getting some productivity boost from AI, but you've got to reinvest all that productivity boost time into learning how to use AI, and the AI is transforming so quickly that what you learn one day is irrelevant the next day. I'm exaggerating a little bit, I guess, for stressing the irony of it all, but it's a really chaotic situation with what should you do, what can you do.

So, no, it's just the observation I have around the AI stuff right now. It's very hard to know how to apply your time and energy and what to be worried about and what to not be worried about. And then you can worry about crypto too. Apparently, Claude has anxiety now, so you've got to worry about his mental health. Was it, Claude? I saw something that one of these systems was stuck in the thought loop and was feeling anxiety. But, you know, I'm really interested in following this.

I'm trying to keep as open a mind as I can about all this stuff, but the pendulum swings from data from one week to the next round. Are these things conscious and have self-awareness, or are these things just statistical models spitting out words, incapable of reasoning, or are they capable of reasoning but incapable, but lacking actual real-world experience? And so they get caught in rationalism loops of deductive logic that's not connected to reality and so on.

and so on. So we're in this really chaotic error where there's a lot of expectation, which may or may not come true. It feels a lot like crypto years ago, and there's probably some people with a really keen eye around what will work and what makes sense it will work and what is hype that is unlikely to materialize. But I don't know who they are yet. It doesn't feel as clear to me as like Bitcoin versus crypto did. Tomor, just really quick. Yeah, this is Joe. I made that comment. I made a post like a month ago. I said it's funny that humans have the ability to be 500 times more productive

and get 50% of their time back. But instead, we're going to be a thousand times more productive and get 0% of our time back. And I think that's just human nature. Really well put, Joe. We're just fully addicted to progress. I think some people will find a way to get time back. But the big difference between today...

Right, but it's like it's the example. Maybe you say, but Jack didn't give 100% of his employees 40% of their time off. No, he did. With a 40% paid discount. He fired 40% of them. And he got rewarded for that by the market. So the market is looking for this, for people to finally admit. Well, but didn't do it because of AI.

He did it because he overhired during COVID. But fair enough. But we're going to be getting a lot more of these things. And every time it's going to be positioned as it, like, when are we going to see somebody say, you know what, we're going to a three-day work week because everybody, he's got 40% group. You get to work less to your point, right? There's just going to be less people with jobs to that degree,

but then hopefully entrepreneurship explodes because of those people without jobs, having access to the same rule, doing well. But this is Joe's point. Like, since the weekend was invented, I don't know what years, some historians will say, you know, this notion of the weekend was invented. I think it had something to do with industrialization and the assembly line. But since then, we haven't gotten any of our time back.

We just keep plowing it more and more. And as these new digital technologies have come in, like I actually remember a time when you left the office before cell phones, before smartphones, before the smartphones, before the internet, you left work. Like the work waited for you in the office. But as soon as the Blackberry came out, work was attached to your body, and the space of the office started to become less and less relevant.

Now, of course, we have live video chat, conference, all this kind of stuff. But we've lost time rather than, made time up. There is going to be a short period here where if you can utilize these tools in a cool way, you actually can get your time back because people are still catching up while you have the ability to be super productive. There's just a couple examples. If you can find a way in your workflow to use voice plus Claude Code in the terminal right now, and you have a lot of different systems that are out there that you're interacting with and you can give it access to those systems, you can now just ask simple questions

and you can operate on a, like we just keep talking about compressing these time cycles, right? And it's pretty incredible what you can do and you can get a lot of finished product. So like, for example, there's a company called Whisperflow, right? They've raised $81 million. They do voice transcription.

In, you know, six minutes for 32 cents in tokens, I just said, hey, like, recreate Whisperflow. I don't want my transcriptions going off my machine. And I had a perfectly fully fledged app. So I replaced that $81 million of fundraising with $32. And $0.32 in six minutes, right? Like that's the world that we're starting to live in. That's kind of scary.

And I think in the short term, I think a lot of jobs actually will be lost. But I think in the long term, like Scott, like you were saying, I think the market recovers. But there is going to be major disruption for the next two years. Yeah. Speaking of major disruption, I invited Maricio up. Hey, buddy. I want to be conscious of his time because I invited him specifically because I saw the news, Maricio, that you guys got an S&P global credit rating and wanted to discuss that with you. So obviously, you've been here a lot and always contributed the conversation. And that seems like massive news. Thanks, guys. Yeah, I do think it's a massive milestone and something that I think has gone a little bit underreported in terms of the significance of the, of the event, really.

So just to recap, for those that might not have read it, Lennon issued the first ever Bitcoin back loan ABS bond, securitized bond. It was the first ABS to hit the market. It was the first ever rated product by S&P 500, but sorry, by S&P. And more importantly, it received an investment grade rating for us as a first-time issuer.

So this is the first time that a Bitcoin product has reached the ABS market in the U.S. And also the first time it's reached an investment grade rating. The issue was for $188 million. And the very interesting thing about it was that coincidentally, the deal was being sold or marketed during the downturn. And we were, as part of that process, you know, many of the investors, this is the first time for them ever investing in a Bitcoin product. A lot of people had questions around how our system would hold up during a down market. And it was actually a great opportunity because in the middle of the roadshow, we were pulling up data of a system working perfectly. And not only the deal continue and close, the deal was two times oversubscribed.

more than two times oversubscribed, actually. So this is the first time a Bitcoin company has tapped access to the roughly $3 trillion ABS market. And for us, I think it's a massive accomplishment. I do think that there are very few firms, if any, that could have pulled this off. I can get into sort of what it takes to get this rating and what's really going to be Yeah, I was going to ask you that because I know you mentioned, I remember that Sailor, you know, obviously as STRF and that has a 10% coupon, but that's not even viewed as investment grade,

right? So you're basically, this is saying that Bitcoin is better collateral. And also, I mean, this is now, I mean, to have S&P evaluate Bitcoin is basically the same framework, correct me if I'm on, as like an auto loan or credit cards. So how do you pay them that Bitcoin collateral is like as reliable as a car or a home? Correct. So to sort of frame this in, in context, right? This is the first ever investment grade rating that a Bitcoin product has ever received. So none of the other instruments that are out there,

whether it's STRC or convertible bonds or even Coinbase bonds, these are all junk rated. And importantly, there's a distinction, right? Our facility is an SPV, it's a securitized loan ABS. It is not corporate debt to let it. That's an important distinction. However, if you look at the ABS market in the US today, it's roughly $2.5 to $3 trillion, 80% of that market

is investment-grade rating, has to be, because so many of the participants in those markets, their qualified institutions, have mandates that they can only purchase investment-grade rating assets. And so really, it just elevates Bitcoin back loans to the highest category and to your point, the assumptions and the stress testing that S&P does is you basically put our book in our loan facility through the same ringer that they've put every other bond that's in the ABS market today.

So auto loans, credit cards, some types of mortgages. And we spent over a, I think it was over a year with S&P. And there was a big education process as part of it. They had to understand our system or model. And they stress test that the living lights out of it. And they still come out with an investment grade rating. And I think what's also so unique about the deal and what puts Leden in such a really, saying it again, but really a unique spot to issues a deal like this is that you need a few things to pull something like this off.

Number one is you need size, right? Our offering was $200 million. but the issuer i.e. Leiden has to have multiples of that in order to vend in new loans to the facility as loans get repaid. So our size was one of the big things that allowed us to do this. The second one is our history. S&P and any other ratings agency will look very heavily at what is the track record of the operator. They stress test, our operations, our assumptions, or management, everything. And so we have a... an eight-year history to show to them.

A perfect track record of eight years, which also, I believe we're the only company that can show a track record that long of perfect operations. And then the third one is that Lennon has a perfectly clean regulatory track record and posture. Lennon has never had any fines, any issues. And so, again, if you look at the universe of vendors and companies that can offer the same type of history, size, and posture,

You find that it's a very, very small universe of companies. So now, that said, this model, I think this offering lays out a blueprint for the next trillion dollars of liquidity to come into Bitcoin. And that to us is a very long-term strategic advantage. Why? Because if you look at who is lending liquidity into crypto markets today, it is largely crypto-native companies or crypto-affiliated companies. companies are investors. And if you round up all of those balance sheets, you wind up into billions. Which is not a small amount. But Bitcoin at a one to two trillion dollar asset, which we believe is going to get to

$5 trillion in the coming years, we need to have lined aside into an equally deep pool of capital. And we've proven that. And we've also proven that there's quite significant demand in that market. again, as a first-time issuer, the deal was two times oversubscribed in a down market. So I think that this is a very exciting path, and I think we've unlocked something that will, I think, will be a transformative deal for the industry and for Lenin. It's incredible.

I can't believe how underreported it was, as you said, because, I mean, this is just a huge step and catalyst for others to kind of pursue the same thing. And obviously, like, since we have you, I mean, I'm just curious how things have been going in this quote-unquote bare market as things have been going down. I mean, there have been a lot of liquidations. How do you handle those? Is there a different psychology here kind of with bare market borrowing? Yeah. So when the market goes out, so we have seen liquidations and the system has worked, you know, perfectly.

We've seen the, you know, our clients tend to be very conservative. So when you come to Leden, you're not looking to... Lenin, by and large, is used by people that are optimizing for transparency, security, right? These are not the type of people that are looking to borrow against the most recent speculative coin or taking 20x leverage on a perpetual, right? These are people that care about not losing their Bitcoin. And with that comes a sort of preemptive mentality as in they have a plan. I would say the very, very large majority of our clients have a plan top up their loans.

There are instances where some loans get liquidated, and that is just the name of this business, and it's a necessary sort of risk management tool. What I do see when the dip comes is, you know, it's funny. We get very busy because on the one hand, we have people topping up loans, at times getting loans, making partial repayments, sending extra Bitcoin. But on the other side, you have people buying the dip. using their loans and sometimes to buy Bitcoin. Sometimes a lot of people were waiting, ironically, for Bitcoin price to be lower before taking

a Bitcoin back loan because they didn't want to, quote, unquote, take a loan at the highs, if that makes sense. And so we've seen pretty strong originations in the middle of all of the sort of downtrend and the price. And what I have noticed actually this week, and I think I mentioned this on Wednesday, is that this week I'm actually starting to notice. some more aggressive positioning, right? Like it's almost, I feel like this week,

things are starting to switch from defense to offense, if that makes sense. This is more sort of anecdotal and from conversations that I'm having. But people seem to be switching their posture from sort of how low can this go to, I think we're bottoming out right at a moment. Cool.

And what, I guess, if you have a loan with Leden, how do you know when your liquidation is likely when there's a, I guess, margin call? How do you make sure that people don't get liquidated? Yeah, great question. So when you come to Lennon, before you take a loan, in the application page, we will show you what the critical price triggers will be for your loan, both for needing more collateral and for liquidation.

Once you take the loan and the price drops, at Lennon, when the LTV reaches over 70%, which is not liquidation. The quotation is 80%. But when your LTV drops enough, or sorry, increases enough that reaches 70%, you start getting high LTV alerts so that you send more Bitcoin to your loan. At Lennon, we don't require you to send any specific amount of Bitcoin to bring your LTV to any particular level. So in that sense, there's no quote-to-quote margin call where you have a period of time to send more Bitcoin. At Lennon, our rule is do not let it get to 80% LTV.

When it gets 80% LTV, the system sells as much Bitcoin as needed to settle the loan. and returns anything left to the client. However, as long as your LTV is over 70, you're going to be hearing from us, and we're going to be telling you to send more Bitcoin to your loan. We have another tool that is shining very brightly in this downturn called Auto TopUp. And Autopopop up allows you to put extra Bitcoin in your leaden transaction account. And when you turn on Auto TopUp on your loan,

the system knows that when your loan reaches 70% LTV, it'll automatically sweep enough Bitcoin from your balance to drop that LTP down to 65%. And we built this because a lot of times our clients would take out these loans and would go on, say, a month-long hiking trip or they would go to their cabin or their farm and they wouldn't bring their hardware wallet.

And they wanted us to build a tool that would help them respond to a need for an additional collateral when they were unavailable. And so we built Auto TopUp. And this is the first real, I would say, drawdown since Auto TopUp has been live. And it worked fantastically.

In fact, if you look around on Twitter, I've seen quite a few posts of people saying, thank you for all the top-up, which is really exactly what we want to see. Sorry, Mike issues once again. And so just, I know we're kind of running into time here, but I just want to ask you generally, now that obviously Bitcoin back loans are becoming more credible,

you have a credit rating, all of these things. Like, how much do you still, I guess, have to answer for the Celsius and the, block by in the past iteration of, you know, crypto loans that obviously went poorly? You know, that is a great question. And I feel that in the, in 2023, 2024, that is all I had, I was asked about. How, how did you guys survive? How was let in, how was that indifferent, right? It was almost as if the, the thinking was, you know, this, this is a broken model, right? Like, nobody should have arrived. And we had to basically prove to people over time that this can be done responsibly.

That what went wrong was not that these people were lending dollars against Bitcoin. It was that they were re-hyposicating the Bitcoin, lending the Bitcoin, outright committing fraud, lending Bitcoin unsecured to generate yield. That's what broke down these platforms. If you're just lending dollars and keeping Bitcoin in custody, you can do this quite responsibly. We've demonstrated that. Now, fast forward to today, we had the ETF, we had the, we had the the administration sort of coming on board. Everybody seems to be sort of looking up now. And I'm starting to see some of those concerns fade away into the background.

And, you know, people have very short memories. And not too long ago, we had another lender go down, blockfields. I don't know if people remember that. That was two weeks ago. And it seems like people just don't want to think about these things right now, like that risk of loss. And if I was anybody considering these products, I would still treat this market as if your biggest risk is the platform operator.

A lot of these platforms are trying to come in and buy market share by seducing people with ridiculous rates and sexy apps and a cool ad. That never ends well. And I don't think it will end well this time either. So what I would say is these things, things come in waves. It's either everything everybody wants to talk about or nobody cares. And I feel like we're moving from the, everybody thought it was paramount to have proof of reserves and to have a track record and to have certainty that you would not go lose your Bitcoin.

And now I'm seeing that sort of move a little bit to, oh, I can get a little better right here. And there is no free lunch here, right? I would say that one of the things that I think about a lot is this idea that people need to understand the full picture of the lending business to assess the stability and robustness of a lender. At Lennon, for example, our funding is public. You can now go and see what dollars cost us, right? You can also see what dollars cost us when you look at our deposit accounts and stable coins. So we're paying anywhere between, call it, eight to nine, well, the junior tranche on the facility is 9.99, okay?

The senior tranche is 6.84. and we're paying between 6.5% and 8% in our growth accounts. We lend at 11.9, and we're working very hard to bring those rates lower. We do have better rates as loans get bigger. However, looking at those data points, you can paint a picture about Lenin's business model, and you can see that it's organic and it is sustainable. You cannot see that in a lot of these defy pools. You cannot see the incentives they're paying the lenders.

You cannot see why somebody is supposedly lending to a two-year-old pool getting less than Fed funds. Why would they do that? They're not doing that. There's a bunch of incentives that people are unaware of, and that's where risk usually hides. Sorry, long rant. It was your long rant. I love it.

Anything else that I missed, that you want to mention? No, I think that this is, you know, we've had a pretty phenomenal, you know, back half of 2025 and started 2026. We did the tether round. We announced our facility. We got named in the Fintech 50, 4th, like 50. And I think that this is setting us up for a continue, for a year of a lot more exciting

announcements. So I would just say, stay tuned. I love what you guys are doing, man. Thanks for taking the time to come join. I just thought that that particular news was so big. And I didn't send, you know, I remember when Sailor, they got some sort of, you know, S&P, even though it was a poor rating. It was big news that they even got one. And, you know, to have Bitcoin back loans have the S&P rating is a huge signal. Yeah, investment grade nonetheless. So I think this will be, you know, stay tuned for future issuances from us. I think our rating is only going to get better.

And that will only translate to better pricing for Bitcoiners and just a more transparent, robust lending industry for all of us. Congrats, man. Thanks again. Dave, thanks as usual for being an astounding co-host. Outstanding. Wonderful. Thank you.

For both, at least, it's not astounding. I'm always astounded. And that's all we got for you guys. We'll be back on Monday. So everybody, have a great weekend. And we will see you on Monday. Bye.